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The Village Of Caliphs
An honest Kadi, matured in solitude, sets out in 1844 with Population and Real Estate Clerks and soldiers to fill the Temettüat Tahrir Book of Kütahya's districts.
The numbers should be the mirror of the people so that the State-i Aliyya should receive the tax and complete the people's servitude.
Village by village is visited, and everything, animate and inanimate, is brought into existence by digitizing. In Khalifaler Village, M. Altar Kaplan adds an extraordinary perspective to his story by making a tree or a dog talk.
ABOUT "THE VILLAGE OF CALİPHS"
The Village of Caliphs can be classified as a classic novel.
Although The Village Of Caliphs is the first novel I have written, it is my second novel published.
I think the most subjective aspect of this novel is its narration technique. The novel begins with a researcher who is doing a thesis on Temettüat notebooks. Then, this first narrator is replaced by a second sub-narrator and begins to tell the story. In the book, the similarity between the destinies of the second-sub-narrator, who appears as a character in the story of the first narrator, and Kadı, the protagonist of the story told by the second-sub-narrator, are tied together in the same fiction.
In this novel, in 1844; 5 years after the declaration of the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Period, to count and determine the socio-economic data (movable and immovable properties owned) related to the region in a remote corner of Anatolia (Gediz, Emet and Örencik districts of Kütahya) and to compile the detainees called Temettuat Register, by writing them in the registers. We are reading a story that takes place at the head of a Kadi and two clerks working under his auspices.
Throughout the book, besides observing the socio-economic events of the period, on the other hand, we watch the changes in the subjective situation of our characters, especially Kadı (human emotions such as love, hope, disappointment, fear) in the face of developing events.
Maybe this novel is based on Bayezid-i Bistami's; We can approach the result in the light of the saying, "The absolute truth cannot be reached by searching, but it is an undeniable fact that only those who reach the truth are still seekers". In this way, we can understand why Kadı is in a constant search throughout the novel.
At the same time, we see how the expectations of the other characters in the novel have changed in the pressure of time, as compared to the roads that curved and flowed in front of them, which the same Kadi and his assistants traveled through the region like drawing a crescent during their duties. While reading the novel, this image of the road constantly tickles our minds…
In this context, the main motif of the novel was Lao Tzu, when he said that "a pot is made of clay, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it meaningful", did he actually mean that one should know how to live with his own emptiness? revolves around the question.