APersonIndependent states
Yunus Emre
The great bard of Anatolian Turkish poetry (c. 1240–1320), who sang of human and divine love in plain Turkish.
Yunus Emre was a Sufi poet who lived in Anatolia in the 13th–14th centuries. Little is known of his life; his poems show he was a dervish of Taptuk Emre. In 1307 he wrote the masnavi Risaletü'n-Nushiyye.
He wrote not in the court language laden with Persian and Arabic but in the plain Turkish of the people, mostly in syllabic metre. Lines such as "Come and see what love has done to me" and "We love the created for the Creator's sake" have been quoted for centuries.
His ideas — love of humanity, humility, equality — deeply shaped Turkish thought. UNESCO declared 1991 the International Year of Yunus Emre, and Türkiye's cultural centres abroad, the Yunus Emre Institute, bear his name.
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Updated: October 2, 2026