People
Article 66 of the Turkish Constitution defines a "Turk" as anyone that is " bound to the Turkish state through the bond of citizenship". The legal use of the term "Turkish" (a citizen of Turkey) is different from the ethnic definition. However, the majority of the Turkish population are of Turkish ethnicity. Besides the minorities that have legal status as defined and internationally recognised by the Treaty of Lausanne; namely Greeks, Armenians and Jews; other ethnic groups include Abkhazians, Albanians, Arabs, Bosniaks, Chechens, Circassians, Georgians, Hamshenis, Kabardin, Kurds, Laz, Levantines, Ossetians, Pomaks, Roma, Syriacs and Zazas, the largest non-Turkic ethnicity being the Kurds, a distinct ethnic group traditionally concentrated in the southeast. While the term "minority" itself remains a sensitive issue in Turkey, it is to be noted that the degree of assimilation within various ethnic groups outside the recognised minorities is high, the following generations generally adding into the melting-pot of the Turkish main body. Within that main body, certain distinctions based on diverse Turkic origins could be made as well by taking account of the same tendency as mentioned.Though Turkish is the sole official language throughout Turkey, broadcasts in local languages and dialects on state media outlets include Arabic, Bosnian, Circassian and Kurdish .
Music
Turkey is a country in Southeast Europe and on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and is a crossroads of cultures from across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, 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.Ottoman court music has a large and varied system of modes or scales known as makams, and other rules of composition. These can be arranged in certain ways to create a fasil, which is a suite of music consisting of a prelude, postlude and a primary section which begins with and is punctuated by improvisatory pieces called taksim.
A full fasil concert would involve four different instrumental pieces and three verbal pieces, including a recognisable song or sarki format, that carries the same makam or modes all the way through, beginning with a prelude taksim and usually ending in a dance tune or oyun havasi.
However shorter sarki compositions, precursors to modern day songs, are a part of this tradition, many of them extremely old, dating back to the 14th century; many are newer, with late 19th century songwriter Haci Arif Bey being especially popular.
Turkish classical music is taught in conservatories and social clubs, the most respected of which is Istanbul's Üsküdar Musiki Cemiyeti. Commonly used instruments in Turkish classical music are the oud, tanbur, ney, kanun and darbuka
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, Baris 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 Sebnem Ferah, Özlem Tekin, and Teoman have substantial fan-bases. Turkey also boasts numerous large-scale rock festivals and events. Annually held rock festivals include Barisarock, 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.
Belly Dancing
From the makams of the royal courts to the melodies of the royal harems, a type of dance music emerged that was different from the oyun havasi of fasil music.In the Ottoman Empire, the harem was that part of a house set apart for the women of the family. It was a place in which non-family males were not allowed. Eunuchs guarded the sultan's harems, which were quite large, including several hundred women who were wives and concubines. There, female dancers and musicians entertained the women living in the harem. Belly dance was performed by women for women. This female dancer, known as a rakkase, hardly ever appeared in public.
This type of harem music was taken out of the sultan's private living quarters and to the public by male street entertainers and hired dancers of the Ottoman Empire, the male rakkas. These dancers performed publicly for wedding celebrations, feasts, festivals, and in the presence of the sultans.
Modern oriental dance in Turkey is derived from this tradition of the Ottoman rakkas. Some mistakenly believe that Turkish oriental dancing is known as Çiftetelli due to the fact that this style of music has been incorporated into oriental dancing by Greeks and Romany people, illustrated by the fact that the Greek belly dance is sometimes mistakenly called Tsifteteli. However, Çiftetelli is a form of folk music of local origin, whereas rakkas, as the name suggests, is possibly of a more mideastern origin.
Dancers are also known for their adept use of finger cymbals as instruments, also known as zils.
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.Halide Edip Adivar, Nazim Hikmet, Sait Faik Abasiyanik, Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca, Nüsret Aziz Nesin, Yasar Kemal, and, more recently, Orhan Pamuk are writers whose works are known outside of Turkey.
As more translations appear - the latest is a post-modernist novel titled Gece (Night), by Bilge Karasu - an increasing number of works are being recognised as having universal appeal. The literature represented evolved in the second half of the nineteenth century with a group of writers who were members of the bureaucratic intelligentsia. Committed to the Tanzimat reforms, they sought to bring change to literature as well, making it a vehicle for influencing sociopolitical thinking and culture in general. At its inception, therefore, modern Turkish literature has set both didactic and aesthetic goals: to be an art form and source of enjoyment, but also to be engaged.
The pioneers of modernism - Ibrahim Sinasi (1826 - 1871), Namik Kemal (1840 - 1888), and Ziya Pasa (1825 - 1880) - were familiar with European literatures and had lived in Europe. They witnessed the central role literature played there, a role lacking in Turkey, where two distinct literary traditions (elitist and popular) split society. The first, following Arab-Persian classical Islamic tradition and seeking artistic perfection rather than social reality, gave priority to poetry (divan siiri); was rigid in verse form, meter, and rhyme patterns, highly sophisticated in rhetoric and imagery; and employed language saturated with Arabic and Persian loanwords largely unintelligible to the masses. The second was based on Turkish folk traditions of form, content, and style in both poetry and prose, and linked the Turks to their Central Asian heritage. In general it was denigrated by the small, educated class. Religiously inspired works, many of them mystic, were important in both traditions.
In the 1860s the Sinasi-Namik Kemal-Ziya Pasa school took the first steps toward modernity. Through translation and adaptation (primarily from French), then original composition, they introduced Western-style poetry and fiction, and wrote the first Turkish plays designed for the modern stage. They also turned to journalism - the Tasvir-i Efkar (Description of ideas) was the principal forum for introducing their works - and accustomed readers to editorials, essays, and literary criticism propagating such concepts as fatherland, patriotism, nation, justice, freedom, and constitutional government. They did not completely reject the past, but gave old poetic forms new elements of content and style, using language more comprehensible to the expanding, middle-class reading public. This movement surged again under the republic, resulting in the romanization of the alphabet and measures to produce an öz türkçe (pure Turkish), both of which had a great effect on literature.
These writers lauded proreform statesmen and satirized traditionalists. They targeted social customs like arranged marriages and moralized against the harem system, marital infidelity, prostitution, and inhuman treatment of slaves. Namik Kemal's play Vatan yahut Silistre (Fatherland or Silistria, 1873) caused antiregime demonstrations, and he spent many years in exile as a result. He and his colleagues put reform before creative art, and in articles and prefaces to their works stressed the didactic and social role of literature. Abdülhak Hamit Tarhan (1852 - 1939) and Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem (1847 - 1914), in contrast, showed increasing concern with aesthetics. Ekrem, a teacher, published his lectures, which displayed his knowledge of Western literature and concern for liberating Ottoman poetic style, and was led into a literary battle with Muallim Naci, represented (somewhat unjustly) as the prime defender of the old style. Ekrem also influenced the literary school that flourished in the 1890s, the Edebiyat-i Cedide (New Literature) or Servet-i Fünun (Wealth of Sciences), the latter the title of the journal serving as its main platform. Its leading poets, Tevfik Fikret (1867 - 1916) and Cenap Sehabettin (1870 - 1934), spoke lyrically of love and nature in a Turkish inspired by the language of the divan poets. Fikret also wrote very provocative antiregime poems.
In fiction, building on the pioneer efforts of Ahmet (1844 - 1912), the leading prose writer, Halit Ziya Ushakligil (1866 - 1945), brought to his novels a more developed literary realism and psychological analysis. His two collections of prose poems show an inclination for artistry that set a trend followed by his contemporary Mehmet Rauf (1875 - 1931), and still finds the occasional follower today.
Although the 1908 constitutional period brought hope to writers after the repressive control of Abdülhamit II, further Ottoman decline and Europe's antagonism engendered permission and anti-Western outbursts among writers of the Fecr-i Ati (Dawn of the Future) group that formed in 1909. Meanwhile, a current of Nationalism gained strength, poets such as Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869 - 1944) proclaiming pride in being a Turk and turning to the folk tradition for verse form, meter, and language. The presence in the empire of émigré Turks from Russia fanned consciousness of belonging to a wider "Turanian" nation, and groups of scholars and writers, including Yusuf Akçuroglu (1876 - 1935), Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (1890 - 1966), and Ziya Gökalp (1876 - 1924), promoted study of the early history and culture of the Turks. The most important group was Genç Kalemler (Young Pens), formed in 1910, which stressed language reform. Despite strong romanticism, the short stories of its leader, Ömer Seyfettin, represent a breakthrough in the strongest in modern Turkish literature.
World War I and the War of Independence, culminating in the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Turkish Republic, presented writers with a fresh panorama of people, places, and events to observe and depict, even greater possibilities for artistic choice through emphasis on Westernization, and an ever-increasing array of readers. Novelists of the older generation, such as Halide Edip Adivar (1884 - 1964), the first important activist woman writer; Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu (1889 - 1974) and Resat Nuri Güntekin (1889 - 1956), represent an important advance in both narrative and character analysis, their works depicting the weaknesses of late Ottoman society, the inner conflicts of its people, the surge of patriotism during the War of Independence, and the new roles of women.
In poetry, three prominent poets adhered to the classical meter and verse form: Yahya Kemal Beyath (1884 - 1958), a neoclassicist who expressed his nationalism by nostalgically recalling Ottoman splendors; Ahmet Hasim (1885 - 1933), a symbolist steadfast in an art for art's sake approach, painting dreamlike vignettes of nature in its most tranquil moments; and Mehmet Akif Ersoy (1873 - 1936), who, although also choosing the classical traditions, wrote in a language very close to prose and spoken Turkish.
Of the many ideologies to which the Turks were exposed from the early days of the Republic, communism captivated Nazim Hikmet (1902 - 1963), the major poet of the century. Having been imprisoned for many years, he fled Turkey in 1951 and spent his remaining years behind the Iron Curtain. He fashioned Turkish free verse, and his works (prison poetry, love lyrics, social or political declamation, long narrative verse) display a striking fluidity of language and a new depth of human understanding. Only Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca (b. 1914), with the breadth of his aesthetic view and intellectual delving into the metaphysical, approaches his stature.
Of prime importance has been the development of realist village literature. Urban-born nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century writers seldom focused on Anatolia and its rural population. With the centre of government moved to Anatolia, and especially after the introduction of a two-party system, the villager became a focus of attention for fiction writers, who now included those born in villages or closely familar with village life. Yasar Kemal writes of the plight of the peasants in the Taurus Mountains and Çukurova Plain. Other writers have followed the villagers in their migration to country towns or big cities. In recent years an increasing number of works have drawn attention to the problems facing Turks who have migrated to Germany and other European countries since the late 1960s. Among other writers who depict the "little man" with deep understanding are Nüsret Aziz Nesin (b. 1915) and Sait Faik Abasiyanik, who has over 100 short stories set in Istanbul, nearly half of them on the island of Burgaz, revealing the life of the fisher-folk on the Sea of Marmara.
Poets also turned to the "common man." In 1941, Ornan Veli (1914 - 1950), Oktay Rifat (1914 - 1988), and Melih Cevdet Anday (b. 1915) published a collection of poems, Garip (Strange), calling for poetic realism untrammeled by rules and dictates, un-adorned and in colloquial speech, concerned with and attempting to communicate with the man in the street. In the mid-1950s Anday joined the Second New Movement, a group including Ilhan Berk (b. 1916), Cemal Süreya (1931 - 1990), and Edip Can-sever (1928 - 1986), who turned to obscurantism, writing poetry that was abstract and abtruse, in some cases almost totally incomprehensible.
Women were rarely mentioned among the writers of the Ottoman Empire before the nineteenth century. Their number increased after the Tanzimat, when a new generation of well-educated women emerged who understood French and were familiar with the works of both the French Romantics and the new Ottoman writers. Best known is Fatma Aliye Hanim (1862 - 1936), elder daughter of Ahmed Cevdet Pasa. The first Turkish woman novelist, her publications also included translations of French, articles, works on history, and a newspaper for women. Halide Edip Adivar served as a model for women from the early days of the Republic, both as a writer and as an activist. Women have turned to fiction rather than poetry. Güiten Akin (b. 1933), for example, a poet who has won many awards, is the only women represented in The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse. In contrast, the surge of enthusiasm for the short story in the 1970s, the Füruzan phenomenon, is credited to the stories published by Füruzan (Selçuk; b. 1935), a young writer of village background who deals especially with the exploitation of villagers in the cities.
In the 1990s women continue to participate fully on the Turkish literary scene. Both male and female writers continue to explore the wealth of their heritage and new avenues of expression.
Architecture
Ottoman architecture is the architecture of the Ottoman Empire which emerged in Bursa and Edirne in 14th and 15th centuries. The architecture of the empire formed a distinctive whole with influences mostly by Persian, Seljuk, Byzantine, Arab and Western architecture. For almost 500 years Byzantine architecture such as the church of Hagia Sophia served as models for many of the Ottoman mosques.The Ottomans achieved the highest level architecture in their lands hence or since. They mastered the technique of building vast inner spaces confined by seemingly weightless yet massive domes, and achieving perfect harmony between inner and outer spaces, as well as light and shadow. Islamic religious architecture which until then consisted of simple buildings with extensive decorations, was transformed by the Ottomans through a dynamic architectural vocabulary of vaults, domes, semidomes and columns. The mosque was transformed from being a cramped and dark chamber with arabesque-covered walls into a sanctuary of esthetic and technical balance, refined elegance and a hint of heavenly transcendence.
