Turkish culture: what the republic closed and UNESCO now lists

What two reform laws took out of Turkish culture

Two laws from the first years of the republic set the terms on which much Turkish cultural practice is recorded now. Act No. 677 of 30 November 1925 closed the dervish monasteries and tombs and abolished the office of keeper of tombs. Act No. 1353 of 1 November 1928 adopted the Turkish alphabet in Latin letters in place of the Arabic script Ottoman Turkish had been written in. The constitution of 1982 names both among the eight reform laws in Article 174, which says that no provision of the constitution may be read as making them unconstitutional and gives their purpose as safeguarding "the secular character of the Republic". How the laws were passed is told in Türkiye: history. This article follows what they did to things people practised.

The lodges were schools of music and verse as well as places of prayer. Sufi orders such as the Mevlevi and the Bektashi were founded or grew across Ottoman lands, and the explicitly religious stream of Turkish folk poetry came out of their gathering places, the tekkes. The Arabic script carried a whole family of court crafts: calligraphy, illumination, miniature painting, bookbinding and paper marbling, which are grouped together as the Ottoman book arts.

Türkiye ratified UNESCO's convention on intangible heritage on 27 March 2006. By September 2026 UNESCO listed 32 elements for the country, and five of them come straight out of the two worlds those laws closed.

The built record runs on a separate list. Türkiye ratified the World Heritage Convention on 16 March 1983, and in September 2026 it had 22 inscribed properties, from the Historic Areas of Istanbul, Göreme and the Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği in 1985 to Sardis and the Lydian tumuli of Bin Tepe in 2025. The practices sit on the other list.

How the whirling ceremony outlived the Mevlevi lodges

The Mevleviye is a Sufi order founded in Konya in 1273. UNESCO's file names Konya and Istanbul as its main centres today. The Sema is the ceremony the order is known for: after a fast of several hours the dancer turns on the left foot in short twists, driven round by the right, eyes open and unfocused so that the room blurs. The music, a repertoire called the ayin, runs in four sections of vocal and instrumental composition and needs at least a singer, a neyzen on the reed flute, a kettledrummer and a cymbal player.

A dancer used to train for 1,001 days in seclusion inside a mevlevihane, learning the order's ethics and prayer along with its music, poetry and dance, and then went back to work and family while staying a member.

UNESCO records what followed without comment. All mevlevihane were closed in 1925 as a result of secularisation policies. The government began to allow performances again in the 1950s, in public only, and eased the restrictions in the 1990s. Across the thirty years in which the ceremony was kept up in secret, what passed from teacher to pupil was mostly the music and the songs, and the file says this stripped performances of part of their religious meaning. Many Sema ceremonies are now staged for tourist audiences, shortened and simplified to suit them. Some private groups are trying to restore the rite's spiritual and intimate character.

UNESCO first proclaimed the Sema in 2005 and inscribed it on the Representative List in 2008. The state that closed the lodges now reports on the Sema under the convention, in periodic reports submitted on 15 December 2012 and 15 December 2021.

Where Alevi and Sunni practice part ways

Who is counted as Alevi

Belief in Türkiye is measured by surveys, and the surveys disagree about the community whose ritual music is on UNESCO's list. KONDA estimated in 2006 that 99.4% of the population was Muslim. The Alevi share is harder to fix: estimates gathered by Minority Rights Group International run from 10% to 40%, KONDA's figure for 2006 was 5%, and in a 2021 survey 4% of adult citizens identified as Alevi and 88% as Sunni.

The semah, inscribed in 2010 as an Alevi-Bektaşi ritual, belongs to this community, and so does much of what Turkish listeners call folk music. The bağlama, the long-necked lute that travelling âşık minstrels carried across Anatolia, has paired strings that hold a religious meaning in Alevi and Bektashi culture. The âşık tradition was almost wholly oral until the nineteenth century and many of its songs have no known author. Some names survive: Köroğlu in the sixteenth century, Karacaoğlan in the seventeenth, Dadaloğlu in the nineteenth. The tradition thinned in the late nineteenth century and came back in the twentieth with Aşık Veysel Şatıroğlu, who lived from 1894 to 1973, and with Aşık Mahzuni Şerif and Neşet Ertaş, both born in 1938. UNESCO inscribed âşıklık minstrelsy in 2009.

How the state supervises religious teaching

Religion reaches schools through the state. Article 24 of the constitution makes instruction in religious culture and morals a compulsory lesson in primary and secondary schools, and puts all religious education under state supervision. Article 136 places the Presidency of Religious Affairs inside the general administration, bound to the principles of secularism.

The religious composition of the country changed within living memory of the republic's founding. Non-Muslims made up 19.1% of the population of what is now Türkiye in 1914 and 2.5% in 1927. KONDA put adherents of religions other than Islam at 0.18% in 2006. The same series recorded adults describing themselves as nonbelievers rising from 2% in 2011 to 6% in 2021. The headscarf had long been barred from a number of public venues, and a constitutional amendment of February 2008 permitted women to wear it on university campuses.

Why calligraphy outlived the Arabic alphabet

What a hattat works with

UNESCO's file on Hüsn-i hat, inscribed in 2021, defines it as writing letters of Arabic origin in a measured and proportional way. Its tools are particular and many calligraphers, the hattats, make their own: paper glazed with organic substances, a reed pen, pen knives, a slab for trimming the reed, an inkwell, soot ink and a pen case. The craft passes from master to apprentice. It was used for the Koran, the hadiths and poetry, for imperial edicts and warrants, and on religious and public buildings, and it can be laid on stone, marble, glass and wood as well as paper and leather. UNESCO records that it is still used in sacred and literary works and on mosques, Turkish baths and temples.

The sultans signed with it. Each had a tughra, a calligraphic monogram carved on the sultan's seal and bearing his name and his father's; there were 35, the earliest belonging to Orhan Gazi, and the form grew into a branch of calligraphy of its own.

How the palace workshops made books

Calligraphy sat inside a larger workshop culture. The palace atelier, the nakkaşhane, produced miniature painting and illumination. Topkapı Palace housed a Greek academy of painters from the fifteenth century and added a Persian one early in the sixteenth. Ottoman miniature followed the text of the book it illustrated and could put several times and places into one picture, a treatment of perspective unlike that of the Renaissance painting being made in Europe in the same decades. Nakkaş Osman and Matrakçı Nasuh worked in the sixteenth century.

Print arrived late and over the calligraphers' objections. İbrahim Müteferrika was given permission by Sultan Ahmed III to publish books on subjects other than religion, against opposition from some calligraphers and religious leaders. His press printed its first book in 1729, and by 1743 it had issued 17 works in 23 volumes, each run between 500 and 1,000 copies.

Two centuries after that press, the alphabet act of 1928 moved all of written Turkish into Latin letters. The hand-drawn Arabic letter stayed on mosque walls and in the workshops of hattats, and in 2021 UNESCO inscribed it for Türkiye. The illumination that framed it followed in 2023, after miniature in 2020, and ebru, the marbled paper used in the same bindings, had been inscribed in 2014.

Which languages Turkish schools may teach as mother tongues

Article 3 of the constitution says the language of the state is Turkish. Article 42 says no language other than Turkish may be taught as a mother tongue to Turkish citizens at any institution of education. Britannica notes that the constitution treats "Turk" as a political term covering every citizen without reference to race or religion, and that ethnic minorities have no official status.

The Constitutional Court recognises four minorities: the Armenians, Greeks and Jews named as non-Muslim minorities in the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Bulgarians. Linguistic rights are protected for Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac, the last after the Ankara 13th Circuit Administrative Court ruled in 2013 that the Lausanne minority provisions also applied to Assyrians.

Kurdish sits outside that list. At the start of the twenty-first century Kurds were estimated at almost one-fifth of the population, and they form a majority in provinces including Diyarbakır, Hakkari, Mardin, Şanlıurfa and Van. Arabic speakers live mainly in Hatay, Adana, Mardin, Siirt and Şanlıurfa. Britannica lists Adyghe, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Ladino, Laz and Zazaki among the others spoken in the country. Legal changes in the 2000s allowed Kurdish to be used in public and taught, and a national television channel in Kurdish opened. Nowruz, the spring new year that counts among the main festivals of the Kurdish regions, marked with fires, new clothes, dancing and gifts, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2024 in a file shared with other states. Hıdrellez, another spring festival and one also kept in the Balkans, was inscribed in 2017.

Turkish itself was remade alongside its script. The early republic stripped out vocabulary of Arabic and Persian origin, with literacy and national unity as the stated aims. The language had a long record as a language of rule in Anatolia before that: on 13 May 1277 Karamanoğlu Mehmed Bey declared Turkish the official language of the Karamanid state. By Britannica's figures for 2024, 99.3% of men and 96.2% of women aged six and over could read.

How Turkish writers answered each change of language

Ottoman literature ran in two streams. Divan poetry, mostly lyric and written as ghazals and qasidas, drew its fixed stock of symbols from Persian verse: the nightingale set against the rose, the ascetic against the dervish. Prose was non-fiction, and fiction lived in narrative verse such as the mesnevî. The Tanzimat reforms of 1839 to 1876 brought the novel and the short story. İbrahim Şinasi wrote the first modern Turkish play, the one-act comedy Şair Evlenmesi, in 1860, and Namık Kemal published the novel İntibâh in 1876. The magazine Servet-i Fünûn, founded in 1891, turned poetry towards a Western model under the poet Tevfik Fikret.

The republic's poets broke with each other in turn. The Five Syllabists wrote patriotic verse in the syllabic metre of folk poetry. Nâzım Hikmet, a student in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924, read Mayakovsky there and came home writing a looser verse. In 1941 Orhan Veli Kanık, Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat published Garip, a small volume that wrote about ordinary days in the language of the street; the academic establishment attacked it and a wide readership took it up. The İkinci Yeni, the Second New, answered Garip in the 1950s with abstract and deliberately jarring language.

Prose went to the village. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's Yaban of 1932 opened the way to the village novel, the genre of Kemal Tahir, Orhan Kemal and Yaşar Kemal, whose Memed, My Hawk made him a Nobel nominee in 1973. Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

What Turkish coffeehouses and shadow plays kept in public

Coffeehouses appeared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Britannica describes them as places for talking politics, playing games and hearing music. Turkish coffee culture was inscribed by UNESCO in 2013, and çay, tea, in 2022, in a file that calls it a symbol of identity, hospitality and social interaction. Traditional sohbet meetings were inscribed in 2010.

Two public performers are on the same list. The meddah, the storyteller, was inscribed in 2008. Karagöz, the shadow play inscribed in 2009, was played across the Ottoman Empire by one puppet master who voiced every character to the beat of a tambourine, and its cast stood for the empire's ethnic and social groups. Its origins are uncertain: an older Egyptian tradition is one proposal, an Asian source another. The anecdotes of Nasreddin Hodja, told in several countries, were inscribed in 2022.

Western theatre arrived in the nineteenth century, and the republic founded a state conservatory and the State Theatre Company. Cinema took prizes abroad from the 1960s: Metin Erksan's Susuz Yaz won the Golden Bear in 1964 and Semih Kaplanoğlu's Honey won it in 2010. Nuri Bilge Ceylan was named best director at Cannes in 2008 for Üç Maymun. Television series reached further abroad. By 2016 Turkish shows were airing in more than a dozen South and Central American countries after a decade in which they took hold of the Middle Eastern market.

What Turkish kitchens are built on

Bread and yoghurt are the staples. Flatbread, lavash and yufka among it, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 in a file shared with other states, and the ceremonial keşkek tradition in 2011. Ayran is yoghurt made into a drink. Filo, the dough used for baklava, is Turkish in origin, and the eleventh-century Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk already records güveç, bulgur and börek.

The cuisine divides by region. The Aegean, Marmara and Mediterranean coasts cook with vegetables, herbs and fish, and in the west, where olive trees grow widely, vegetable dishes in olive oil are served as meze. The Black Sea coast lives on corn and anchovies. Central Anatolia is known for pastry, keşkek, the mantı of Kayseri and gözleme. The southeast makes kebabs and dough desserts such as baklava, kadayıf and künefe, and eastern Anatolia is known for its soups. Dish names often carry a city, so Urfa and Adana kebab differ in seasoning and in the amount of Aleppo pepper.

The knowledge behind some of this is on UNESCO's urgent list. Olive cultivation practices were placed there in 2023, beside Ahlat stonework in 2022 and a whistled language in 2017. Four further nominations were pending in 2026: felt making, yoghurt making, baklava and transhumance, the seasonal droving of livestock. The Mesir Macunu festival was inscribed in 2012.

Why Kırkpınar wrestlers still meet at Edirne

Oil wrestling, yağlı güreş, is reckoned the national sport, and the Kırkpınar tournament at Edirne has been held every year since 1362 by the account in Wikipedia's culture article. UNESCO inscribed it in 2010, traditional Turkish archery in 2019 and the board game mangala in 2020. Cirit, an equestrian game, is still played at regional festivals.

Football is organised around Istanbul clubs founded before the republic: Beşiktaş in 1903, Galatasaray in 1905 and Fenerbahçe in 1907. Galatasaray won the UEFA Cup and the UEFA Super Cup in 2000, and the national team took bronze at the 2002 World Cup. Women's volleyball clubs have won repeatedly in Europe: Vakıfbank İstanbul won all 52 of its matches in the 2012 to 2013 season.