Tepegoz

The spring at Uzunpınar ran cold enough to ache the teeth, and Sarı Çoban had brought his flock there because the grass was good and nobody else came. Then the water went bright. Peri maidens had come down on the bank with their wings still fastened to their arms, and the shepherd, alone in an empty pasture with nothing to stop him, threw his felt cloak over them and caught one. What he did next the epic states in four words and does not dress up. When he let her go she told him she had left something in his keeping, that he should come back in a year to collect it, and that he had brought ruin down on the Oghuz.

A year later he came back to the same water and found a thing lying on the ground with no head or tail to it, faintly luminous, and he could not make it out. He slung stones at it. Under every stone it swelled, and he ran. Bayındır Han and his lords happened to be riding out that day and gathered around the object, prodding it with lance and boot, and it was the spur of Aruz Koca that finally split the mass open. Out of the split came a boy with a man’s body and one eye in the crown of his head.

Aruz Koca asked to raise him. It went wrong at the first feed. The wet nurses put to him died one after another, and in the end he was fed out of cauldrons of milk. He grew quickly, played with the other children, and playing meant taking their noses and ears off with his teeth, so Aruz drove him out of the camp. His mother came back for that. She put a ring on his finger, and from then on no arrow found him and no sword bit.

He set himself up on a rock called Salahana and closed the roads. No source in the tradition bothers to give his height, because the eye does all the describing that is required: one socket where a face should carry two, in a body otherwise built like a man’s. That single eye is the whole argument of him. In Turkic folk reckoning a paired organ arriving single is one of the plain marks of a demonic thing, and the name announces it before the story gets going.

The two old cooks, Yünlü Koca and Yapağılı Koca, worked his fire every day. They boiled the mutton and set it in front of him, and when he had finished it he ate the two men who had been walked up the mountain alongside the sheep. Afterwards he slept, and the smell of grease stayed in the rock.

He had killed Alp Rüstem. He had killed Kıyan Selçuk, who was Basat’s own brother. Half the fighting strength of the Oghuz went up that mountain and came back short, and when there was nothing left to try they sent Dede Korkut to bargain. The bard came down with terms: two men and five hundred sheep every day, delivered, with the two cooks assigned to do the work. The Oghuz paid it.

Basat had been lost as an infant when an enemy raid scattered the camp, carried off and raised by a lion, and brought back to his father’s tent moving like something that had never worn a saddle. Dede Korkut gave him his name and one instruction: you are a human being, do not keep company with animals. He kept to it.

A woman whose son’s name had come up in the tally caught Basat as he rode back from a raid, and begged. He went up to Salahana and put an arrow into Tepegoz’s back, and the arrow came away like a stick thrown at a wall. The giant turned, took hold of him, and dropped him into the cave with the mutton. Down there Basat asked the cooks the only question worth asking. They told him: the eye. He set a roasting spit in the fire and waited while the iron went from red to white, and when it went in, the noise brought stone down off the ceiling.

Blinded, Tepegoz put himself across the cave mouth and let the flock out one animal at a time, passing his hands over every back as it came. Basat killed a ram, got inside the hide, and walked out on all fours under those hands.

What follows is a run of offers, each one a trap. Tepegoz called him back and gave him the ring, saying it would keep arrow and sword off him, and Basat put it on, and a dagger came out of the dark, and he sprang clear to find the ring lying on the ground under the giant’s foot again. There was treasure. There was a domed vault that came down on top of him. He got clear of each one, and each time he said the same thing, which was that God had got him clear. Scholars have argued about that ring for the better part of a century, because a monster arming his own executioner makes no sense on any reading of the plot, and the least romantic explanation is probably the right one: the tale is two tales stitched together, and this is the place where the stitching shows.

In the end Tepegoz gave away the only thing that could kill him, a sword hanging sheathless in his own cave. Basat took it down and struck off his head with it. Before the blow the giant asked whose son he was, and on hearing that this was the boy from Aruz Koca’s tent, his own foster-brother, he did not soften. He asked God to see Basat dead too.

None of his strength was ever really his. The peri gave him the ring, the ring gave him the skin nothing could open, and the skin gave him the roads and the tribute and the fear that kept both running. Everything he owned came out of what was done to his mother at the spring, which is why the sympathy in the story sits at such an uncomfortable angle. His limits ran along the same line. The eye could be reached, the cooks knew it and said so, and he could be talked out of his own secrets by an enemy sitting in his own dark, which happened twice.

The resemblance to Polyphemus is not something modern readers dreamed up. Heinrich Friedrich von Diez set the two side by side in 1815, calling the Oghuz creature a cyclops before most of Europe knew the epic existed, and the question has been open ever since: taken from Homer, ancestor to Homer, or two branches off something older than either. C. S. Mundy argued in 1956 that stretches of the Oghuz story come straight out of the ninth book of the Odyssey. Orhan Şaik Gökyay preferred the reverse, that Homer heard the tale travelling in Asia, a reading that suited the nationalism of its moment rather too neatly. The manuscript settles none of it. The fullest copy sits in Dresden and was written in the sixteenth century, and one-eyed man-eaters turn up right across the Turkic world under a dozen names, eleven separate versions among the Gagauz alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tepegoz?

Tepegoz is a one-eyed, man-eating giant from the Book of Dede Korkut, the great epic cycle of the Oghuz Turks. His name means roughly “eye on the crown of the head”, which is exactly where his single eye sits. He appears in the eighth of the book’s twelve tales, the story of how Basat killed him.

How was Tepegoz born?

A shepherd of the Oghuz named Sarı Çoban caught and raped a peri maiden at the spring of Uzunpınar. She told him to return in a year for what he had left with her, and warned him that he had brought disaster on his people. A year later he found a shapeless glowing mass at the spring, which split open under the spur of Aruz Koca to reveal a boy with one eye in the top of his head.

Why could Tepegoz not be killed by weapons?

His peri mother gave him a ring after the Oghuz expelled him, and while he wore it no arrow could pierce him and no sword could cut him. This is why half the Oghuz heroes died trying. The one place he could still be harmed was his eye, a secret his two cooks eventually passed to Basat.

How did Basat kill Tepegoz?

Basat heated a roasting spit in the fire and drove it into Tepegoz’s eye, blinding him, then escaped the cave by wearing a ram’s hide and walking out among the sheep. He survived a series of traps disguised as gifts, including the ring and a collapsing vault. Tepegoz finally named the sheathless sword hanging in his own cave as the only thing that could kill him, and Basat used it to cut off his head.

Is Tepegoz the same as the Greek Cyclops?

They are not the same figure, but the parallels are close enough that scholars have compared them since 1815: a one-eyed cannibal giant in a cave, blinded with a heated point by a hero who then escapes under a sheep. Tepegoz has a fuller story than Polyphemus, running from his conception to his death, and unlike Polyphemus he is killed. Whether the Oghuz tale borrowed from Homer, fed into him, or shares an older common ancestor is still argued.

Related Entries

Peri, Basty, Karakoncolos, Yelbeghen, Asena, Polyphemus, Cyclops, Odysseus (Ulysses), Arimaspi, Tartalo, Ojáncanu, Balor, Likho, Hitotsume-kozō, Grendel