Utopia, Anti-Utopia and the Utopia Tradition in Turkish Literature

Since Plato's Republic, the desire to achieve an ideal social system has led people to conceive utopias. At the same time, however, utopias came to be seen as totalitarian conceptions for they left freedom out in order to make equality possible, which resulted in the creation of anti-utopias. The feature common to anti-utopias is that they point to the possible dangers awaiting societies in the future. Utopias originated in Europe. The fact that no utopias were created in Muslim societies is attributed to Islam, and it is claimed that the texts written in Islamic civilization did not aim to change the world but to ornament it. The first utopian texts in Turkish literature were dreams written in an effort to save the declining Ottoman State. In the period of Servet-i Funun, which was a time of crisis, some utopias such as the Green Country (Yesil Yurt) initiative emerged. Utopian novels favoring the nation-state became quite common in the 1930s, after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic. After 1965, a pessimist outlook on the future became dominant in Turkish literature and anti-utopias outnumbered utopias, which was a situation closely related to social life. Therefore, it is possible to view these anti-utopias in our literature as sociological signs of warning.