The selection of foreign films especially resonates with me, as a lover of world cinema. But, looking at this year’s selection, I am disappointed at the lack of Turkish films in competition. In fact, there is not a single one. Turkey’s involvement in this year’s festival materialises in Izmir-born director Semih Kaplanoğlu's appointment as one of five judges on the panel for the Short Film competition. And there is a tenuous connection with the Iraqi–Kurdish director Hiner Saleem’s My Sweet Pepperland, which is nominated in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ category. This tells the story of a Kurdish war hero who accepts a post in a village on the Iranian–Turkish border, which turns out to be a hotspot for illegal trafficking. There he meets a young woman who has come to work as a teacher in a newly opened school, despite her brothers’ strong opposition. Love blossoms.

The festival’s L’Atelier programme, founded nine years ago to help young and emerging filmmakers finance their productions, does have one Turkish offering (out of 15) this year. Directed by Özcan Alper, the film Memories of the Wind (a still from the initial takes can be seen above) will go into production in May 2014 and will be shot in Istanbul, Artvin (the director’s birthplace) and Batumi in Georgia. It tells of Aram, a poet, painter, translator and member of the opposition, of Armenian descent. The action takes place over the most crucial days of the Second World War and spans several locations, including Büyükada (the largest of the Princes Islands on the Marmara Sea near Istanbul) as well as towns on the Black Sea. Alper is an accomplished director, with two features already under his belt, so my anticipation is high.

Turkey’s film industry has been growing in recent years, both nationally and internationally, and from 2000 onwards the country has seen the most productive and commercially successful period in its film history. Consequently its presence at Cannes (which though substantial has never been huge) has also grown – especially in the past two years – so it is puzzling that its showing at this year’s festival is so dismal. In the first half of 2012 there were 137 theatrically released films in Turkey, so there is certainly plenty to choose from. Could it have something to do with genre? Festival circuits tend to favour long, poignant films dealing with the darker side of humanity, while in 2012–2013 Turkish cinema took a lighter approach.

Screened last year at Cannes was Fatih Akın’s excellent documentary Polluting Paradise (Akın also won Best Screenplay in 2007 for Edge of Heaven). Polluting Paradise tells of the idyllic Camburnu village in northeastern Turkey, threatened by a government decision to build a landfill site directly above it – much to the dismay of its villagers, the mayor and the tea-growers whose plantations are severely compromised. The young director L Rezan Yesilbas won the prestigious Palme D’Or for his short film Sessiz-Be Deng, which tells of a woman from Diyarbakır, whose daily routine is shattered when she goes to visit her husband in prison. And the aforementioned Semih Kaplanoğlu co-produced Aida Begic’s Children of Sarajevo, which was awarded a Special Mention in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ category.

A still from Polluting Paradise

In 2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (a film that helped put Turkey’s modern cinema on the map) won the Grand Prix (Ceylan has enjoyed the greatest success of any contemporary Turkish director at Cannes, with films in competition in 2011, 2008, 2006, 2003 and 1995); and Lufti Akad’s The Law of the Border was screened as part of the Cannes Classics. The Law of the Border is a 1966 classic about a man from Deliviran, a small village near the Syrian border, who while trying to stay away from a life of crime gets pulled into it, only escaping when he agrees to take a herd of sheep across the border. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, on the other hand, is a modern classic, part murder mystery, part character analysis but overall an epic in all regards – stunning cinematography, acting, direction and narrative. Ceylan is also a consummate photographer, which could explain why the film was shot as it was – in all its sweeping landscape glory. To explore Ceylan's work, his book Panoramas of Turkey 2003–2009 is a good place to start.

A still from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

These recent offerings from Turkey clearly demonstrate a maturing film industry. Let us just hope that in future we will see more Turkish cinema in festivals worldwide, including Cannes.

The Greek geographer Strabo wrote of his experience of the cave where visitors were encouraged to hurl animals into its poisonous maw to watch the instant effect. ‘This space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground,’ he wrote. ‘Any animal that passes inside meets instant death.’ 

Photo: view of Pamukkale (Dick Osseman)

Now, a book on Bursa is the latest addition to the ‘Heritage Protecting Cities’ series published by the Foundation for the Protection and Promotion of the Environment and Cultural Heritage (ÇEKÜL). The series aims to collate information on and analyse the Turkish cities which have undergone significant conservation work. It looks into why and how the cultural heritage of a place should be protected, and who should be responsible for it. 

ÇEKÜL was founded in 1990 and is presided over by architect and lecturer, Dr. Metin Sözen (a towering  figure in the field of Turkish architectural conservation who for many years was responsible for some of Istanbul's prized palaces, including Dolmabahçe Palace, Beylerbeyi Palace, and Yıldız Palace). The Foundation strives to help preserve the built and natural environment of the country by building networks and raising awareness. This, in turn, they hope will add impetus to the conservation movement which really started flourishing in the 1970s with the steps taken to protect the Black Sea town of Safranbolu , which has examples of some of the best preserved Ottoman-era vernacular architecture (Safranbolu has consequently been named a World Heritage site by Unesco in 1994 – though Çekül's finest achievements was the wholesale preservation of a small nearby town of very large kokaks built by  the families of prosperous palace pastry chefs, and birthplace of the diva of the Scala, Leyla Gencer: Yörük Köy, which featured in Cornucopia 47).

The book delves into Bursa's history, culture and architectural wonders, and discusses in detail the endevours that have been made throughout history to protect it. It is the fifth book to be added to the series, joining Sivas, Gaziantep, Birgi, and Mardin. 

For more on Bursa, Cornucopia 38 is a good place to start. 

There is a common misconception that puppetry is merely a form of entertainment intended for children – a fun and educational way to explain complex concepts or stories. Puppetry was important throughout the Ottoman Empire in the form of ‘shadow play’, which involved flat, cut-out figures held between a light source and a translucent screen, with a single puppet-master voicing all the characters representing the major ethnic and social groups. Two of the most popular characters were Karagöz and Hacivat: Karagöz stood for the common man (uneducated but direct and honest), whereas Hacivat represented the educated class and spoke Ottoman languages, often with a poetic flair. They told stories of good and evil, of honour and betrayal, of sensibility and impulsiveness, and yes, their audiences were mostly juvenile.

But, as with any art form, puppetry has changed tremendously over the years, globally and in Turkey. At the turn of the 20th century puppet theatre started making a move away from its folk roots and suitable-for-all-ages storytelling and evolving into something that could speak to adult audiences and reinvigorate the high-art tradition of theatre. The conventional marionettes, glove puppets and shadow puppets gave way to contemporary forms of puppetry, using not only puppets but aspects of the actors themselves.

The 16th International Puppetry Festival (May 8–19, 2013) encapsulates these, reflecting the dilution of the outdated conception of puppetry as entertainment for children using dolls hanging from strings, and challenging popular perceptions of the meaning of traditional puppetry. The question the festival poses – of the puppeteers themselves as much as their audiences – is ‘Are you into puppetry?’

At this year’s festival I have so far seen two very different performances, which seemed to me to mirror the ying-yang of puppetry theatre: one highlighted puppetry and its many possible forms; the other used puppets simply as extensions of the actors. The one thing they had in common was that neither performance hid the actors but rather used them as part of the narrative.

The first performance I saw was Dark Cabaret, by Turkey’s Ahşap Çerçeve Puppet Theatre. This show combines various techniques in a very pleasing adult cabaret. A trio of actors dressed all in black use their own bodies – the show opens with them attaching red noses to their knees to construct three disagreeable musicians – as well as table puppets, life-size puppets, and a spot of shadow play to present a fusion of music, colours and rhythm.

Ahşap Çerçeve Puppet Theatre’s Dark Cabaret

Without words – just a few decorations and creative use of ultra-violet light – the show is a mish-mash of international musical numbers (from Italian classics to Swan Lake to tango to gypsy sounds and hints of a didgeridoo) performed in a flamboyant and sometimes comedic style. There were also interesting examples of the bankaru technique, a traditional Japanese theatre form calling for at least three actors to manipulate each puppet and in which the manipulators appear openly, in full view of the audience. As one actor made a puppet with his hand, the other two put costumes on it or added body parts. The use of this technique elevated the show from a mere feast for the eyes and ears into a testament to the power of movement and teamwork.

The second performance, Hôtel de Rive, was a collaboration between Germany’s Figüren Theater Tübingen, France’s Bagages de Sable, and Switzerland’s Theater Stadelhofen. This show, which could not have been more different in flavour from Dark Cabaret, was based on four texts by Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss Surrealist painter and sculptor. The production, inspired by Giacometti’s writings, sculptures and drawings, presents a hypnotic landscape, in which an actor taking centre stage portrays Giacometti, with the puppets as a secondary feature.

Hôtel de Rive: 'Giacometti’ in his hotel room in Geneva

The stories are centred around the artist’s stay at the Hôtel de Rive in Geneva during the Second World War, where his room was also his studio space. Using tall, skinny miniature puppets, reminiscent of Giacometti’s sculptures (which were heavily influenced by Etruscan art) as reflections of the artist’s alter ego, the audience is transported into his subconscious. An empty jacket depicting Giacometti’s visions of Siberia, giant pipes, a spider attacking his face, a life-size flower dancing at the Le Sphinx club in Paris, goggle-eyed metal figurines reminiscent of Alex’s nightmarish experiences in A Clockwork Orange, and the concluding skeleton-like puppets dancing around Giacometti covered in a white sheet are perhaps figurative representations of his conceptual thoughts, feelings and desires.

Other performances that I will be seeing at the festival include the Austrian Christoph Bochdansky’s All About the World (May 14), in which the universe itself explains why the world was made; Kaplan, by the theatre company Banyan, a Mexican interpretation of Turkish shadow theatre (May 16, 17 and 18); and Turkey’s own Kadro Pa’s debut, Macbeth in the Kitchen (May 15), a unique take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth played out using kitchen objects.

Christoph Bochdansky’s All About the World

There are plenty of shows geared to children as well, including a number of performances from the İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi City Theatre (IBB City Theatre) and Hayalbaz Oyun Atölyesi’s The Town Musicians of Bremen. And I am looking forward to an exhibition, to be displayed all around İstiklal Caddesi, from the Italian photographer Mauro Foli, who has been travelling with his mobile studio for more than 25 years, taking black-and-white photos of puppet artists around the world. A workshop introducing the visual theatrical language of Philippe Genty, a French pioneer of contemporary puppet theatre performances, also looks fascinating.

Performances are on until May 19 and tickets can be purchased directly from the e-ticket section on the festival’s website. The festival is being held in venues both sides of the Bosphorus. The easiest way to navigate the website is to visit PERFORMANCES in the menu bar first, then PROGRAMME. For the exhibition and workshop, see EVENTS. You can also download the programme. For further information: +90 212 267 5444, info@biletinial.com

It’s a simple title but it doesn't prepare you for the treat in the Topkapı stables. The earliest maps on display in this exhibition (until May 20) are based on Ptolemy’s Geography but we quickly move on to maps that show the development of Islamic cartography. And they are gorgeous. Some on vellum, some on paper, many gilded and illustrated so they can be appreciated as images as well as cartographic masterpieces.

Pîrî Reis was an admiral, geographer and cartographer in the 16th century who is best known for his Kitâb-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation). His map of the world showed part of the Americas and the coast of Africa. Topkapı Sarayı may have one of the best collections of his work and many people will enjoy the exhibition for his maps alone.

But the exhibition has a broader focus and goes on to include a detailed chart of the Black Sea, the north and south poles, detailed plans of cities under siege and much more. One of the more unusual items is a scroll produced to thank Süleyman the Magnificent for the Arafat Water Project which channeled water to Mecca and Mount Arafat. On a smaller scale we see how water reached Topkapı Sarayı from the aqueduct of Valens. And yes, those maps are beautiful too.

A well illustrated catalogue is available in the Topkapı shops for 90TL and will soon be available from cornucopia.net, price £40. Enquires: books@cornucopia.net

Griselda Warr is a book expert and curator and the author of 'Adventures in Istanbul', her memories of a childhood in Sixties Istanbul (Cornucopia 44) 

An essay entitled OL Knipper in Yalta and Gurzuf (found in one of the most comprehensive virtual libraries of Chekhov’s writing) chronicles the pair’s burgeoning love affair, which began in Yalta in the summer of 1899.

Chekhov and Knipper had first met the year before that, on September 9, 1898 (coincidentally her 30th birthday), when she was rehearsing his play The Seagull. Chekhov, at that time Russia’s most eligible bachelor, watched her perform and took an interest. The following year, while Knipper was holidaying with her brother in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, capital of Georgia) and Chekhov was in Taganrog (a port city on the Sea of Azov, northeast of Crimea), they exchanged letters and Chekhov invited her to Yalta. She had never been there before and was keen to visit. They met up on July 18 in Novorossiysk (just across the sea from the Kerch Peninsula) and left on a ship that same day. Reaching Yalta two days later, Chekhov settled into the Marino Hotel (which still exists to this day), while Knipper went to stay with family friends in Gymnasium Street, three kilometres away.

Despite not sleeping under the same roof, the pair spent their days together, often going to Autka (a village close to Yalta), where Chekhov was building his belaya dacha, in which Knipper had expressed great interest. They took many walks through the areas around Yalta, enjoying such sights as the Uçan Su (Flying Water) waterfall at Massandra, and visiting Gurzuf (where Chekhov was eyeing up another dacha to buy) and Oreanda. Chekhov was proudly showing Knipper all the splendours Crimea had to offer and later described them in a story, Lady with the dog (first published in December 1899 in Russkaya Mysl – translated as Russian Thought – magazine, one of Russia’s most popular magazines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which published stories and essays by many great writers). Lady with the dog tells of a married banker who has an affair with a young woman while holidaying in Yalta. Although Chekhov himself was unmarried, his choice of subject matter certainly echoes the relationship that was forming between him and Knipper that summer. After two weeks of getting to know each other, they left for Moscow on August 2 – a journey that would become one of Knipper’s lifelong memories.

The following April, Knipper returned to Yalta with Chekhov’s sister, Maria Pavlovna, with whom she had developed a friendship. Knipper stayed in Chekhov’s house, enjoying one of the sunniest rooms with a view out onto the garden. On April 14, the Moscow Art Theatre, the company to which Knipper was attached, came to Yalta and over the course of a week performed Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Seagull, as well as two other plays. All the locals and tourists visiting Yalta congratulated their favourite author, Chekhov, on his success, and he was presented with a palm branch tied with a red ribbon bearing the words: ‘To Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who can profoundly interpret Russian reality. Yalta, April 23rd, 1900’. The couple would look back on that week in Yalta as one of the happiest times of their lives.

Chekhov, his mother Yevgeniya, his sister, Maria Pavlovna, and Knipper

By now Chekhov was so in love with Knipper that he could not imagine life without her, and they spent the summer of 1900 in his now-acquired Gurzuf dacha. Shortly after she left in August he wrote her a letter full of emotion and longing: ‘…it seems that the door will open and you will walk in, my sweet, glorious, magnificent actress… I am good, in good health, but thinking about you, dreaming about you. I miss you so much. Be happy and in a good health. Kissing you affectionately, 400 times…’ So much did he miss Knipper that he would allow no one to enter her room in his house. Maria Pavlovna, who stayed on after Knipper had left, wrote to her saying: ‘Nobody can stay in your room downstairs. Chekhov will not allow it.’

Knipper returned to stay with Chekhov in Yalta from the end of the following March until mid-May. On May 25 they were married and left for a honeymoon in the Ufimsky District (in the Republic of Bashkortostan). After their return to Yalta on July 8, Knipper stayed on for another a month and a half and, though she was based in Moscow, continued to seize every possible opportunity to head back to Yalta, even if just for a few days.

The couple’s final time together in Yalta was between July 9 and September 19, 1903. The following year Chekhov died and Knipper was left to spend her summers there alone. As the place that immortalised their union it would always hold a special significance for her.

Knipper returned to Yalta every summer (except during the Second World War), staying in the Gurzuf dacha, left to her by Chekhov in his will. It was her favourite place and the house seemed to come to life whenever she was there. Very often she had visits from famous guests: artists and writers such as Alla Tarasova (a fellow leading actress of the Moscow Art Theatre), the renowned Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter, Ivan Kozlovsky (one of Russia’s greatest tenors), and the writer Boris Lavrenev.

The dacha in Gurzuf

Knipper last visited Gurzuf in 1953. Unsurprisingly, given her deep connection with the place, she was anxious to leave the dacha to someone or something she believed in. She finally decided on the Art Theatre. That year, she wrote a letter to an actor friend, Dorochin: ‘I am really worried about my Gurzuf house. This is very serious and very urgent. I want to go to the highest authorities. I want to tell them how beautiful the nature is around here and ask them to pass the house to the [Art] Theatre, even when I am still alive. It holds all our [hers and Chekhov’s] memories’.

Unfortunately, it was not to be, and it was only in 1987 that the Gurzuf dacha became a filial of the Chekhov and Knipper-Chekhova museum in Yalta. Many things in the museum provide glimpses of Chekhov and Knipper’s life together. One unusual item is a tablecloth signed by more than 80 guests who visited them over the years, their handwritten signatures embroidered with coloured thread. There is also an extensive collection of photographs, including idyllic scenes of Yalta, and of the happy times Chekhov and Knipper spent there.

Yalta, 1903

In 2001 the historian and ethnographer Vera Katina released the results of her two-year archive research on Akhmatova’s stay in Yevpatoria. Katina found that, after separating from her father, Akhmatova’s mother had taken her five children there from their home in Tsarskoye Selo, a town not far from St Petersburg, where the Russian imperial family resided (and which might have also been their home as both Akhmatova’s parents descended from nobility). In Yevpatoria, Akhmatova's mother had rented a house from a Sevastopol merchant, Ananii Savelevich Paskhalidi. It had four bedrooms and was reasonably priced at 330 rubles per year.

The house still exists today, next door to the aforementioned literary café, and carries a memorial plaque (below), which reads: *‘Here, in Paskhalidi’s house, from 1905–1906, lived Anna Akhmatova/Gorenko.’* It is uncertain why the family chose Yevpatoria, but the fact that Akhmatova’s sister Inna had tuberculosis and that the south of Crimea was the go-to place for the illness because of its climate could be one very plausible reason.

An essay written by Akhmatova not long before her death in 1966 entitled About me, in short (taken from the book Anna Akhmatova: Experience Analysis by IK Sushilina) reveals that while in Yevpatoria she wrote many poems describing her ‘helplessness’.

The 16-year-old clearly lived with a sense of terrible loneliness and a tragic perception of her life. In her diaries and letters from the period 1905–1907, she reveals: ‘If you only can see how miserable and unnecessary I am… I  can’t sleep for four nights…. And this is horrible… When everyone goes to the restaurants or to the theatre, I sit listening to the stillness in a dark room. I am always thinking.’ She even tried to commit suicide – albeit rather embarrassingly, as she admits in her personal correspondence: ‘I tried to hang myself [using] on a nail, and the nail popped out of the limestone walls. My mother was crying, I was ashamed – it was awful.’

Akhmatova had started writing poetry at the age of 11 and by the time she was in Yevpatoria her poems already displayed her signature vivid imagery and disciplined form. One such surviving poem (there are very few from when she was so young), talks passionately of the first signs of love and longing:

I am able to love,
I am able to be submissive and affectionate.
I am able to look in your eyes with a smile,
Attractive, sensitive and quivering.
And my slender waist so airy and slim,
And my gentle, aromatic curls.
Oh, he who is with me, his soul is restless,
And bliss is embraced…

Akhmatova was clearly deeply unhappy – possibly because her parents had just divorced; possibly because of something to do with her future husband, Nikolay Gumilev. She had been seeing Gumilev before the family’s move to the south, but they had broken up and she had fallen madly in love with his friend, Vladimir Golenischev-Kutuzov. Gumilev wrote his first book of poems The Way of the Conquistador when Akhmatova was already in Yevpatoria and for some unknown reason he sent this book not to Akhmatova, but to her brother Andrei, who was with her there.

The following year Akhmatova and Gumilev rekindled their friendship when she submitted a poem to his literary journal, Sirius, and they married four years after that – although it has been claimed that she never loved him but simply married her childhood friend.

It is difficult to tell whether Akhmatova’s feelings during her sojourn in Yevpatoria were reflections of a time and a place or simply the artistic stirrings of a teenage girl. She described the period as one where the ‘muffled echoes of the fifth Revolution reached Yevpatoria… cut off from the world’. Could this isolation have spawned her feelings? This is something we will, unfortunately, never know for certain.

Fashion statement: A work by Turkish Cypriot ceramicist and acrtress Ayhatun Ateşin

The visiting art-lover expecting to find a traditional art biennale may well be disappointed. Most major art biennales – such as Venice, the world’s oldest – have a strict thematic starting point, often reflecting a current socio-political or aesthetic issue, with appropriately selected – sometimes almost hand-picked – artists or national pavilions. Not so with BienalIzmir. This, of course, might not be automatically a disadvantage, given the fact that we are so often left unsatisfied by the more usual curatorial trends and ideas – just think of the endless debates on the highly controversial Italian pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.

Installation and performance by Nursel Önen

From this point of view, BienalIzmir’s “conceptlessness” can in itself be interpreted as a kind of concept – that of opening the possibility of self-promotion to as many artists as possible. No thematic sectors, no national pavilions, just an average 3-5 metres per artist. For the moment it works, but I am sure the organisers will wish to overcome the 'growing pains' of this young event in order to establish an even higher-quality art gathering, with a long life ahead of it.

Nude, by Seçil Gürbüz. At the Izmir Biennial the onus is on the viewer to pick the pearls

In future years making a stronger selection will hopefully become easier. It has to be said that this year’s exhibitors are showing items that are more like applied-art or craft products, as opposed to fine art. And there are very few experimental and new-media works: alongside loads of paintings and sculptures there were hardly any photos or video artworks and few installations.

Hanging felts by Zuhan Kuval-Mills, a Turkish-born Australian multimedia artist

However, holding such a huge art event in the city is in itself a great achievement, and a monumental amount of preparatory work was required to bring together so many artists from literally all over the world. For this alone the organisers deserve our esteem and congratulations. As for the visitors, they can feel like pearl-divers plunging into the flow of exhibited works to discover the artists they like. Visiting all the halls might be tiring, but then we have two long years to rest before the next BienalIzmir.

'Voices Rising: Women of Transylvania' by the visual artist and poet Patricia J Goodrich

'The Melting' by Ebru Öngen Corsini, a member of the faculty of fine arts, design and fashion at the Izmir' University of Economics

Zoltán Somhegyi is a Hungarian art historian based in Izmir

The Istanbul Tulip Festival ends for another year today. The festival started eight years ago to revive the city's interest in flowers and to remind those who might have forgotten that many flowers in gardens all over Europe were first discovered in Anatolia. The impressive displays beautify Istanbul's green spaces in an array of blindingly bright colours and shapes – there were 13 million planted this year.

Tulips came into fashion with a vengeance in the 16th and 17th centuries. But as the late Turhan Baytop wrote in The Painted Garden, Cornucopia 13, the type of tulip cultivated at that time is completely different to the tulips you will find today. The Istanbul Tulip of Ottoman times was a delicate, long, almond-shaped flower, said to have originated from the wild dwarf Kefe tulip (Kefe Lâlesi) found in southern Crimea. It was completely extinct by the end of the 18th century.

The tulips that are being planted today to remind us of Turkey's national flower are, ironically, large half-cup hybrids that have been re-imported back from the Netherlands. Despite this, as a newcomer to Istanbul admiring the tulip displays in Gülhane Park, below the walls of the Topkapı Palace, I did find them impressive indeed, and absolutely the perfect accompaniment to the gorgeous spring the city has been having.

Wegner says that his painting reflects 'Anzac Day notions of mateship, friendship, courage and devotion, which is very significant for dogs'.

Works by some of the other finalists depict powerful imagery of war, such as Bill Nix's Wild Colonial Boys (top) and Allyson Parson's Tide Line Gallipoli depicting an Australian flag and military paraphernalia washed up on the Turkish coastline (above). 

The 2013 Gallipoli Art Prize exhibition is on in Sydney at the Gallipoli Memorial Club until May 5.