İlyas, İskender, Belkıs: Anadolu/Osmanlı Kültür Evreni

Starting to work on a brand new topic requires a lot of reflexion and it is very difficult to describe a research which will take shape only along the road, in progress. Kafadar in his immersive seminar will try to map a cultural semantic field through figures like Hızır/Khidr/Man-of-green, Ilyas/Elias, Iskender/Alexander and Belkıs/Nigist Saba. How do these figures, and the tales associated with them, endow a cultural sphere as well as a physical/human geography with meaning? How would it be possible to conceive the old “universe/horizon of meaning” today, how to drag the past field of experience into the present, how to write and tell it — with which words and why? These questions will be considered within the framework of the late medieval/early modern lands of Rum.