Kizil Elma | Red Apple

Kizil Elma(Almıla)|Red Apple [1]. It is interesting to note that Turkish sources referred to Vienna as the "golden apple" and Costantinople as the "red apple" - Turkish myth speaks of "the warrior of the faith who will pluck the red apple." The symbol refers to the Westward motion of the sun and was the war cry of Turkic tribes moving West. Almaty Legend of apple orchard on an island is also repeated in Avalon which also means Apple Island. From time immemorial, the Isle of Avalon [2], has been home to the Goddess. This ancient sacred place is the legendary Western Isle of the Dead where people were called here to die, to be transformed and to be reborn.

The Bulgarian wedding banner consists of a flag attached to a pole that has been ritually cut from a tree. The banner is topped with a red or gold foil-wrapped apple symbolizing the sun and fertility has its roots from their Turkic past. In Norse myth, Idunna was the keeper of the 'apples of immortality' which kept the Gods young. The 'fruit-bearing tree' refered to by Tacitus in his description of Norse runic divination may have been the apple.

The Greek Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus, a national martyr, is the subject of myths by the Greek people. Stories have been told of the Marble Emperor where Constantinos is said to have been rescued by an Angel and that he will sleep until he returns to chase the Turks from Constantinople to the Red Apple Tree "Kokkini Milia" (Κοκκινη μηλια).Kokkinι Milia (Red Apple tree) was a region which the imagination of the Greeks placed in the depths of Asia Minor and beyond. It is there that they hoped to push back the Turks, i.e., where they originally came from. One of the problems identifying apples in religion, mythology and folktales is that the word "apple" was used as a generic term for all (foreign) fruit, other than berries but including nuts, as late as the 17th century. For instance, in Greek mythology, the Greek hero Heracles (a metaphoric sun god, hence red apple), as a part of his Twelve Labours, was required to travel to the Garden of the Hesperides [3] where sun sets and pick the golden apples off the Tree of Life growing at its center.

In Latin, the words for "apple" and for "evil" [4] are similar in the singular (malus—apple, malum—evil) and identical in the plural (mala). This may also have influenced the apple becoming interpreted as the biblical "forbidden fruit".
Mavi Boncuk |
Mustafa Yildizdogan sings Kizil Elma


[1] Malus sieversii is a wild apple native to the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Northern Afghanistan and Xinjiang, China. It has recently been shown to be the sole ancestor of most cultivars of the domesticated apple (Malus domestica). It was first described (as Pyrus sieversii) in 1833 by Carl Friedrich von Ledebour, a German naturalist who saw them growing in the Altay Mountains.

[2] King Arthur legend was also transported from Asian Myths. The oldest version is from Daghestan of the Caucasus.

[3] In Greek mythology, the Hesperides (Greek: Ἑσπερίδες) are nymphs who tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the Atlas mountains in Tanger, Morocco at the edge of the encircling Oceanus, the world-ocean.

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[3] Apple (Eng.)/ Pomme (Fr.) / Manzana (Sp.) These words, which all mean the same thing, should be explained one at a time, as they come from different sources. In regard to apple, all European languages other than the Romance languages, ie., the great majority of Indo-European languages, including the Celtic tongues, use a word with a root ap, ab, af or av for apples and apple trees: aballo (Celtic), apple(Eng.), Apfel (Germ.), aeppel (Old Eng.), abhal (Irish Gaelic), epli (Icelandic), afal (Welsh), jabloko (Russian), and jablko (Polish). In regard to pomme, this French term comes from the Latin pomum, which originally referred to all fruit. Before Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire some time in the 4th. Century, the Latin word malum (melon in Greek) meant "apple." After the adoption of Christianity, however, and due to the important symbolism of the apple in the bible (ie, the Garden of Eden), the general term pomum, "fruit," was used to describe the apple as "the fruit of fruits." In regard to manzana, this Spanish term comes from the Iberian pronunciation of matiana, a Gallo-Roman translation of the Latin word matianum, which was a scented, golden apple first raised by and named after Matius, a friend of Caesar's who was also a cookbook author ["Apple" Footnote: The French village of Avallon (in the Yonne area), where there are a lot of apple trees, received its name from the legend of the sacred island of Avalon or Abalon, meaning "Apple Orchard"--incidentally, the "-on" suffix is an "augmentative" and explains the origin of the name of the Pacific shellfish "Abalone"--that is, "big apple."].