Folklor Akademi Dergisi

Öz

The minstrel tradition, one of the important cultural elements of the Turkish world, is carried out in many provinces where Turks live, especially in regions such as Ardebil, Tabriz, Urmia, Zanjan, Qazvin, Merkezi, and Hemedan in Iran. The Iranian Turkish minstrel tradition has a structure that reaches many aspects of culture with the number of minstrels, the diversity of stories and minstrel moods, the richness of musical instruments, and different performance venues. In the geography of Hemedan, one of the regions that contain the above-mentioned characteristics of the minstrel tradition, minstrel performances access the public in two areas: traditional and electronic locations. In this context, traditional venues where the culture is transferred to the public and comes into contact with the people include friends’ assemblies, village houses, weddings/family gatherings, circumcision ceremonies/butchering, minstrel festivals, birthdays, commemoration programs, poetry nights, other events/feasts/festivals, while electronic performance venues such as Isteriyo Ahmadi Music House, internet/social media, radio, and television have also been included in the minstrel tradition due to the sociocultural changes that occurred among Iranian Turks in the modern period. The performance venues in the region were determined by observation and interview methods during the field research conducted in Iran in 2015, 2017-2018. In these years, coffeehouses were one of the places where the Hemedan minstrelsy tradition was performed, but in the research conducted in the region in 2023, it was seen that it was no longer among the performance venues of minstrels and its role in the tradition had become symbolic. The performances of minstrels at circumcision ceremonies/butler cutting, minstrel festivals, commemoration programs, birthdays, and poetry nights have consequently been noted to have increased in recent years in the area and have now established themselves as one of the important performance locations of the minstrelsy tradition. It was aimed at examining the past and present structure of the minstrel performance venues found during the field research as they were reshaped on the axis of cultural changes and transformations. These venues were examined within the framework of contextual theories in the study. The ethnographic model, one of the qualitative research methods, was utilized in the presentation of the study. In this context, it has been observed that the Hemedan minstrelsy tradition’s performance venues are experiencing modifications in their traditional settings due to demands from society on the one hand, and on the other, they are presenting the public with new performance locations in an effort to fulfill those demands.