government appears to be encouraging a return to both Turkish techniques and subject matter in music. Contemporary composers tend to adopt Anatolian subject matter to modern scores. The first Turkish language opera, Kerem, by Adnan Saygun (1907- ), was performed in full in the 1952-53 season and was based on an old folk legend. Saygun, a professor at the Ankara Conservatory, was sent to study in the West by Atatürk. He is best known for his oratorio based on the ancient mystic poet, Yunus Emre, but he has also composed string quartets, symphonies, piano concertos, and orchestral suites for Turkish dancers. Other well-known composers of the mid-20th century include Cemal Resit Rey, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Erol Buyukburc, and Zeki Muren. Erkin, an instrumentalist, studied in Paris and taught piano at the Ankara Conservatory of which he later became director. Buyukburc, winner of the Balkan Folk Festival Prize for 3 consecutive years, turned native folk music into Western-style popular music by using Western instruments. Muren tried to fit Turkic-Asian monotonic music into a polyphonic framework. He has also attempted a Wagnerian synthesis of music and drama by making color, costume and action integral elements in his compositions. PAINTING Because of the Islamic ban on the representation of human and animal figures, pre-Ottoman art was limited to architecture and the decorative arts. The 12th- and 13-century mosques and tombs of the Seljuks in Konya and those of Koça Sinan, architect to Süleyman I, are particularly noteworthy. In line with the Islamic and Middle Eastern pattern Turkey had a long tradition of decorative arts, tiles, rugs, fabrics, and miniatures-which waned in the late 19th century. Calligraphy declined with the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1923. Western, especially French, influence was felt beginning in the late 19th century. Western artists visited the court of Mehmet II, and Turkish themes and styles became popular in Paris. The government opened a museum in 1868, a museum school 6 years later, and a School of Fine Arts in 1881. Modern painting, however, developed only after 1914 when students returned from abroad with a background of French impressionism. Ibrahim Calli, who died in the 1950's and was the father of modern Turkish painting, used impressionist colors and lighting techniques in Turkish landscapes and portraits. With the ban on human figures disregarded after 1923, painters depicted republican heroes on canvas and in sculpture. By 1933 Group D, an association of six artists, introduced cubism, yet always within the framework of classical Turkish art and Anatolian village scenes. Painting, which began with landscapes, by the 1940's and 1950's emphasized people and folk life in a manner reminiscent of the French academics. Surrealism in color and figures became popular in the late 1950's, but folk and nationalistic themes still prevailed. Anatomy is distorted to cubic forms reminiscent of the works of Picasso and Kandinsky. Sculpture is also modern, developing abstract forms, as well as meshing metal and wood into sculptured works. Painting became an authentic art form only in the 1940's. Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglü (1913- ), Turkey's foremost contemporary painter, has tried to combine Western form and technique with Anatolian subject matter. A graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Ankara as well as schools in Paris and Lyon, Eyuboglü was a member of Group D and has been commissioned for works at the Brussel's World's Fair and for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Large splashes of color overlaid with delicate brushwork dominated the artist's early period, but now he attempts to recapture, as in his canvas "The Donkey," the Byzantine mosaic effect with a pointillistic use of oils. There are also many female artists, including Eyuboglü's wife, Eren, known for the harsh, flat tones she achieves. Other well-known artists include Turgot Zaim, who rediscovered Turkish miniatures, and Hasan Kaptan, who acquired fame as a teenager in the early 1960's for his peasant and market scenes in Oriental blue and green. Cemal Tollu (1899– ), also a member of Group D and former professor at the Ankara School of Fine Arts, uses massive figures, varied colors, and fresco-like techniques on canvas. Formerly assistant director of the Ankara Archeological Museum, Tollu painted the frescoes for the capital's opera house. Zeik Izer, experimental like most Turkish artists, offers brilliant color and the impression of a hastily-brushed work. FOLK ART Folk art, developed in Anatolia during the Ottoman period, has declined in importance. Some handicrafts, such as copperware, needlework and pottery, have been converted to light industry, but the quality of articles, produced for tourists, does not compare with Ottoman artisanship. Porcelain, unlike other crafts, developed as an original TurkishAsia Minor art without borrowing from Arab or Persian examples. Designs based on plants, especially flowers, and sea scenes were applied in combinations of white, turquoise blue and green. The development of porcelain, like tilework, also followed two other lines-the Damascus style, with abundant flowers and rich red color, and the Rhodes style, using shades of pink, grey, brown, dark green and white. Tile manufacture has been revived and tiles, formerly used as wall coverings in mosques and palaces, are available in vivid blues and greens reminiscent of the 16th and 17th centuries. Carpet weaving is done at home by women under contract to dealers, but both the craft's economic importance and quality have declined. Floral designs with narrow bands, plainer than the large geometric Persian patterns, are worked in reds, blues and yellows similar to traditional Ottoman carpets. CHAPTER 11 The people of Turkey are overwhelmingly Moslem; over 98 percent of the population claim Islam as their faith. To be a real Turk requires that one be a Moslem. Those who are not-about 250,000 Christians and Jews concentrated in Istanbul and Izmirare legal citizens but are not fully accepted as Turks (see ch. 5, Ethnic Groups and Languages). Since the 15th century when the Ottoman rulers became the primary power among Moslem peoples, the development of Islam as a political force has been closely associated with the Ottoman Empire. Post-revolutionary Turkey is comprehensible only if the full meaning of the Turkish people as Moslems and the full significance of the Turkish transformation for the development of present-day Islam are considered. Islam from its very inception was more than a religion; it was a way of life. It had produced and been developed in a theocracy and it retained this quality in the subsequent centuries. With the ascendancy of the Ottoman Empire the permeating nature of Islam was reinforced. For more than 400 years the Ottoman Empire was the principal power of the Moslem world; it provided Islam with a source of vitality and significance. As caliphs, Ottoman sultans claimed spiritual ascendancy over all Moslems, and their religious fervor spread Islam into Christian Europe and North Africa. The Empire and Islam were closely identified; each reinforced and became an expression of the other. Since the beginning of the Turkish transformation in the 1920's, there have been numerous religious changes. Religious institutions have been stripped of their overriding political and economic power, and religious leaders have been deprived of governmental channels in exercising authority. At least in the legal sense, religion has been made a personal concern, a matter of individual conscience. Thus in theory religion and the state have been separated. In fact Islam has been subordinated to the state, which has brought under its control all the surviving Moslem institutions. The |