ATHENS: Greece will press its claim to a shadow puppet theater that UNESCO has deemed to be part of Turkey\u2019s cultural heritage, the Foreign Ministry in Athens said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The puppet theater features Karagz (\u201cblack-eyed\u201d in Turkish), a hunchbacked trickster who tries to make a living by hoodwinking Turkish officials and generally avoids all manner of honest work.<\/p>\n
The setting is loosely placed during the Ottoman rule of Greece, from the mid-15th to the early 19th century. The Greek version of the puppet theater features Karagiozis (Greek for Karagz).<\/p>\n
Infused with a cast of Ottoman-era social cliches \u2013 including a Turkish enforcer, a Zante dandy, a Jew and a rough-hewn Greek shepherd \u2013 it was a popular form of folk entertainment in Greece until a few decades ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe UNESCO convention on intangible cultural heritage enables neighboring countries to also access the same commodity,\u201d Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigoris Delavekouras told a news briefing. \u201cGreece has tabled a statement that the same practice exists in our country and a discussion \u2026 regarding this issue will take place in Nairobi in October.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that the Karagiozis shadow theater is an \u201cinseparable\u201d part of Greek culture.<\/p>\n
UNESCO last year placed Karagz on its list of intangible cultural elements, associating it with Turkey where the character was originally born.<\/p>\n
In Greece, however, the character remains a powerful icon of resistance to authority even though Karagiozis performances are now only practiced by a few enthusiasts. Karagiozis is also a common byword for \u201cfool\u201d in Greek.<\/p>\n
The origins of Turkish Karagz theater and its hide-crafted puppets are lost to history, though it is assumed that it was introduced to Turkey from Egypt.<\/p>\n
Shadow theater is believed to have first surfaced in India over 2,000 years ago. \u2013AFP, with The Daily Star<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ATHENS: Greece will press its claim to a shadow puppet theater that UNESCO has deemed to be part of Turkey\u2019s cultural heritage, the Foreign Ministry in Athens said on Wednesday. The puppet theater features Karagz (\u201cblack-eyed\u201d in Turkish), a hunchbacked trickster who tries to make a living by hoodwinking Turkish officials and generally avoids all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":179167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2939,225,1094,89],"tags":[8281],"class_list":["post-20762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultureart","category-greece","category-tourism","category-turkey","tag-piracy-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}