Tengri’s Children: Scattered but Unbowed

We were born under the only roof that ever mattered —the sky. It was our father, our temple, the one constant in a life of movement. While empires rose and fell like brittle fences, we carried the unbroken thread between earth and unseen. We healed ourselves with the same hands that held the reins of wild horses. The grasslands whispered our names. The wind wrote our laws.

Fire came from the south, a hunger that did not understand the sacredness of open spaces. They called it conquest, we called it weather. Every storm passes. The sky remains. So we ran, not as fugitives, but as guardians of a truth too vast for walls. The sky followed its children.

Then came the storm wearing a familiar face, a hollow crown that called itself kin but knelt to foreign gods. They shattered our altars, replaced our songs with chants we did not recognise. Yet the sky did not answer their prayers. It remained, indifferent to their borrowed faith.

Later, the men of lines and ledgers came, their hands heavy with paper and punishment. They uprooted us, replanted us in soil that did not know our horses’ breath. They spoke of 'light,' of 'science,' but their light was a cage, their science a new mythology. They never understood: we were the ones who carried civilisations in our saddlebags, who traded not just silks and spices, but the secrets of Irk Bitig.

They thought they could erase us. But the sky does not forget. We are the nomads. The sky is our only land.

Düşlerimde gezer Börteçine,
Kral taçlarını küçümseyen ayın aydınlığında,
Öz’ümde dolaşır, yele dönen Süñük’ümde.
Gömseler bile Yer kusar,
Taşları delip yol bulan Ot'lar gibi.
El’ler gelip geçer!
Adlarını kanla kazır, buna 'tarih' derler,
Oysa Yer onarır yarasını, Çöl yeniden doğurur.
Kök onların değil, Kam’larındır,
Kökrek’e baktığında, Köz’ünde kendini görenlerin.