Our DEMOS trip with Prof. Dr. Saim Sakaoğlu

Abstract

Prof Dr Saim Sakaoğlu's support for young academics pursuing scientific studies is well known. I too have benefited from his guidance in every project and book publication I have undertaken in the following years. In fact, I felt Prof Sakaoğlu's academic and moral support when I submitted the “Turkish Folk Song Archive Project”, which I started in 1993, to the Selçuk University Research Fund and when I visited the German Folk Song Archive between 1 July 1996 and 30 August 1996 to continue the “Turkish Folk Song Archive Project”. On 14.11.2002, I was honoured to receive the Turkish Folk Culture Service Award from his hand, which was given to me by the Folklore Research Council. Prof. Sakaoğlu and I received an invitation from the journal Demos Internationale Ethnographische und Folkloristische Informationen (founded in 1960) to represent Turkey in early 1993. Until 1990, the aim of the journal was to present ethnographic and folkloristic studies from the former Eastern Bloc countries in Western countries, as the subtitle (Folkloristic Information from the People's Democracies) suggests. With the dissolution of the East German Academy of Sciences in 1990, the Akademie Verlag ceased publication of the journal (until then only the 4th issue of volume 30 had been published). Finally, the financial problems were overcome when the British publishing group Gordon and Breach Science Publishers; Harwood Academic Publishers acquired the publishing rights, and the journal was published with a new profile in 1992. The journal's editorial board consisted of Dr Brigitte Emmrich and renowned scientists from 16 countries. From 1993, Prof. Sakaoğlu became the Turkish representative on the journal's editorial board and I became a corresponding member on behalf of the Institute of German Studies, where I worked as a lecturer, and we began to write short book reviews, which are explained in more detail below. In the summer of 1996, at the invitation of the Working Group for Folklore Studies (later renamed the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore) at the Technical University of Dresden, I took part in the development of the journal and then presented both the report on Turkish folklore prepared by Prof. Sakaoğlu and the contribution I had prepared at the journal's 3rd general editorial conference. In this article, we will analyse the books, articles and events that we reviewed in German in the journal DEMOS during the time we worked together as an editorial board member (Saim Sakaoğlu) and correspondent (Ali Osman Öztürk). We will first present this breakdown quantitatively by year and then briefly attempt to evaluate it qualitatively.