The aim of this paper is to determine how and to what extent Fazıl Say, whose inspiration, according to his own words, is the bridge between Europe and Asia, has become an ambassador between Europe and Turkey.2 A further aim is to determine whether Fazıl Say may be referred to as ‘hybrid’ concerning both his person and his works. This will be done first by describing his background and then the conditions which led not only to his European, but also his global success. Assuming that not only his family, social environment and education were decisive in this process, the social changes that took place in Turkey following the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 are detailed, with special consideration of the reforms directly affecting art and music. To offer more insight into this context, the mutual influences on music between the Ottoman Empire and Europe are outlined.

If we look at the Mediterranean only as a space, a dissonant geography is obvious. Its diversity is mistakenly reduced in a process of ‘diorthosis’, a cognitive and operational approach that starts from assuming the nature of things and functionality modes rather than arriving at a proper image via actual analysis.1 The study of flows, of networks – i.e. the circulation of ideas, people, finances, and so on – challenges the continuous representation of the Mediterranean between homogeneity and otherness, and re-posits it as both a post-colonial imbricate site of encounters and currents and as a site of new hegemonic and counter-power discourse(s) and alliances. This paper explores the ‘mobility’ paradigm as an initial approach to contemporary geographies of the Mediterranean. The latter are being created not only by the media, powers and ideologies, but also by everyday people’s inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and emotional interactions in places and digital communication channels. Such interactions are often characterized by blockages of inter-ethnic or inter-cultural exchanges, as well as by inequalities. They present and discuss initial paths of new encounters structuring North–South relationships, and vice versa, but also circular and East–West ones since they are typified by a variety of personal and virtual mobilities in terms of gender, motivations, emotional geographies, impacts, and circulation rather than origin/destination, and so on. It seems to me that the internet and people’s spatial mobility underline a deep process of change for the Mediterranean. A dialectic of diaspora politics, circuits of funds, weapons, empowerments, and emotions, challenge the boundaries of political communities in transformation. The Mediterranean thus appears as a global space of confrontation, emulation, opposition, dialectics, and change. Places, flows, wires and digital TV are the loci for all this. There is no assumption of ‘Mediterranean as a bridge of cultures’; instead, we all are actors in networking communities

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s opened the gates of immigration to Israel and to the West. The wave of immigration to Israel also included criminal elements who wanted to evade the rule of law in their countries. The arrival of these people to Israel aroused my interest in the historical causes of corruption in Russia, forms of corrupt behaviour by state employees, and the processes of development and creation of criminal organizations in Russia.

Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?

A new leading actor has been added to the Cyprus Conflict. The winner of the Presidential elections held on the morning of Sunday, 26 April 2015, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyeti – TRNC) was the independent candidate Mustafa Akıncı. Both Nicos Anastasiades, who was elected President of the Republic of Cyprus in 2013, and Akıncı are rare leaders supporting the Fifth Annan Plan, which was rejected in a referendum by the Greek Cypriots in 2004. One of the most vital catalysts that could play a role in the resolution of the Cyprus Conflict is a charismatic leader who aims for the resolution of the conflict. Whether the current Presidents have this personality and can change the current balances that are monopolized by the conservatives-nationalists on the Island will be revealed as a result of the negotiations. This article briefly tackles the UN parameters relative to the Cyprus Conflict and addresses the problems awaiting Presidents Anastasiades and Akıncı during the peace negotiations that have started anew.

Using water for body treatments has an especially long tradition in many cultures and, is deeply intertwined with Roman and Ottoman culture. However, it is clear that today it is not possible to attribute bathing – not even a specific type of bathing, such as the hammam steam bath – to one particular culture (ignoring the obvious problems associated with trying to delineate clearly between such blurred constructs as a specific culture or as a discrete entity). Thus, the ‘Turkish bath’ is a widely used term introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century or applied to various different manifestations. The term reflects the European perception of Turkish bathing culture, primarily connected with bathing within a hammam complex or – as the Turkish term goes – a hammami. Bathing in the hammam-style is rather a Roman cultural practice, an element adapted and integrated in Ottoman culture and readapted thereafter into modern Western culture. It is often believed that these practices are rooted in the cultural history of the present state of Turkey (although ancient ‘Turkish bath’ architecture famously exists in Greece or Albania, too1). Furthermore, the geographical or architectural nexus between mosques and hammams and, also, the temporal order of Islamic culture (in which visiting a hammam before various ritual occasions is required) have often suggested seeing the Turkish bath as a religious custom.

The paper briefly outlines the history of Chinese educational migration to the West and discusses some of the policies and socioeconomic trends that have made China the largest source of international students today. It then presents findings from studies of Chinese students’ experiences in Europe, which indicate that personal development and time for reflection is becoming part of what some middle class students and their parents expect from the study abroad experience. This opens new possibilities for European universities in the fields of humanities and social sciences. At the same time we will probably see a growing demand for study abroad programmes that offer training for social service sector professionals, a field where China has a perceived need for developing new attitudes and skills.

Juxtaposing Europeanness and Turkishness has always been a recurring theme in Turkish literature and media. In this study, an analysis of a Turkish sitcom entitled Avrupa Avrupa that was broadcast on Turkey’s only state-run TV channel is provided, focusing on how Turkishness and Europeanness are portrayed. It is found that the sitcom portrays Europeans and Turks through traditionally well-known, coarse stereotypes. It is inferred from the sitcom’s latent ideological messages that the EU may accept Turkey, although it is by no means a European country.

It has long been known that the vast majority of the Annunciation pictures show the Virgin on their right. All former studies, including one by the present author, treat this as a problem of left-right or mirror symmetry. This is not correct: this symmetry exchanges the right and left hands and such a transformation is not permitted: Gabriel, must always be represented as right-handed. That this is so emerged from the study of a database that we have created, which contains 1007 Annunciations from C3 to 1750. Details of this database, which the author intends to put in the public domain in due course, and of other results, will be left for a further paper. It is a sufficient example here that from C3 to 1400 Gabriel shows his right hand to the Virgin in 62 items out of 93, and the left hand in only two. Even from 1401 to 1750 the Angel shows his right hand to the Virgin 278 times and only 22 for the left. A brief pictorial study of the evolution of the Annunciation paintings from C3 onwards shows why the right-handedness of Gabriel made it easier for the painter to present him on the left. A summary table of the results obtained from the database is provided. This study offers some explanation of the fact pointed out in a former paper that sculptural representations of the Annunciation are often variant, with the Virgin on the left.

The memory of classical empires has been prominent in both Chinese and European history but it has had a different imprint in each culture. The Han territories were periodically reunified in part and were more consistently ruled as unified empires from the 13th century onwards. In medieval Western Europe the Carolingian and the Holy Roman empires boasted of being renewals of the glorious ancient models but they developed in a different environment, were no longer built on the Roman scale, and only borrowed selectively from the Roman repertoire. In this essay we examine how differences in power relationships, fiscal regimes, and territoriality help explain both the peripheral impact of the classical model in the European context and the enhanced prospects for it in Chinese history from the 12th century onwards.

For many European cities, a key motivation in developing event strategies is to use an event as a catalyst for urban regeneration. One type of event that is particularly used as a means of urban development is the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) initiative. Based on a case study of the 2008 ECOC Liverpool, this article aims at conceptualising the significance of this major event for a city’s economic, cultural and social regenerations. In terms of economic regeneration, the role of the ECOC has been central in creating Liverpool’s visitor economy and reshaping the city’s image. Liverpool planned different themes for eight consecutive years as a way to ensure economic sustainability. As far as cultural regeneration is concerned, the ECOC contributed to the cultural regeneration of Liverpool by stimulating cultural participation and interest from the demand side, as well as improving cultural provision and collaboration in the cultural sector from the supply side. As for social regeneration, Liverpool treated access development as a policy guideline and considered the ECOC as an opportunity to enhance the sense of place. The most significant lesson learned from Liverpool is its long-term planning and the efforts made to integrate the ECOC into the overall urban development strategy. As a result, a more balanced and long-term effect on urban regeneration could be achieved.

The great contribution of China to politics was the development of a bureaucratic, meritocratic civil service, based on mastery of a well-defined canon of scholarship. Civil servants were scholars. Already under the Han dynasty, Confucianism (the Rújiā or school of the scholars) was made the official ideology of the State and the basis of the competitive examination system. Europe was less advanced in political organization than China. Rulers and their courts relied on family ties and brute force. The only working bureaucracy belonged to the Catholic Church. This paper follows the parallel development of both the Western and the Chinese traditions and emphasizes their points of intersection, such as the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th and 17th centuries and the visits of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey around 1920.

Globalization has accelerated international and intercultural exchange in almost all aspects of life and every discipline of study has to take a global perspective for its development. This paper discusses some current issues in China’s ‘foreign language/literature’ sector, at the tertiary level of human and social sciences, and it does so in terms of localized concepts and diverse fields of study, administrative intervention, institutional organization, professional recognition, academic dilemmas, and problems and prospects of development in view of the international context of sociocultural globalization.