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Are the participants "Mevlevi"? If "Mevlevi" means born into a Mevlevi
family or initiated into the Mevlevi order, some are and some are not. in the 1960s and 1970s, Şeyh Selman Tüzün led the public "re-creations" of the ceremony at the annual Mevlana festival in Konya, Turkey and tours abroad. Tüzün was leader of the Bahariye Mevlevi Lodge in Istanbul [M1] and a direct descendent of 18th-century Mevlevi leaders [M2].
Dervish Mehmet Susamış (photo), a dancer, participated in Mevlevi ceremonies for years before they were abolished in 1925 [Friedlander, 81].
At the other extreme, at the same festival in Konya and on tours abroad, visiting musicians from Istanbul or Ankara were often secular Turks who had minimal acquaintance with the Mevlevi.
The various dancers (semazenler) and musicians (mutrip) fall somewhere between those two extremes. |
