Among all Bashkir folk works Majit Gafuri first of all distinguished the epic ‘Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu’. The poet paid a special visit to Belebeyevsky District to the Bashkirs living in the vicinity of the big lake Aslykul in 1909. For several days he listened to folk songs, legends and tales. Among others, he recorded the legend of Batyr Zayatulyak and the underwater princess Hyuhylu. Gafuri also paid attention to folk songs and published his records as a separate book in 1910.

The poet wrote about why he was so interested in this legend in the introductory word to the book. He noted that ‘the old melody of Zayatulyak’ was beautiful and that the Bashkirs kept the memory of those legendary events as if they took place in reality. The poet writes: ‘When reading the legend, the reader has the feeling that once he also passed through the places near Aslykul, where I sat and made notes about it.’

The epic ‘Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu’ tells about love of legendary batyr Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu, daughter of the lord of lakes Aslykul and Kandrykul. The action of the legend unfolds not only on land, but also in the fantastic underwater world, where Hyuhylu lives:

Before 1917, the epic ‘Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu’ was also distributed in a manuscript version, which people made for themselves. This was confirmed during the research of the text recorded by Gafuri. In recent years, folklore scholars have recorded many variants of this epic in Bashkortostan and the Orenburg region.

Bashkir scientists made a great progress on the study of this legend. For example, a separate chapter is devoted to this research in the book ‘Epic Heritage of the Bashkir People’ by writer and folklore specialist Kirei Mergen. The scientist emphasizes the similarity of some motives of ‘Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu’ with the epic ‘Ural-Batyr’ and makes other valuable observations.