Türkiye Culture & Language

Turkish culture draws on Central Asian Turkic origins, Persian and Arab influence, a Byzantine inheritance it lives inside, and a republican modernism imposed from above.

Architecture

Mimar Sinan, chief architect to Suleiman the Magnificent, built several hundred structures in the sixteenth century and effectively defined what an Ottoman mosque looks like — a great central dome on semi-domes, pencil minarets, and light handled as a material. The Süleymaniye in Istanbul and the Selimiye at Edirne are his.

The kitchen

Regional to a degree that surprises people: Black Sea cooking with anchovies and cornbread, Aegean with olive oil and wild greens, south-eastern with pepper, pistachio and lamb. Kebabs are a family of dishes rather than one, meze is a long social meal, and Gaziantep’s baklava is protected by designation.

Carpets and textiles

Weaving is regional and legible — the pattern, knot and dyes of a kilim identify where and often by whom it was made, and motifs carry meanings about protection, fertility and family. It is an art form with a market, which is why the selling can be so intense.

Music and the dervishes

The Mevlevi sema — the whirling ceremony of the order founded by Rumi’s followers at Konya — is UNESCO-listed and is a religious rite rather than a performance, whatever the tourist versions suggest. Turkish classical music, folk saz traditions and a large contemporary pop industry all coexist.

The hamam

The Ottoman bathhouse survives as a working institution, not a spa concept, with scrubbing and soap massage on a heated marble platform under a domed roof.

Turkish is the official language. It is Turkic rather than Indo-European or Semitic, agglutinative — grammatical information stacks onto the ends of words — and has vowel harmony, which gives it its characteristic sound. It has been written in the Latin alphabet since 1928, so it is at least readable, and the spelling is entirely phonetic.

Kurdish is spoken by a large minority in the south-east, and Arabic near the Syrian border.

English is spoken in tourist areas, hotels and among younger urban people, and much less in the interior and the east. German is common thanks to the Turkish community in Germany.

A few words open doors: merhaba for hello, teşekkür ederim for thank you, lütfen for please, ne kadar for how much, and afiyet olsun, said to anyone eating.