#rumelia

"The strings of my heart are elaborated flowers, there they give birth to a garden of ours"

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Nil Basdurak (PhD year 2) writes...

This summer, I was involved in an exciting project which was funded by Istanbul Technical University’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM), in collaboration with a group of fellows including Onok Bozkurt and Naz Nazlı Alatlı. We have been working on this project for more than three years, but only this year did we have the opportunity to conduct preliminary field research in Macedonia and Serbia. Our project is, essentially, about the child in the center of the photograph below, pictured standing among the Bekhtashi dervishes in front of their dergah (lodge) in Skopje, Macedonia in 1901. His name was Kemal Altınkaya and he became the grandfather of my fellow researcher Onok Bozkurt.

 This photo is from Onok Bozkurt’s personal archive, 2015.

 While Kemal Altınkaya was growing up, his curiosity for music, stories, languages, and culture was influenced by the dergah atmosphere in Skopje. Consequently, he became an author, a musician, and an early local ethnomusicologist who collected many songs and Ilahis (religious music sang in the lodges) from various cities in the Balkans like Skopje, Belgrade, Prizren and Lefkosia. He wrote about music in its cultural context, analyzed music, and categorized the songs which he collected all around the Rumelia region—which was the European part of the Ottoman Empire—based on their genres, cities, subject matters, rhythm, melodic structures, etc. Kemal Altınkaya’s output during the first half of the 20th century was significant in terms of conserving the cultural heritage of the Ottoman era; the songs that he collected offered glimpses into social and cultural life, patriotic sentiments, and the multicultural environment in the Balkans during the Ottoman rule. Although a great number of Rumelian songs known today in Turkey and in the Balkans are from his collection, many more of these songs have disappeared and been forgotten due to political and regional reasons.    

When Kemal Altınkaya died in the 1950s, he bequeathed a wide range of personal archives to his family. This personal archive first led us to conduct a lenthy archiving project (digitizing the materials, translating from Ottoman Turkish to Contemporary Turkish, categorizing the materials,  etc.). Secondly, it led us to undertake a recording session for the forgotten songs, for which Sumru Ağıryürüyen, a famous singer from Turkey, helped us. Finally, we commenced preliminary fieldwork in order to appraise all of these sources effectively. We conducted several interviews with the Turkish community in Skopje, and at the same time, we had to opportunity to meet with Ethnomusicologists based in Serbia and Macedonia who mostly study on local musical cultures. The most exciting parts of our fieldwork were the interviews that we made in Vranyaand at Bekhtashi dergahs which gave us a lot of information connected to what we are looking for.

Now, I am looking forward to next year, when we will undertake a second—and much more productive--fieldwork excursion. Here, we will start working on an ethnographic film with a group of professional filmmakers. The last (but not the least) amazing part of this project is that Toronto-based singer Brenna MacCrimmon made mention of Kemal Altınkaya in one of her concerts which took place in Istanbul in 2014, and she also sang a song from the collection of forgotten songs of Kemal Altınkaya.

West-Rumelian Turkish dialect

West-Rumelian dialect was a dialect of Turkish language that was spoken in the Balkans. It was a lingua franca between non-Turkish and Turkish population. It was explored and defined by Hungarian Turkologist Gyula Németh. In his work he stated that this dialect has heavy "Slavo-Hungarian" influence. It is known that many Muslims from Rumelia came to South Hungary after Ottoman conquest there, and since many of those were Bosnian Muslims, Németh called this dialect "Bosnian-Turkish". This dialect was used in Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and parts of Croatia. Other people who studied this dialect were Janos Eckmann, Zsuzsa Kakuk (Hungary), Dimitri Gadžanov (Bulgaria) and Olivera Yaşar Nasteva (Macedonia).

Vowel harmony in this dialect is lost, one of the main characteristics of Turkic languages. There are also some other characteristics that are not typical for other dialects. Read more: 

Vowel Harmony