On the picture: The recently arranged Yunus Emre Parkı, south of the Yunus Emre mosque.
Yunus Emre (c.1240-c.1321) is a poet and Sufi mystic, who lived in Karaman for a number of years. He has exercised immense influence on Turkish literature, from his own day until the present. Yunus Emre being, after Ahmet Yesevi and Sultan Walad, one of the first known poets to have composed works in the spoken Turkish of his own age and region, rather than in Persian or Arabic, his diction remains very close to the popular speech of his contemporaries in Central and Western Anatolia.
Poems of Sultan Yunus Emre — despite being fairly simple on the surface — evidence his skill in describing quite abstruse mystical concepts in a clear way. They mainly concern divine love as well as human destiny. A poem by Yunus Emre: “There is an I in me, Deeper than me, Whose eyes look at me From inside of me”.
Yunus Emre's portrait is depicted on the reverse of the Turkish 200 lira banknote issued in 2009.
Correspondent: J.M.Criel, Antwerpen.
Source: Wikipedia.