Turkish Culture

The culture of Turkey combines a heavily diverse and heterogeneous set of elements that have been derived from the various cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean (West Asian) and Central Asian region and to a lesser degree, Eastern European, and Caucasian traditions. Many of these traditions were initially brought together by the Ottoman Empire, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state.

During the early years of the republic, the government invested a large amount of resources into fine arts such as paintings, sculpture and architecture. This was done as both a process of modernization and of creating a cultural identity. Because of the different historical factors defining the Turkish identity, the culture of Turkey combines clear efforts of modernization and Westernization undertaken in varying degrees since the 1700s, with a simultaneous desire to maintain traditional religious and historical values.

Turkish culture has undergone profound changes over the last century. Today, Turkey may be the only country that contains every extreme of Eastern and Western culture (along with many compromises and fusions between the two). The Ottoman system was a multi-ethnic state that enabled people within it not to mix with each other and thereby retain separate ethnic and religious identities within the empire (albeit with a dominant Turkish and Southern European ruling class). Upon the fall of the empire after World War I the Turkish Republic adapted a unitary approach, which forced all the different cultures within its borders to mix with each other with the aim of producing national and cultural identity. This mixing, instead of producing cultural homogenization, instead resulted in many shades of grey as the traditional Muslim cultures of Anatolia collided with the cosmopolitan modernity of Istanbul and the wider West.

Political, legal, religious, cultural, social, and economic policy changes were designed to convert the new Republic of Turkey into a secular, modern nation-state. These changes were implemented under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As a result, Turkey is one of the most westernized Islamic nations.

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