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The modern Republic of Turkey is today a unique crossroads of culture – European, Central Asian, and Middle-Eastern. Although to pin the country down to just one of these would be impossible. Turkey remains home to some of the first known Neolithic settlements. But it is also forever the setting of Troy, the city conquered by the Greeks in Homer’s Iliad. Early Christian Byzantium with its many magnificent churches and monasteries hold a well honored place in Turkey alongside the glories of the Ottoman age.
Over the course of its many thousand year history, the Anatolian penninsula has been alternately dominated by both Eastern and Western influences. Many a conquering empire and fortune-seeking migrant have entered that continental gateway between Europe and Asia. Turkey continues to be enriched by legacies they left behind. In Turkey, intertwined yet seemingly incompatible cultures have often found unique and harmonious expression.
Turkish culture as cultivated by the Ottomans was a blend of Byzantine, Persian, Islamic, nomadic tribal influences. Under the Ottomans, Istanbul was a cosmopolitan center, with a population mix of orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Ottoman society was dynamic and remarkably diverse in its ethnic make-up. Known to encourage and even celebrate this diversity, the Sultans regularly commissioned music and art forms which freely absorbed and were enriched by the cultures of the many peoples living under their rule. Ethnic communities retained much of their culture as well as a degree of political independence. Intermarriage was accepted, and laws were tolerant of religious and cultural differences. Consequently, the Orthodox Church maintained a generally peaceful relationship with the Ottoman government.
Turkey today strives to maintain its traditional religious values and at the same time a modern European outlook. By comparison to the social policies of its Ottoman past, modern Turkish society is intensely interested in promoting the concept of a Turkish identity. To this end, the legacy of Ottoman art and architecture has oft been cited as a unifying element by those campaigning for the creation of a national identity. Even so, the city of Ankara, chosen as the capital of Turkey in the 1920’s, was designed according to the principles of modern architecture with the intention that it would stand apart from the past, and thus become a symbol of Turkey’s move forward as a new and different entity, separate from that which it had been under the Ottomans. The Ankara landscape features many buildings engineered with the clean lines of modernism, but also some interesting and innovative blends of traditional styles conceived in new ways.
Turkey is an Islamic country where Muslims constitute a 98% majority. Its Ottoman era mosques have remained in continuous use despite the dismantling of the Ottoman kingdom. Still, the Turkish government is explicitly committed to notion of secularism, which has moved it to take such extreme steps as outlawing the head-scarf. The ridiculous law, no doubt conceived with the good albeit severely misguided intentions of curbing fundamentalism, is largely ignored on both sides of the political divide. In ignoring this law, the Turkish government seems to have implicitly admitted that the protection of freedom of religion is part of what makes the country a secular democracy, and a fitting heir to the Ottoman legacy.
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