Tag: soap opera

  • Turkey has a star role in more than just TV drama

    Turkey has a star role in more than just TV drama

    ISTANBUL // During a recent visit to the UAE, Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s president, was confronted with an unexpected request.

    fo08fe TurkeySoftPower

    “Please tell us how the Turkish soap operas on television will end. Otherwise, we will not be able to pry our women away from their TV sets,” Mr Gul quoted his Emirati hosts as saying last week.

    Turkish television series have long been popular in the Middle East. Yet they are one reason why Turkey topped a recent poll of most admired nations in the region.

    In the survey, carried out by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (Tesev), 78 per cent of those polled in 16 countries the Middle East had a very or somewhat favourable opinion of Turkey. The UAE was second with 70 per cent.

    In the case of Turkey, respondents said it was a regional model because of its democratic system, economic development and Muslim identity. Three-out-of-four of those surveyed also said they had seen a Turkish television soap – a testament the country’s expanding influence, said Gokce Percinoglu.

    “TV series form a part of Turkey’s soft power,” said Ms Percinoglu, an analyst at Tesev, an independent think tank.

    Not all Turks were impressed with the survey’s findings.

    They said that the country’s high favourability ratings across the region – like the much-touted “Turkish model” – were both soft and misleading.

    On the one hand, maintaining Turkey’s positive image depended on democratic progress in the country, they said. On the other hand, its reputation is tarnished by limits on media freedom and a hardening of fronts in the long-running Kurdish conflict.

    “More democratisation is the biggest chance for Turkey” to keep improving the favourable perception of the country in the region, Mensur Akgun, a co-author of the Tesev study, said. “But a military intervention or authoritarian tendencies of a civilian government would be risks.”

    The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, has been accused of overseeing the arrest of about 100 journalists and an increasing number of university students and of abandoning efforts to solve the Kurdish conflict by democratic means. The government rejects the accusations.

    Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the secularist opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), wrote in Monday’s Washington Post that Turkey under Mr Erdogan could not be a model for the Middle East.

    “Turkey today is a country where people live in fear and are divided politically, economically and socially. Our democracy is regressing in terms of the separation of powers, basic human rights and freedoms and social development and justice,” Mr Kilicdaroglu said.

    The Tesev poll was conducted by telephone and by in-person interviews between October and December last year among 2,323 people in the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen and Libya.

    According to the survey, 77 per cent of respondents thought Turkey had a positive effect on peace in the Middle East. Another 71 per cent thought Turkey should play a bigger role in the region, 67 per cent said Turkey was a “successful combination of Islam and democracy”, and 61 per cent of people in the Middle East considered Turkey a possible model for the region.

    Support for the Turkish model is highest in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, Tesev said, three countries that overthrew their long-time regimes during the Arab Spring and were visited by Mr Erdogan last year. Support for Turkey is lowest in Syria, reflecting deteriorating ties between Ankara and Damascus over the violence of Syrian government forces against protesters.

    The main reason people regard Turkey as a model are its democratic system (32 per cent). Its strong economy (25 per cent) and its identity as a Muslim country (23 per cent) were also at the top of the poll.

    While political and economic factors play vital roles in Turkey’s image, the poll also found strong cultural influences, especially its soaps. Murat Yetkin, a columnist, wrote in the newspaper Hurriyet Daily News that Turkish soaps were so popular in the Middle East “because they show that to live a modern and open life in a modern society is possible”, adding that “Turkish soap operas give messages of hope that a modern political, social and economic life can be lived by Turks, as well as by Arab viewers”.

    The role of cultural factors such as television shows was hard to quantify, “but the influence is there”, Mr Akgun said.

    For Zayed University students, that seems indisputable.

    When Mr Gul, Turkey’s president, met them during his recent visit to the UAE, they asked about Muhtesem Yuzyil, or Magnificent Century, a Turkish TV series about the life of Suleiman the Magnificent, an Ottoman sultan of the 16th century.

    “They are all following that show,” he later told reporters.

    via Turkey has a star role in more than just TV drama – The National.

  • Turkish TV Series Help Greeks Forget Financial Crisis

    Turkish TV Series Help Greeks Forget Financial Crisis

    Turkish TV Series Help Greeks Forget Financial Crisis

    By Stella Tsolakidou on January 7, 2012 in News

    tourkika sirial

    Athens Reuters made an extensive and thorough report on Turkish drama TV series dominating daily Greek TV programmes, with more and more Greeks becoming enthusiastic over the neighboring country’s products.

    Beginning the report with an Athens taxi driver, his Turkish passenger, who happens to be the boss of a company selling Turkish TV series to Greece, and the driver’s wife, who wants to know what is to happen of her favorite protagonists in the coming episodes, Reuters explains how “the glitzy tales of forbidden love, adultery, clan loyalties and betrayal” have become a sort of comfort for recession-hit Greeks.

    The financial crisis plaguing Greece led TV channels to buy Turkish productions in order to save money. But now, it seems that these soap operas are “saving” the Greeks from their everyday problems.

    Some fear this is a cultural invasion but others see it as an opportunity of getting to know the everyday lives of simple people.

    “Kismet”, “Ask ve Ceza”, “Ezel” and “Ask-I Memnu” are only some of the many Turkish series previously broadcast or still on air in Greece.

    The panoramic shots of Istanbul, the awakening of memories related to better times, lost traditions and familiar scenes have skyrocketed the ratings of the Turkish TV series.

    “Ezel” and the other series portray a lost dimension of Greek society that has been buried in recent years,” novelist Nikos Heiladakis wrote in a local newspaper article about the success of one crime drama. “It awakens in today’s Greek a lost identity,” he wrote.

    According to Reuters, Greek fans are so impressed by the new trend that they are already writing Turkish words on their Facebook accounts, while “some Greek magazines have started offering CDs for intensive Turkish lessons.

    via Turkish TV Series Help Greeks Forget Financial Crisis | Greece.GreekReporter.com Latest News from Greece.

  • Turkish Soaps Drive Macedonians To Istanbul

    Turkish Soaps Drive Macedonians To Istanbul

    Written by: Balkan Insight

    December 27, 2011

    By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

    yaprak dokumu

    Turkish soap operas lure increasing numbers of Macedonian tourists to Istanbul, where they hope to catch a glimpse of their favorite stars.

    In 2011 Istanbul remained one of the top holiday destinations for Macedonians, many of whom are eager to see the city where their favourite Turkish soap operas come to life.

    Tourist agencies that offer tours to the sets of these heart-rending TV novellas that have taken Balkan audiences by storm say business is booming.

    “People are simply curious and they want to see,” says Sonja Samardziska from the Skopje-based Skaut tourist agency, adding: “We already have two full buses booked and we are expecting more”.

    The agency offers a tour of the live sets from the soap opera ‘Yaprak Dokumu,’ or Falling Leaves, a love and crime melodrama centered on the life of one Istanbul family.

    Like elsewhere in the Balkans, this show, currently airing in Macedonia, has broken viewing records.

    The Balkan craze for Turkish soap operas arguably started last year when the Turkish television series called ‘Binbir Gece,’ or A Thousand and One Nights, became a prime time hit overnight in all of the former Yugoslav republics plus Albania, Romania and even Greece.

    In Macedonia the show, which was broadcast on the now-defunct A1 TV, was a huge success.

    “But this year it’s all about Yaprak Dokumu,” says one employee of the Skopje-based Nehar Tourism agency. “Most of the people want to see the family house where this TV novella is being filmed.”

    Prices for Macedonians who wish to spend New Year’s Eve closer to their favourite TV characters vary from 100 to 160 euros, depending on the accommodation.

    In a recent article, Turkish news portal Hurriyet Daily News said that Turkish soap operas have raised the country’s influence abroad, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East, supporting the so-called “soft power” of Turkish diplomacy.

    According to Hurriyet, more than 100 Turkish TV series have been watched in over twenty countries this year, earning more than $60 million.

    Skopje based Sociology professor Ilija Aceski says that the key to the success of these series in the Balkans lies in their familiarity.

    “The societies here have many similarities with Turkish society. The clash between traditional family values and the more liberal understandings of sexuality and marriage, the crime stories, they are all issues that people can relate to,” he says.

    Time magazine recently described the export of Turkish soap operas as the “secret of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan”.

    About the author:

    Balkan Insight

    The Balkan Insight (fornerkt the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

    via Turkish Soaps Drive Macedonians To Istanbul.

  • Turkey: Turkish soap operas invade the Middle East

    Turkey: Turkish soap operas invade the Middle East

    Turkey: Turkish soap operas invade the Middle East

    Soft power for a neo-Ottoman expansion, experts

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    The poster of The poster of “Forbiddden Love”, a successful Turkish soap opera

    (ANSAmed) – ANKARA, DECEMBER 12 – People in more than 20 countries watch Turkish soap operas and experts say that these television shows are spreading Turkish values and lifestyle in the Middle East and North Africa. It is also believed that they exercise a ”soft power”, supporting Ankara’s neo-Ottoman diplomacy.

    Television serials like ”Muhtesem Yuzyål” (”Magnificent” Ottoman ”Century”), “Ask-i Memnu” (Forbidden Love) and “Yaprak Dokumu” (Falling Leaves) are breaking records in the number of viewers. The more than a hundred episodes that are in circulation have earned the producers the equivalent of more than 60 million USD this year only. These facts are reported by Turkish websites, which point out that a Japanese television channel has made a documentary on Turkish soap operas and their impact on tourism and export. And the American Time Magazine recently called these series ”the secret of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan”.

    ”With the increase in the number of soap operas circulating internationally, learning the Turkish language and culture has become very important in the Arab and Balkan countries,” a sociologist of the Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Nilufer Narle, wrote on the website of the Turkish newspaper in English Hurriyet Daily News. She added that ”this is what we call ‘soft power’ in the context of cultural industry.” According to the internet site dailybeast.com, the final episode of the Turkish soap opera ”Noor” was seen by 85 million viewers, ranging from Syria to Morocco. Moreover, Hurriyet reports, 78% of people who were interviewed in a poll carried out in the Arab world and in Iran said that they had watched Turkish soap operas. Kemal Uzun, director of ”Noor”, claims that viewers ”feel part of what is happening” on the screen. ”Our cultures and geography are closely related, we have strong ties,” he added. ”These series have an enormous impact,” said Izzet Pinto, head of the company that distributes ”Magnificent Century” and ”Thousand and One Nights”, set in modern Istanbul. The writer of a report with the title ”The image of Turkey in the Arab world,” Paul Salem, underlined that ”the stars of Turkish television become pop idols” and these soap operas create ”great sympathy for the Turkish identity, culture and values,” a role that was played in the past decades by Egyptian television and film. The spread of soap operas seems to follow the geography of Turkish foreign policies and even goes beyond that, following global taste: ”We started broadcasting in the Balkan countries this year,” said Firat Gulgen, president of Calinos Holding which produces 80% of the series exported by Turkey. Pinto, chairman of distribution company Turkey’s Global Agency, pointed out that babies in the Balkan area are now named after characters from the series ”Thousand and One Nights.” But Turkey also exports its soap operas to many countries in central and eastern Europe and the Far East, even to Japan and Malaysia. (ANSAmed).

    via Turkey: Turkish soap operas invade the Middle East – General news – ANSAMed.it.