On An Overgrown Path

These art works are by the prolific musician and artist Mercan Dede . I first came across his work when I was in Istanbul years ago , and his ambient take on Sufi music featured in my Sounds of Sufism programme on Future Radio in 2010. Born in Istanbul and now resident in Canada, Mercan Dede's music integrates traditional Turkish instruments such as the ney and bendir with electronica to create a mix targeted at young dance club audiences . Sufism's liberal tendencies mean it is marginalised and sometimes persecuted by orthodox Islam, and Mercan Dede - aka DJ Arkin Allen - is in turn frowned on in traditional Sufi circles for, ironically, creatively implementing the Sufi doctrine of not going with the flow, but making the flow. As can be seen in the three examples, Mercan Dede's art works embrace syncretic themes; a selection of his art and music is on his personal website . Mercan Dede is actively helping make the flow: a portion of the proceeds from sales of hi...

Around 20 million selfies appear on social media each week. Each member of the Generation Y cohort will take more than 25000 selfies during their lifetime, and more people were killed taking selfies in 2015 than in shark attacks. As can be seen from the photo above, which appeared in BBC Music Magazine , selfies are now an integral part of classical music. The culture of rabid self-promotion of which the selfie is just a part, is not confined to celebrity maestros . In fact it is particularly evident among music journalists, where the written selfie now supplements the visual selfie. So to further distance myself from what Canadians accurately term egoportraits, I recently changed my semi-anonymous Facebook profile picture to the graphic below. It was a change of little consequence, but much to my surprise it has been greeted with widespread approval. Was it because I had forgone posing in full fig behind a bust of Sir Henry Wood? Or was it because of the visual impact of the graphic...

Can you tell the state of a nation by the quality of its bookshops? My question is prompted by a recent visit to France where, once again, I was astounded by the range and quality of books on display in the country's bookshops. It wasn't just in the university city of Nantes , it was also in provincial towns such as La Roche sur Yon where the independent Mediastore carried a range of books and music that not only put to shame Britain's retailers but also proved irresistible. So from a major display of books commemorating 1968 I splurged on Les années 68 which provides a world view on that extraordinary year. An equally impressive music range yielded, among other CDs, Taksim Trio , a new release from the Turkish label Doublemoon which has featured here before. The trio of Hüsnü Senlendirici on clarinet, Ismail Tunçbilek on baglama and Aytaç Dogan on quanun dance between traditional, arabesque, jazz and classical styles in an album that is categorised as world music but...

Excellent article by Jon Lusk in today's Guardian about contemporary Turkish music. The World London festival this weekend showcases music from Turkey. Featured artists include Ayse Tutuncu , Goksel Baktagir , Sabahat Akkiraz , and Muslum Gurses , and all those links will take you to YouTube videos. The World London festival coincides with the tense Turkish general election on Sunday (July 22). There are many Overgrown Path readers in Turkey, and we wish that country a safe, and democratic, election. My two photos are of polychrome underglaze Yznik tiles in the Mosque of Rüstem Paşa in Istanbul, which we visited earlier this year. You will find more about Turkey by following this path . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

'I want an integrated Europe, in other words, a Europe that has borders ... Turkey is in Asia Minor' ~ Nicolas Sarkozy , French President-elect. 'The selection panel for the 2010 European Capital of Culture have recommended that the German town Essen and the Hungarian city of Pécs should share this title together with a third one, Turkey's Istanbul' ~ UNESCO World Heritage website

In March we were in Turkey and were held spellbound by the country’s unique cultural and religious mix. But in recent weeks we have watched with increasing alarm as the country’s religious and secular factions have moved on a collision force, culminating in this week's massive demonstrations in Istanbul. Taksim Square is the political nerve centre of Istanbul. Today's violent May Day demonstration took place there, and I took the photo below of a small demonstration in the square in March. Taksim is the Turkish word for division, and was the rallying cry of Turkish Cypriots who supported the partition of Cyprus into Turkish and Greek enclaves. As I write Turkey is under threat of a military coup, and, in a frightening reminder that tyranny is never far away in the Balkans, it was an abortive coup in Cyprus in 1974 that ended the military dictatorship in neighbouring Greece. If anyone needs reminding of the political and cultural horrors that accompany Balkan military coups ...

I have written several articles recently praising contemporary Turkey. Today's Guardian reports on the flipside: "Five Turkish punk rockers and their agent face up to 18 months in jail for insult after a bureaucrat took offence at their song criticising the country's unpopular university entrance exam. The head of Turkey's central examination board, OSYM, Unal Yarimagan reportedly smiled when he first saw a clip of OSYM, Kiss My Arse by Deli (mad), a group from the western city of Bursa. "I'm a tolerant person, but that didn't stop me doing my duty and checking it wasn't breaking any laws," he said. Last month, an Ankara prosecutor said it was, and a court case is due to begin on May 2. "It's ridiculous," says the lead singer and lyricist, Cengiz Sari, 24. "I was 17 when I wrote that song. I was just your typical rebellious teenager." Sensitivity to criticism is a common trait of Turkey's great and good. Since Mar...

This photo essay portrays a double miracle. Not only are the Byzantine mosaics and frescoes in the Chora Church in Istanbul truly miraculous, but their survival through the city’s tempestuous history is a second miracle. The Church of St Saviour in Chora is today known as the Kariye Camii (Mosque) Museum. Originally part of a monastery dating from the early 5th century, the church takes its name from the Greek word ‘chora’ , meaning land outside a city, although the church has long since been swallowed up by the sprawl of urban Istanbul. The church was rebuilt three times between the 6th and 12th centuries, with two of these reconstructions following earthquake damage. It was then ransacked, but not destroyed, during the Fourth Crusade in the 13th century, when forces from the western Christian churches pillaged Orthodox Constantinople. The miraculous transformation of the Chora Church came in the years following the defeat of the Crusaders and the return of Constantinople to Byzanti...

No two modes of architecture could be more different from one another than the Muslim and the West Christian. West Christian architecture in its early phase is filled with the craving for weight and massiveness; and in its second phase, the Gothic, in that for a spectacular liberation from that weight in a skyward ascent ... Moslem architecture is quite the opposite. A mosque is to be a court, a square, a market-place, lightly built to hold a large concourse of people. Allah is so great that nothing human can vie with Him in strength or endurance ... Even the Moslem castles, large though they are, give the effect of being light and insubstantial. But a Mosque is also a place for the contemplation of the Oneness of Allah. How can this better be done than by giving the eyes a maze of geometric patterns to brood over? The state aimed at is a sort of semi-trance. ( Pliable - See my reference to the Mevelevi Order below ). The mind contemplates the patterns, knows that they can be unravelle...

Modern Istanbul's complex geography renders it all but unmappable: three dozen districts swelling over seven hills, no single centre, fingered by water, jumbled in time. Age dilutes its fluidity. I can't keep a grip on its currents of slippery politics, of chaotic transport, of residents drawn together to argue, talk and trade. Its light is maritime, a sea lies over each shoulder, yet the city is 2,000 miles from any ocean. A ten-minute stroll takes me from a sleepy Greek fishing village to a Hapsburg cul-de-sac reminiscent of a Klimt painting. Across the horizon surge waves of new world tower blocks. In the shifting expanding spiral of my wanderings, I find its anarchic streets, its shifting colours, its millions of voices, its dreams of a legendary past at once foreign and familiar. I'm at the Pudding Shop, the first meeting point on the hippie trail to Kathmandu. In 1957, two brothers from the Black Sea, Namik and Idris Çolpan opened the Lale Pastanesi across from Ista...

Calligraphy by Yazi Sanatcisi Now playing - Su by Mercan Dede. Contemporary culture in Istanbul is really jumping ahead of becoming European City of Culture in 2010. We ate at restaurants like Amedros in Sultanahmet that would not be out of place in London or New York. The new Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in a converted military warehouse on the waterfront with its exhibition of work from the Magnum Photos agency is sensational. And there is a music scene to match. If you don't know Mercan Dede's contemporary take on Sufi music here is an introduction in his own words, or even better listen to his music on his website , and on YouTube : Mercan Dede (photo below) believes that when you put digital, electronic sounds together with hand-made, human ones, you can create universal language, capable of uniting old and young, ancient and modern, East and West. It’s a bold claim, but the Turkish-born and Montreal-based musician/producer/DJ has the career and the music to back i...

A report on Arab Human Development in 2002, prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the United Nations, reveals some striking contrasts. “The Arab world translates about 350 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Mamoun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year” … Islam is one of the world’s great religions. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught men of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune th...