Each year at our festivals, we enjoy the cultural arts of Turkey. We also have specially-organized art exhibits that travel through the Southeast. Our current exhibition is entitled “Under Vine and Fig Tree: 500 Years of Turkish Jewish History” and is currently on tour in Tennessee. This show is a collection of 20 photographic images of Jewish-Turks in Istanbul, Turkey over the past several hundred years.
In addition to musical performers at our annual festivals, we also organize the Whirling Dervishes of Rumi. The ritual whirling of the dervishes is an act of love and a drama of faith. It possesses a highly structured form within which the gentle turns become increasingly dynamic as the individual dervishes strive to achieve a state of trance. The music that accompanies the whirling from the beginning to the end ranges from somber to rhapsodical; its effect is intended to be mesmerizing and proves to be meditative to watch live.
Some of our past concerts and performances inlcude Omer Faruk Tekbilek (at the 7th Annual Atlanta Turkish Festival) and The Whirling Dervishes of Rumi from Turkey (annually).