The context for this well organised and popular event, which coincides with the annual Children’s Day, is important for a visitor from Western Europe to understand. Turkey is not really like most Western European countries today even if in the big cities there are superficial resemblances. If you were a regular traveller behind the old Iron Curtain then Turkey, a bastion of NATO during the confrontation with the USSR, looks familiar. The architecture, repertoire and organisation of state theatres, for example, are very similar, East and West. You quickly realise also that what you are seeing are the trappings of ‘modernism’ as understood in the 1920’s.
