Samuel Vock-Verley

The theme of the quest is a common feature of the stories regarding Khidr in the Sunni and Alevi contexts of contemporary Turkey. This quest takes the form of a deeply counter-intuitive ethical process of coming to terms with a supernatural being told to oversee the morality of every individual. For the seekers, it is a matter of transforming their relationship with others and the world in order to "become Khidr", according to a process of ethical subjectivation and a Sufi dialectic of interiority and exteriority. This article explores the narratives of "Khidr-seekers" to understand the practical and theoretical modalities of this moral and spiritual quest. With the help of ethnographical fieldwork and digital accounts, its aim is to understand the contemporary evolutions of a traditional Islamic endeavor.

In the region of the Western Black Sea in Turkey, several hills bear the name of the Islamic figure of Khidr, locally known as Hızır. The Hıdırlık hills concentrate the local forms of religiosity – Hıdrellez festivals, Hızır legends, Sufi shrines, namazgah and rain prayers. Drawing on the archives and the published works of Turkish folklorists, this article studies the narratives and rituals related to those hills. It explores the symbolic dimensions of geography, in the way that they are locally expressed in rural Sunni Islam in Turkey. In that sense, the Hıdırlık hills may be analysed as « geosymbols » (Bonnemaison 1981) of the local Sunni culture. This study also highlights the evolution of this symbolism in the context of the historical changes that affected the local religious life during the second half of the twentieth century.

"For us, nature is sacred"  I have often heard this phrase in my exchanges with the Dersimli, the inhabitants of Dersim with whom I have been conducting my research since 2019. Since the late 1990s, environmental activism has become a major cause capable of bringing the Dersimli together, organised into associations with transnational ramifications and brought together each year at festivals. What does the word 'sacred' mean in this particular context? Why is it used in this way, and what effect does it have? And how can we understand the same reference to the 'sacred' among social actors with such different values and backgrounds? In this short blog article, I propose to differentiate between the dynamics of sanctification and sanctuarisation in order to understand how different generations find themselves sharing the same desire to make sacred and to protect a region ravaged by violence.

Published on the blog of the French anthropology journal Terrain : https://blogterrain.hypotheses.org/20729