Walking through Kadifekale, the hilltop fortress district above İzmir, the French photographer Philippe Dupuich watched schoolchildren call out in English to the man beside him. His companion, Orhan Çetinbilek, answered in Turkish and told them he was Turkish like them. The children were astonished. Dupuich recounted the moment to Al-Monitor in September 2025, and his point had less to do with the children than with the geography, since this happened in the Aegean, the region where most Afro-Turks actually live.
A member of the executive committee of the African Culture, Solidarity and Assistance Association, Çetinbilek sits at the center of a two-decade effort to make a community visible in its own country. Its most public instrument is a festival whose public celebration disappeared for decades, even as versions of it survived away from view.
A Three-week Spring Festival, Reduced To A Weekend
Celebrated by İzmir’s African community from the 1880s into the early republican period, the Dana Bayramı, or Calf Festival, once ran for three weeks, each with a distinct function. Beyhan Türkkollu, the association’s vice president, has described how the celebration unfolded. During the first week, a woman known as the godya, a community leader, walked the streets with musicians to announce the festival. The second week was devoted to collecting money, food, and clothing, which were later redistributed to people in need, while some of the money raised went toward buying a calf. During the third week, the decorated animal was taken through the neighborhoods before the procession ended at the tomb of Yusuf Dede in Kadifekale.
Although Law No. 677, adopted on November 30, 1925, closed dervish lodges and shrines and ended the festival’s public celebration, oral histories indicate it continued secretly into the 1950s, particularly in villages around Torbalı. When Mustafa Olpak, who founded the association in Ayvalık in 2006, began asking questions about the festival, those later celebrations were still within living memory for some of the oldest people he encountered.
Rebuilt as an organized public festival from 2007 onward, Dana Bayramı now draws backing from the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality and has been staged in Torbalı, Bayındır and the city center at various points. Gone is the animal sacrifice. The 17th edition, held on September 20 and 21, 2025, opened with Dupuich’s Afro-Turk Spirit exhibition at Bıçakçı Han in Basmane and a panel on African traces across Western Thrace, Anatolia and Iran, moderated by Çetinbilek. A cortege came down Kıbrıs Şehitleri Caddesi that evening, Melis Sökmen played Vasıf Çınar Meydanı, and the Sunday belonged to a community picnic at Buca Gölet.
The History The Festival Is Arguing With
Arriving with a one-sentence version of this history, that Afro-Turks descend from enslaved Africans and that is the whole of it, is the default for most visitors. The community pushes back on it insistently, and the record supports them. Banning the African slave trade in 1857 did not end slavery in the Ottoman Empire, which persisted in practice into the empire’s final years. According to historian Michael Ferguson, İzmir’s African population expanded significantly after abolition. In his 2014 dissertation, The African Presence in Late Ottoman Izmir and Beyond, Ferguson writes that the city became the main site where the Ottoman state, backed by its British abolition partners, settled rescued emancipated Africans.
By the 1880s, Ferguson argues, the city likely held the largest proportion of emancipated Africans anywhere in the empire. Some were absorbed into households, some placed in state institutions, some formed their own quarter, and others moved out into the agricultural hinterland that had made İzmir rich. Holding that community together, in Ferguson’s account, were African women, and particularly older women, which is precisely what the godya tradition records. He also notes that the city’s non-African residents treated these gatherings as a threat to public order, an attitude that carried into the republican period and, in his reading, still shapes anti-Black racism in Turkey.
Beyond enslavement, several other routes led into the Aegean. Al-Monitor’s reporting identifies free men recruited into the Ottoman military, agricultural workers granted land in the late empire and early republic, and families resettled from Crete during the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Africans in Ayvalık say their Cretan ancestors arrived speaking Greek and later picked up Turkish. Extensive intermarriage followed all of it.
Inside a single family, the results can be startling. Türkkollu told Al-Monitor that her maternal ancestors were brought to Macedonia in the mid-19th century and resettled in İzmir during the exchange. At the same time, her paternal line runs through African, Arab, and Yörük Turkish ancestry. Asked about the size of the population, she was blunt: “We never reflect on numbers.”
Names That Should Already Be Familiar
Born in İzmir in 1883, Ahmet Ali Çelikten trained at the Ottoman naval technical school and flew as a military aviator during the First World War. He is often described as one of the world’s first Black military pilots, and sometimes as the first, though sources diverge on his ancestry. Some trace it to a grandmother taken from Bornu in present-day Nigeria, while others describe his mother as of Nigerian origin. He served through the War of Independence and died in İzmir in 1969.
Alongside him sit the singer Esmeray, a significant figure in 1970s Turkish pop, and the dancer and singer Melis Sökmen, who performs at the Calf Festival. Afro-Turks also entered electoral politics more visibly in 2018. Yalçın Yanık, an Afro-Turk leather worker from İzmir, ran for parliament as the Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) third candidate in İzmir’s 1st electoral district. At the same time, Mesut Mercan sought an İYİ Party nomination but did not make the party’s final candidate list. Yanık was not elected, but his candidacy marked a rare moment of Afro-Turk representation in national politics.
That visibility has not erased the assumptions Afro-Turks still encounter in everyday life. Al-Monitor documented people being mistaken for migrants or tourists, called Arap, an old Turkish term that has also been used for Black people, or worse, and repeatedly asked to explain where they are from.
What The Community Is Building Now
Long before he died in 2016, Afro-Turk writer and activist Mustafa Olpak had begun pushing the community’s history into wider public view. His memoir Kenya-Girit-İstanbul: Köle Kıyısından İnsan Biyografileri was adapted by TRT into the documentary “Arap Kızı Camdan Bakıyor,” released internationally as “Baa Baa Black Girl,” marking the first time Turkish state television mentioned Afro-Turk histories. Beginning in October 2007 and running for eleven months, the oral history project Sessiz Bir Geçmişten Sesler [Voices from a Silent Past], undertaken with the Turkish History Foundation and supported by the EU, recorded the life stories of 100 Afro-Turks, 53 men and 47 women.
Nearly two decades later, Philippe Dupuich approached the same question through photography, spending three years documenting Afro-Turk communities in Basmane, Hasköy, and Kadifekale before presenting Afro-Turk Spirit at the French Cultural Center in İzmir in September 2025 and later at Bıçakçı Han during that year’s Dana Bayramı. For Dupuich, however, photographs can only preserve part of what is at risk of being lost. He has argued that the community’s oldest members need to record their own stories in their own words while those memories can still be preserved firsthand.
If You Want To See The Festival
Where: İzmir is the main base, with the festival’s historic geography centered on Kadifekale and nearby Basmane in Konak district. Afro-Turk communities also have deep roots in Hasköy in Bayındır district, the Büyük and Küçük Menderes valleys, and parts of Aydın and Muğla provinces.
When: Dana Bayramı was historically a spring festival, but recent dates have varied. The 2025 edition took place on September 20 and 21. Check the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality’s annual program or the association before planning a trip around it.
Getting there: Flights from Istanbul to İzmir Adnan Menderes Airport take roughly 75 to 90 minutes, with seasonal direct connections from several European cities. İzmir is also an easy base for trips to Ephesus, Şirince, and the Çeşme peninsula.
