What Does Devlet Mean in Turkish? Why the Word for "State" Also Means Luck
For a reader in a hurry: Devlet means "the state" in modern Turkish, but the word has a much longer history. It comes from an Arabic root associated with changing fortunes, and Turkish dictionaries still preserve its older meanings of happiness, prosperity, and luck. In devlet kuşu, good fortune arrives like a bird landing on someone's head. Yet the importance of the state in Turkic history goes back long before the word devlet entered Turkish. The Göktürks spoke of il, the political order they could establish or lose, while kut expressed the good fortune associated with legitimate rule. These ideas later appeared in Kutadgu Bilig, an eleventh-century work about justice, fortune, and government. Ottoman thinkers developed their own understanding of how a state could endure through the Circle of Justice, which connected the ruler, the army, wealth, and the people. Even devran, a word for changing times and fortune, belongs to this wider history, although it comes from a different Arabic root.
Devlet is one of the Turkish words I find most interesting. Today it usually means the state, the world of government and authority. In older expressions, though, the word seems to belong somewhere else. A person might be addressed as devletlüm, or said to have had the devlet kuşu land on their head. In these phrases, devlet is something a person can have and something a person can lose.
Learners usually meet devlet early, in phrases like devlet dairesi (a government office), devlet hastanesi (a state hospital), devlet okulu (a state school) and devlet memuru (a civil servant). Then a news story about a lottery winner says devlet kuşu başına kondu, and the dictionary meaning stops working. A bird of the state landing on someone's head makes no sense in English. In Ottoman Turkish it made complete sense, because devlet also meant good fortune, prosperity and high rank.
A word that began as a turn
Devlet comes from the Arabic dawla, built on the root d-w-l, and it is one of many everyday Turkish words of Arabic origin. The root carries the idea of alternation, of something passing from one hand to another.
It appears only twice in the Qur'an. In Āl ʿImrān 3:140, after a defeat in battle, the verse says of the days of victory and loss that God makes them alternate among people. In al-Ḥashr 59:7, the same root describes wealth that should not circulate only among the rich.
The political meaning grew out of that sense of a turn. When the Abbasids took power from the Umayyads in 750, the change itself was a dawla, a turn of fortune that had come to one family. Bernard Lewis argues that when the Abbasid caliph al-Manṣūr spoke of dawlatunā, he meant "our turn" more than "our state." Over time the word came to name the dynasty whose turn it was, and dynasties wrote it into their titles.
The Ottomans called their empire Devlet-i Aliyye, the Sublime State. The abstract meaning "the state," as a political scientist would use it, settled only in the nineteenth century.
The Ottomans hoped their devlet would last forever. The word they used for it had begun as the name for a turn that passes.
The fortune inside the word
Next to the political meaning, Turkish kept the meaning of fortune, and it still does.
The dictionary of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) lists five senses for devlet.
The first two are the state and its organs of government. The other three are "greatness, high position," "happiness" and "luck."
Devlet kuşu, the bird of fortune, is associated with the legend of the hümâ. According to one version of the legend, when a ruler died without an heir, the bird was released, and the person on whose head it landed became the new ruler. The Ottoman word hümâyun (auspicious, and later imperial) derives from the Persian name of this mythical bird. The proverb ya devlet başa ya kuzgun leşe puts the two possible endings of a risk side by side: either fortune lands on your head, or the raven lands on your corpse. Government plays no part in it.
The best-known line on this meaning of devlet was written by a sultan. Süleyman the Magnificent (Kanuni Sultan Süleyman) wrote poetry under the pen name Muhibbî, and one of his gazels opens with this couplet:
Halk içinde muteber bir nesne yok devlet gibi
Olmaya devlet cihanda bir nefes sıhhat gibi
Among people nothing is held in such esteem as devlet;
yet there is no devlet in this world like a single breath of health.
The couplet also found a place in modern Turkish music. Barış Manço (1943–1999), one of Türkiye's most beloved singers and a leading figure in Anatolian rock, recorded a song titled Olmaya Devlet Cihanda Bir Nefes Sıhhat Gibi, bringing Süleyman's centuries-old words to a new audience.
The thought itself is an old one. Health is worth more than wealth in many languages and many proverbs. What makes the couplet interesting is who wrote it and how he used the word. Devlet appears in both lines, and in both it means worldly fortune:
wealth and rank. The poet ruled the Devlet-i Aliyye, and in his own verse he used the word in its other sense, for the things a person has and can lose.
Devran comes from a different root
Devran sounds like a relative of devlet, and many popular explanations treat the two as one family. They come from two different Arabic roots.
Devran, together with devir (period, era, rotation), daire (circle) and devr-i daim (perpetual motion), belongs to the root d-w-r, which means to turn in a circle.
Devlet belongs to d-w-l, and so does a word that looks unrelated: tedavül, meaning circulation, especially when referring to money. Turkish also uses the expression tedavülden kalkmak for something that is no longer in circulation. A banknote withdrawn from use has tedavülden kalkmış, but the expression can also describe an old word, custom, or practice that has fallen out of use. Both words preserve something of the original Arabic root's association with change and movement.
The confusion is easy to understand. The two roots differ by a single consonant, and both describe movement. To a Turkish ear, devlet and devran sound like cousins.
What interests me most is where the two words ended up. Turkish dictionaries give devran the meanings "the world," "fate, fortune" and "time, age." When people say devran döndü, the wheel has turned and the tables are reversed. Devlet, from the other root, carried the same sense of fortune. One root about taking turns and one about circling arrived in Turkish at the same idea: luck that does not stay in one place.
İl and kut: Turkish words for the state before devlet
Turkic peoples were building states long before the Arabic word devlet entered their language. The Göktürks formed a large khaganate across Inner Asia in the sixth century. The Orkhon inscriptions, carved in the 730s in what is now Mongolia, are among the oldest surviving texts in a Turkic language, and they have their own word for the political community: il, later el.
One passage in the Kül Tigin inscription remembers a time when the Turks had lost their il and served a foreign court. The people speak in the first person:
İllig bodun ertim, ilim amtı kanı?
İlli millet idim, ilim şimdi hani? (modern Turkish)
I was a people with a state; where is my state now?
Like devlet in later Turkish, il could be established, protected or lost. Although the two words have different origins, both reflect the importance of political order in Turkish history.
Turkic states developed different forms of government over time. The Uygurs adopted Manichaeism and later established a prosperous state around Turfan, known for its trade, art, and literature. The Seljuks relied on Persian administrators and Islamic institutions, while the Ottomans adapted earlier Turkish and Islamic traditions to build their own system of government.
Despite these differences, an older Turkic idea remained important: kut, the good fortune and legitimacy associated with rulership. Unlike devlet, kut is a Turkic word. It also appears in the title Kutadgu Bilig, a long poem on government, justice, and good fortune, completed by Yusuf Has Hâcib in Kashgar in 1069–70 and presented to the Karakhanid ruler. Its title is usually translated as "the knowledge that brings happiness."
The poem has four main characters, each representing a different idea. The ruler Kün Togdı represents justice, while his vizier Ay Toldı represents kut, or good fortune. The Turkish scholar Reşit Rahmeti Arat explained kut as saadet, ikbal, devlet: happiness, good fortune, and devlet.
Ay Toldı eventually dies, and his son Ögdülmiş, representing reason, takes his place.
His death reflects an important idea in the poem: fortune is temporary. Ay Toldı even compares himself to a deer that is difficult to catch and easy to lose. Nearly five centuries before Süleyman wrote his famous couplet, Turkish literature was already exploring how easily fortune could disappear.
Further reading: the full poem is available in English
Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig)
A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, translated by Robert Dankoff (University of Chicago Press, 1983).
The world is a garden and its wall is the state
If power comes and goes in turns, a ruler has a practical problem: how to keep his turn. Writers in Persian, Arabic and later Ottoman Turkish answered with a chain of dependencies that historians call the Circle of Justice.
The ruler needs an army. The army needs money. The money comes from the people who work the land. And those people can only keep working if they are treated justly, which brings the chain back to the ruler.
The idea is much older than the Ottomans. A short version is attributed to the Sasanian king Ardashir I, and a longer, eight-part version circulated in an Arabic book of advice presented as Aristotle's letters to Alexander the Great. Ibn Khaldun quoted those eight lines in the fourteenth century and called them a circle with no fixed beginning or end.
The Ottoman version most people quote comes from Kınalızâde Ali Efendi, who finished his book of ethics, Ahlâk-ı Alâî, in the mid-1560s while serving as judge of Damascus, in the last years of Süleyman's reign and a few years after Hürrem Sultan died. In a modern Turkish edition of the work, his eight sentences read as follows:
Adl’dir mucib-i salâh-ı cihan Justice is the cause of the world's well-being.
Cihan bir bağdır dîvarı devlet The world is a garden; its wall is the state.
Devletin nâzımı şeriattır What gives the state its order is the sharia.
Şeriate olamaz hiç hâris illâ mülk The sharia has no guardian except sovereign power.
Mülk zabt eylemez illâ leşker Nothing but the army can hold sovereign power.
Leşkeri cem’ idemez illâ mal Nothing but wealth can gather the army.
Malı cem’ eyleyen raiyyettir It is the subjects who gather the wealth.
Raiyyeti kul ider padişah-ı âleme adl Justice makes the subjects servants of the ruler of the world.
The last line returns to justice, and the circle closes. The raiyyet, or reaya, were the taxpaying subjects of the empire. In Kınalızâde's time the word covered Muslims and non-Muslims alike, most of them peasants; the narrower meaning "non-Muslim subjects" came later. In the circle they are the link that everything else rests on, since the wealth that pays the army comes from their work.
The name dâire-i adliyye, or adalet dairesi, is the label later scholars gave to this family of sayings. It appears as a heading over Kınalızâde's lines in a modern edition. Whether he used it himself is uncertain.
When writers thought the circle was breaking
A century later, Ottoman writers used the circle to diagnose what had gone wrong. In 1653, Kâtib Çelebi wrote a short treatise for a council called to deal with a budget crisis. He compared society to a body whose four classes had to stay in balance. In 1702, the historian Naîmâ opened his chronicle with the circle in four steps: the state stands on soldiers and officials, they live on wealth, wealth comes from the subjects, and the subjects are kept in order through justice. He also repeated an older saying: dünya küfr ile yıkılmaz, zulüm ile yıkılır, "the world is not destroyed by unbelief; it is destroyed by oppression."
Writers of this advice literature often placed the moment the circle began to break in the late sixteenth century, after Süleyman. Historians today treat their complaints as arguments for reform written within a genre, and the old textbook label duraklama dönemi, the "stagnation period," has largely fallen out of use.
The circle also had a practical side. Sultans issued adâletnâme, justice decrees that forbade officials from collecting illegal taxes or demanding unpaid labor from the reaya. Their standard formula was almayasız ve aldırmayasız: "you shall not take, nor have it taken." Decrees like these were issued again and again, which says something about how often the abuses returned.
Where the words live now
Modern Turkish uses devlet as a plain, neutral word for the state, and the fortune meaning survives mostly in fixed phrases and idioms. Devlet kuşu still lands on lottery winners and on people who inherit unexpectedly. Devran döndü still describes a reversal of fortune.
The dictionary entry also lists everyday compounds built on the word. Devlet baba, "father state," is the state imagined as a parent who provides and protects, and people use it warmly or with a little irony . Devlet kapısı, literally "the door of the state," is the everyday way of talking about government employment: someone with a public-sector job works devlet kapısında. And according to TDK, a devlet düşkünü is someone who once lived in plenty and happiness and later fell into poverty.
The d-w-r words have spread just as far. Devir teslim is the handover of an office from one official to the next. Daire is a circle, the everyday word for an apartment, and in a ministry the name for an office, so devlet dairesi, one of the first phrases on a learner's list, puts the two roots side by side. And when old banknotes are withdrawn, Turkish says they are tedavülden kaldırıldı, removed from circulation, with a word from the same root as devlet.
The sentence Adalet mülkün temelidir, "justice is the foundation of mülk," is one of the most quoted sayings in Turkish public life, from parliamentary debates to the Justice Academy of Türkiye, which cites it as a principle of judicial independence. Its mülk is the same word as in Kınalızâde's fourth and fifth lines: sovereign power, rule over a land. A learner hearing it today will most likely translate it as "property."
A Few Thoughts on Justice
Of course, ideas and reality do not always agree. From the early Turkic states of Central Asia onward, Turks have placed great importance on having a state of their own. The loss of political order was often feared more than living under an unjust ruler. Yet the ideal remained that the state should serve its people, protect them and provide the conditions for a good life.
History offers plenty of examples of rulers who forgot this, and of people who tried to remind them. Power attracts ambition, personal interests, and corruption, but it has also produced thinkers, reformers and ordinary people willing to challenge injustice. Perhaps that is why the Circle of Justice is still worth remembering. The fact that an ideal has never been fully achieved is not a reason to abandon it. We can still expect better from those who govern us, and hope for a fairer world.
There is a popular saying that hard times create strong people, strong people create good times, good times create weak people and weak people create hard times.
History is rarely that simple, of course. But perhaps this, too, is a kind of circle. Whether we keep going around it or learn something along the way is another question.
Back to the Word
Look up devlet in the Turkish Language Association's dictionary today, and even the order of its meanings is interesting. The state comes first, followed by its governing institutions. Then come high office, happiness, and finally a person's fortune. For happiness, the dictionary even quotes Süleyman's couplet that we encountered earlier. The older meanings are still there, although they are less common in everyday Turkish.
While writing this, I found myself thinking about the American Declaration of Independence and its famous phrase, "the pursuit of happiness." Could there be some connection between these older ideas of happiness, good government and the state?
I don't know of any direct historical link and the two traditions developed in very different circumstances. Still, I find it interesting that people separated by centuries and geography were asking what happiness had to do with the way a society was governed. Perhaps that's a question for another article.
Vocabulary
devlet – state; also high position, happiness, luck
devlet kuşu – the bird of fortune;
devlet kuşu başına kondu: he or she had a stroke of great luck
devran – the world; fate, fortune; time, age
devran dönmek – for fortunes to reverse, for the tables to turn
devir – period, era; rotation; transfer (devir teslim: handover)
daire – circle; apartment; office, department
tedavül – circulation (especially of money)
kut – happiness, good fortune (Old Turkic; Arat renders it as saadet, ikbal, devlet)
il / el – state, political community (Old Turkic)
mülk – property; in classical usage, sovereignty, rule
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: What does devlet mean in Turkish?
A: In modern Turkish, devlet means "the state" or its government, as in devlet dairesi (government office). Dictionaries also list high position, happiness and luck among its meanings, and the sense of fortune survives in idioms like devlet kuşu başına kondu, "the bird of fortune landed on his head."
Q: What does devlet kuşu başına kondu mean?
A: It means someone has had a sudden, life-changing stroke of luck, such as winning the lottery or receiving an unexpected inheritance. Devlet kuşu, the bird of fortune, comes from the legend of the hümâ, a bird said to choose a new ruler by landing on his head.
Q: Do devlet and devran come from the same root?
A: No. Devlet comes from the Arabic root d-w-l, which means alternation or taking turns, and devran comes from d-w-r, which means turning in a circle. Both words came to carry the sense of fate or fortune in Turkish.
Q: What is the Circle of Justice (dâire-i adliyye)?
A: It is a model of government found in Persian, Arabic and Ottoman political writing. The ruler needs an army, the army needs wealth, wealth comes from the subjects, and the subjects prosper only under justice. The best-known Ottoman version is Kınalızâde Ali Efendi's eight sentences in Ahlâk-ı Alâî (mid-1560s).
Q: What does "Adalet mülkün temelidir" mean?
A: It means "Justice is the foundation of sovereignty." Here mülk has its classical meaning of rule or sovereignty. In everyday modern Turkish mülk usually means property, so the sentence is easy to misread.
Sources
Bernard Lewis, "Hükûmet and Devlet," Belleten XLVI: https://belleten.gov.tr/tam-metin-pdf/1735/eng
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Devlet": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/devlet
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Devir": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/devir--mantik
TDK Güncel Türkçe Sözlük, entries "devlet" (meanings and compounds), "devlet düşkünü" and "devran": https://sozluk.gov.tr
Islamawakened, Qur'anic root D-W-L: https://islamawakened.com/quran/roots/Dal-Waw-Lam.html
Sohail H. Hashmi, "Dawla," Encyclopedia.com: https://encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dawla
Tahsin Yazıcı, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Hümâyun" (the hümâ legend and the idiom başına devlet kuşu konmak): https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/humayun--hukumdar
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Devletlü": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/devletlu
Ozan Sağsöz, Medyascope (2022): https://medyascope.tv/2022/02/06/ozan-sagsoz-yazdi-ya-devlet-basa-ya-kuzgun-lese-osmanlida-hukumdarlik-sembolizmi-uzerine/
Gülay Durmaz, "Muhibbî," Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (couplet cited from Coşkun Ak, Muhibbî Dîvânı, Ankara: KTB, 1987): https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/muhibbi
TBMM Tutanak Dergisi, Dönem 19, Cilt 47, 44. Birleşim (14.12.1993), pp. 646, 651, 662: https://www5.tbmm.gov.tr/tutanaklar/TUTANAK/TBMM/d19/c047/tbmm19047044.pdf
Türkiye Adalet Akademisi, 2020 Yılı Performans Programı, p. 7: https://taa.gov.tr/yuklenenler/dosyalar/dosya_28_12_201921_34_30_4-turkiye-adalet-akademisi-2020-performans-programi-.pdf
Erdem Konur, "Orhun Yazıtlarında Sosyal ve Siyasi Mesajlar" (Kül Tigin inscription, KT D 8–9): https://turkoloji.cu.edu.tr/pdf/erdem_konur_orhun_yazitlari.pdf
Gülçin Çandarlıoğlu, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Uygurlar": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/uygurlar
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Kutadgu Bilig" (Mustafa Kaçalin, after R. R. Arat): https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/kutadgu-bilig
M. E. Yıldızlı, "Kutadgu Bilig Kahramanları Üzerine Yeniden Düşünmek," Karadeniz Araştırmaları XX/77 (2023): https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3021267
Yusuf Has Hâcib, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, trans. Robert Dankoff (University of Chicago Press, 1983); review in IJMES: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/yusuf-khass-hajib-wisdom-of-royal-glory-kutadgu-bilig-a-turkoislamic-mirror-for-princes-robert-dankoff-trans-publications-of-the-center-for-middle-eastern-studies-no-16-chicago-university-of-chicago-press-1983-pp-291/724EE0009BCDDFE3EBA8FAF3A1A5BFFA
Jennifer London, "The 'Circle of Justice'," History of Political Thought 32:3 (2011): https://www.academia.edu/20261917/The_Circle_of_Justice
Linda T. Darling, Mamlūk Studies Review 10:2 (2006): https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/956/files/MSR_X-2_2006-Darling.pdf
Linda T. Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East (Routledge, 2013): https://www.routledge.com/products/9780203096857
Ejder Okumuş, "Osmanlılarda Siyasal Bir Kurum Olarak Adalet Dairesi," Politika Dergisi (2005): https://www.politikadergisi.com/sites/default/files/kutuphane/osmanlilarda_siyasal_bir_kurum_olarak_adalet_dairesi.pdf
Kınalızâde Ali Efendi, Devlet ve Aile Ahlakı, haz. Ahmet Kahraman, Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser, İstanbul, n.d., pp. 282–283 (the eight sentences, as quoted by Okumuş)
Küre Ansiklopedisi, "Ahlâk-ı Alâî": https://kureansiklopedi.com/tr/detay/ahlak-i-alai
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Kınalızâde Ali Efendi": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/kinalizade-ali-efendi
Aleksandar Fotić, Balcanica XLVIII (2017), on the changing meaning of reaya: https://dais.sanu.ac.rs:443/handle/123456789/5292
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Düstûrü'l-amel": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/dusturul-amel
TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Naîmâ": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/naima
Halil İnalcık, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Adâletnâme": https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/adaletname
Heather L. Ferguson, Osmanlı Araştırmaları 35 (2010), on the decline narrative in Ottoman advice literature (with Douglas Howard, Cemal Kafadar and Rifaat Abou-El-Haj): https://osmanliarastirmalari.isam.org.tr/dergi/article/download/494/497/1481
Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2010): https://nes.princeton.edu/publications/second-ottoman-empire-political-and-social-transformation-early-modern-world
Wonderful reading and fascinating how much political wisdom emanated from the Ottoman Empire. “The money comes from the people. The people can only keep working if they are treated justly. This brings the chain back to the ruler.” Sounds ultra-modern to me.