When it comes to recent developments in Turkey, sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. One of the best at finding the humour in what would otherwise make you weep is Cem Dinlenmiş, the artist and cartoonist whose weekly ‘Anything Goes’ (‘Her Şey Olur’) column in Penguen pointedly captures the absurdities that punctuate life in this country.

Cem Dinlenmiş, ‘Established 1991’, 2015, Acrylic and marker on canvas, 100 x 150 cm

His most recent solo show at x-ist, You’ll Know When You See It, builds on the acerbic snapshots in his weekly column to tell a more complete story. By chronicling the exploits of a fictional company, Akarca Construction, in Esenyurt, an actual district of Istanbul, Dinlenmiş comments on Turkey’s modernisation adventure as seen in the changing urban, political and cultural landscape of this one particular area. His works are both biting and accessible – the simplicity of his rounded figures, whose facial expressions are little more than a few lines and dots, belies their depth, and the larger landscape they occupy is chock-full of humorous – if sadly accurate – details.

Dinlenmiş recently spoke to us about the inspiration behind this compact exhibition, which runs until Saturday, February 27.

Cem Dinlenmiş, ‘Chairman’s Message’, 2015, Acrylic and marker on wood, 50 x 60 cm

In your exhibition You’ll Know When You See It, you take an inventive spin on reality by documenting the exploits of a fictional construction company, Akarca Construction, in a non-fictional district of Istanbul, Esenyurt. What made you decide to create an imaginary construction company? Were you concerned about potential backlash if you had documented the actions of a real construction company?

Fictional characters have a representational image – a real construction company would not be capable of representing all the characteristics of Akarca Construction Company. I document the actions of actual construction companies in my political cartoons without too much worry about backlash. However, in the exhibition I needed an actor that could easily connect different scenarios.

You note in the panel about Akarca Construction, that ‘As a friend of the arts, Akarca Construction supports many contemporary art projects and exhibitions.’ Do you think that corporations have too much sway in the Turkish art world? Do you feel this corporate influence has created an environment of self-censorship?

By adding art sponsorship to this imaginary company’s profile, I was trying to imply that we’re not talking about a small local firm here. It’s obvious that corporations play an important role in today’s global capitalist art markets – investing in contemporary art, sponsoring museums, galleries and biennials to gain social legitimacy. I can say this leads not only to self-censorship but also to direct censorship in many cases.

Cem Dinlenmiş, ‘Esenyurt 2016 A.D.’, 2016, Fountain pen on paper, 100 x 70 cm

One of the most compelling pieces in your exhibition is the map of Esenyurt, which pokes fun at recent urban development. What inspired you when drawing this map?

The map of Esenyurt is somewhere between my cartoons in Penguen Magazine and the paintings displayed in my exhibitions. I was trying to apply the ironic storytelling I use every week [in Penguen] to a couple of works in order to connect the paintings with my more humorous pieces. Although Esenyurt is well known for being historically aligned with the CHP (Republican People’s Party), the victory of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2004’s local elections began to wipe out traces of the former era in the district. You can notice the social and political contrast when you look at the names of the parks, streets and boulevards. The spatial effects of social and economic change are noteworthy in the area, so I found that documenting the process through a map was useful.

Cem Dinlenmiş, ‘Nightswimming’, 2016, Acrylic and marker on canvas, 40 x 50 cm

The major pieces in the exhibition, like ‘Soldiers Deployed in Esenyurt’ and ‘Life in Tozkoparan’, provide the ‘big picture’ of Istanbul neighbourhoods. Other works provide a narrower focus, such as a man swimming alone in the pool between new apartment buildings. Why did you want to include these more focused pieces?

In the exhibition you can see the painting of a website, the painting of a district and the map of a district, all of which look at the same subject from a different scale. In a couple of works I tried to create compositions that focus on the details of a larger landscape. Changing the scale helps me visually piece the story together. Looking back, I think I could have also included a short comic story, which is something I might work on in the future.

‘You’ll Know When You See It’ runs until February 27. Dinlenmiş’s work also appears at ‘Istanbul: Passion, Fury, Joy’ at MAXXI in Rome, which runs until April 30.

Main featured image: Muhsin Akgün

Keeping track of Istanbul’s ever-changing cityscape is a full-time job, especially as skyscrapers and mixed-use developments have mushroomed in the past decade. Accompanying the construction boom are questions of how the city’s past should factor into its future growth – what role does historical preservation play in a city obsessed with new-builds?

In an article published last Friday on Stambouline, a blog dedicated to the art and architecture of the Ottoman world and beyond, the doctoral candidate Emily Neumeier explores this question, albeit through a very focused lens: the Narmanlı Han. The historic building, located on İstiklal Caddesi and best known as home in the 1930s to such cultural greats as Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, is at the centre of the most recent conflict over how to approach urban-renewal projects. 

At the moment, the building’s distinctive rounded facade is concealed by scaffolding. Moreover, the plans for refurbishment are nebulous, which is certainly a cause for concern.

The rounded facade of the Narmanlı Han is now sadly covered in scaffolding.

Neumeier begins the piece by explaining why so many people are worried about the fate of Narmanlı Han. After witnessing several so-called ‘restoration’ projects on İstiklal, specifically the dreadful enlargement of the Demirören building, residents ‘fear the literal and metaphoric lack of transparency that the scaffolding represents,’ she writes. It could be ‘another potential bait-and-switch situation that will only come to light once the damage [has] been irreversibly done.’

The main aim of the piece, though, is to ‘lay the foundations for a focused architectural history of the site now occupied by the Narmanlı Han’. As Neumeier writes:

‘Besides offering some minor corrections to the timeline of the building’s history that keep circulating in recent news articles, it should also be stressed that what we see on the ground today is not a coherent structure that can be labelled with a single date or architect, but rather an amalgamation of different phases of construction and repair.’

The public has not been able to access the courtyard for several years. (This photo was taken in 2014.)

What follows is a captivating retelling of the Narmanlı Han’s structural development as it morphed from a Russian Embassy in the late 19th century into a bohemian enclave in the 1940s and 50s. Ultimately the building was ‘more or less shut down around 2000’, writes Neumeier. ‘Nostalgia for the quiet courtyard and the wisteria blossoms has been mounting ever since.’

Neumeier also documents the recent row over the restoration project, providing a deft explanation of the two main approaches to preservation in Istanbul, and how these differences are revealed in the language used – the term ‘restoration’ (restorasyon) usually denotes a project where the emphasis is on historic conservation, while the term ‘renewal’ (yenileme) generally refers to the replication of an historic structure (often after the demolition of the original building). ‘The fact that the Narmanlı Han itself transitioned from a “renewal” to a “restoration” project in the past few years can largely be attributed to developers responding to an increasingly vocal and organised community of activists who are stepping in where they feel their local government has failed,’ she writes.

İstiklal Caddesi and its environs are a microcosm of the struggle in Istanbul over whether to rebuild or to restore, with advocates of the former usually motivated by commercial gain. (Gentrification in Beyoğlu is a booming business, one that threatens not just the appearance of the area but also its long-term tradesmen and tenants, the repositories of Istanbul’s intangible cultural heritage.) Neumeier has provided some much-needed context for this debate as it applies to the Narmanlı Han. We highly recommend that you click here and read the full article.

All images courtesy of Emily Neumeier.

To follow the plight of the Narmanlı Han, you can follow Beyoğlu Kent Savunması on Facebook and Twitter.

‘Hundreds of dogs were laying in the streets and enjoying the sun from Pera all the way to Şişli! It is not exactly an attractive sight. These mangy dogs who often exhibit wounds inflicted by their co-sufferers neither move for pedestrians nor for carriages or trams. People usually just step over them; coachmen try to drive around them, while officials are posted along the tram lines with a stick in their hands to shoo away the dogs, but often without success. When one group of dogs goes away, another instantly reappears!’ (The Istanbul Letters of Alka Nestoroff, p 32)

Writing to her mother in 1907 shortly after her move to Istanbul, Alka Nestoroff’s observations about the city’s street dogs could just as easily be attributed to today’s foreign visitors – many Westerners are surprised to see dogs freely roaming the streets, assuming they would be better off in homes or shelters. 

Taşkafa: Stories from the Street, a 2013 documentary by the German artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman and narrated by the storyteller, essayist and critic John Berger, disabuses viewers of that notion. Taking the city’s street dogs and those who care for them as her subject, Zimmerman explores broader themes of power and the public, community and gentrification, and the ongoing resistance to a single way of seeing and being. The film also takes a stand againt the poor treatment of Istanbul’s non-human populations, who contribute greatly to the emotional and psychological health of the city.

Zimmerman, according to a Hackney Citizen article, believes that ‘public spaces must be shared with animals too’, even though developers and government officials may not see it this way. She initially became interested in the treatment of Istanbul’s street dogs because '"it’s a whisper of what we do to people", a metaphor for the sterilisation of our streets and an example of our tense relationship with animals and nature’.

The film will be shown at Somerset House in London on Tuesday, March 8, as part of the Museum of Innocence exhibition. After the screening Zimmerman will take part in a Q&A with Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren, Professor in Humanities at Vanderbilt University and author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life, published in 2015 by Columbia University Press.

The screening starts at 7 pm. Tickets are £12.00 / £10.00 concessions and can be purchased here.

The clowns are coming to town, ready to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Not that Istanbul is an especially dangerous place for clowns. But when the 20th Theatre Festival takes over the city in May, these particular clowns will have to die, over and over again.

Four members of Spymonkey, the UK's leading physical-comedy company, will be performing all 74 onstage deaths – 75 if you count the black, ill-favoured fly killed in Titus Andronicus – in Shakespeare’s works as part of the festival programme. The Complete Deaths, adapted and directed by Tim Crouch, is both a sombre and sublimely funny tribute to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It is also one of the highlights of a programme jam-packed with exciting performances.

The appeal of the Istanbul Theatre Festival, organised every two years by the Istanbul Arts and Culture Foundation (IKSV), is two-fold: a multitude of international productions grace the city’s theatres and performance spaces, and the thriving Turkish theatre scene is opened up to non-Turkish speakers through the use of surtitles.

The women of ‘Ham Havâyi’

This year’s nine international performances span a wide range of languages and formats. Ham Havâyi, a Persian-language production where three Iranian women sketch out the story of their lives as they cook, and d’après une histoire vraie, a choreographic study of falling and touching inspired by Turkish folk dancing, look particularly promising. 

Meanwhile Secret Face, Mesut Arslan’s adaptation of Orhan Pamuk’s surreal film script, offers an eerie take on identity. Walking the line between dream and reality, the production is enhanced by the inventive light choreography of the scenographer Erki De Vries. Co-produced by the Istanbul Theatre Festival, the performance will be in English with Turkish surtitles.

The actors featured in the festival’s version of ‘Macbeth’

As for local productions, the sky is the limit. With 23 different performances, you have your pick of the traditional – Shakespeare is well accounted for, with both Coriolanus and Macbeth on the docket, while Chekhov’s The Seagull and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot will also be staged – as well as the more avant-garde.

The mischevous Yiğit Serdemir of ‘Schizo Shakes’

Keeping in line with our love of the Great Bard, we’re especially excited to see Schizo Shakes, a mash-up of Shakespeare’s plays adapted and directed by Yiğit Serdemir. Likewise, an adaptation of Elif Shafak’s best-selling novel The Bastard of Istanbul also looks appealing – we’re curious to see how Shafak’s prose is translated to the stage. Both productions are in Turkish, but will be screened with English surtitles.

Anyone with even a passing interest in theatre is sure to find something enticing in this extensive line-up.

The festival runs from May 3 to 28. Click here to peruse the entire programme. Tickets will go on sale on Saturday, March 12, at 10am, and can be purchased from Biletix.

All photos courtesy of IKSV.

Delving into Turkey’s past, present and future is on the docket this month as we explore three exhibitions in Istanbul – truth be told, we like our art with a dash of history.

The first stop is at The Empire Project in Cihangir to see Burhan Kum’s solo show Unofficial (ending April 9). This exhibition, which features Kum’s oil paintings and mixed media works, tangles with the question of painting’s role in public debate. Kum comes to the conclusion that, like banned books and films, paintings which undermine or threaten the dominant system are hidden away – a practice that was prevalent in both Ottoman and European lands, and still persists today.

Burhan Kum, ‘One Hundred and Fifteen Years’, 2015–2016, oil on canvas, curnice pole and curtain, 217 x 153 x 10 cm

Kum takes as his main subject Osman Hamdi Bey’s 1901 painting ‘Genesis’, whose whereabouts are currently unknown. The painting depicts a pregnant woman sitting on a Koran stand in front of a mihrab with holy books, including the Koran, scattered at her feet – a clear challenge to Ottoman religious norms. Having recreated the lost work, which is titled ‘One Hundred and Fifteen Years’, Kum reminds us that Ottoman taboos were indeed questioned by the artists of the time. He even covers the underside of his painting with a curtain to hide the religious books strewn about, which is how Mehmet Güleryüz recalls first seeing ‘Genesis’ when visiting the house of a private collector (a titbit from the small yet informative exhibition book).

Burhan Kum, ‘The Last Copyist’, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

In ‘The Last Copyist’ Kum employs his unique mix of oils and ink – his best works marry the two – to show an Ottoman painter copying from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s famous Orientalist painting ‘The Slave Market’ (1866). Yet the Ottoman painter’s copy is a close-up of the naked woman’s torso with two fingers in her mouth, highlighting the most erotic aspect of Gérôme’s work. It is a nod to the ways in which Orientalist paintings were a vehicle for displaying the illicit. 

Just a short stroll down from The Empire Project is another exhibition that shines the spotlight on the Ottoman past and its meaning for today. Until March 27, Tophane-i Amire is hosting Ottomans and Europeans: Pasts and Prospectives, curated by Beral Madra. The show is a key component of Ottomans and Europeans: Reflecting on Five Centuries of Cultural Relations, a year-long project supported by various big-name institutions.

On display are six works made by artists from Europe and Turkey who took part in a residency in Biella, Italy, during the summer of 2015. Collaborating with senior artists and curators, the six participants reflected on the relations between Ottomans and Europeans, and the impact – if any – of historical cultural exchange on the present cultural interaction between Europe and Turkey. Such questions may come across as a bit unwieldy, but the resulting works are cohesive and demonstrate close collaboration – a positive sign for establishing lasting cultural relationships.

Leone Contini, ‘Undigested-Gallipoli’, 2016, videos, objects

The video installations steal the show. Leone Contini’s ‘Undigested-Gallipoli’ immediately grabs your attention with periodic high-pitched beeps amplified by the vaulted ceilings of the old armoury – the video shows Contini sweeping the shores of Gallipoli with a makeshift metal detector. By investigating the ‘skin’ of the former battlefield in an attempt to find the metallic leftovers of war, the artist has created his own way of remembering a past that still affects the present.

Driant Zeneli, ‘Venezia’, 2016, single channel HD video, sound, music, colour

Driant Zeneli’s ‘Venezia’, hidden in one of the two makeshift screening rooms, is dizzying and discombobulating. The artist uses moving images and sound to represent the architecture of Venice, although it quickly becomes clear that it’s not the Venice we know and love. Instead, Zeneli filmed a newly opened resort in Antalya, Turkey, named ‘Venice’. The resulting work questions the power of the imaginary and how image factors into our understanding of history.

Moving beyond the weight of history and what it means for the future, Ahmet Polat’s exhibition at x-ist in Nişantaşı, titled A Bridge Too Far (ending April 2), is firmly rooted in Turkey’s present.

Ahmet Polat, ‘Presence, Karaköy’, 2015, fine art print on Hahnemühle paper, 33 x 50 cm

Polat has a knack for catching Istanbul’s residents with their guards down. In his work ‘Presence, Karaköy’, a man is portrayed slightly out of focus, which adds to the impression that he has been caught unawares. Within this moment there is a brief glimmer of vulnerability, an opening and honesty that keeps your eyes glued to the photograph.

Ahmet Polat, ‘Mashattan, İstanbul’, 2015, fine art print on Hahnemühle paper, 160 x 240 cm

When he widens his lens and takes in the bigger picture, the artist captures the city mid-change. In ‘Mashattan, İstanbul’, the artist presents in the foreground an idyllic scene – people swimming in a pool on what looks to be a hot day – which is contrasted with the construction of future skyscrapers in the background. The spectre of urban sprawl looms over the fun.

The main featured image is from ‘Ottomans and Europeans: Pasts and Prospectives’, which ends Sunday, March 27. ‘A Bridge Too Far’ ends on Saturday, April 2, and ‘Unofficial’ ends on the following Saturday, April 9.

Once summer rolls around, the make-up of Istanbul’s population shifts ever so slightly. While many residents decamp to summer houses and small villages to escape the heat and humidity, the city receives an influx of (mainly foreign) students who enrol in the various summer courses and study abroad programmes on offer.

This year Koç University is organising four courses that will be of interest to Cornucopia readers. The first is its Ottoman Summer School, which is in its second year (not to be confused with the long-running Intensive Ottoman and Turkish Summer School in Cunda). Taking place at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations (RCAC) in Beyoğlu, the programme will be held from July 11 to August 19. Instruction will concentrate on the skills of reading and understanding a variety of Ottoman texts. Some knowledge of Ottoman is required, and classes will be divided into two levels: intermediate and advanced.

Going even further back in history, Koç is organising a new intensive summer programme on the ancient languages of Anatolia from August 15 to September 4. Also being held at the RCAC, the course provides graduate students (and advanced undergrads) with a comprehensive introduction to the Hittite and Akkadian languages, and the cuneiform script in which they were recorded. Instruction in these subjects can be difficult to come by, so we image this course will be popular with students whose work requires knowledge of Hittite and Akkadian.

Finally, there are two programmes that take the city of Istanbul as their point of focus. ‘Istanbul Through the Ages’, an innovative five-week summer course open to graduate students of history, art history, archaeology and urbanism, will be held at the RCAC from July 11 to August 19. Beginning with the Neolithic Age and ending in the 21st century, students will learn how the city worked and how monuments were integrated into its fabric.

The other Istanbul-centred programme is ‘Urban Political Ecology on the Road’, a three-week summer course on the relationship between the contemporary city and its natural resources. This subject is especially pertinent to the current situation in Istanbul, where the threat of development constantly looms over the city’s green spaces and waterways. As a part of the ‘on the road’ concept, the class will adopt a hands-on approach to the city and undertake a series of guided fieldworks. Not a graduate student? Not to worry: the programme is open to both graduate students and young professionals. The course runs from July 11–29 and will be held at the main campus of Koç University in Sarıyer.

Applications for all four programmes (as well as the Intensive Ottoman and Turkish Summer School in Cunda) are due on Friday, April 15. For more information on curriculum, application requirements and programme fees, please visit the individual course listings shown below.

Ara Güler has found himself in the spotlight yet again. Last week it was announced that The Eye of Istanbul, a documentary film about the legendary Armenian-Turkish photographer and the culmination of his retrospective exhibition in Istanbul, won Best of Fest at the DC Independent Film Festival. The screening at the festival also served as the US debut of the documentary, which was directed by Binnur Karaevli and Fatih Kaymak.

Anyone with a passing interest in Turkey has likely seen Güler’s work. He is to Istanbul what Ansel Adams is to the American West: his black-and-white photographs memoralise a particular place in time, articulating its inherent value. While Ansel’s majestic shots of Yosemite inspire environmentalists, Güler’s photographs of Istanbul and all its moving parts both spark and magnify the love visitors and residents feel for the city. Need proof? Look no further than Cornucopia 17, which features his phenomenal pictures in a 40-page spread celebrating Turkey’s 75th birthday.

Yet his iconic shots of the city are not the only reason Güler has earned the moniker the ‘eye of Istanbul’: he is also incredibly prolific. Güler’s career has spanned over 60 years, during which time he has generated more than one million photographs – although best known for his pictures of Istanbul, a significant percentage of his work was shot in other parts of Turkey and abroad.

Employing a non-linear narrative, the documentary follows Güler as he prepares for his retrospective exhibition. While assembling and organising his photographs for the show, the 87-year-old relates the stories behind his most iconic images. These anecdotes are an oral history of sorts, documenting the lives of the people he met and the major historical events he witnessed. They also reveal Güler’s wit, curiosity and resourcefulness.

You can watch the trailer here:

The film, which was also a finalist at the International Thessaloniki Film Festival, does not yet have a release date in Turkey. But we will keep you abreast of any developments.

If you would like to see Güler’s work up-close, there is an exhibition at the Fulya Art Centre that features Güler’s photographs of the author Yaşar Kemal, another cultural great. It is a hidden gem – we were the only ones in the gallery when we stopped by last week. We highly recommend visiting it this weekend. The show finishes on Thursday, March 31.

The IKSV Film Festival is, in one word, immense. Over the course of 11 days, 221 films from 62 countries will be screened.

Yet while the size of the event is noteworthy, what separates this film festival from the others organised in Istanbul is its focus on competitions. The seven major competitions, each with 10 or more entries, spotlight foreign films that often did well on the international film circuit but did not gain much traction in Hollywood.

Emine, the main character of ‘Ember’, is left caring for her sick child when her husband Cemal is arrested in Romania

The International Golden Tulip Competition features acclaimed films from all over the world, such as Eva Doesn’t Sleep (main featured image), a film about the fate of Eva Perón’s embalmed body by the visionary Argentinean director Pablo Agüero, and Ember, the latest from the Turkish master Zeki Demirkubuz. The former, however, will be screened only with Turkish subtitles (as are most foreign films), but the latter will have English subtitles.

‘Mercury’ chronicles an awkward dinner with art professionals

There are also three competitions dedicated solely to filmmakers from Turkey: the National Golden Tulip Competition, the National Documentary Competition and the National Short Film Competition. These categories are a treasure trove for lovers of Turkish cinema who like to discover new talent. Melis Balcı’s short Mercury shows a gallery assistant dining with the gallery owner, an art collector, a curator and an institution director and subsequently observing the absurd and corrupt hierarchy of the art world. In the National Competition, Muhammet Tayfur Aydın’s Black Crow follows an Iranian actress living in France as she tries to reach Iran overland through Turkey. Non-Turkish speakers are in luck, as all Turkish films will be screened with English subtitles.

A still from Michael Snow’s 1971 film ‘La Région Centrale’, shot over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm and consisting entirely of preprogrammed movements

Speaking of discoveries, audiences in Istanbul will have the chance to become better acquainted with masters from 1970s American avant-garde cinema. As part of the ‘In Pursuit of Light’ section, films from such pioneering figures of this special genre as Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, will be screened at the Istanbul Modern Cinema in their original 16mm format.

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in ‘Miles Ahead’

There is the traditional gala section, featuring films such as the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn, which tells the story of Eilis, an Irish emigré adjusting to life in New York in the 1950s. A new section this year is simply titled ‘Musicians’ and highlights films portraying people who have made music an inseparable part of their lives. Morgan Neville’s documentary about the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, entitled The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, will appeal to classical music lovers, especially those who saw and perform with the Silk Road Ensemble at Zorlu Centre in 2014. If your musical interests lie more in jazz, you should check out Born to Be Blue, a film loosely based on Chet Baker’s life, and Miles Ahead, a dynamic, fast-moving free-form investigation of Miles Davis’s genius.

Freddy Kroger knows how to frighten

Another section unique to this festival is ‘Midnight Madness’, perfect for those who crave a good fright. Films such as The Nightmare on Elm Street will play at midnight every Friday and Saturday of the festival at the Atlas and Rexx theatres.

Looking through the schedule is almost overwhelming – there is so much to discover! Click here to access the full programme and get lost in the world of film.

The 35th Istanbul Film Festival runs from April 7–17. Tickets go on sale on Saturday, March 26, and can be purchased from Biletix and the box offices at the Atlas and Rexx movie theatres.

Films will be screened at Atlas, Beyoğlu and Fitaş theatres on Istiklal, Rexx Cinema in Kadıköy, Feriye Cinema in Ortaköy, Istanbul Modern Cinema, the Pera Museum, Akbank Sanat and the Italian Cultural Centre.

This unattributed portrait of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, Moroccan Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I in London, was painted in 1600. Excommunicated by the Pope and at war with Catholic Spain, the Tudor queen had made alliances with the Muslim world and was selling arms to Morocco. The story is told in Jerry Brotton’s latest book, This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World, which is being read every morning this week at 9.45 on BBC Radio 4 by Derek Jacobi.

Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps, sheds light on a neglected area of English history. Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603) was a time of adventure and exploration. The Barbary and Levant Companies began trading, and many English merchants, diplomats and adventurers headed for the Islamic world, often converting to Islam, according to Brotton. Elizabeth sent a ship full of gifts to Sultan Mehmed III, and travellers came the other way, too. Brotton reveals that 60 English plays with Turks, Moors and Persians were staged between the opening of London’s first permanent playhouse in 1576 and the death of the Virgin Queen. Shakespeare’s Othello may have been inspired by the figure of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud. The painting was bought by the University of Birmingham in 1955 and is now at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Daunt Books in London will host a launch of Jerry Brotton’s book on Thursday, April 13, at 7pm. Brotton will also be giving a talk on his book at the British Library on Friday May 6 at 6.30pm.

Have an idea for a research project related to things Turkish or textiles? Now is the time to put pen to paper and apply for the Ancient & Modern Prize, an award of £1,000 given to a candidate aged under 26 or over 60. Applications are open until October 31, 2016.

Sponsored by Cornucopia and Halı magazines, with additional support from the three major London auction houses, Bonhams, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, this scholarship is the brainchild of the art historian, sculptor and author John Carswell. As he wrote in Cornucopia 49, the aim of the award is to support original research by two categories of people often passed over by traditional funding sources: those deemed too old, and those too young to have climbed onto the first step on the ladder.

Peter Andrews examines the 18th-century tent of the Indian ruler Tipu Sultan at Powis Castle (Cornucopia 51)

Past winners have included Peter Andrews, doyen of tent studies. Since receiving the award in 2014, Andrews’s comparative study of historic Indian tents has been published under the title Tentage at the Calico Museum and its patterns. The volume is illustrated with colour plates and beautiful drawings by his wife, the late Mügül Ataç. Andrews used the money from the prize to examine two unique Indian tents – the legendary Tipu Sultan (1725–50) at the National Trust’s Powis Castle in Wales and the 1535 Tienda de Campaña in Toledo – for his new book, which will be devoted to Indian tents outside the Calico Museum.

Pat Yale, winner of the 2015 prize, used her funds for part two of her journey to retrace the footsteps of Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) across Anatolia. Though more of an Arabist and Classical archaeologist, rather than a Turcologist, Bell often travelled in and out of Istanbul, traversing through the highlands of Anatolia to reach Syria and points further south.

Pat Yale pictured at Binbirkilise, near Karaman, in central Anatolia

Yale has given talks on her research in London and at the University of Newcastle, where the university-affiliated Great North Museum is hosting an exhibition titled The Extraordinary Gertrude Bell. The show, which runs until May 3, draws from the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, which has an excellent online library, and also utilises significant loans from the British Musem, Imperial War Museum and others. On April 14, Yale will lecture on her project at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul from 3 to 5pm. Space is limited, so call +90 212 377 4000 to reserve your spot.

Applying for the Ancient & Modern Prize is easy: no references are needed, and applicants must simply state their age and provide a brief summary of their project in no more than 500 words. Applications are judged on a scale of 1 to 25 by an anonymous committee who never meet, and there is no discussion. The scores are added up by the honorary secretary, and the highest earns the Ancient & Modern prize, while the runner-up receives the £500 Godfrey Goodwin prize, named after the distinguished Ottoman architectural historian who died in 2005. Please click here for more information on how to apply, and send all entries and enquiries to secretary@ancientandmodern.co.uk.

When Istanbul is abloom with tulips each April, it is often the sheer quantity of flowers – the cascade of colour in Emirgan Park comes to mind – that dazzles visitors. But for budding botanists, discerning the different varieties is what delights. If one such botanist were to find the Tulipa sprengeri hidden in the multitude, we now know it would be thanks to Professor Johannes ‘John’ Jacob Manissadjian, the subject of a new exhibition at SALT Galata.

Empty Fields follows many strands, but at the centre is Manissadjian, a professor of natural sciences at the American Anatolia College in Merzifon from 1890 to 1915 and the founder of the school’s natural science museum. In addition to collecting and identifying more than 80 new species of plants, butterflies and bees from Asia Minor, he also sent rare wild flowers – such as the Tulipa sprengeri, whose six pointy red petals open widely in a manner more welcoming than other varieties – to the Netherlands for reproduction in botanical gardens and plant nurseries. Believed to be extinct in the wild, this type of tulip is now widely grown as an ornamental.

‘Silene Manissadjiana Freyn’ plant collected by, and later named after, Manissadjian from Akdağ, Amasya, Turkey, September 10, 1892

Turkey’s rich biodiversity has been severely understudied, or so goes the traditional narrative. And while more certainly needs to be done to document and conserve the country’s unique species and ecosystems, especially as they come under attack from nonstop development, Empty Fields suggests that there are lacunae in the historical narrative. By diving deep into archival materials, the untold stories of certain communities come to the surface – in this case, the story of an Armenian-German scientist, botanist and plant collector who cultivated a natural science collection which eventually exceeded 7,000 specimens.

The archive in question is that of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), also known as the American Board Archives. SALT has been cataloguing and digitising the multilingual archive, currently in the care of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT). Empty Fields is the culmination of two years’ work in the archive by curator Marianna Hovhannisyan.

The annual meeting of the Western Turkey Mission in front of Anatolia College, Merzifon, Turkey, 1908

The exhibition opens with a timeline of ABCFM’s missionary work in the Ottoman Empire and later the Republic – the missionaries’ field, as it were – and a summary of the project’s conceptual underpinnings. The ‘empty’ data fields found when cataloguing the American Board Archives are magnified and displayed as a wallpaper of sorts, indicating the gaps in historical narratives and demonstrating the unknown depths of the archival material.

Professors of the Anatolia College dressed in various disciplines, 1912

The abundance of the American Board Archives is illustrated in the sections focusing on the establishment and development of the American Anatolia College in Merzifon and Manissadjian’s drive to create a library-museum. One especially striking photograph shows the professors of the Anatolia College, which was established in 1864 as a theological seminary and later evolved into a boarding school with Armenian and Greek students in 1886, dressed as the various disciplines.

This 1910 photograph of the College’s orchestra demonstrates the abundance of activities on campus.

Another riveting image portrays Manissadjian with his students.

The library-museum building in mid-construction

Unique for its time and region, the College endeavoured to add a library-museum to its already expansive campus between 1910 and 1911. Manissadjian provided the curatorial vision and methodology, which merged his local, regional pedagogical interests with the prevailing humanist impulses of American and German museological tradition. In addition to local geological specimens collected by students and members of the College’s Archaeological Club, the museum contained natural objects from the peripheries of Anatolia. The biodiversity of the territory that would later become Turkey was being collected, identified and preserved under the careful eye of Manissadjian.

The atrocities of 1915 are not the focus of this exhibition, yet they represent a critical juncture, a break in time. It was at this point that all pedagogical work was halted and the school lost almost all its staff and students. After being arrested by the gendarmes on June 26, 1915, Manissadjian was released, thanks to a bribe paid by the missionaries. Together with his family, he was later allowed to reside at a German farm in Amasya on the basis that he was of German descent.

Handwritten pages from Manissadjian’s catalogue line the walls of the exhibition

Amazingly, Manissadjian returned to militarised Merzifon in 1917 with the intention of documenting the museum’s collection. The resulting book, Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolian College, was found in the American Board Archives. Handwritten pages from the catalogue line the walls of the exhibition, illustrating Manissadjian’s thoroughness in cataloguing and labelling each object. While the collection is no longer intact, the catalogue is a testimony to the importance of the professor’s work and the pride he took in acquiring, preserving and displaying the specimens of Asia Minor, several of which are named in his honour. It also demonstrates, together with the other archival materials, what exactly was lost.

Manissadjian eventually emigrated to America. As for the College, the American missionaries moved it to Thessaloniki, while maintaining the museum in Merzifon until 1939 in an attempt to attract the local Muslim Turkish people and build trust with what remained of the mission. However, the natural science collection was ultimately dispersed to other institutions in Turkey.

Despite this rupture, Manissadjian’s passion for the natural sciences endured – at least in the lives of others. The last section of the exhibition features Ara Dildilian, who also emigrated to the US, describing how he acquired his interest in rare rocks and minerals from his neighbour in Merzifon: Prof Manissadjian.

Empty Fields goes beyond simply recreating Manissadjian’s collection – an almost impossible task – or memorialising a largely forgotten moment in Anatolian history. Erasures are displayed alongside artefacts, and the archive is viewed through a contemporary lens, raising questions about future conditions of loss and displacement. Yet this is not just a juxtaposition of past and present – the exhibition exposes the networks, the ripples through time, that led to the establishment of institutions like the Anatolia College and its museum in Merzifon, and also allowed Manissadjian’s legacy to live on, whether in a former neighbour’s love of rocks or a tulip tucked away in an Istanbul park.

‘Empty Fields’ ends on June 5. The exhibition will be accompanied by an e-publication and a public programme.

Main Featured Image: Kew Royal Botanic Gardens

In this blog series, the photographer Lynn Gilbert takes us on a journey through Turkish homes.

Travelling to the town of Borçka, located in Artvin Province in Turkey’s Black Sea region, is an experience that I savoured long after my visit. For it was in this small town that I gained an unexpected insight into life in traditional Turkish homes.

I was eager to visit, as little has been written about the region in English, and because my time in nearby Camili, recognised as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, had been so rewarding. Yet the long drive from the Georgian border to our destination didn’t bode well: the rutted roads cut into the mountains, and gnarled tree roots and trunks crowded the road on either side. It felt like we were headed into the wilderness.

When we finally arrived in Borçka, it quickly became clear that the remote area wasn’t just humble – it was downright poor. I was beginning to fear I would not find any interiors worth photographing.

Borçka is a place of astonishing extremes. When you widen your lens, you see a backdrop of majestic mountains, lush and green, and, in the distance, modern housing blocks, manicured farms and asphalt roads carved precisely into the mountainside. Yet the town itself stands in stark contrast to the grandiosity of the surrounding mountain ranges. It is an insular farming community – families live by the needs of their animals. Chickens and undernourished cows wander around like house pets, and the old, wooden houses look like they won’t last the winter.

However, tucked into many of these tumbledown structures – where kitchen sinks are frequently outside and the water is frigid – is one room that has been created with pride. (Almost a miracle when you consider there are no shops in the area, except for a tiny room where one can buy basic essentials.) At the centre of this room? A stove.

It wasn’t until my trip to Borçka, almost a decade after beginning my personal odyssey to document Turkish interiors, that my eyes opened to the extraordinary significance of what I’d been seeing all along, even in the houses that, on the surface, had little to offer. Looking is one thing, ‘seeing’ is another. And for the first time, I saw how this unassuming stove is the core of the Turkish traditional home.

Nearly all of the old homes I’ve visited possess a small, blackened, wood-burning stove in the shape of a metal square or rectangle and balanced on thin metal legs. Occasionally, it looks like a large, metal garbage bin painted brown and set on a small base. On the stovetop are three pewter pots of varying sizes, and a tall, thick curved exhaust pipe runs from the stove to the back wall.

The room with the stove is the heart of the house. It is often the only source of warmth in these poorly-insulated dwellings. At meal times, a table suddenly appears in the room with the stove, and family and unexpected guests are generously fêted with an abundant and sumptuous array of dishes. I was treated to many of these repasts, and they were more fun than any dinner party I’ve attended.

Not only that, but the only entertainment, provided by family and friends who drop by unannounced, takes place around the stove. It makes sense, then, why this is the one room in the house that has been painstakingly assembled from pieces of colourful fabric, like a jewel box where imagination trumps possessions and sparkles with joy.

An established photographer, Lynn Gilbert has been fascinated with people’s living environments since her early teens. Visiting 60 countries in six decades, she has seen more than 3,000 houses and 20,000 rooms. In her nine extended trips to Turkey, Gilbert became fascinated with the unique quality of the Turkish home. Her photographic study documents – for the first time – the beautiful old houses, both humble and affluent, that form part of Turkey’s cultural heritage. Please visit her website for more photographs.

Copyright Lynn Gilbert.

The sun shone through the great glass roofs of the London Book Fair on its opening day today, when publishers from around the world brought their books to market. Sometimes it seemed more like a travel fair, and trips could be planned around such tempting titles such as Medieval Georgian Icon-Painters (Georgian National Book Centre), The Flora of the Silk Road (I.B. Tauris) and the doorstopping Persian Paintings from the Al Sabah Collection in Kuwait (Thames and Hudson). The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism was giving away well-produced colour pocket books on historic places to visit as well as literary titles, including The Last Tram by Nedim Gürsel and The Well of Trapped Words bv Sema Kaygusuz, translated by Maureen Freely. ‘Print in Istanbul’ was a message that fluttered above the crowds (see picture), and on the first floor were the serried booths of 14 Istanbul printers. The latest printing of Ara Güler’s timeless Lost Istanbul was open for visitors to look through on the stand of Ofset, the company that prints Cornucopia.

The three-day London Book Fair at Olympia continues until Thursday 14th April.

Each year the Istanbul Jazz Festival, sponsored by the Istanbul Arts and Culture Foundation (IKSV), manages to push the envelope in terms of either artists or venues.

In 2016, they are doing both.

The highlight of this year’s packed programme features two rapidly rising jazz acts performing at a very untraditional venue. On July 14, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington (main featured image), whom the New York Times has dubbed ‘the most-talked-about jazz musician since Wynton Marsalis arrived on the New York scene three decades ago’ (funnily enough, Wynton’s brother Branford is also in the festival line-up), will headline at Beykoz Kundura, a former shoe factory on the outskirts of Istanbul that has found new life as a set for television series and fashion photographers.

Ibeyi is a group formed by 19-year-old French Cuban twins Naomi and Lisa-Kainde Diaz

The aim is to eventually transform the Beykoz Kundura complex, which is currently under restoration, into one of Istanbul’s most prominent arts and culture spaces. It seems fitting, then, that two acts representing the future of jazz – the soulful sister duo Ibeyi are opening for Washington – will perform at an event space that seems destined for great things.

Laura Mvula

The British singer-songwriter Laura Mvula – another rising star – is scheduled to perform on July 22. Mixing the sounds of gospel, jazz and psychedelic rock, Mvula made a splash in 2013 with her Mercury-nominated debut Sing to the Moon. She will take the stage with Jacob Collier, a master of many instruments who was heralded by The Guardian as ‘jazz music’s new messiah’, in the garden of the Embassy of Germany Tarabya Summer Residence.

Damon Albarn, waving the flag, first toured with the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music in 2010

The festival is also playing host to some large-scale performances that are sure to impress. The opening concert on June 27 will feature the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music under the baton of Issam Rafea and with special guest Damon Albarn, best known as the lead singer of the alternative rock band Blur. Due to the on-going conflict in Syria, the Orchestra was forced to scatter across Europe. They only recently reunited and are set to perform at Southbank Centre and Glastonbury ahead of their first show in Istanbul. The aim behind this series of concerts is to celebrate the remarkable music culture of Syria.

Gregory Porter

Another grand performance pairs American jazz vocalist Gregory Porter with the TRT Jazz Orchestra conducted by Kamil Özler. Porter is no stranger to Istanbul, and we imagine that concertgoers will be delighted to see a familiar face at Cemil Topuzlu Open Air Theatre on July 25.

Jane Monheit

While the festival features several standout performers, there are also some shows focused on celebrating jazz classics. The trumpet virtuoso Nicholas Payton and American vocalist Jane Monheit will perform the songs of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald at The Seed in Emirgan on July 13, while Hugh Coltman will pay homage to Nat King Cole at Uniq Open-Air Theatre on July 15.

Antonio Sanchez

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Antonio Sanchez, the Mexican jazz drummer and creator of the brilliant soundtrack to the film Birdman, is scheduled to perform. So too is a trio consisting of Brad Mehldau on piano, Mark Guiliana (whose shows at Salon IKSV this past year were sold out) on drums and John Scofield on guitar.

Last year’s jazz in the park event was a success

As for local talent, some of the best Turkish jazz musicians, like Önder Focan & the Şallıel Brothers and Elif Çağlar, will participate in the festival’s ‘Night Out’ event, a progressive concert in Kadıköy. In addition, the European Jazz Club sessions will bring top names from the Turkish jazz scene together with European virtuosos for a series of performances at Salon. Finally, if you can’t stand the thought of being cooped up inside during the sweltering summer months, check out the free jazz in the park session on July 17, which will feature the finalists of the ‘Young Jazz’ competition. 

The IKSV Istanbul Jazz Festival runs from June 27 to July 25. Click here to see the full programme. Tickets go on sale on Biletix at 10 am on Saturday, April 16.

All photos courtesy of IKSV.

It may not look like Turkey, but the WOW Kremlin Palace in Antalya was the sole Turkish connection at this year’s Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, held from April 14–17 in Hawick, Scottish Borders. Sasha Litvintsev’s short film Exile Exotic is set at the hotel, which features a replica of the Kremlin incongruously perched next to a gigantic swimming pool.

When Litvintsev and her mother left Russia, the only countries they could go to without a visa were Egypt, Turkey and Thailand – evidence of how Russian history has limited the free movement of individuals. So, Turkey it was. The film narrates the surreal beginnings of their exile from Russia at this Antalya resort, where they were able to visit the Kremlin again. The image of holidaymakers messing around in a pool is set against an operatic score, which Litvintsev describes as ‘reminiscent of the song of the sirens [that made] Odysseus stray on his long journey home’.

The trailer for ‘Exile Exotic’

This record of Litvintsev’s personal pilgrimage was screened as part of the ‘Altered State I’ short film programme. ‘Altered state’ also served as the theme for this year’s festival, which was a celebration of the most inventive and thought-provoking experimental film and artists’ moving image of 2016. According to the organisers, the idea of an altered state ‘lies at the very heart of experimental film practice: the ambition to challenge, to question, and to alter the state of things’. It is a form of intellectual and visual activism that posits a set of alternative possibilities, both vivid and subtle, for living, thinking and feeling.

The Alchemy Festival has gone from strength to strength since its launch in 2010. There were over 800 submissions this year, and ultimately 124 films from 26 countries were shown across four days. The programme ranged from international feature premieres and experimental shorts to video art and live cinema performances.

A still from Julie Witford’s ‘100 Seconds’

We were also chuffed that Cornucopia's very own Julie Witford had a short piece featured in the Moving Image Makers Collective (MIMC) screening. This curated section featured films selected from MIMC submissions – MIMC, a Scottish Borders filmmaking group, has produced a variety of films, exhibitions and screening events, while exploring processes of collaborative working, group critique and individual practice. Julie’s film 100 Seconds documents a dramatic moment of flooding in Hawick’s Slitrig, soundtracked by music from Fazıl Say’s Istanbul Symphony, a composition many Cornucopia readers will be familiar with.

It’s no wonder Alchemy keeps growing, given its widening reputation as an intimate, friendly and hospitable film festival. Turkish experimental film and moving image makers are strongly encouraged to apply for the 2017 festival. Applications open on May 1, with a closing date of October 30. Click here for more information on submissions.

‘Turkey is not really an olive oil country.’ It seemed a strange thing to say at an event hosted in Turkey and dedicated to the world of olives.

‘So why are we meeting here?’ one international participant whispered after the Turkish academic Artun Ünsal made his declaration on the first day of the ‘Slow Olive’ gathering. The event brought producers, consumers, chefs, scholars and environmentalists from around the Mediterranean together for four days last week in the Aegean town of Ayvalık.

Scholars came from around the Mediterranean to the four-day event, which had a packed programme

It’s true, as Ünsal argued, that olive oil consumption per capita in Turkey is dramatically lower than in fellow producing countries such as Greece and Italy. But other speakers at the inaugural Slow Food-organised event amply demonstrated the important place that olives and olive oil hold in Turkey’s history, culture, ecology, politics and cuisine.

‘The first thing my forefathers did when they settled in Altınova was plant an olive tree,’ said food history researcher Nedim Atilla, whose grandfather was brought to Turkish soil from the Greek island of Lesbos during the population exchange of the 1920s. The painful history of that period reshaped the agricultural landscape of the Aegean and other affected regions, emptying many villages of their main producers of olives and olive oil, and in some cases replacing them with people who were more used to growing different crops such as wheat and tobacco.

Nedim Atilla speaking at Slow Olive

‘There was a huge vacuum left behind. People from [the olive-growing regions of] Crete and Lesbos settled in the Altınova and Edremit area, so olive culture continued there. But not every area was so lucky,’ Atilla said.

One of the less fortunate places was Akçaabat, on the Black Sea coast near Trabzon. The presence of olive trees in the region is noted in the historical record at least as far back as 1064, and the area generated the Ottoman Empire’s second-highest level of taxes from olives, after Crete, according to Türkün Sümerkan of the GOLA Culture, Art and Ecology Association.

‘Evliya Çelebi wrote about seven types of olives in Trabzon, including one that was small, black, cherry-like and could be eaten straight off the tree,’ said Sümerkan. Other olives in the region were put in sacks in a long trough made from karaağaç (elm) wood and ‘stomped like grapes to make olive oil,’ she said, positing that the motion of the line of olive-stompers in the trough, their hands held high to grab a rope strung above to keep them from slipping, found its way into the moves of the traditional Black Sea horon dance.

‘There were probably songs that went along with it that were meant to make the tedious work a bit more palatable,’ Sümerkan continued. ‘But [after the population exchange] there was no one to transfer that olive culture to, so local songs and folklore were not passed down.’

Slow Olive participants tasting some of the different olive varieties that come from all over Turkey

Olive trees are still found and harvested in a few places along the Black Sea, a fact that may come as a surprise to the casual eater in Turkey, where olives are generally associated with the main growing areas and olive-oil-rich cuisine of the Aegean coast. That’s a perception that Slow Food Turkey sought to change at the Slow Olive event with an exhibition and tasting of dozens of olives – black, green, brown, red, salty, meaty, tangy – from places as far-flung as Artvin in Turkey’s mountainous northeast and Mardin along its southern border with Syria.

‘There are around 90 types of olives in Turkey, but primarily just ten species are cultivated,’ said agricultural engineer Mücahit Taha Özkaya, a faculty member at Ankara University. ‘We don’t know about or benefit from our biodiversity. Each olive has a different aroma and taste; even the same type of olive tree in a different location yields olives that smell and taste differently.’

Each of the 90 types of olives in Turkey have a different aroma and taste

That diversity is under threat not just from neglect, but also from the extreme weather concerns caused by climate change and from rapid development of coal-fired power plants and other energy facilities, according to environmental activist Mahir Ilgaz of 350.org. ‘Coal is the biggest threat to olive growers in Turkey – of nearly 80 new coal plants planned, most are on the coast in olive-growing areas,’ he said. Long-sought regulatory changes would make it even easier to develop such areas by exempting small groves from existing protections.

Though good-quality olives and olive oil can be made from large, plantation-style monoculture production areas, small groves like those still often found in Turkey are invaluable for preserving both olive culture and the broader habitat, explained Güven Eken of the environmental group Doğa Derneği.

Small olive groves play an important role in preserving the broader habitat

‘Up until a century ago, olive groves were a food source, grazing land, habitat for many species – not just something that generates a product but an integral part of nature,’ Eken said. ‘If olive groves are naturally grazed, as they were by wild deer and goats before human cultivation, other species of plants, such as mushrooms and wild greens, can be harvested from underneath the trees. Wood, oil, wild vegetables and cheese from grazing animals can all be part of the harvest from an olive grove.’

‘Co-existence is one of the cultural values of the olive,’ Eken added. ‘There’s an unwritten culture around olives that needs to be protected and transferred to the next generation.’

Doing so has economic benefits as well as societal ones, according to Piero Sardo, president of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. He argued that his country, Italy, has seen its once-rock-solid place as the world’s top producer and exporter of olive oil threatened because it focused too much on producing oil in high quantities and not enough on ‘narrating the diversity’ of its olive varieties, small producers and landscapes. ‘Someone can always start to produce and sell olive oil at a lower cost,’ he said. ‘The culture of the product has to reach the market too.’

Doğa Derneği’s Eken sounded a similar note. ‘Olive oil shouldn’t be considered to be just based on the olives it’s made from, but on the whole system [around the trees],’ he said. ‘The different ecosystems covering different parts of Turkey are part of the reason for the richness of our cuisine.’

The participants of Slow Olive relaxing among the olive trees on Cunda Island (Source: Jennifer Hattam)

That argument may just be the most powerful one of all for protecting and preserving olive-growing culture. Of the many serious topics addressed during Slow Olive – from environmental pollution to land-grabbing to fair trade – it was Istanbul-based chef (and owner of Kantin, one of Cornucopia’s favourite eateries) Şemsa Denizsel’s discussion of zeytinyağlılar, or ‘dishes with olive oil’, that got the crowd most riled up.

Describing how she prepares her fresh beans with olive oil, Denizsel asked the audience whether they make their zeytinyağlılar with sugar or not. A fierce and loud debate quickly broke out, with people jumping to their feet and not waiting for the microphone to reach them before arguing the merits or faults of adding sugar to these dishes, generally based on the ironclad argument ‘that’s how my mother always did it’.

If that kind of passion can be harnessed to defend and support Turkey’s olive growers, their culture will endure here for many more centuries to come.

Jennifer Hattam is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, writing frequently about food and the environment, among other topics. Follow her on Twitter.

All photos provided by Slow Food Turkey unless otherwise noted.

Over the next few months Istanbul’s galleries and museums are pulling out all the stops before the summer exodus. The following exhibitions in Beyoğlu are particularly exciting, and, as a bonus, they can be visited during the course of one day. Once you’ve had your Turkish coffee and some sustaining börek, head over to Istanbul Modern for the first show. The walk past the rubble and construction sites into the museum entrance – Istanbul Modern seems like the only structure still standing in this part of Karaköy – will get you into the right headspace.

The destruction of neighbourhoods and green spaces in the quest for increased profits, the sprouting of new skyscrapers on the Istanbul skyline, the displacement of Istanbul’s poor to high-rises in the outskirts of the city – the Istanbul housing landscape has shifted significantly in the past decade, inspiring artworks and exhibitions aplenty. Yet this is by no means a new story. Don’t Be Late Home, the fifth exhibition in the VitrA Contemporary Architecture Series at Istanbul Modern (ending June 26), depicts and describes in detail how the approach to living spaces in Turkey has evolved – often by leaps and bounds – from the late Ottoman period up to the present.

A poster designed by İhap Hulusi for Emlak Bank in the 1950s (Source: Gökhan Akçura Archive)

There is certainly a lot of ground to cover: in the time between the proliferation of stately wooden yalılar in the 19th century and the mixed-use developments popular today there was a massive restructuring of the experience of space. The bulk of the exhibition thoroughly documents the trajectory of dwellings in Turkey, with explanatory texts accompanied by photographs and adverts from various archives. While the preponderance of written material makes the exhibition a bit cumbersome – I kept thinking that the heavily researched panels would be easier to digest as a catalogue – anyone with an interest in architecture or the home in Turkey will have more than enough material to geek out over.

The Tüten Apartment building as it looks today (Source: Will Harper)

Where Don’t Be Late Home shines is in its examples of individual dwellings. Buried in the massive wall of text are stories about exceptional buildings, many of which I’ve passed by hundreds of times. The Vedad Tek House II (approx 1916) on Valikonağı Caddesi in Nişantaşı, with its elegant projections (çıkma), is labelled as a masterpiece of Turkish architectural history, while the Tüten Apartment building (1936), whose curvilinear lines dominate İnönü Caddesi in Gümüşsuyu, is recognised as an important example of the struggle for modernism.

Individual details of Turkish homes (Source: Emma Harper)

On the other side of the exhibition space is a wall of unmarked photographs capturing the charming and the more mundane aspects of Turkish homes throughout the years. Some of these homes are featured in a short video – the camera captures one room in each house. Despite the absence of their owners, the rooms exhibit the familiar touches of home in Istanbul: the caw-caw of distant seagulls, ornate couches, a television blaring a Turkish news programme and a doorbell chiming Beethoven’s Für Elise. It was the sound of the doorbell that drew me into the screening room, but it also drew me out: different doorbells were placed at intervals throughout the exhibition, a project executed by the artist Cevdet Erek. I saw numerous visitors gasp in recognition at a sound they hadn’t heard in years, and then run to press the other doorbells like eager kids.

Another show that triggers a trip down memory lane is Scent and the City at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations (RCAC) (ending June 8), only a short walk up the hill from Istanbul Modern. Curated by Cornucopia’s own Lauren Nicole Davis, this exhibition is the first to be exclusively focused on the sense of smell and the recreation of scents from Turkey’s rich olfactory past.

Roses play an important role in Turkey’s rich olfactory past

The first part of the show explores the science behind the way our sense of smell often awakens memories that sight, taste, sound and touch do not. Since the sense of smell is processed in the brain in a unique way – most olfactory data first goes to the emotional centre of the brain, the amygdala, and then to the brain’s memory centre, the hippocampus – we strongly associate emotions and memories with odours, even from early childhood.

I experienced this first-hand at the exhibition. The smell of honey reminded me of late spring afternoons spent with my father, extracting the golden nectar from our hive’s frames with a large, silver-coloured heated knife, and how excited I was to give it a go on my own. Soon after, the smell of fresh coffee grounds transported me back to my parents’ kitchen on cold winter mornings, when the dark room filled with the scent of freshly brewed coffee and I longed to stay in the house all day.

This engineering wizardry solves the problem of a massive perfume cloud hovering over the exhibition

While it’s remarkable that different scents can take you back to a particular place in time, what’s even more remarkable is how Davis and the exhibition's designers, Cem Kozar and Işıl Ünal of PATTU, have created a system allowing visitors to smell individual scents without creating a cloud of perfume in the compact space. Vaporised scents come out of a small tube after visitors press a button. The scents are then drawn into another tube that arches over the first. It makes you feel as if you are in a luxurious laboratory.

Can you guess the smell?

With this technical aspect of the exhibition so expertly solved, you can easily focus on the past and present ‘smellscapes’ of Turkey. Using written historical records from the Hittite and Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations to the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, Davis recreates the components of lost scents. Among others, you can smell the honey, cedar and sesame used in a Hittite recipe for cleansing water (the recipe for the perfumed ‘fine oil’, the fourth ingredient, is unknown). There are also sections dedicated to Turkish coffee, roses and Ottoman incense – in fact, Fulya Yahya recreated Ottoman incense water (buhur suyu), which was often offered to guests after a meal to wash their hands in, from a recipe found in the 18th-century notebooks of the chief laundryman Yusuf Ağa. On your way out (assuming your nose is up for it), you can test your own sense of smell at the ‘Guess the Smells’ station.

If you still have some energy after all that reading and sniffing, take a short walk up İstiklal to ARTER. There are three solo exhibitions on display until May 15, two of which will make you see the natural world through a new lens.

The colourful installation ‘Plexiberg’ (2016) plays with two-dimensional and three-dimensional space

Bahar Yürükoğlu’s solo show Flow Through takes as its departure point her travels to the Arctic Circle in 2015. Building upon this place of extremes – in the summer the sun doesn’t set, while in the winter darkness prevails – the artist creates fictional spaces that test the visitor’s perceptive capabilities. In her work ‘Plexiberg’ she uses light from projectors and plexiglass plates of various size, shape and colour to create a deconstructed iceberg – the resulting visual riddle plays heavily with the translation between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. This playful approach can also be seen in her photographs of Arctic landscapes. By complicating the original image with filters, reflections, disjunctions, and collapsing and expanding the picture plane, Yürükoğlu creates a trompe l’oeil effect and endeavours to overcome the limits of Cartesian space.

Murat Akagündüz, ‘42*31"19.68"N. 43*37"54.66"E.’, 2015, Kaf series, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

One floor up is Murat Akagündüz’s exhibition Vertigo, which also raises questions about cartography and visual representation. In a series of 13 paintings the artist depicts some of the world’s highest mountain peaks as seen on Google Earth. Painting with the colour white he has created works that appear abstract when viewed close up. Only when you move away from the painting does the subject show itself – I felt like I was searching for the hidden image in a Magic Eye picture. The resulting spatial disorientation creates a tension that the viewer can silently contemplate, for the space feels as if it has been blanketed with a sound-absorbing snow.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end, pat yourself on the back and head to Mikla on the roof of the Marmara Pera for a celebratory glass of wine and dinner with a view.

‘Flow Through’ and ‘Vertigo’ at ARTER end on May 15, ‘Scent and the City’ at the RCAC ends on June 8, and ‘Don’t Be Late Home’ at Istanbul Modern ends on June 26. All photos provided by the museums/galleries unless otherwise noted. To learn more about Istanbul’s historic European quarters, purchase Cornucopia 51, Istanbul Unwrapped: The European City and the Sultan’s New City.

Turn almost anywhere in the Turkish art world – whether biennials, group exhibitions at major art institutions or small collaborative projects – and you’ll find Cevdet Erek and his stirring experimentations with sound, space and rhythm. So it was no surprise when the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) announced last week that it will present a project by Erek at the Pavilion of Turkey at the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The Pavilion of Turkey will be located in the Arsenale building at Sale d’Armi, the long-term venue secured by İKSV until 2034.

The project team that Erek will collaborate with has not yet been disclosed, but you can be sure that the work will incorporate Erek’s signatures: rhythm and site specificity. With a background in architecture and music – he has been handling the drums and electronics for the rock band Nekropsi since high school – Erek magically melds music and art. His work for the 14th Istanbul Biennial, ‘A Room of Rhythms – Otopark’, turned an empty parking garage in Galatasaray slated for demolition into an echo chamber, with blips and beeps mapping the acoustic architecture of the abandoned space. Since the destruction of the building has been postponed, Erek has been hosting collaborations with musicians like the clarinettist Oğuz Büyükberber and the guitarist Tolgahan Çoğulu. In one performance, Gökhan Deneç tried to suspend sound in the space, with Erek then trying to interrupt the silence and fill the emptiness with a davul.

You can currently see Erek’s work at Don’t Be Late Home at Istanbul Modern, and come June his work will be displayed at the Jameel Prize 4 exhibition at the Pera Museum. Organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in partnership with Art Jameel, this show features the works of 11 artists and designers shortlisted for the fourth Jameel Prize. If you’re not in Istanbul, you can always listen to his haunting soundtrack for Emin Alper’s film Albuka (Frenzy), which was screened last year at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival.

As one of the world’s art meccas, New York is always teeming with exhibitions, fairs and public art installations. This month, a good number of the thousands of works on display are made by artists from Turkey, both present and past. So lace up your trainers, because we’re traipsing around the Big Apple to see all the Turkish art on offer.

The first stop is the hard-to-reach Randall’s Island Park, home to the glitzy Frieze New York. Now in its fifth year, the art fair runs from May 5 to May 8. Only one Istanbul gallery made the cross-Atlantic trip for the 2016 edition: Rampa. It is the gallery’s fourth year at the exclusive art fair (with six years at Frieze London also under its belt), and it’s presenting works by an all-star roster: Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Nilbar Güreş, Gülsün Karamustafa and Erinç Seymen.

Gülsün Karamustafa, ‘My Love Is My Sin’, 2016, under glass print, collage, 90 x 63 cm (without frame), courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul

The latter three are making a singular splash – each artist will present one never-before-seen work. The highly acclaimed Gülsün Karamustafa provides a bold and colourful mixed media work titled ‘My Love Is My Sin’ (above). Nilbar Güreş’s work ‘She, Her Wife and Their Child’ is a playful take on gender identity and norms, while Erinç Seymen’s ink on paper drawing titled ‘Family Values’ reads as a critique of the power dynamics in traditional heteronormative relationships.

Ergin Çavuşoğlu, ‘Black Tresses’, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 30.5 x 25 cm, courtesy of the artist and Rampa Istanbul

The focus, however, is on Ergin Çavuşoğlu, whose solo exhibition at Rampa Istanbul Which sun gazed down on your last dream? is running concurrent with Frieze New York. From new sculptures to video, painting and drawing, Çavuşoğlu’s works explore a kind of metaphoric inebriation from wondering about and wandering in the trivialities of the world – they look at the everyday in a uniquely philosophical and spiritual manner. Not only does Rampa’s stand at Frieze New York act as a mirror to this solo exhibition, it also shows the artist’s range by displaying works from 1998 to today. 

Ergin Çavuşoğlu, ‘Crystal & Flame’, 2010, four-channel synchronized (1920 x 1080) video installation with sound, 00:38:15 (Installation view from PEER, London, 2010, © C. Dorley-Brown, courtesy of Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York)

The impetus behind emphasising Çavuşoğlu’s work is his inclusion in But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art from the Middle East and North Africa at the Guggenheim. Opening April 29 and on view until October 5, the exhibition features his three-channel video ‘Crystal & Flame’ (2010), having recently been acquired by the museum. The show, which is curated by Sara Raza, will travel to the Pera Museum in 2017, where visitors will also be able to see Gülsün Karamustafa’s installation ‘Create your own story with the given material’ (1997). (While her work was also acquired by the Guggenheim, it won’t be displayed in the New York show.)

Nilo, ‘No Name 2’, digital artwork on canvas, 45.5 x 45.5 inches

After a stop at the Guggenheim, head down to Agora Gallery where the group exhibition Solitary Spaces (ending May 17) features work by the Turkish artist Nilo. Her large-scale oil paintings are intimate explorations of the individual. Although she paints in a largely realistic style, Nilo also uses out-of-place objects and abstract designs to obscure her subjects and add a touch of surrealism to her work.

Ewer, Yunus b Yusuf al-Naqqash al-Mawsili, Jazira, probably Mosul, dated AH 644/AD 1246–47, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Finally, if you’re more enamoured with Turkey’s past than its present, Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs (ending July 24) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will tickle your fancy. This landmark exhibition features some 270 spectacular works of art, including ceramics, glass, stucco, works on paper, woodwork, textiles and metalwork created between the 11th and 13th centuries. The above pear-shaped ewer inlaid in silver is particularly stunning. While the featured works were created across a large swathe of land, running from modern-day Turkmenistan to the Mediterranean, they attest to the great flowering of culture under this Turkic dynasty.

When visiting New York, be sure to check out one of the Turkish restaurants mentioned in Cornucopia’s New York guide.

Turkestan Journey, the current, free exhibition at Asia House, recalls a time a hundred years or more ago when women of Central Asia were adorned with an armoury of jewellery. The 60 pieces in a dozen glass cases are part of a thousand items collected over the past 20 years by the Kazakstan assets management company, Almaly. Identifying the tribes and regions from Western Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgystan, these ornaments, of silver and gold, coral, carnelian, turquoise, pearl and mother-of-pearl weighed heavily on women both old and young. Also on show are kaftans and embroidered robes from Bukhara, and filigree belts worn by Crimean Tatars.

The items are not labelled, so visitors must flick through the accompanying £45 bilingual catalogue provided to explain what each one was for, what it is made of and where it is from. It also explains the jewellery’s social role – after the age of 40, women tended to wear much less jewellery. The catalogue also has photographic portraits, the earliest from 1876, and the latest from a 2013 shoot by the London-based Russian photographer, Sasha Gusov. In black and white, these portraits of contemporary bejewelled women are blown up and framed around Asia House’s basement gallery. The exhibition continues until May 12.

Pictured here, left to right: late 19th-century Yomud silver hair ornament (asyk) from Turkmenistan; silver, gilt and coloured glass breast ornament from Western Kazakhstan; and a 19th-century silver gilt button (tuime) from Kazakhstan.