= Paper =
The analysis of the Turkish popular literature, which was told and sung by the âşık, the story-tellers who used to recite their folk stories in the remote villages of Anatoly, shows that though these folk stories are original, some of their episodes go back to former traditions, like the Armenian legends and the Byzantine epos. In the same time, the religious and/or ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Anatolia – Greek, Armenian and Georgian Christians, but also Jews and Shiite Muslims – developed various attitudes toward these Anatolian folk stories. In some cases, they adopted it as they were told and they introduced them in their own repertory. In other cases, they adapted, partially or totally, these folk stories, making their heroes Christians or Shiites, changing their names and their places of birth. All these attitudes show the extreme vitality of the oral tradition in Anatolia.
