Sarp Kalay, M.A.

Projektsleitung: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Hacısalihoğlu

In September 1937, the German classicist Clemens Bosch stood before the Second Turkish History Congress in Istanbul and argued that Anatolia, not Greece nor Rome, was the original source of the Mother Goddess cult(Cult of Kybele/Magna Mater) that would travel to the heart of the Roman Empire. This paper was not merely a historical claim; it was a cultural intervention. Delivered by a scholar exiled from Germany after the National Socialist purge of universities, before an audience of Turkish intellectuals and Republican officials, it exemplified a broader phenomenon: the strategic mobilization of Classical Antiquity as a shared intellectual language through which Turkey was repositioning itself within Mediterranean and European civilizational narratives.

This PhD project argues that the Humanistic turn in early Republican Turkey was not a derivative reception of European ideas but a strategic reconfiguration of transnational intellectual resources in the service of a distinct Republican modernity. This project approaches Humanism not solely as a historiographical development but analyses it as a broader intellectual framework shaped by the traditions of German Classical scholarship (Altertumswissenschaft) and its wider circulation within the German-speaking and Anglo-Saxon worlds. It examines how this framework was actively reshaped in Turkey, and how Classical Antiquity, particularly Ancient Greece, Rome, and Anatolia, functioned as a shared cultural language enabling Turkey to articulate its relationship to both its own past and the wider Mediterranean world.