Arzu Öztürkmen

Celebrating National Holidays in Turkey: History and Memory

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having “an accumulative effect upon successive generations” (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Partys assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republics reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

The Role of People'S Houses in the Making of National Culture in Turkey

Scholars engaged in the study of nationalism have often stressed an analytical distinction between the rise of nationalism and the growth of nations since nationalism, by its very nature, has always preceded the nation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). In the case of Turkey, the rise of nationalist movements rooted in Ottoman Turkism has been well-documented by studies focussing on their pioneering leaders, publications and institutions. Efforts aimed at the making of a Turkish nation, however, coincided with the period following the establishment of the Turkish nation-state. This new phase of Turkish nationalism differed from the preceding nationalist movements of the late Ottoman era, in its concern with the consolidation of a form of its own. It borrowed elements from, but also deviated from, the expansionist, pan-Turkist tendencies of the earlier era.

Orality and Performance in Late Medieval Turkish Texts: Epic Tales, Hagiographies, and Chronicles

The purpose of this essay is to look in depth at a selected part of that corpus produced within the particularly chaotic political context of late medieval Asia Minor (Anatolia), where different languages, scripts, and genres competed with one another. In search of signs of orality and references to oral performances in written texts, the essay will particularly focus on three manuscripts, all reflecting the world of the Turkish-speaking communities of the late medieval Anatolia: the Book of Dede Korkut, the Vilayetname-i Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli, and the Tarih-i Al-i Osman of Aşıkpaşazade. These manuscripts can be situated within the framework of a literary-historical genre as “epic,” “hagiography,” and “chronicle,” respectively. In the late medieval Anatolian context, these three manuscripts shared linguistic, stylistic, and discursive commonalities, while, however, fulfilling different functions for different audiences, an issue that calls attention to the pitfalls of genre analysis in historical context. As examples of the unsettled—or even, at times, chaotic—historical-ethnographic setting of late medieval Anatolia, these three texts stand as “genres-in-progress,” to crystallize only in the late sixteenth century into more structured forms. Put into the same cultural-historical framework, these texts, with their signs of orality, reflect the diverse ways in which three types of communities—tribal, religious, and political—constructed and expressed their past.