Handicrafts; Intangible Cultural Heritage; Pottery; Sustainability; The Village Dölek Gümüşhane;

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85116354986&partnerID=40&md5=a65d29f976d2b3652dec31e83731ea73

Soil is one of the main sources of human life with its various uses. One of these uses is pottery making. Pottery, which refers to making vessels from the soil for various purposes, is almost as old as human history. As in various regions of the world, Anatolian people have been making pottery by combining the four basic elements of the Earth, namely the soil, air, water and fire with their creativity for nearly nine thousand years. As commercial activity wheel pottery has continued to live in various places in Turkey, while traditional or primitive pottery have been practiced in Anatolia since the Neolithic period. This type of pottery is one of the main elements of folk culture and is at the center of it. However, recent changes in the socio-economic and cultural structure have rapidly regressed traditional pottery made in Anatolia and today these activities are limited to 16 centers. Therefore, the sustainability of traditional pottery, which is one of the important carrier elements of intangible cultural heritage, has been brought to the agenda of the researchers as an important issue. By revealing the basic character of pottery made in the village Dölek, Gümüşhane, the paper aims to discuss how pottery can be safeguarded within the framework of the principles introduced by the UNESCO’s Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The data used in the study were collected first hand by the author through fieldwork. In this context, a field study was conducted in the above-mentioned village for one month in the summers of 2019-2020, and the history and culture of pottery was tried to be understood through in-depth interviews with potters and sellers. Pottery making stages were observed and recorded through participant observation. The results were interpreted in the context of the Convention on the Protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The results of the study show that pottery production in the village was done with a few simple tools, without wheels, entirely by women, and in traditional ways. There has been a decline in pottery especially due to out-migrations and technological developments and modernization efforts planned with top-down approaches have not yielded any tangible results. The findings were interpreted in the context of the Convention. Mistakes such as excessive commercialization and decontextualization were found to be the main reasons of the failure of the attempts to develop pottery in the village. In addition, these activities focused on the resulting tangible products and ignored the intangible elements such as knowledge, skills, culture, memory and space. These attempts tried to banalize the pottery in Dölek village through mass production, as-similating it to other places and this, in turn, threatened environmental sustainability. In order to safeguard pottery in Dölek, as in other countries, this handicraft should be added to the Convention-related lists, and it should be safeguarded with the new paradigm brought by the Convention, with a participatory planning that takes into account the wishes and needs of the society and pottery masters.