Exploring Philosophical Concepts with a Turkish Fairy Tale

Fairy tales represent the world and tell realistic and fantastic stories about people, animals, and supernatural beings. Every society has fairy tales that have traces of their culture. We can see that the characters of fairy tales in Western countries are generally fairies, witches, and devils, but the characters of Turkish fairy tales include mostly a Padishah, a giant, and a Keloglan. Turkish fairy tales reach back into antiquity and the period of the Ottoman Empire, with three-thousand tales collected in Turkey over the last three decades (Barbara Walker, The Art of the Turkish Tale (Texas: Texas UP, 1990)). In this chapter, we will start with a brief recounting of Keloglan and the Golden Nightingale, then focus on raising the philosophical issues that include courage, envy, and moral evil problems by analyzing the chosen tale. We will reflect on the philosophical themes that emerge from this fairy tale and raise philosophical questions about the human experience.