This article examines the images of mythological characters and interprets the text of the dastan “The Tale of Shan’s Daughter” from the point of view of folklore studies. The author of the dastan is considered being the ancient Bulgarian poet and educator Mikail Bashtu. The author solves the super-task of his dastan - the conversion of a pagan to the Muslim faith - with the help of several artistic techniques, among which an important place is occupied by a dream, which is equally characteristic of archaic folklore and ancient Eastern literature. Forces of good and evil, love and rejection, procreation, expressed by the concept of “woman” point to the most ancient layers of traditional everyday culture of the Turks, and the transformation of these images into divine forc-es of the Islamic persuasion allows us to trace how the Turkic peoples passed from one religious hypostasis to another. The genre definition of the work is determined through the analysis of its poetics. In particular, the features of the plot structure and artistic language are considered.