Tofa (Karagas) Türklerinin Bilmeceleri
The Riddles of Tofa (Karagas) Turks

Summary/Abstract: Tofa (Karagas) Turks today live in the villages of Nijneudinsk raion in the Irkutsk oblast of the Russian Federation in the Southern Siberia. Living collectively in the Aligcer, Nerha (Tof. Nirsa) and Upper Gutara villages and as scattered in the Nijneudinsk raion and Shumskiy (Uda II) and Voznesenskiy villages, the Tofa Turks were known as the ‘Karagas’ and/or ‘Karagas Tatars’ until 1930. According to the 2010 census, having a total population of only 762, the language of Tofa Turks is included in the Redbook of UNESCO and listed as one of the ‘endangered languages’. The Tofa Turkic language is classified under ‘Uighur-Oghuz’ group in terms of Turkic dialects and has an important place in the comparative Turkology studies because of bearing certain archaic properties and parallelism with Mongolian language. In addition, the facts that the Tofa Turks do not a written language and have lived for centuries depending on oral traditions make the oral cultural products more important in functional terms. Legends, fables, fairy tables, songs, proverbs and riddles are among the major types of oral culture. This study deals with the riddles of the Tofa Turks, a less-studied subject in the General Turkology. Tofa riddles are about humans, animals and birds, earth and natural occurrences and events, nutrition culture, hunting tradition, moral values and traditions. Various researchers attempted to explain the birth of riddles with mythological elements. Since the riddles of the Tofa Turks have certain mythological traits and characteristics in terms of their content, they are extremely striking in the aspect of myth - riddle relation. The current study examines 74 riddles of the Tofa Turks for their style and content, and aims at contributing to the individual or comparative researches to be made in this field.

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