Culture of Turkey
The culture of Turkey or the Turkish culture includes both the national culture and local cultures. Currently, Turkey has various local cultures. Things such as music, folk dance, or Kebab variety may be used to identify a local area. Turkey also has a national culture, such as national sports leagues, music bands, film stars, and trends in fashion. After the establishment of the republic, Kemalism emphasized Turkish culture, attempted to make "Islam a matter of personal conviction", and pursued modernization.
Literature
is the collection of written and oral texts composed in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today. Traditional examples for Turkish folk literature include stories of Karagöz and Hacivat, Keloğlan, İncili Çavuş and Nasreddin Hoca, as well as the works of folk poets such as Yunus Emre and Aşık Veysel. The Book of Dede Korkut and the Epic of Köroğlu have been the main elements of the Turkish epic tradition in Anatolia for several centuries.The two primary streams of Ottoman literature were poetry and prose. Of the two, the Ottoman Divan poetry, a highly ritualized and symbolic art form, was the dominant stream. The vast majority of Divan poetry was lyric in nature: either ghazals or qasidas. There were, however, other common genres, most particularly the mathnawi, a kind of verse romance and thus a variety of narrative poetry. The tradition of Ottoman prose was exclusively non-fictional in nature; as the fiction tradition was limited to narrative poetry.
The Tanzimat reforms of 1839–1876 brought changes to the language of Ottoman written literature and introduced previously unknown Western genres, primarily the novel and the short story. Many of the writers in the Tanzimat period wrote in several different genres simultaneously: for instance, the poet Namık Kemal also wrote the important 1876 novel İntibâh, while the journalist İbrahim Şinasi is noted for writing, in 1860, the first modern Turkish play, the one-act comedy "Şair Evlenmesi". Most of the roots of modern Turkish literature were formed between the years 1896 and 1923. Broadly, there were three primary literary movements during this period: the Edebiyyât-ı Cedîde movement; the Fecr-i Âtî movement; and the Millî Edebiyyât movement. The Edebiyyât-ı Cedîde movement began with the founding in 1891 of the magazine Servet-i Fünûn, which was largely devoted to progress along the Western model. Accordingly, the magazine's literary ventures, under the direction of the poet Tevfik Fikret, were geared towards creating a Western-style "high art" in Turkey.
Poetry
Poetry is the most dominant form of literature in modern Turkey.The 'folk poetry' as indicated above, was strongly influenced by the Islamic Sunni and Shi'a traditions. Furthermore, as partly evidenced by the prevalence of the still-existent ashik 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 Mehmed Bey declared Turkish the official state language of Anatolia's powerful Karamanid state; subsequently, many of the tradition's greatest poets would continue to emerge from this region.
There are, broadly speaking, two traditions of Turkish folk poetries;
- 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 of the Sufi religious orders and Shi'a groups.
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 and opposition —were more or less prescribed. Examples of prevalent symbols that, to some extent, oppose one another include, among others:
the nightingale — the rose
the world — the rosegarden
the ascetic — the dervish
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 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, 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, 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.
File:Orhan veli statue1.JPG|thumb|upright|Orhan Veli Kanık was the founder of the Garip Movement in Turkish poetry.
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. The authors were Orhan Veli Kanık, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Oktay Rifat. 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". 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.
File:Daglarca 1030118.JPG|thumb|left|180px|Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca was one of the most prolific Turkish poets of the Turkish Republic with more than 60 collections of his poems published, laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Award.
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, 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 best-known poets writing in the "Second New" vein were Turgut Uyar, Edip Cansever, Cemal Süreya, Ece Ayhan, and İlhan Berk.
Outside of the Garip and "Second New" movements also, a number of significant poets have flourished, such as Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, who wrote poems dealing with fundamental concepts like life, death, God, time, and the cosmos; Behçet Necatigil, whose somewhat allegorical poems explore the significance of middle-class daily life; Can Yücel, 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, whose early poetry was highly leftist but whose poetry since the 1970s has shown a strong mystical and even Islamist influence.
Prose
The style of the current novelists can be traced back to the Genç Kalemler journal in the Ottoman period. Young Pens was published in Selanik under Ömer Seyfettin, Ziya Gökalp and Ali Canip Yöntem. They covered the social and political concepts of their time with the nationalistic perspective. They were the core of a movement which became known as the "national literature."With the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkish literature became interested in folkloric styles. This was also the first time since the 19th century that Turkish literature was escaping from Western influence and began to mix Western forms with other forms. During the 1930s, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Vedat Nedim Tor published Kadro, which was revolutionary in its view of life.
File:Orhan Pamuk 2009 Shankbone.jpg|thumb|upright|Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Stylistically, the early prose of the Republic of Turkey was essentially a continuation of the National Literature movement, with Realism and Naturalism predominating. This trend culminated in the 1932 novel Yaban by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. This novel can be seen as the precursor to two trends that would soon develop: social realism, and the "village novel". The social realist movement was led by the short-story writer Sait Faik Abasıyanık. The major writers of the "village novel" tradition were Kemal Tahir, Orhan Kemal, and Yaşar Kemal. In a very different tradition, but evincing a similar strong political viewpoint, was the satirical short-story writer Aziz Nesin. Other important novelists of this period were Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Oğuz Atay. Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, is among the innovative novelists, whose works show the influence of postmodernism and magic realism. Important poets of the Republic of Turkey period include Ahmet Haşim, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Nâzım Hikmet. Orhan Veli Kanık, Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat led the Garip movement; while Turgut Uyar, Edip Cansever and Cemal Süreya led the İkinci Yeni movement. Outside of the Garip and İkinci Yeni movements, a number of other significant poets such as Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca, Behçet Necatigil and Can Yücel also flourished.
The mix of cultural influences in Turkey is dramatized, for example, in the form of the "new symbols of the clash and interlacing of cultures" enacted in the novels of Orhan Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.