HIDDEN TURKEY

Current project (in production) :

Turkey is a land of incalculable cultural and historical wealth: a place of diverse cultures, an area whose historical peoples have greatly affected western and world civilizations. And it is a country whose rich history is mirrored in its cuisine, one of the world’s oldest and greatest. Hidden Turkey takes viewers on a journey through several regions of this ancient country where they will see fascinating landscapes and historical sites, from mountains to the sea, from old cities and towns to traditional villages. We will meet the real people of Turkey in their fields and markets, at work and in festivals. And we will be invited into homes to break bread with families and to see just how great Turkish dishes are made at home.

Turkey is both a seed bed of western civilization and the vital crossroad for the peoples and cultures of the ancient western world. Turkey may be the place where agriculture began, and with that the foundation of all civilization. The earliest example of domesticated wheat and perhaps animals (including dogs) have been discovered by archaeologists in southern and eastern Turkey. The most complex Neolithic village yet discovered, almost 9,000 years old, lies among the wheatfields of the Konya Plain. One of the world’s greatest archaeological discoveries, Çatalhöyük, was something like a proto-civilization and it was part of a trade and religious network that may have extended all the way south to ancient Jericho.

Turkey is also a land that bridges the peoples and cultures of Europe and Asia. Through its long human history, Turkey has received peoples and influences from across the world: it was the terminus of the Chinese Silk Road; the heartland of Homeric Age Greece; and the final home for cultures that rose in the steppes of Central Asia.

Bronze and Iron Age peoples and civilizations followed the early farming communities. About four thousand years ago, Hittites crossed the Caucasus Mountains from the Ukraine and founded an empire that stretched down to the borders of ancient Egypt. The ruins of their great capital city of Hattusis near modern Ankara remains. Phrygians, once ruled by King Midas, the Lydians of King Croesus, and others followed. Not the least of them were Greeks who built cities along all the country’s coasts. Their poetry remembered early trade and warfare– the Homeric epics about the Aegean and the stories of Jason and the golden fleece about the Black Sea. The fishing and trading ports of Sinop and Trabzon remind us of the days when Argonauts sailed along the Black Sea coast on their way to the treasures of Colchis (modern Georgia).

The Greek descendants of Alexander the Great’s army and Romans left their marks on Turkey, including their later religion, that of the Byzantine Empire, Orthodox Christianity. Nowhere are the remains more spectacular than in Cappadocia. In a landscape of spectacular by huge rock cliffs, thousands of churches and chapels are carved into the living rock. Beside them are domestic structures of the local farming people, some so numerous as to make whole underground cities.

Turkey is, of course, named for the Turkic speaking groups who migrated over long periods of time beginning in the 11th century C.E. Muslim converts they replaced Byzantines as rulers beginning with Seljuks, through the great Ottoman Empire, and finally the modern Turkish Republic. The famous Seljuk architecture reflects Arabic, Persian and Byzantine influences. But Ottoman period villages such as Safranbolu, north of Ankara in Central Anatolia or around Konya to the south of the capital show what real traditional Turkish life was like for centuries.

Food is a perfect example of Turkey’s history and character – its long past and its acceptance of new peoples and ways. Nomadic Turkish tribeswomen brought a tradition of stuffed foods such as boreg and, dumplings. After contact with Persia in the 10th century, a taste for that great cuisine with its many spices and fruit-laced meat stews. Like many other nations, Turkey adopted new foods in the 16th century. A famous original Turkish dish called Imam Byaldi (a stuffed eggplant), for example, is composed of trans-Asiatic eggplant, South American tomatoes, indigenous herbs, pine nuts, olive oil (ancient Greek), and served with bread made from the first domesticated grain, wheat. Turkish breads are widely acknowledged to be Europe’s best.

If it did nothing else, the Ottoman Empire made itself the center of a great cuisine. All cooks of the old Ottoman regions, twenty-six nations in all, recognize Turkish cookery as the basis for many of their own great and traditional dishes. The grand cuisine of eclectic origins created at the Sultan’s Palace, the Topkapi, and it then passed down to middling ranks of society so that today we have one of the world’s great culinary traditions, even in home cooking.

Arts, crafts, folkore, and traditional music reflect the same themes. Coppersmiths in Ankara’s copper street work in the same materials as their ancestors of the Early Bronze Age. Rug weavers and cloth makers follow Central Asian ways but they also come from a much older Neolithic tradition. The women who make rugs such as kilims express their culture and ideas about the world through their art, and they also do so through their cookery. Meanwhile, village theater and musicians tell tales and sing songs of days gone by and of everyday life – often at a village feast.

Turkey is a country that is modernizing rapidly. It is also a land where family values and traditions remain strong, especially in the small towns and villages of the interior. There, among the remains of great ancient civilizations dwell a warm and friendly people, eager to share a meal with visitors. Hidden Turkey allows us to accept that invitation and to show just how important to everyone in the world today.

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