By Claire Whitman ~
In Türkiye, confining the past in crumbling stone vessels of words is not needed. Heritage flourishes there—on skilled hands of artists, whorl of pots kneaded round by village cooks, whizz of skirted dancers, and voice of a story-teller on starry night skies. These are all intangible cultural heritage of Türkiye: living human expressions of identity, creativity, and continuity conveyed over centuries.
In the midst of all that globalization, the guards are all echoic sentinels, repeating the ancient wisdom in remembrance in other languages.
Their work is instructive: the past does not stand still—neither does, but it changes and continues in Türkiye.
Nowhere are ‘Turkey’s cultural jewels more boldly showcased than in the centuries-long art of weaving and ceramics. Thousands of women stream into cities such as Hereke from villages with thousands more, seated at looms, weaving carpets with centuries-old mother-to-daughter tradition. They’re not ornamentation—those carpets are speaking about culture. There’s ‘meaning in every knot, pattern and color, conjuring love, shelter, or nature’s rhythms.”.
Even in the capital of Turkish ceramics, Kütahya, even there so do the artisans cut and hand-paint. They are not glancing back; they are dreaming forward, shaping day’s work out of centuries’ designs.
The Culinary Heritage Served with Heart
Food is not Turkish food; it’s legend. From crinkly crust of crunk baklava to meat surplus of long-cooked kebab, each meal bears witness to what geography, history, and culture have accommodated.
In a city such as Gaziantep—locally recognized by UNESCO as a Creative City of Gastronomy—nights are family legacy preserved over centuries. A son picks it up from his father just how to pound pistachios in attempting to construct the most delicate baklava. A granddaughter learns from her grandmother how to pull and roll dough for mantı, meat dumplings infused with memory. Each mouthful a sticking, a coming together after centuries.
Dance and Music: Social Rhythm of Memory
Far less publicly celebrated is Turkish music and dance culture, continuing to animate social memory centuries after dancing. From Aegean seashore coast shoreline zeybek dances to Anatolian interior halay, they are not danced in a veil of entertainment—these are affiliation dances.
They are young performers on the host country’s wedding day, where the nation overall arrives to partake, national dress, to return and tell their ancestors. The older women are occasionally in attendance—their own task some of them have to do no more than be, keepers of tradition and no performers. They will not entrust such tales, wedded to dance and music, to the centuries’ custody.
More contemplative is whirling dervish Sema of Mevlevi dervishes, always credited to mystic poet Rumi. Sema ceremony has also been included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a blend of religion and art—a union of man and god.
The Power of the Spoken Word
Even in the farthest reaches of Anatolia, there is word-of-mouth power. The hearth or warmth of a tea house is where word of mouth retains the old, the ancient, the laughter. That the people, those stories—epics, myths, fables—fed culture in the past, and by the devout teller, does now.
Dede Korkut is also famously known by his own name, and along with part of one of the tales which are still to be found in local epics which are still being recited today, and family survival, migration, and everyday life histories. Oral tradition preserves something perpetually human in the increasingly technologically networked world: actual voices, actual memories, brought together by means of connection.
Living Heritage in a Changing World
The history of Turkey is discussed somewhere else in the globe, not only in structures and ruins, but also in people who live as life does. The aforementioned fact was not sacrificed on, to which other Turkish traditions—from paper marbling called Ebru to coffeehouses—conservatively its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
But tradition is something more. It is a by-product of subsidizing the craftworkers, and cultural prejudice against tradition as old-fashioned but hip. In its sense-ting and hip hip modernizing, man on the street is the beat of its cultural revolution.
What they’re doing—spinning a yarn, writing, dancing, cooking—is to illustrate that tradition isn’t in the rearview mirror. It’s about knowing as you go down the highway and remembering to remember that the past is always included in every step taken, every bite taken, every yarn spun, and every rug tied.
