Köroğlu (Кероглу): Azerbaijani Folk Epic / illustrated by A. Hajiyev, 1965. In Azerbaijani (Cyrillic script).

Кероглу : азербайджанский народный эпос / [тертиб едэни М. Һ. Тәһмасиб] ; рәссамы А. Һачыjев.
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Köroğlu: Azerbaijani Folk Epic / compiled by M. H. Tahmasib; illustrated by A. Hajiyev. For middle and older school-age children.
Baku : Azerbaijan State Publishing House, 1965. 376 pp., illustrated. Text in Azerbaijani (Cyrillic script).
Print run of 35,000 copies. Hardcover, oversized "encyclopedic" format.
Front free endpaper bearing an owner's inscription in ink.
Binding good: wear and losses to the covering material at the edges and corners of the boards, spine rubbed. Text block good: firm and clean, without staining.

"Köroğlu" ("Son of the Blind Man") is the great heroic epic of the Azerbaijani people, crystallizing by the seventeenth century out of songs and legends surrounding a historical or semi-historical hero who led a band of rebels against Ottoman and local oppression from his mountain stronghold of Chanlibel, mounted on his legendary horse Girat. The epic's western branch (Azerbaijani, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Kurdish versions) gained unusual international notice in the nineteenth century after the Polish orientalist Aleksander Chodźko recorded and translated an Iranian-Azerbaijani version, which the French novelist George Sand in turn read, admired, and translated into French in the 1840s-50s, calling its hero "the Napoleon of the nomads." Systematic Soviet-era recording and study of the epic from the repertoire of Azerbaijani ashug (bard) performers was carried out by the Nizami Institute of Language and Literature of the Azerbaijan SSR Academy of Sciences, culminating in the standard scholarly edition of 1949. The present volume is a later illustrated adaptation prepared for young readers by the folklorist Mammad Hussein Tahmasib, a leading specialist in Azerbaijani epic and oral literature, with dramatic black-and-white illustrations by A. Hajiyev depicting Koroglu's battles, his horse Girat, and the epic's cast of warriors, merchants, and adversaries. Issued by the Azerbaijan State Publishing House in a run of 35,000 copies in an oversized format, this edition brought the national epic to a new generation of Soviet Azerbaijani schoolchildren.