Chura Batyr

Chura Batyr is a heroic figure of Tatar epic song, the protagonist of a dastan preserved among the Volga Tatars and shared, in variant forms, with other Kipchak Turkic peoples. He is the ideal batyr, the brave warrior who gives his life in the defence of his homeland, and his cycle is remembered in Tatar tradition in connection with the last days of the Kazan Khanate. Transmitted orally and gathered by folklorists into the corpus of the Tatar heroic epic, his story preserves the martial ethos and the historical grief of a people, and stands beside the epic of Idegäy among the surviving monuments of Tatar oral literature.

Domains

• war

Powers

• defends the Kazan Khanate

Epithets

• Чура батыр — Chura the HeroF. I. Urmanche, Татар мифологиясе, s.v. Чура батыр. (secondary)

Sources

• Chura Batyr is the hero of a Tatar heroic dastan, a warrior-defender associated with the Kazan Khanate whose story is preserved in the Turkic epic tradition of the Volga.: F. I. Urmanche, Татар мифологиясе: энциклопедик сүзлек, Kazan, 2008–2011, s.v. Чура батыр. (secondary); M. X. Bakirov, Татарский народный эпос, Kazan, 2001. (secondary)