By Barbaros Z. Alpman ~
Walking the cobble stone serpent avenues of Istanbul or enduring the keened saz dirge on Anatolian ridges, one observes: Turkey is not so easily rent as rewoven, retold anew to the world.
Turkey has ever been and will remain a world-giant of culture, cosmopolitan and ageless in its ancient-new West-East. Turkish revanchism of culture is eye-stab for foreign neutral bon vivants but reconstruction of imagination of new Turkish self elsewhere in the world.
Few have been so close to human condition as Turkish television and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s television. Turkish television and Turkish cinema established a strong presence on the global platform as a number one for the first time ever.
Turkish TV series such as Diriliş: Ertuğrul and The Club (Kulüp) during this period have lost the largest number of giant global viewers. Good plot, emotional verisimilitude, and good characterization have blinded good South Asians as well as Latin Americans too. They are cultural diplomacy where Turkish history, Turkish values, and Turkish sensibilities are being presented to all the nook and corner of the world to the millions of world-wide living rooms.
Music Beyond Generations
Turkish renaissance music snarls in anger. From wailing Ottoman death lament to snarling Anatolian rock futurism, Turkish music is charting an unbelievably-textured sound-land which doesn’t care a whit’s mind of geography, or of history.
Gaye Su Akyol and others are mixing surf rock, psychedelia, and Turkish folk into trans-border singles. Trans-border production, i.e., Tarkan on a single with world pop icons, is the sole exception to world beat genre culture appropriations.
Turkey’s musical energy, has one icon, Istanbul Jazz Festival was hippest place for musicians and hipsters of every hue and one of the venues where there was cross-cultural cross-pollination at high levels. There medieval folk instruments are mixed with fresh beats and Turkey’s multi-culture heritage is replicated and re-mapped in an effort to outspan its arms.
A Food Revolution Based on Tradition
Closer to all intercultural experience—and Türkiyehas never felt foreign—is a meal to consume. Turkish cuisine, its taste, its texture, its history, now is consumed everywhere.
Restaurants like Istanbul’s Mikla and Mehmet Gürs reinvent classic cuisine, too, and global cuisine is enriched by the variety of Turkish cuisine. Even non-haute cuisine like Istanbul street foods simit, döner, and künefe find their ways to world food bazaars and food supermarkets of the high end increasingly.
GastroAntep Festival, on the other hand, honors the food culture of Türkiye and putsTürkiye in the spotlight of the world as the gastronomic champion. Sense celebrations connects the nation’s heritage—Middle East and Mediterranean, Central Asia—a taste tradition with every bite.
Saving the Past, Shaping the Future
Turkiye’s dish composition is in forms: old and new. Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, icon-twists, standing monuments, Ankara and Izmir green and go new.
Young Turkish architects came onto the international scene with their innovative architecture design. Emre Arolat Architecture (EAA) and others utilized past design symbols and motifs and used them in accordance with present design styles of mosques and museums to design homes.
Turkey is privileged to be in a position to host and offer internationally renowned design exhibition and design conference like Istanbul Design Biennial where international master architect personalities, historians, and minds come and tread and reside at point of identity and point of cultural design. They are international forum of gamle Turkey as it holds the heritage.
A Global Dialogue Through Culture
As a definition, Türkiyen is gigantic both literally and metaphorically because it is both geographically and metaphorically sandwiched between Europe and Asia and is the sole site where the single, solitary world center of exchange exists.
But geographically separated and separated, but it’s Türkyie’s storytelling passion—on TV, in buildings, music, and food—what laments its culture the world’s happiness. Wholeness of everything to a people forced over their legacy in naked religion with open arms for tomorrow.
The bigger the world, the more it has to remind us all in Türkiye that home is ridiculous where culture is the problem, and, gruesomely on a massive scale, understandable. It’s not rehistorizing—it’s rehistorizing for everybody.
