Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi

Öz

While folk songs reflect the feelings and dreams of the society that created them, they draw realistic images by interpreting life with a natural fiction. Among these images, which can be evaluated in sociocultural and social psychology contexts, those related to space are related to gender roles. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between rivers in natural spaces and women's gender role in the context of folk songs. For this purpose, folk song texts were analyzed using document analysis and qualitative data collection methods. The boundaries of the research were determined with the folk songs containing the river image in the TRT repertoire. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that in the majority of these folk songs, the river was the space of exit to the public space for women. However, in folk songs, it has been seen that rivers are sometimes a space of conscious refuge, the outcome of which is connected to death. The motif of the woman choosing the river as the space for her suicide act, which is typically seen in a group of folk songs, constitutes the axis of this study. In this research, three folk songs featuring three different rivers from three different regions were selected and focused on, emphasizing that the river as a space for suicide exists in many parts of Anatolia and Balkans.