Turkey
Tom Birchenough
As we approach the anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the television schedules devoted to it are becoming denser and denser. In volume, at least, rather more than insight. We wonder just what more can be broadcast, after all, about the history concerned that has not already been said at some point in the century that has followed the conflict's tragic onset?Jan Peter’s ambitious Great War Diaries answers two questions that remain relevant, namely, just how did it really feel, and then, what was it like for those on the other side(s)? One of the more impressive programmes we have Read more ...
David Nice
The sprightly tread of Handel’s Queen of Sheba, attended by two wonderful Turkish oboists, wove the most fragile of gold threads between full orchestral exotica and Rameau motets of infinite variety last night. Not that any more links need be found: it’s the addition of the late night events which turns the Proms into a real festival, not the mere concatenation of concerts you might find in the main orchestral season. And no-one could have asked for a higher level of engagement last night from either Austrian live wire Sascha Goetzel and his amazingly high level Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Read more ...
fisun.guner
School kids today could probably tell you a thing or two about mummies in ancient Egypt, Romans and how they built straight roads and aqueducts, and possibly, at a stretch, even a few things about the British Empire. But the Ottoman Empire? Name me a sultan. Give me the year the Turks conquered Constantinople, or the year they took control of Islam’s third holiest site – Jerusalem? The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors began by asking why the story of the world’s last Islamic empire, which ruled across three continents and was presided over by just one family over its 600-year Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s the women who keep things together in Umut Dağ’s debut feature Kuma, and you can see the weight of the burden that matriarch Fatma (Nihal G Koldas) has been carrying etched on her face. Fatma’s latest endeavour to preserve balance in her Vienna-based Turkish family goes further than before, and provides the first surprise in Dağ’s film.Opening with the colourful atmosphere of a village wedding in Turkey, we assume that Fatma and her husband Mustafa (Vedat Erincin, below right, with Koldas) have married off their good-looking son Hasan (Muruthan Muslu) to the innocently youthful country Read more ...
Sebastian Merrick
I can’t wait to check out Istanbul’s galleries in a couple of years. Already endowed with an exploding arts and design scene, with Istanbul Modern in its unique location hanging over the Bosphorus, the retrospectively-looking Santral half integrated into an Ottoman power plant, and the area around Tophane sprouting art boutiques and design outlets like nobody’s business, its creative output has just been given a huge boost.The boost comes thanks to, of all things, an ex-footballer Prime Minister who has overseen protests throughout Turkey not by trying to calm the situation but by toughing it Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Late on a spring Friday evening, İstiklal Caddesi, the main shopping thoroughfare in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, exudes all the delicious traditional Turkish aromas: roasting chestnuts, fierce black coffee, döner grills and simit, İstanbul’s bagel, still selling like hot cakes way after midnight. Most of all, though, milling with the crowd, you are struck by something else, something less familiar these days, in Europe anyway: the smell of money.While the old economies are on their knees, Turkey has been booming: 9.2 percent growth in GDP in 2010, 8.5 percent in 2012. Last year the motor Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yok is a fine Turkish word meaning “there isn’t any”. You use it for “no”, as in, say - is Midnight Express any good? Yok.The hot news surrounding this production was all in the scarpering of its two stars a week before opening, both exceptional Russian artists with stellar reputations to lose. While Britain was agog at the latest fleeing from responsibilities of the wayward tyro Sergei Polunin - slated to play Billy Hayes - probably the more indicative evacuee was the senior Igor Zelensky, Polunin’s mentor and boss at the Stanislavsky Ballet, but better remembered over here as a king of Read more ...
carole.woddis
It’s like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women’s lives. While Amelia Bullimore’s sparky three-hander Di and Viv and Rose is storming audiences in Hampstead, Mehmet Ergen, the dynamic Turkish-born founder of both Southwark Playhouse and the Arcola, is continuing to make waves in unfashionable Hackney and Dalston.Directed by Ergen and written by Leyla Nazli, Mare Rider offers up a hallucinatory and disturbingly revisionist feminist fable for our time. The title character Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Next month, as has been the case for centuries, lovers of the poet and mystic Jalaluludin Rumi (known simply as Mevlana - The Master - in Turkey, Iran and Persia) will come together to celebrate the day of his passing, on the 17th of December 1273. Thousands gather for a week commemorating what Rumi called his “marriage to eternity” with a grand ceremony of whirling dervishes.I attended this impressive spectacle a few years ago, which took place in a basketball stadium (there were buses of Japanese tourists outside). In the last few years a more fittingly dedicated building has been Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a peculiarly boundless quality to Istanbul – a city where private domestic life sprawls publicly out across pavements and parks, the bustle of the city seeps out beyond land onto the commercial waterways of the Bosphorous, and cats stroll casually in and out of concert halls. Borders here are porous, a symptom of those greater national divisions that set Turkey in an ongoing tug of war between Europe and the Middle East – a frontier territory, one of political, religious and cultural dialogue but also of conflict.It’s a dance enacted nowhere more vividly than in Istanbul’s annual Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's over an hour before we see a woman in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. And even then, she arrives slowly, appearing at first more of a heavenly human smudge than a fully formed figure. But moments later she is filling the screen, and setting it ablaze with warm light. Light that seems to emanate as much from her blue eyes and young face as it does from her lamp. For the first time in the film, we can see. The male-dominated darkness that grips the opening 60 minutes lifts in response to this moment of clarity and beauty. The tired male eyes that greet her, all double- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery. All of which should make Nefés, Pina Bausch’s travelogue on Istanbul, one of the more substantial productions of her long series Read more ...