Last weekend's Eurovision win was one of a remarkable series of recent Turkish cultural successes. These reflect a society that is becoming more outward-looking, writes Aengus Collins.
You could see it in her eyes, and in her arm thrust forward and beckoning. Sertab Erener, last weekend's Eurovision winner, sang defiantly, a woman who knew she had the voice, the song and the choreography to take the prize. More than that, she sang like a woman fully aware of how much a victory would mean back at home.
I watched her victory with a roomful of Turks and when the crucial vote was cast, the elation broke like a thunder-clap. The Eurovision is something of a debased currency for the Irish after all the wins, but it is an institution which retains an undeniable power. With Sertab's victory came shouting and jumping and embracing, as well as phone calls from Istanbul, where people had streamed onto the streets in celebration. And underpinning all this elation, there was something richer, something rawer, an emotion lying somewhere between pride and gratitude. It was one of those rare moments when nationalism seems a warm and precious thing.
In Ireland we should perhaps be familiar with all this. The strangest things establish the strangest of links between countries, and so the Eurovision touches on imperfect analogies between Ireland and Turkey. Our process of modernisation in recent decades was very different from the one in which Turkey is currently engaged - we started from a higher baseline and we built on a wholly different history. But in both cases, culture has played its part. If you can find an audience, the arts allow a modernising country to begin to tell a different story about itself. And for all the kitsch, the Eurovision does provide an audience. We know this. Ripe for parody it may have been, but the Riverdance interval was, for a range of reasons, an important moment in the recent history of Irish culture.
Turks have little reason to be aware of our small island on the other side of Europe, but the Eurovision makes its mark. They know that we've won the thing with uncanny frequency. More surreally, they know Johnny Logan. Not in a vague and distant way, but with instant and knowledgeable recognition. On Saturday night, I was treated to accurate renditions not just of What's Another Year? and Hold Me Now, but of Terminal Three as well.
Sertab's win capped a scarcely believable week for contemporary Turkish culture on an array of international platforms. At Cannes, a Turkish film, Uzak, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize and received heartfelt praise from journalists who were otherwise splenetic in their assessment of the festival this year. And in Dublin, the IMPAC award, one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes, went to the Wunderkind of Turkish literature, Orhan Pamuk.
What are we to make of this trilogy of successes? Certainly, the timing was fortuitous, but these victories do attest to the increasing confidence of a society that is becoming significantly more outward-looking. Turkey is still beset by many of the problems that have plagued it for decades, its woeful political culture chief among them. But the prospect of EU membership has brought significant reforms, and despite the ongoing economic crises, there is a new mood, and a sense that finally the country might be moving in the right direction.
The Turks worked hard for their Eurovision victory. Sertab Erener was no novice plucked from anonymity, but a classically trained singer with more than a decade of experience as a pop star in Turkey. Her début album was, when released, the biggest-selling ever in Turkey. She has duetted with Ricky Martin and with Jose Carreras. In choosing her, Turkey signalled that it was going all out this year.
Following her win, Sertab's status as a major star is guaranteed. What remains to be seen is whether she goes on to acquire the particularly iconic status enjoyed by the two firmly established female living legends of Turkish music, Ajda Pekkan and Sezen Aksu.
Ajda Pekkan, though still only in her 50s, is the elder stateswoman of Turkish pop. She broke on to the scene in the 1960s with a Turkish version of Strangers in the Night and is now a national institution of sorts. (Incidentally, she too was a Eurovision participant, in 1980, the year of Johnny Logan's first victory.)
Sezen Aksu is more directly a predecessor of Sertab's. Indeed it was Sezen who nurtured Sertab's early career, using her as a backing singer and writing much of the material on her début album. Sezen remains Turkey's undisputed queen of pop (Madonna to Ajda's Piaf perhaps), a position she has managed to combine with a consistent awareness of the political significance of what she does.
In the 1970s, Sezen was the first Turkish woman to write and perform her own songs rather than to interpret others' material. Throughout her career she has been politically committed. As recently as last summer she was in the headlines for her concert performance of songs in the Armenian, Greek, Kurdish and Hebrew languages on a public holiday commemorating a 1922 military success. This was a bold move in a country where the authorities are only slowly learning how to deal fairly with their national minorities. But Sezen's concert brought forth a surge of mainstream support, giving shape and focus to an otherwise nebulous sense that things are changing in the country, that the people are moving forward even if the authorities still find that hard to do.
This kind of overt cultural politics perhaps seems far removed from the spectacle of the Eurovision, yet Sertab's win is politically significant in its own way, giving cultural expression to Turkey's growing confidence in its European destiny.
Perhaps for the newer generation the older battles do not have to be fought so openly because, in principle, they have already been won. Myriad problems remain in Turkey, but things have moved on a long way.
What now for Sertab? For the moment, she will be fêted like a queen, and throughout the summer her Eurovision song will echo across the Bosphorus from the open-air nightclubs on Istanbul's coast.
And meanwhile, in the background, the planning for next year will already have begun. For the winning country, the chance to host the Eurovision is the real prize for victory, providing an opportunity, perhaps without real parallel, to project an image of both country and people to a vast and strangely captive audience. In its own way, the Eurovision enables the host nation to present itself anew, to start to tell a different story of itself. In Turkey, that is an opportunity that will be cherished.