1. Anatolia and Türkiye (Turkey)

Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula that connects Europe and Asia. Today, Anatolia forms a large part of the modern Republic of Türkiye. Anatolia has long been a multicultural region. Of course, the Turks are the largest ethnic group in the region, but it has also been home to Kurds, Assyrians, Pontic Greeks, and Armenians. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the dances of the Turks, Kurds, and Assyrians. We will look at the Armenians in the next chapter, and we already talked about the Greeks in chapter 12.

1.1. Geography and History

Türkiye (the preferred name for the country formerly known as Turkey; pronounced roughly TOOR-kee-yay or /tur.ki.je/ in IPA) lies at the crossroads of Asia and Europe and has long served as a bridge between the two. The Bosporus Strait is the major waterway that runs through the city of Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean. On the west side of the Bosporus is Europe, and on the east side is Anatolia. Türkiye is bordered on the north by the Black Sea. In the west, it borders Bulgaria, Greece, and the Aegean Sea. To the south, it borders the Mediterranean, Syria, and Iraq, and to the east, it borders Georgia, Armenia, and Iran.

Byzantium (now Istanbul) was founded by the ancient Greeks and was considered one of the great cultural centers of the ancient world. When the Roman Empire split into separate Eastern and Western Empires, Byzantium became the Eastern Empire’s capital and was renamed Constantinople. It became a center of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Later, when the Turkish-speaking Sultanate formed the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople was renamed again as Istanbul. It remains to this day a hub of culture and exchange as the primary inlet to the Black Sea from the Mediterranean.

Western Türkiye astounds visitors because so many historical places and events we associate with ancient Greece actually occurred in what is present-day Türkiye, along the Dardanelles and the eastern Aegean seaboard. For example, ancient Troy, famous for the Greek legend of the Trojan horse, sits halfway down Türkiye’s Aegean coast. Hippocrates, the Greek physician whose Hippocratic oath modern doctors still follow, practiced in Bergama, near Troy. The impressive Greek/Roman ruins of Ephesus, the jewel of the ancient Greek conquests in the Middle East, lie along the Aegean coast south of Izmir. The Apostles Luke and John Christianized Greece, and they are both buried in Ephesus. And Izmir was the capital of King Midas’s realm, famous in Greek mythology for his golden touch.

The Ottoman Empire, based in Türkiye, was one of the major world powers in the 17th-19th centuries CE. Ottoman Turkish influence is felt throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East, as we saw in Eastern European dance and music. Partly because of the Ottomans’ relative tolerance, there are a number of ethnic minorities living in Anatolia. Along the southern border, and on the border with Iraq and Iran, there is a very large Kurdish minority, with its own distinct language and culture. For generations, the Kurds have been fighting to create an independent country of their own in Türkiye, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Another group that has sought recognition is the Armenians. What is now Eastern Türkiye was once part of the nation of Armenia, a Christian country where an Indo-European language was spoken. After World War I, the Turkish government set out to assimilate Armenians and Kurds. What happened to the Armenians of Türkiye is widely recognized in the international community as a genocide. The Turks vehemently reject this characterization (and it is, in fact, a crime in Türkiye to suggest that there was an Armenian genocide). The Laz live on the Black Sea on the border with Georgia. They speak a Kartvelian language related to Georgian. Their folk culture is closely related to that of the Georgians. We will discuss Armenian dance in the next chapter.

1.2. Turkish Music

Turkish music often sounds harsh to Western ears. It relies heavily on the zurna, a double-reeded instrument similar to the oboe. Zurnas are loud, and their high-pitched, raspy tone quality is a bit of an acquired taste. Indian snake charmers play a shawm, which is a type of zurna. The Turks also play the kemençe, which is a fiddle-like instrument. They play a number of strummed lute-like instruments, such as the saz or bağlama, the strummed zither called the kanun, and a flute-like instrument called the kaval.

• Kaval
• Zurna
• Kemençe (bonus: they’re doing the Black Sea dance Horon here)
• Bağlama music

1.3. Turkish Traditional Dress

There are several regional variations in Turkish costume. In the north along the Black Sea, the men wear distinctive black baggy pants called şalvar. They also wear black vests, black turbans, and many gold chains. In the southwest of the country, such as Gaziantep, men tend to wear similar costumes in shades of brown, orange, and green. Very characteristic of this region are the wide, woven belts. Women throughout the country wear harem pants, aprons, and long coats as well as pillbox hats and veils. Their hats often sport gold coins and gold braiding.

1.4. Turkish Dances

Black Sea dances (Horon) are characterized by very sharp arm movements and jerky steps. Another unique style of dance, the Kaşik or spoon dances, involves dancers creating their own percussion by snapping wooden spoons together as they dance. Türkiye has its own equivalent of the Greek Zeibekikos, the Zeybek. Like their Greek counterparts, the dancers enter a trance-like state and imagine themselves as eagles. Another religious dance tradition is the Whirling Dervishes, who spin rapidly to induce a trance state. Türkiye is also the home of Çiftetelli, or Belly dancing, which comes from the tradition of sexual dance entertainment for the Ottoman sultan’s court. Originally, the majority of belly dancers were male (the Köçekler – see Chapter 2). The ethnic minorities of Türkiye, such as the Kurds, Assyrians, and Laz, also have their own dance styles.

• Black Sea Horon
• Kaşik spoon dances
• Zeybek
• Whirling Dervishes
• Male Belly dancing
• Female Belly dancing

2. The Kurds

The Turks speak a Turkic language that’s unrelated to the languages of Europe. Their close neighbors in Eastern Anatolia, the Kurds, speak a collection of dialects known as Kurdish, an Indo-European language closely related to Persian. The Kurds, like the Turks, are Muslims. There is no current Kurdish nation, although many Kurds aspire to one. Instead, the Kurds live in southeastern Türkiye, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, and northern Iran. In Türkiye and Syria, there are separatist groups, many of them armed and violent, with aspirations for a Kurdish state called “Kurdistan”. Northern Iraq has a semiautonomous Kurdish province. The Kurds live in the Zagros and Taurus Mountain ranges. All of the countries where Kurds now live have, at one time or another, had policies of cultural suppression and cultural assimilation of the Kurds. For example, in Türkiye, it was illegal to broadcast music in the Kurdish language until 1991, and political figures in southern Türkiye were arrested and charged with treason for using the Kurdish language. The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq oversaw a brutal genocide of Kurds in Northern Iraq called the Anfal campaign. The Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization that controlled much of Northern Syria and Iraq during the Syrian civil war was at least partly defeated by battles with Kurdish militias, many of which were staffed by women freedom fighters.

Kurdish folk costumes (and, in fact, everyday wear) are often in earth-colored browns, greys, and greens. More brightly colored costumes are worn for special occasions such as weddings and other celebrations. Women wear floor-length dresses and sometimes wear short vests. Except in highly conservative and religious regions, women do not typically wear hijab head coverings, although it is typically up to each woman to decide whether to wear it or not. Men wear baggy pants, often with a bulky fabric belt around the waist. They often wear a square vest or jacket.

Kurdish music and Turkish music actually have a lot in common. They tend to use the same instrumentation. This is at least partly because musicians from each culture have borrowed extensively from the other. Obviously, Kurdish music is most often sung in Kurdish.

Kurdish dance, however, has a distinctive style. The dancers in Kurdish dancing stand very close to each other, essentially shoulder to shoulder, with hands clasped and fingers interlocked. The hands are held at waist height, with elbows bent and forearms parallel to the floor. Traditionally, people dance in gender-segregated lines. The genders even dance in different rooms or spaces. Unlike Turkish dances, which always progress counterclockwise, Kurdish dances can go in either direction.

There are many different dances, but two of the most common are the Halay, which is also done by Turks and Armenians, and the Şêxanî (also spelled Sheikhani, pronounced shay-khan-ee, IPA: /ʃejxani/), which is also found in Armenia and with the Assyrians. The Halay is a simple walking dance, and in fact, the word Halay just means “dance”. Şêxanî is characterized by stamping steps and motions that go in and out of the center of the circle.

• Kurdish men’s dance from Dayarbakır
• Halay
• Şêxanî
• Women dancing a Şêxanî

3. The Assyrians

The Assyrian Empire was a major world power in very ancient times (i.e., 2600 BCE). As one of the major Mesopotamian cultures, they were part of the group that built the first cities and invented a very early form of writing called cuneiform. Today, the Assyrians are a minority group occupying territory overlapping with that of the Kurds in Syria, Türkiye, Iraq, and Iran. The modern Assyrians (also called Chaldeans) speak modern Aramaic, the language people believe Jesus spoke. They are also among the few Christian ethnic groups in the region.

Assyrian music and dance also overlap with Kurdish styles. For example, they also do variations on the Şêxanî, which they call Sheikhan. Another characteristic dance is the Bagiyeh, which is related to the Sheikhan.

• Bagiyeh video 1
• Bagiyeh video 2
• Tolama video

Further Reading

• And (1959), and Özkök (1973). See the References section at the end of the book for full citations.
• Van Dobben, Danielle J. (2008). Dancing Modernity: Gender, Sexuality and the State in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic. University of Arizona thesis.
• https://nationalclothing.org/middle-east/31-turkey/40-each-of-seven-turkey-regions-has-its-own-clothing-traditions-and-features.html

Some Suggested Dances for Teaching

The following links take you to descriptions and instructions from my website, Folk Dance Musings, for dances appropriate for teaching to new dancers.

Türkiye:

• Kendime
• Ağir Halay
• Heyamo
• Damat Halayi
• Dambaşi
• Ordu

Kurdish:

• Halay
• Sexani
• Bablekan
• Zozan

Assyrian:

• Sheikhan
• Bagiyeh
• Tolama