Turkish folk music

Turkish folk music (Türk Halk Müziği) combines the distinct cultural values of all civilisations that have lived in Turkey and its former territories in Europe and Asia. Its unique structure includes regional differences under one umbrella. It was the most popular music genre in the Ottoman Empire era. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Atatürk asked to make a wide-scale classification and archiving of samples of Turkish folk music from around the country, which was launched in 1924 and continued until 1953 to collect around 10,000 folk songs. In the 1960s, Turkish folk music met with radio and folk musicians like Aşık Veysel, Neşet Ertaş, Bedia Akartürk became the most popular names of the Turkish folk music. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the rising popularity of arabesque and Turkish light western, Turkish folk music has lost some ground, but singers like Belkıs Akkale, İzzet Altınmeşe, Selda Bağcan, Güler Duman and Arif Sağ made successful hit songs and became important representatives of the genre.