Culture of the Ottoman Empire

The culture of the Ottoman Empire evolved over several centuries as the ruling administration of the Turks absorbed, adapted and modified the various native cultures of conquered lands and their peoples. There was influence from the customs and languages of nearby Islamic societies such as Jordan, Egypt and Palestine, while Persian culture had a significant contribution through the Seljuq Turks, the Ottomans' predecessors. Despite more recent amalgamations, the Ottoman dynasty, like their predecessors in the Sultanate of Rum and the Seljuk Empire were influenced by Persian culture, language, habits, customs and cuisines.Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire had substantial subject populations of Orthodox subjects, Armenians, Jews and Assyrians, who were allowed a certain amount of autonomy under the millet system of the Ottoman government, and whose distinctive cultures were adopted and adapted by the Ottoman state.

As the Ottoman Empire expanded it assimilated the culture of numerous regions under its rule and beyond, being particularly influenced by Turkic, Greco-Roman, Arabic, and Persian culture.

As with many Ottoman Turkish art forms, the poetry produced for the Ottoman court circle had a strong influence from classical Persian traditions; a large number of Persian loanwords entered the literary language, and Persian metres and forms (such as those of Ghazal) were used.

By the 19th century and the era of Tanzimat reforms, the influence of Turkish folk literature, until then largely oral, began to appear in Turkish poetry, and there was increasing influence from the literature of Europe; there was a corresponding decline in classical court poetry. Tevfik Fikret, born in 1867, is often considered the founder of modern Turkish poetry. Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, an Ottoman writer and intellectual had also started his early career by writing poems in the newspaper of İbrahim Şinasi, Tasvir-i Efkar. Later in his career he helped a literary movement in the Empire – Servet-i Fünun, to emerge. Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, had published poems like, Ah Nijad!, Şevki Yok and Güzelim.

Poet-musicians (ozan), were travelling around the Central Asia since the 9th century by telling epics, stories, and performing religious acts with their kopuz This tradition lived in Anatolia in the time of the Seljuk and the Ottoman Empire but with an Islamic intervention. The name aşık was adopted starting from the 14th and 15th centuries, it was an equivalent of the name ozan. Aşıks were the poets with an instrument called bağlama (saz), they were travelling around Anatolia and telling epics from old Turkic tradition with Islamic influence."

Prior to the 19th century, Ottoman prose was exclusively non-fictional, and was much less highly developed than Ottoman poetry, in part because much of it followed the rules of the originally Arabic tradition of rhymed prose (Saj'). Nevertheless, a number of genres – the travelogue, the political treatise and biography – were current.

From the 19th century, the increasing influence of the European novel, and particularly that of the French novel, began to be felt. Şemsettin Sami's Taaşuk-u Tal'at ve Fitnat, widely considered the first Turkish novel, was published in 1872; other notable Ottoman writers of prose were Ahmet Mithat and Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil.

Ottoman architecture developed from earlier Seljuk Turkish architecture, with influences from Byzantine and Iranian architecture along with other architectural traditions in the Middle East. Major religious monuments were typically architectural complexes, known as a külliye, that had multiple components that could include a mosque, a madrasa, a hammam, an imaret, a sebil, a market, a caravanserai, a primary school, or others. Early Ottoman architecture experimented with multiple building types over the course of the 13th to 15th centuries, progressively evolving into the classical Ottoman style of the 16th and 17th centuries. The classical style mixed the Ottoman tradition with a stronger influence of the Hagia Sophia, resulting in monumental mosque buildings focused around a high central dome with a varying number of semi-domes. The most important architect of the classical period is Mimar Sinan, whose major works include the Şehzade Mosque, Süleymaniye Mosque, and Selimiye Mosque. The second half of the 16th century also saw the apogee of certain Ottoman decorative arts, most notably in the use of Iznik tiles.