Isa the Prophet: some Turkish anecdotes not found in the Arabic tradition. Part 1: The long-living worshipper

This article is a first outcome of a long-term research project, aiming to gather and classify those Osmanlı narrative texts, both prose and verse, which deal with the “Muslim” Jesus, and which seem to have no counterpart in Arabic tradition, according to repertories.1 In the course of my survey of the Turkic ʿİsà corpus, I have detected a number of “Märchen-Typen” that will be discussed in a series of publications. In this first instalment, I would like to present the story of the Long-living worshipper.