“I’m afraid of losing you,” said Kerim, holding Fatmagül in a gentle embrace. “You don’t need to be afraid,” Fatmagül answers, doe-eyed, before they lose themselves in a passionate kiss. 

Scenes like this one from What is Fatmagül’s Fault? characterise Turkish TV dramas (also known as dizis), which have taken the world by storm in the last two decades. Lovers who defy their families’ wishes, forbidden affairs, meddling parents, and historical retellings – these storylines have avid watchers from the Balkan and Gulf countries all the way to China. In South America, parents have even started naming their babies after their favourite dizi characters. 

In recent decades, drama series have introduced millions of people to Turkey, but they are only one of the tools the country has used to reshape its global perception. Under the ruling AKP, Turkey has increasingly asserted itself on the international stage – capturing TV screens, building mosques, language schools, and cultural centres abroad, and hosting international sports competitions.  

Turkish authorities have also expanded the flagship Istanbul airport and backed the majority state-owned Turkish Airlines to include more destinations than most other European competitors.  

Dizis come in a wide variety of genres. Historical dramas put a charismatic spin on Ottoman sultans fighting off foreign invaders (in storylines that often mirror Turkey’s contemporary military campaigns), while action-packed dizis running on faux-Ottoman nostalgia show brave officers outsmarting and defying the threats of Western imperialism. And then there are the Anatolian-style romance soap operas that feature themes relevant to more intimate, domestic settings: the clash between conservative and “modern” values, the rich and the poor, and dramatic storylines of honour and sacrifice. As a soft power tool, dizis have been very effective.

If you turn on a TV in the Balkans, you’re never more than a few channel flips away from a Turkish soap opera. They are so popular, in fact, that North Macedonia nearly passed a bill to prevent the “Turkification” of society. “Dizi tourism” is soaring, and only British and American shows have more global viewership than Turkish series. And wherever Turkish TV celebrities go, they are met by screaming crowds. 

Turkey’s dizzying rise 

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu strived to build a “new Ottoman geopolitical space” in their foreign policy, reshaping Turkey as the “central country” in the region. This vision also aims to bring about new economic, cultural, and political relationships with former Ottoman territories. And the AKP has been successful in its goal. Through repeated military incursions, creating a buffer zone, and now active involvement in state-building in Syria, as well as extensive operations in the Black Sea, Turkey has solidified its geopolitical relevance. Moreover, the country has become a defence partner to the European Union and has played a key role in the bloc’s externalisation of migration. Still, TV series are by far Turkey’s most successful cultural export. 

While dizis have served to present a favourable impression of Islam and Turkish culture in countries that Turkey does not often interact with, the shows have had a much more controversial task in regions with a shared Ottoman past: to shift and overpower negative historical narratives. In parts of the Balkans where mentioning Ottoman rule often elicits curses and acrimony, Christian Orthodox audiences overwhelmingly join their Muslim neighbours in bingeing propaganda-laden storylines about the very empire their history teaches them to resent. How did this happen?  

Softening modernity

The answer lies in discourse. When these shows cross borders, they do not dominate or conflict with other cultures as much as converse with them. Turkish dramas are often met by audiences willing to – sometimes heavily – negotiate and compromise on their views.  

And this exchange is bilateral. Much like the dizi – which Professor Arzu Öztürkmen of Boğaziçi University calls a “genre in progress” – the idea of Turkey itself, as a bridge between East and West, is continuously (re)negotiated. More than a century after the Ottoman Empire’s fall, Turkishness remains contested. Secular or Sunni, educated and urban or agrarian and rural, faux- Ottoman nostalgia or a path towards continued Westernisation – such debates play out as much on a political as they do on a cultural level. 

Dizis bring these conflicts to the forefront. A modern Turkish setting disrupted by a traditional love affair, or a biased and glorified perception of an Ottoman past long gone – few dizis simply portray modernity as a stable state of affairs. The characteristic (over) dramatisation of dizis – which lends them the typical soap opera comparison – not only constitutes a renegotiation of Turkishness, but also grapples with modernity itself. 

In most non-Western parts of the world, modernity is often shaped hegemonically by the West, leaving non-Western countries in need of spaces to bargain with, process, and integrate its disorienting aspects. Turkish shows offer spaces to vent frustrations about changing values, vanishing certainties, and what feels like the intrusion of a foreign moral order. They stage conflict to explore where an “old” concept (honour, family, sacrifice) might still be able to stave off change, or at least soften its edges. 

Dizis allow communities that aren’t built on Western individualism to witness transformation in ways that feel more natural to their own moral fabric – to grieve modernity, while also embracing it.