FRANZ1969-001 - ethnographic attestation
Afshar vanvanı, caller of the south wind
Turkey - Tomarza district, Kayseri province - Near East - Anatolia
Weather / fertility magic
vanvanı
Source term: Schwirrholz
vanvanı: the largest of İcadiye's three whirring woods; the name imitates its sound.
In İcadiye, an Afshar village in the Taurus southeast of Kayseri, old men remembered when the whirring woods had work to do: at the end of winter they were swung to lure the warm south wind of spring. By the 1960s the rite was gone and only the play remained. Each year as winter ended, old men or older brothers carved three kinds of whirring toys for the children. The largest, the vanvanı, named for its sound, droned on a cord swung round the hand. The village's rain prayers had lapsed too, the processions to the threshing floor where a black donkey was doused with water. Of all the area's peoples, only the Alevi Kurds around Sarız had the same woods.
Zu Kinderspielen sind heute Schwirrhölzer geworden, mit denen früher der warme Südwind im Frühjahr angelockt werden sollte.
Bullroarers, with which the warm south wind was once meant to be lured in spring, have today become children's toys.
Erhard Franz, Das Dorf Icadiye (1969), p. 367
- Object
- Propeller-shaped carved wood about 14 cm long, pierced at one end and fitted with a cord, swung round the hand to give a dull whirring.
- Source
- Erhard Franz, Das Dorf Icadiye: Ethnographische Untersuchung einer anatolischen ländlichen Gemeinde (Inaugural-Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, 1969), pp. 366-367
- Source location
Page references
pp. 366-367 (d. Wetterzauber), n. 1
- Source confidence
- high
- Location note
- İcadiye village, Tomarza, Kayseri (OSM village node), the village Franz studied.
- Weather magic
- Toy / secular survival