The types of folktale narrators and cultural identity among Iranian Turks from Tabriz

There is a certain relationship between narratives and narrators in Turkish culture from past to present and holistic structure within the borders of Turkic speaking World. In the historical and geographical dependent breadth of Turkish culture, many types of narrators and the narrative genres have provided a typology in the context of the narrators and the narratives. In Turkic speaking World, there has been a relationship between narrators and oral narratives, and this situation can be observed diachronically and synchronically. Observation of this relationship is based upon the creativity, performance and transmission, the structural and formal fea-tures, the content, and the function of folk narratives. As a genre of folk narratives, the folktales and their narrators can also be examined in this context. It should be noted that, as one of the folk narrative genres, folktales are not depended on a special or professional narrator, and as a result they differ from the narrators of epics and minstrel stories. Although some of folktale narrators can be singled out as the “folktale mother” or “folktale ancestor”, the folktales can be narrated by everyone. It is widely accepted that children and young people are the primary audience of the folktales, but anyone can be the audience of folktales. Folktales are fantastic narratives of daily life, having certain structural features, forms, and types, and carry the functions of recreation, education, and transmission of certain values and messages. All these features of folktales develop within the framework of a certain tradition and in conjunction with the individual characteristics of the narrator, and the characteristics of the community to which the narrator belongs. A folktale is recreated at each performance, based on the personal characteristics of narrator and his/her cultural milieu. The most influential elements in this recreation process are the narrator s emphasis on identity and cultural heritage. While the narrator tells the folktale as an individual, he/she also conveys the cultural identity characteristics to which the narrator belongs. It should be pointed that although the typology of folktale narrators in the Turkic speaking world shares some common features, but each region has and reflects its own characteristics. The city of Tabriz, which is one of the leading cultural centers of Iran, one of the regions with a large Turkish population within the borders of the Turkic speaking world, is particularly active in the creating, performing, and transmitting of Turkish folktales in the region, and the narrators and folktales display certain typological features. The transmission of self and community identity and cultural heritage take the first place among the prominent elements in those features. Turkish narrators in Iran not only convey their own repertoires, but also create, perform, and convey the Turkish cultural assets in the region according to the cultural codes they belong to. Based on this information, we deter-mined the subject matter of this article as the typology of folktale narrators among Iranian Turks and the cultural identity transmission of narrators. In the article, we first dwelled on the folktale narrator as a narrator type and mentioned the characteristics of this narrator type depending on its place in the individual and socio-cultural structure. Then, we explained the typological characteristics of folktale narrators among Iranian Turks, and the attitude of the narrators in the subjects of identity, cultural heritage, and their transmission, in the case of Tabriz, based on the data gathered in the study titled “A Study on Turkish Folk Tales in Tabriz-Iran”. As a result, in the case of Tabriz, we found out that among Iranian Turks, folktales are considered as language and cultural heritage, reflecting an artistic fiction and conveying their cultural identity through these texts. Finally, we ana-lyzed roles of both folktales and narrators in protection and transmitting Turkish language, cultural heritage and identity in Tabriz, in Iran.