International symposium - The Image of the ‘Turk’ on the Territory of the Present-Day Slovenia and the Image of the ‘Frank’ in Osmanlis

The symposium will bring together Slovenian, Turkish and other participant scholars from various fields (historians, linguists, anthropologists, literary historians, etc.), with the purpose of exploring the representations of the ‘Turk’ in the eyes of the population on the territory now covered by the Republic of Slovenia as well as, reciprocally, the image of the ‘Frank’, as the Christian population outside the Ottoman Empire was generally referred to, and which the ‘Slovenian’ population was a part of. The symposium will embrace a thematic scope large enough to cover several important aspects of the title topic: questions of identity in the first place, like, on the one hand, the ambivalent attitude of the Ottoman Turkish novelists towards westernisation, with materialism as the greatest threat to Ottoman cultural norms and traditions, on the other hand, the myth of the ‘Turkish incursions’ as one of the founding myths of the Slovenian national identity; the reciprocal images of the ‘other’ interpreted as constructions that result from a projection of unconscious cultural collective phantasms by which both see the other as ‘different’ and ‘inferior’; on the one hand, the boundaries of ‘otherness’ in the Ottoman context examined through a Karagöz character of Western origin, the Frank, on the other hand, Johann Weichhart Freiherr von Valvasor’s construction of ‘otherness’ in Habsburg Europe of the period; the reception of Ottoman music in Europe from the sixteenth century to the present time, and many other interesting topics. To make the symposium a genuine international event particularly marked by the contributions of the two organising sides, Slovenian and Turkish, the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey in Slovenia has kindly accepted to invite six Turkish academic participants while other participant scholars will be either Slovenian or from third countries. //The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia has contributed substantial support.//