ABSTRACT
Following the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, initiated in 1570, Turks from various regions in Anatolia, but especially from the Konya-Karaman region, were brought from their homeland to Cyprus in order to increase the population of the island and to farm the land that had been abandoned by the departing Venetians. Needless to say, these immigrants brought their language and culture with them, and that included their music. Yet if we are to understand the cultural inheritance of present-day Turkish Cypriots more completely, we need to look more closely at this Anatolian background, recognizing that, although Ottoman classical and Mevlevî (Sufi) music embraced, and interacted with, a broad range of Middle Eastern and Central Asian musical cultures within what Amnon Shiloah has called ‘The Great Tradition’ (Shiloah 1995), local idioms of folk song and folk dance were marked by considerable specificity. In the first place, there are distinctions to be drawn between indigenous Anatolian styles and those that accompanied the waves of Central Asian migrations. Among those who came from Central Asia were Yörük-Türkmen peoples, and this group formed a significant part of the communities that moved to Cyprus. It can thus be assumed that Turkish-Cypriot music-making has more in common with these Yörük-Türkmen traditions, notably centred on the Mevlevî order (this was founded in the Konya-Karaman region), than with those of indigenous Anatolian Turks, whose background was rather different in terms of faith, cuisine, mores, music and folk poetry.
