ABSTRACT
No Turkish Cypriots undertook serious research into Cypriot or TurkishCypriot folklore before the second half of the 1950s. So-called ‘folk’ culture equated to traditional culture; it was really an integral part of daily life, and there was no strongly felt need to reflect upon it discursively. But with the increase in tension between the two communities, especially in 1957 and 1958, all of a sudden folklore emerged into the foreground as an important agent of cultural policy. It became a principal means of representing or symbolizing difference; in other words, it was deemed to be an effective tool in any ideologically motivated attempt to translate yesterday’s ‘friend’ and ‘neighbour’ into today’s ‘Other’. Accordingly, in the early 1960s several Turkish folk ensembles were established, but with an emphasis on Turkish rather than Turkish-Cypriot repertory, as indicated by the
dominance of the saz, an instrument with a long history in Anatolia, but virtually no history in Cyprus (see the discussion in Chapters 2 and 5).
