Başına devlet kuşu konmak

Literal Translation

For the bird of fortune to land on one’s head.

Meaning and Usage

Başına devlet kuşu konmak describes a sudden stroke of great good fortune that arrives without planning or effort. Turkish speakers say başına devlet kuşu kondu when someone receives an unexpected inheritance or wins the lottery.

The devlet in the idiom keeps an older meaning of the word: fortune and high position. 

How the same word came to mean “the state” is traced in the history of the word devlet.

Said about a friend, the idiom usually sounds warm and a little amazed. Said about someone who seems to have done nothing to earn their luck, it can carry envy or irony. In the first person it often appears as a wish: başıma bir devlet kuşu konsa, “if only the bird of fortune would land on my head.” Talih kuşu, “the bird of luck,” is used in the same way.

The verb konmak means “to land, to perch,” and the bird is the subject of the sentence. Başına is baş (head) with the possessive -ı, the buffer -n-, and the dative case -a, which marks where the bird lands. Başıma means “on my head,” and başımıza means “on our heads.” The second-person form baş-ın-a also gives başına, so the context shows whose luck it is. The way these suffixes stack is shown step by step in how Turkish builds meaning through suffixes.

Example Usage

Turkish

Komşumuza hiç beklemediği bir anda büyük bir miras kaldı. Başına devlet kuşu kondu.

English

Our neighbor unexpectedly inherited a large fortune. The bird of fortune landed on their head.

Cultural Note

The bird in the idiom is the hümâ, a mythical bird whose name comes from Persian. 

Turkish has long called it devlet kuşu and talih kuşu. According to a rivayet, a story passed down over generations, when a ruler died without an heir, a hümâ was released over a public square, and the person on whose head it landed became the new ruler. Tahsin Yazıcı’s entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records this story and notes that the popular idiom reflects it.

Cemal Kurnaz, writing in the same encyclopedia, describes the wider beliefs about the bird. The hümâ lived permanently in the sky and only sometimes came down to about forty arşın above the ground, a traditional unit of roughly two-thirds of a meter. Whoever its shadow fell on, or whoever it landed on, would become a ruler or very rich. People also believed it had no feet, that it laid its eggs in the air, that it could never be caught alive, and that anyone who killed it deliberately would die within forty days.

The same bird gave Ottoman Turkish one of its most official words. Hümâyun, formed from hümâ, first meant “auspicious, blessed” and came to describe anything belonging to the sultan: Bâb-ı Hümâyun, the main outer gate of Topkapı Palace, Dîvân-ı Hümâyun, the imperial council, hatt-ı hümâyun, a decree in the sultan’s own hand, and donanma-yı hümâyun, the imperial fleet. During the Tulip Era, a pavilion built in Bebek was named Hümâyunâbâd.

In H. Dilek Batislam’s survey of fifteen divans, the hümâ and phrases built on it appear 264 times. The anka appears 112 times and the simurg 36. Necâtî, writing about a beloved he can never reach, says:

Kim hümâ inmez yere konmaz kebûter Kâ’be’ye

For the hümâ never comes down to earth, and the dove never lands on the Kaaba.

In the same poetic language, a kind glance from the beloved meant the devlet bird landing on the lover’s head. The poet who used the hümâ most often in Batislam’s survey was Muhibbî, the pen name of Süleyman the Magnificent, who wrote this couplet while ruling the Ottoman Empire:

Original

Perçemin zülfün Hümâ-veş saye saldı üstüme
Pâdişâh-ı âlem oldum çün gedâ oldum sana

Modern Turkish

Saçının perçemi, zülfün, hümâ gibi üstüme gölge saldı.
Sana dilenci olduğum için dünyanın padişahı oldum.

Translation

The lock of your hair cast its shadow over me like the hümâ;
I became ruler of the world, since I became your beggar.

Yunus Emre wrote: Devlet erdi ondan bana / Hâcet değil hümâ kuşu, “Fortune reached me from him; I have no need of the hümâ bird.”

In Türkiye, when a bird’s droppings land on someone’s head or shoulder, people often say it will bring luck. Batislam counts this among the modern traces of the hümâ.

Further Reading

According to Kurnaz, the hümâ is among the birds that set out to find the simurg in Farid ud-Din Attar’s Mantıku’t-tayr, known in English as The Conference of the Birds.