Turkish Folklore is often anonymous and passed from one generation to the next. It includes epics, legends, folk poems, ballads, elegies, folk songs, riddles, folk tales anecdotes, proverbs, expressions and rhymes. Nasrettin Hoca, Karagoz, Yunus Emre and Koroglu are the best known folk heroes.

Turkish Folk Dance

Folk dances have a great role in Turkish folklore. Folk dances have different characteristics based on their regions and are generally engaged in during weddings, when sending sons off to military service and during religious and national holidays

The lively Turkish folk music, which originated in Asia, is in complete contrast to the refined Turkish classical music of the Ottoman court. Until recently, folk music was not written down, and the traditions were kept alive by the ' asiklar', or Turkish troubadours. In the last century, writing in music developed and Turkish folk songs became more protected with being noted down by musicians.

A Meddah in Engravings

There are five kinds of traditional Turkish performing arts; Village Plays (plays that are put on in accordance with rural traditions on special days like weddings and holidays), Meddah (a kind of one-act dramatic play where the narrator also imitates the various characters in the play), Karagoz (traditional show theatre, where the shadows of human and animal figures, cut out of leather and colored, are thrown onto a white curtain using a light source behind it), Orta Oyun (a theater, in style and theme, resembling Karagoz but performed by real actors) and Tuluat Theater (a mixture of Orta Oyun and western theater). Although these arts have lost power and importance in the latest decades; they are important elements of the Turkish Folklore and are still popular among people.