Bullroarer (fırıldak), Çakmak Köyü, Edirne

fırıldak / virildak / kıcırdak

Source term: Bullroarer

fırıldak is the Turkish word for a whirligig or spinning toy; virildak and kıcırdak are regional names for the same toy.

Etymology. In Turkish, fırıldak names many things that spin: a child’s pinwheel turned by the wind, a vaned window ventilator, a chimney cowl that swings round with the wind — and, figuratively, a trick, or someone who keeps changing his mind.

A wooden bullroarer from Çakmak Köyü, a village in Edirne province in the European corner of Turkey, its flat blade tapered and smooth-edged so it whirls at the end of its cord. The musicologist Laurence Picken collected it during the fieldwork behind his Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (1975), where it appears on plate 31a and where he compares its smooth, thinned blade to a Hungarian cousin — the same child's whirligig, fırıldak in the everyday Turkish, spun on a cord at arm's length in a circle sized to the child. Picken's collection later passed to the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The device is made by the youngest shepherd-boys, and by boys in general, from the age of 7 onwards.

Laurence Picken, Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (1975), p. 371

Particulars

Object

Smooth-edged rotating-blade bullroarer with tapering blade, MAA 1977.221.

Function

A child's whirligig by type: a fırıldak, the everyday word for a spinning toy, whirled on a cord at arm's length in a circle sized to the child. Its smooth tapering blade has a Hungarian parallel.