Koyash

In the Turkic cosmological framework recorded across sources, Koyash is the Sun‑personified deity who participates in creation. Several accounts state that Kök Tengri (the Sky) created the earth using rays of sunlight, a process in which Koyash is thus implicated as a creative/animative agent. Genealogical summaries in the tradition place Koyash among the children of sky and earth deities (sources group him with Kök Tengri and the Earth goddess/Toprak Ana), and he is situated as a visible heavenly being whose rays transmit Tengri's life force to the world.

Sources do not fix a single anthropomorphic portrait; instead Koyash is commonly represented in visual and poetic motifs as brilliant, fiery, and mobile. Iconography and artifact imagery frequently render the sun as a fiery bird or a winged (flying) horse, and he is associated with chariot/horse imagery that symbolizes the sun's daily flight across the sky. Such motifs appear on pottery and personal ornaments in material culture and emphasize fire, light, and movement rather than standardized human features.

Koyash's primary functions are cosmological and life‑giving: his rays are conceptualized as 'strings' linking the Sun to the spirits of plants, animals, and humans and serving as channels for Tengri's vital force (for example, transmitting life force to infants). Sources also record a creative role—Kök Tengri used sun rays in the making of Earth, which places Koyash among agents of creation. In some accounts Koyash is attributed martial or dangerous capacities: a tradition reports that the sun god can form 'solar strands' from his hands capable of ensnaring and burning victims, and some descriptions portray him with warriorlike aspects. Overall the sources present him as a powerful, luminous heavenly actor rather than a malevolent trickster.