Google marked the 123rd birthday of one of Turkey’s most prominent early 20th century folk poets and singers on Oct. 25.
The search engine’s Turkish home page showed a cartoon of Aşık Veysel playing his bağlama, a local stringed instrument, with
Turkish carpet motives in the background. Veysel was born in Şarkışla, a town in the central province of Sivas, on Oct. 25, 1894.
He was blinded during childhood and was given a bağlama by his father and began learning to play and sing.
In the 1930s, he began attracting attention across Turkey after meeting poet Ahmet Kutsi Tecer at a folk poets’ night in Sivas and beginning to play around the country.
His music and poems, often tinged with both happiness and sadness, inspired a new generation of folk artists in Turkey and covered by numbers of musicians.
Veysel died of lung cancer on March 21, 1973.
