Cheap nationalism in Turkey?

“Turkey still has not been delivered from cheap nationalism. Why should Dalaras hesitate about giving a concert in Turkey, and why should we not listen to the velvet voice of the Aegean? Why should Aynur be forced off stage because she sang in Kurdish?” asked Hasan Saltuk, the owner of Kalan Music, who is also dubbed as the archaeologist of Anatolian music, in a phone interview with the Daily News.

“No one calls me a Greco-phobe when I go to Greece to give a concert,” said Livaneli, also a close friend of Dalaras who performed with him as well as with many other Greek musicians. “Turkey is losing major points; polarization [of society] is rising. Artists speak from the heart, unlike politicians,” Livaneli said in relation to another public spat about the Kurdish singer Aynur Doğan. Doğan provoked the fury of protesters when she sang a song in Kurdish at the Harbiye Open Air Theater as part of the jazz festival organized by İKSV in recent weeks.

“[They] are forcing us toward ‘one nation, one language’ and trying to turn us into an intolerant mass,” Fehmiye Çelik from Kardeş Türküler, a band that plays the folk songs of Anatolian peoples, told the Daily News via a phone interview.

Greek singer Dalaras to perform in Turkey amid political hurdles August 3, 2011 VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU – Hürriyet Daily News