Volkan Aytar

This chapter aims to contextualize the political and socio-cultural processes that make entertainment a site for the articulation of ethnic and class relations and nation-state building. It argues that leisure consumption and musical entertainment are shaped by the interaction of consumers and producers. The chapter also focuses on regulators and mediators. It argues that, in terms of state-led regulation, the Classical Ottoman period borrowed the traditional paternalism of the Byzantine period. The chapter proposes and attempts to develop a "multi-layered perspective" that hopes to speak not only to the spatial concentrations and clustering of musical entertainment establishments but also to the continuities and breaks in Byzantine, Ottoman, and Republican forms. During the Reform Ottoman period, then, with the institution of constitutional citizenship and formal equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, lonca and millet-based stratifications as well as state and religious regulatory bans and limitations were eased.