The culture of Turkey () or the Turkish culture () combines a heavily diverse and heterogeneous set of elements that have been derived from the various cultures of the Eastern European, Eastern Mediterranean, Caucasian, Middle East and Central Asian traditions. Many of these traditions were initially brought together by the Ottoman Empire, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state spanning across Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
During the early years of the Republic of Turkey, established after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the government invested large sums of resources into fine arts such as architecture and sculpture, and other artistic fields around the country in-line with the newly implemented reformist and West-leaning policies. This was done as part of a process of modernization, westernization, and of creating and outlining a new Turkish cultural identity, rather than the previously established and depicted Ottoman identity.
People
History
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 adopted a unitary approach, which leads the different cultures within its borders to mix with each other with the aim of producing a national and cultural identity. A series of radical reforms soon followed, central to these reforms were the belief that Turkish society would have to Westernize itself both politically and culturally in order to modernize. Political, legal, religious, cultural, social, and economic policy changes were designed to convert the new Republic of Turkey into a secular, modern nation-state. These changes were implemented under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Literature
Turkish 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 (also known as mesnevî), 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 (Awakening), while the journalist İbrahim Şinasi is noted for writing, in 1860, the first modern Turkish play, the one-act comedy "Şair Evlenmesi" (The Poet's Marriage). 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 (New Literature) movement; the Fecr-i Âtî (Dawn of the Future) movement; and the Millî Edebiyyât (National Literature) movement. The Edebiyyât-ı Cedîde (New Literature) movement began with the founding in 1891 of the magazine Servet-i Fünûn (Scientific Wealth), which was largely devoted to progress (both intellectual and scientific) 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.