D Yrd. Doç. Dr. Meryem Müzeyyen Fındıkgil Zahlreiche, das Stadtbild Istanbuls bis heute prägende, öffentliche Gebäude tragen die Handschrift deutscher Architekten aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Die Architekturhistorikern, Frau Dr. Meryem Müzeyyen Fındıkgil, wird uns in ihrem deutschsprachigen Abendvortrag auf einen virtuellen Rundgang mitnehmen zu einer großen Fülle an berühmteren, wie auch kaum bekannten, baulichen Zeugnissen […]

Over the last decades, the performing arts played a crucial role in the implementation of Alevi visibility in Turkey as well as abroad. Whereas music and sound played a major role in this developments, dance and movement have also been crucial avenues through which Alevi aesthetics became accessible to a larger public. In this lecture, […]

Türkiye’de yaşayan Alevi topluluklarında müzik icrasının boyutlarının tartışılacağı bu sunumda, müzik terminolojisinden çalgılara, müzik icrasından edebi içeriğe kadar geniş bir kavramsal çerçevede “Alevi müziği” konusu irdelenecektir. Özellikle müziğin, Alevi kültürü ve inancının içindeki yeri ile günümüze kadar bu konuda yapılan çalışmaların içeriklerinin sorgulanacağı sunumda, Alevi topluluklarında etnografik müzik araştırmalarının nasıl yapılabileceğine dair bir tartışma yürütülecektir. […]

With a large part of Alevi traditions in today’s Dersim/Tunceli hardly being practiced anymore, most contemporary singers of the region are deeply influenced by the beliefs and aesthetics of the “path of god”. This talk aims to briefly describe former rituals, their (musical) actors, such as pirs/dedes, dervishes and koceks, together with the wide range […]

The study of manuscripts from Alevi communities has undergone a remarkable upswing over the last decades. Increasingly, we learn more about the predominantly religious knowledge that was preserved in writing. The variety of manuscripts known so far is broad: They encompass, among others, notebooks, ritual manuals, poem anthologies, treatises, narratives, epics, certificates, and family trees. […]

Born and raised on the peripheries of the Russian Empire, Ahmet Caferoğlu studied Oriental Linguistics and Literature at the universities of Baku, Istanbul, Berlin, and Breslau. From 1929 up to his death in 1975, Caferoğlu had decisively contributed to shaping Turkish Turkology through his indispensable research on the dialectology of Turkish and on Old Uyghur; […]

Alevi ritual practice is a significant means in (re)producing a specific Alevi habitus and cultural identity. It is well known that the cem ritual and the emblematic semah were formative in the so-called Alevi revival. Representations of such performances became core symbols of ‘Aleviness’. Despite this, Alevis often complain of a lack of ‘authenticity’ of […]

As the second-oldest branch of Experimental Psychology, the Psychology of Aesthetics investigates the multi-factorial determination of aesthetic appreciation and production. Having focused on various questions in the visual arts, manuscripts are merely beginning to draw more attention from scholars in the field. My talk will trace potential factors influencing aesthetic valuation of manuscripts, and highlight […]

The so-called ‘Oxford Anonymous chronicle’ is a comprehensive history of the Ottoman dynasty in Turkish, compiled from various sources to tell the story of the dynasty from its rise to the year 1484 (AH 889). Like several other histories produced around the same time, some of which it influenced, it presents the Ottomans in the context of wider Islamic history and contains […]

The landscape of Sinan’s architecture in Thrace offers an opportunity to rethink the value of the famous Ottoman architect in light of his huge legacy, presented through his architectural and engineering works, which are spread out over a vast territory that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Especially in the Balkans, a region of conflicts […]