Gulyabani

The road out of an Anatolian village keeps its manners for about a mile and then gives them up. Past the last threshing floor the ground goes stony and pale, the wind comes off the slope carrying dust and the dry smell of thyme, and the only landmark left is the burial ground, its stones leaning where the earth has settled underneath them. Anyone walking that stretch after dark knew the rule, in Anatolia and in the Azerbaijani uplands alike. If something out there says your name, it already knows more about you than it has any business knowing.

The thing that says it is the gulyabani. The name is a piece of Persian worn smooth in Turkish mouths: gûl-i beyâbânî, the ghoul of the wilderness, built on the Arabic ghūl, whose root carries the sense of taking hold of a man from the one direction he was not watching. Orhan Hançerlioğlu, cataloguing Turkish belief in 1975, called the Turkish word a corruption of that phrase and glossed it flatly as the desert giant. The Ottoman dictionaries had already kept the whole family sitting at one table. Ahmed Vefik Paşa’s Lehce-i Osmanî of 1876 lists gul alongside gulyabani, karakoncolos, gaylân and mugaylan as if they were interchangeable, and Şemseddin Sâmi’s Kāmûs-ı Türkî of 1901 supplies the definition that still fits best: a fearful shape that takes body in front of a man’s eyes, in lonely places, in the dark.

Where it came from depends on how far back you follow it. In the lore of pre-Islamic Arabia the ghouls were fallen jinn, and the accounts split on what they had done. Some of them had gone up to eavesdrop on heaven and steal news out of it. Others had taken the form of beautiful women and married men. Either way a burning star came after them, and a few caught fire and died, and the rest fell. The ones that came down in the sea became crocodiles. The ones that came down on land became ghouls. Zakariyyā al-Qazwīnī wrote that account into his book of marvels in the thirteenth century, and nobody has since offered a better explanation for why the creature is so good at wearing a face.

Wearing faces is the whole of its method. It takes every colour and every shape, appears to the solitary walker in whatever form will draw him, and never argues. One thing does not change. The feet stay as they are, and every old description leaves them as a donkey’s hoof, which is why the traveller who survives in the tellings is usually the one who looked down. The feet are the tell. A hoofprint on a track where no donkey has passed all week is worth more than any amount of staring at what is talking to you.

On an ordinary night it does nothing dramatic. It waits at the edge of the burial ground where the last of the light gives out, and when a man comes up the track alone it calls once, in the voice of somebody he has been missing, and he stops walking. Then he steps off the road toward it, which is the only thing it ever needed him to do.

Demîrî’s great compendium of animals, read in its Ottoman translation, gets the character down in three clauses: it enters shape after shape, it leads a man astray, it destroys him. Then it adds two lines worth keeping. The gul is the sorcerer among the jinn, and it is the mad one among the devils. Later classifiers gave it a shelf. The jinn were sorted into the aghwāl, the siʿlāt and the ʿafārīt, which yield the gul, the siʿla and the ifrit; the gul kind were held to be female for the most part, with the male called qutrub, and the marid sort reckoned the cruellest and the most cunning of all of them.

Its powers are one power seen from several angles. It can be anything, so it cannot be identified. It can sound like anyone, so it cannot be refused. It has nothing to do all night but wait, so it cannot be outlasted. And it owns a particular kind of ground, the unlit distance between one lit place and the next, which means the only reliable defence against it is not to be there.

The limits are stranger than the powers, and the strangest is a rule about swords. One blow kills it. A second blow brings it back. So an encounter that ends well ends in an oddly static way, with a man standing over a heap of something in the dark, blade still up, arm shaking, deliberately doing nothing, because doing anything else would undo what he has just managed. Where a sword was not to hand there were words instead. The reports recommend the basmala and the recitation of the Throne Verse to keep it from coming near a house, and the call to prayer against its mischief.

Those recommendations sit inside an argument that was never settled. The Qur’an does not mention the ghoul. The hadith literature contradicts itself about it, one group of reports denying any such creature and another prescribing the protections above, and the scholars had to choose. Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāyīnī and Zamakhsharī, with most of the field behind them, took the denials and concluded that the creature did not exist and that belief in it was a leftover of the ignorance before Islam.

The story travelled anyway. Out of old Arab and Persian telling it came into Anatolian Turkish folk knowledge under a spread of names, cadı and umacı and dev anası and gulyabani and karakoncolos, and settled in Turkey and in Azerbaijan inside the broader belief in cin, where it has stayed. The court poets took it as well. In classical Turkish verse it appears as gûl, as gûl-i beyâbân, as hayîl-i yabân, and it stops being a hazard of the road and becomes an insult. The rival who lures the beloved away from the poet is a gulyabani, luring and trapping and making prey; and so, more waspishly, is the ascetic who has cut himself off from human company and gone to live out in the wild.

Then, in the early 1910s, and the sources will not agree whether that was 1911, 1912 or 1913, Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar put the creature at the centre of a novel and used it to take itself apart. Gulyabani is generally called the first Turkish novel to work in Gothic material. A young woman named Muhsine is sent out to service in a remote mansion that the district says is full of jinn, peris and worse, and she is taught the household’s protections, and the noises come, and the terror is entirely real to everyone inside the house. It is also entirely manufactured, staged by the owner’s nephews to drive their aunt mad and inherit her property. Centuries at the edge of the graveyard, and the creature ends the book as a costume worn by relatives who want money. The novel was popular enough that the word never left Turkish, and it survives now less as a demon than as the thing a tired parent reaches for at bedtime, which is roughly the career the hoofprint always predicted for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Gulyabani?

The Gulyabani is a shape-changing demon of Turkish and Azerbaijani folklore that haunts wasteland, empty roads and burial grounds, and kills travellers who are out alone after dark. Its name comes from the Persian gûl-i beyâbânî, “the ghoul of the wilderness”, built on the Arabic ghūl. It belongs to the wider family of jinn rather than standing on its own.

How does the Gulyabani attack people?

It does not usually attack in the open. The Gulyabani takes on whatever shape or voice will draw a solitary walker off the road, often the voice of somebody the victim has been missing, and only destroys him once he has left the track under his own power. Persuasion is the whole method, and the shape is the weapon.

How can you recognise a Gulyabani?

By its feet. The old descriptions let the Gulyabani change every colour and every outline it has, but they never let it change its feet, which stay shaped like a donkey’s hoof. In the tellings, the traveller who survives is the one who looks down rather than at the face talking to him.

How do you kill a Gulyabani?

With a single blow and no follow-up. The tradition holds that a Gulyabani dies at the first stroke of a sword and comes back to life if it is struck a second time, so restraint matters more than force. Where no weapon was available, people used the basmala, the Throne Verse and the call to prayer to keep it away from the house.

Is the Gulyabani part of Islamic belief?

Not settled belief, no. The Qur’an never mentions the ghoul, and the hadith reports disagree with one another, some denying that such a creature exists and others recommending protections against it. Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāyīnī, Zamakhsharī and most later scholars concluded that there was no such being and that the idea was a survival from pre-Islamic Arabia.

Related Entries

Karakoncolos, Karakura, Basty, Tepegoz, Yuxa, Dede Korkut, Peri, Shahmaran, Ghoul, Djinn, Ifrit, Marid, Div