Mehmed Bahâyî Efendi was the thirty-second shaykh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire and one of the most important poets of the 17th century. With these qualities, he was mentioned as a statesman and a literary figure both in the historical sources of his period and in the tezkires, which are accepted as biographical sources of classical Turkish poetry. Some poets living in this century also wrote poems about Bahâyî, usually in the form of eulogies, and especially wrote poems emphasizing a special date about the events in various periods of his professional life. The aim of this article is to identify these poems in question and based on the infirmation in the biographical dictionaries, to reveal how Bahâyî was evaluated as a statesman and a poet by the biographers and poets, as well as the biographical information given about his life.
In the study, after an introduction, brief information about Mehmed Bahâyî Efendi is given. In the next section, the poems identified as a result of the scanning of the 17th century divans, the texts of which are available, are classified according to their verse forms and their characteristics are stated. The poems whose texts could not be found but were found in the tezkires are given under a separate heading. These poems were then subjected to an evaluation
Classical Turkish poetry, Sheikhulislam Bahâyî, biography, eulogy, history poems.