CULTURE OF TURKEY

The 'culture of Turkey' is a diverse one, derived from various elements of the Ottoman Empire, European, and the Islamic traditions.
The nation was modernized primarily by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As he transformed a religion-driven former Ottoman Empire into a modern nation-state with a very strong separation of state and religion, there was a corresponding increase in the methods of artistic expression. During the first years of the republic, the government invested a large amount of resources into fine arts such as paintings, sculpture and architecture. This was done as both a process of modernisation and of creating a cultural identity.
Because of the different historical factors playing an important role in defining a Turkish identity, the culture of Turkey is an interesting combination of clear efforts to be "modern" and Western, alongside a desire to maintain traditional religious and historical values.

Contents

People

Music

Literature

Poetry

Prose

Architecture

Traditional Arts

Cuisine

See also

Notes and references

External links

People

The question "Who are the Turks?" does not have an easy answer. At the turn of the 20th century the Ottoman Empire was a multinational state extending over three continents. This page limits its discussion to the borders of the Republic of Turkey (founded in 1923). The location of the pictures are given with the name of the city or as a region, in case the source does not mention it.
Turkish culture has undergone profound changes over the last century. Today, Turkey may be the only country that contains every extreme of Eastern and Western culture (along with many compromises and fusions between the two). The Ottoman system was a multi-ethnic state that enabled people within it not to mix with each other and thereby retain separate ethnic and religious identities within the empire (albeit with a dominant Turkish and Southern European ruling class). Upon the fall of the empire after World War I the Turkish Republic adapted a unitary approach, which forced all the different cultures within its borders to mix with each other with the aim of producing "Turkish" national and cultural identity. This mixing, instead of producing cultural homogenization, instead resulted in many shades of grey as the traditional Muslim cultures of Anatolia collided with (or had imposed upon them) the cosmopolitan modernity of Istanbul and the wider West. Thus, Turkish culture in many ways represents a continuum that bridges past and present, East and West.

Music

Turkey is a Eurasian country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and is a crossroads of cultures from across Europe, North Africa, the Caucasus and South and Central Asia. The music of Turkey includes elements of Central Asian folk music, Arabic, Persian classical music, ancient Greco-Roman music and modern European and American popular music. Turkey, rich in musical heritage, has developed this art in two areas, Turkish classical music (similar to Greco- Roman) and Turkish folk music (Similar to Central Asian). The biggest Turkish pop star of the 20th century was probably Sezen Aksu, known for overseeing the Turkish contribution to the Eurovision Song Contest and was known for her light pop music.
European classical composers in the 18th century were fascinated by Turkish music, particularly the strong role given to the brass and percussion instruments in Ottoman Janissary bands called Mehter who were the fist marching military band in History. Joseph Haydn wrote his ''Military Symphony'' to include Turkish instruments, as well as some of his operas. Turkish instruments were also included in Ludwig van Beethoven's ''Symphony Number 9''. Mozart wrote the "Ronda alla turca" in his ''Sonata in A major'' and also used Turkish themes in his operas. Although this Turkish influence was a fad, it introduced the cymbals, bass drum, and bells into the symphony orchestra, where they remain.
Jazz musician Dave Brubeck wrote his "Blue Rondo á la Turk" as a tribute to Mozart and Turkish music.
Turkish pop music boasts numerous mainstream artists with wide followance since the 1960s like Ajda Pekkan and Sezen Aksu, and younger pop stars like Sertab Erener, Tarkan and Mustafa Sandal. Underground music and the genres of electronica, hip-hop, rap and dance music saw an increased demand and activity following the 1990s.
Turkish rock music, sometimes referred to as Anatolian rock, initiated during the 1960s by individuals like Cem Karaca, Barış Manço, and Erkin Koray, has seen wide-range success and has grown a considerable fan base. A few of the more mainstream Turkish rock bands include Mor ve Ötesi, Duman, and maNga. Individual rock performers like Şebnem Ferah, Özlem Tekin, and Teoman have substantial fan-bases. Turkey also boasts numerous large-scale rock festivals and events. Annually held rock festivals include Barışarock, H2000 Music Festival, Rock'n Coke, and RockIstanbul, during many of which internationally renowned bands / artists frequently take the stage together with Turkish artists.
In 2003, a Turkish singer Sertab Erener won the Eurovision Song Contest with her song Everyway That I Can.

Literature

Main articles: Turkish literature

The history of Turkish literature is traced back to Orkhon inscriptions. Most of the Turkish literature before the adaptation of Islam was verbal literature. With the adaptation of Islam, Turks were influenced with Persian culture and they developed literature using the Persian structures, such as mesnevi, gazel etc. With the 19th century and tanzimat period, artists began to use western structures. The republican period is dominated with western forms of literature.
Turkey's first Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, has an influence on the modern Turkish Litrature.

Poetry

Main articles: Turkish poetry

Poetry is the most dominant form of literature in modern Turkey.
The 'folk poetry' tradition in Turkish literature, as indicated above, was strongly influenced by the Islamic Sufi and Shi'a traditions. Furthermore, as partly evidenced by the prevalence of the still existent aşık/ozan tradition, the dominant element in Turkish folk poetry has always been song. The development of folk poetry in Turkish—which began to emerge in the 13th century with such important writers as Yunus Emre, Sultan Veled, and Şeyyâd Hamza—was given a great boost when, on 13 May 1277, Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey declared Turkish the official state language of Anatolia's powerful Karamanid state;[4] subsequently, many of the tradition's greatest poets would continue to emerge from this region.
There are, broadly speaking, two traditions of Turkish folk poetry:
'the aşık/ozan tradition,' which—although much influenced by religion, as mentioned above—was for the most part a secular tradition;
'the explicitly religious tradition,' which emerged from the gathering places (tekkes) of the Sufi religious orders and Shi'a groups.
Much of the poetry and song of the aşık/ozan tradition, being almost exclusively oral until the 19th century, remains anonymous. There are, however, a few well-known aşıks from before that time whose names have survived together with their works: the aforementioned Köroğlu (16th century); Karacaoğlan (1606?–1689?), who may be the best-known of the pre-19th century aşıks; Dadaloğlu (1785?–1868?), who was one of the last of the great aşıks before the tradition began to dwindle somewhat in the late 19th century; and several others. The aşıks were essentially minstrels who travelled through Anatolia performing their songs on the bağlama, a mandolin-like instrument whose paired strings are considered to have a symbolic religious significance in Alevi/Bektashi culture. Despite the decline of the aşık/ozan tradition in the 19th century, it experienced a significant revival in the 20th century thanks to such outstanding figures as Aşık Veysel Şatıroğlu (1894–1973), Aşık Mahzuni Şerif (1938–2002), Neşet Ertaş (1943– ), and many others.
'Ottoman Divan poetry' was a highly ritualized and symbolic art form. From the Persian poetry that largely inspired it, it inherited a wealth of symbols whose meanings and interrelationships—both of similitude (مراعات نظير mura'ât-i nazîr / تناسب tenâsüb) and opposition (تضاد tezâd)—were more or less prescribed. Examples of prevalent symbols that, to some extent, oppose one another include, among others:
the nightingale (بلبل bülbül) — the rose (ﮔل gül)
the world (جهان cihan; عالم ‘âlem) — the rosegarden (ﮔﻠﺴﺘﺎن gülistan; ﮔﻠﺸﻦ gülşen)
the ascetic (زاهد zâhid) — the dervish (درويش derviş)
In the early years of the Republic of Turkey, there were a number of poetic trends. Authors such as Ahmed Hâşim and Yahyâ Kemâl Beyatlı (1884–1958) continued to write important formal verse whose language was, to a great extent, a continuation of the late Ottoman tradition. By far the majority of the poetry of the time, however, was in the tradition of the folk-inspired "syllabist" movement (Beş Hececiler), which had emerged from the National Literature movement and which tended to express patriotic themes couched in the syllabic meter associated with Turkish folk poetry.
The first radical step away from this trend was taken by Nâzım Hikmet Ran, who—during his time as a student in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924—was exposed to the modernist poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, which inspired him to start writing verse in a less formal style.
Another revolution in Turkish poetry came about in 1941 with the publication of a small volume of verse preceded by an essay and entitled Garip ("Strange"). The authors were Orhan Veli Kanık (1914–1950), Melih Cevdet Anday (1915–2002), and Oktay Rifat (1914–1988). Explicitly opposing themselves to everything that had gone in poetry before, they sought instead to create a popular art, "to explore the people's tastes, to determine them, and to make them reign supreme over art".[21] To this end, and inspired in part by contemporary French poets like Jacques Prévert, they employed not only a variant of the free verse introduced by Nâzım Hikmet, but also highly colloquial language, and wrote primarily about mundane daily subjects and the ordinary man on the street. The reaction was immediate and polarized: most of the academic establishment and older poets vilified them, while much of the Turkish population embraced them wholeheartedly.
Just as the Garip movement was a reaction against earlier poetry, so—in the 1950s and afterwards—was there a reaction against the Garip movement. The poets of this movement, soon known as İkinci Yeni ("Second New"[22]), opposed themselves to the social aspects prevalent in the poetry of Nâzım Hikmet and the Garip poets, and instead—partly inspired by the disruption of language in such Western movements as Dada and Surrealism—sought to create a more abstract poetry through the use of jarring and unexpected language, complex images, and the association of ideas. To some extent, the movement can be seen as bearing some of the characteristics of postmodern literature. The most well-known poets writing in the "Second New" vein were Turgut Uyar (1927–1985), Edip Cansever (1928–1986), Cemal Süreya (1931–1990), Ece Ayhan (1931–2002), and İlhan Berk (1918– ).
Outside of the Garip and "Second New" movements also, a number of significant poets have flourished, such as Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (1914– ), who wrote poems dealing with fundamental concepts like life, death, God, time, and the cosmos; Behçet Necatigil (1916–1979), whose somewhat allegorical poems explore the significance of middle-class daily life; Can Yücel (1926–1999), who—in addition to his own highly colloquial and varied poetry—was also a translator into Turkish of a variety of world literature; and İsmet Özel (1944– ), whose early poetry was highly leftist but whose poetry since the 1970s has shown a strong mystical and even Islamist influence.

Prose

Main articles: Prose of the Republic of Turkey

The backgrounds of current novelists can be traced back to "Young Pens" (Genç Kalemler) journal in Ottoman period. Young Pens was published in Selanik under the Ömer Seyfettin, Ziya Gökalp ve Ali Canip Yontem. They covered the social and political concepts of their time with the nationalistic perspective. They became the core of a movement which will be called national literature.
With the declaration of republic, Turkish literature becomes interested in folkloric styles. This was also the first time the literature was escaping from the western influence and begin to mix western forms with other forms. During the 1930s Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu ve Vedat Nedim Tor begin to publish KADRO. KADRO was revolutionary in its look at the life.
Orhan Pamuk is a leading Turkish novelist of post-modern literature. He is hugely popular in his homeland, but also with a growing readership around the globe. As one of Europe's most prominent novelists, his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the recipient of major Turkish and international literary awards. The most recent of his novels is "Snow." Pamuk is the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, with his melancholic point of view to various cultures in Istanbul. However, a big debate is goning on in Turkey about Pamuk's winning; many Turks think that he won the prize by his political ideas.

Architecture

Classical Turkish architecture is best shown in its mosques. The Blue Mosque and Suleiman Mosque, for example are two of the most popular and beautiful structures in Turkey.
The various other non-Turk population also follow their own different customs aside from the regional.

Traditional Arts

Callgraphy
Gilding
Ebru (Marbling)
Miniature

Cuisine

Turkish cuisine blends ingredients and recipes inherited from the territories covered by the Ottoman Empire with the Turkic and Central Asian cuisine. Turkish Cuisine generally consists of sauced dishes prepared with cereals, various vegetables and some meat (usually Lamb), soups, cold dishes cooked with olive oil and pastry dishes.

See also

★ Turkish folklore

★ Education in Turkey

★ Censorship in Turkey

Notes and references

External links

★ Turkish Cultural Center

★ Turkic Cultures and Children's Festival, Turkic Fest

★ Online Turkish Culture TV

★ All About Turkish Culture

★ Kalem Guzeli Traditional Turk-Islam Arts

★ Art and Culture of Turkey

★ Turkish Oral Narrative at Texas Tech University

★ Turkey:a cultural profile

★ Cute dolls with traditional Turkish costume

★ The word marbling is in Turkish EBRU (cloud, cloudy) or abru (Water face) (En Français. It is derived from the word ebre which belongs to one of the older Central Asian languages and it means the "moiré, veined fabric, paper etc..." used for covering some manuscripts and other holy books. Its origin might ultimately hark back to China, where a document from the T'ang dynasty (618-907) mentions a process of coloring paper on water with five hues. Through the Silk Road this art came first to Iran and picked up the name Ebru. Subsequently this art moved towards Anatolia. Specimens of marbled paper in the Turkish museum and private collections date back as far as the 15th century but unfortunately there is no evidence to show at what date the art of marbling paper first appeared in Anatolia.