From: hla@urartu.sdpa.org (H. Hirac Asodyan)
Subject: Hoping for a culture
Keywords: 6000 or 8000 years? 
Organization: S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 02:05:42 GMT

In article<1992Dec24.165853.10444@nynexst.com> erkin@nynexst.com (Erkin 
Cubukcu) posted the following a few days ago. 
 
> TURKISH CULTURE

> As a digression  from  the hot topic, seriat vs.  secularism.  I decided to
> write  about  something  which  I  felt  we,  as  Turks,  should  pay  more
> attention,   that   is   our   culture.   Speaking   of   culture,  in  any 
> typical international gathering, someone will come up and say Chineese have
> (8000?), Iranians have (5000?) & Greeks have (3000?) years of civilization,
> what have you got, as Turks. My typical comment has been that we have  also  
> a very long  history of civilization, maybe (2000?) or (3000?) years, maybe
> longer.  But I am not sure, in the back of my mind, the  exact  length  and
> how to  measure  it,  in the first place.  Usually, discussion ends with no
> concrete result.  So the question is how can we measure its length.    When
> someone  talks  about  its lenth does he/she mean the written civilization.
> If that is  so, then do the tales, (e.g. Dede Korkut, Homer) told from  one
> generation to   another   count?    What  about  the  interactions  between
> civilizations?  Which culture gets (copies) from which culture?  The reason 
> I decided to write on these topics was some books and articles I read,  and
> of course,  the discussions I had with my non-Turkish friends.  I will talk
> about them below:  

> In one of the footnotes of Plato's "The Symposium" there was a reference to
> a play  written  by  Euripides. The name of the play was Alcestis.  In this
> play, Admetus, king of Pharae in Thessaly was told by Apollo that  he  must
> die unless he could induce a substitute to die in his place.  When even his 
> parents refused  to  do  so, his  wife  Alcestis  offered herself.  She was
> afterward rescued from Hades by Heracles.  Phaedrus mentions this story  in
> his speech in the Symposium to praise the love and  emphasize its power.   

> Does this sound familiar?  I remember reading the same story in Dede Korkut 
> in Lycee in Turkiye. Is it possible that two societies in different parts of 
> the world  in  different times can come up with exactly the same story?  If
> this is not possible then is it possible that one copied from another?   

> Does anyone on the net know which is older, Dede Korkut stories or Euripides's
> play Alcestis?   

> Again, one day I was browsing the Magazine, National Geographics. In one of 
> the letters to the editor, an Iranian wrote that National Geogrphics made a 
> mistake  identifying  Mevlana  Celaddin  Rumi as a Turkish Sufi although he
> lived or died in Asia Minor. The letter, I assume  was  referencing  to  an
> article   about   Mevlana   published  in  an  earlier  issue  of  National
> Geographics, According to this letter, Mevlana is  Iranian  with  his  name
> spelling (and possibly sounding) Iranian as given in the letter.   

> These create some confusion for me.  Either in high school in Turkiye, they 
> are not teaching us the truth or other cultures are trying to claim what we 
> have.  And  we,  Turks, are not trying hard to protect our culture.  We are
> not studying our past, our culture and its interaction with others.   

There is little doubt that Turks are not doing enough to collect, categorize 
and study/research their cultural treasures, material or otherwise. However, I 
do not see how one can claim that Turkish culture is open to anyone demanding 
ownership of a piece of it and automatically assume antiquity to anything 
because there are relatively few studies in the said field. As you and me 
along with other Turkish citizens on this net are aware that we were schooled 
in an environment that stressed the idea that the civilization was created by 
the proto-Turks, let alone discussions on foreign influences in the Turkish/
Turkic cultures. What is worse is that our government still claims ownership 
to previous Anatolian cultures by arguing language affinities on the basis 
of...nothing but agglutunitivity! Recently, I came to posses an old issue of 
a Sunday (Boston) Herald Traveler Magazine (an insert to the paper dated Nov. 
12, 1967) heralding the arrival of "8,000 Years Of Turkish Culture" in the 
town. Another striking example is in the Turkish embassy's publication 
Turkey Today (July/August 1992) which under the headline "6,000 Years Of 
Turkish Life" was announcing a new course at the Smithsonian's. Since most all 
s.c.t. readers have an idea when the settlement of Turks in today's Turkey 
began, it is totally unnecessary to go into the subject. In the light of these
and the Turkish government's insistence to acknowledge the Armenian 
architectural monuments in three-way (Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian) 
politically-sensitive eastern Turkey simply as "Christian" or "Christian 
Turkish" monuments, a very good case can made that so far it has been the 
Turkish government, acting in the perceived interests of the Turkish people, 
claiming other's treasures. 

> I do not even remember seeing a book  about  Dede  Korkut  selling  in  the
> bookstores in Turkiye. I am sure it is published somewhere in Turkiye,  but 
> is not  very popular so you do not see it in the bookstores.  I do not dare
> to imagine seeing translations of Dede Korkut or similar literature selling 
> in New York, Paris or London. I keep wondering if it is  too  difficult  or
> not  worth  the  effort  to  translate  them to other  languages by Turkish
> literati born and/or living in these places.  Or other  possibility  we  do
> not have capable people to the job.   

Obviously there are capable translators in Turkey. But it is always easier to 
claim ownership to other's stuff, rather than putting the energy into a 
creation or a study.  :-)

> As I  think  about  I get mor frustrated.  Not only do we care our past but
> also today's culture.  I remember in "Ilkokul" we use to have a very  small
> pocket size dictionary.  Many decades past since then I have yet to see one 
> big  dictionary  including  all the words we use new or old, similar to the
> American Webster's Dictionary. Is it embarasing that there is not even  one
> descent dictionary we can give to the students coming from Turkic Republics 
> of Central asia?   

Come now, there are a number of them. One title that comes to my mind is 
"Okyanus".

> In  Turkiye, there is a big euphoria about Central Asia. Apart from forming
> economic relationships, everyone wants to  know  more  about  these  Turkic
> Republics. there  is  a  desire  to  know  our ancestry.  After all, we are
> taught that we came from there.  Turkish Education   Minister  visited  the
> Central Asia  in  this  past summer.  (At that time I  was in Turkiye and I
> watched an interview with him about his trip to the area on  TV  after  his
> return).   In  his  interview,  he told that visiting Semerkant, Buhara and
> many other great places we learned in history classes  is  like  living  in
> history since  our  ancestry  lived  in  those  places.    I  wonder if any
> professor in any Turkish University started a study on the culture  and  as
> part  of it the  language of these Turkic republics to see the commonalities
> and  differences  between these and Turkish culture and to see which of the
> stories  are genuinely ours and which ones we took from other cultures.

Another assumption is made here in the form of alleged common ancestry for 
the people living in Turkey. Who knows, it may perfectly be that perhaps a 
half or more of today's Turkish citizens have little or no affinity with
Turkic invaders of the 11th century! It seems that this as well the antiquity 
and originality of the Turkish people and its culture respectively are 
important to Erkin. But do these really matter? Do the Turks really need 
these? Are these that important for the people in Turkey? What if the history 
of the Turks does not go back far enough, say 2,500 years?

And the most important of all questions: Does Turkey need natural blond, blue 
eyed female customs officers at international airports as was proposed 
recently?

> Erkin Cubukcu

H. Hirac Asodyan

> -- 
> Erkin Cubukcu                          Ph#:     (914) 644-2876
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