Nation-states that were built after the French Revolution of the late 18th century rejected previous traditions and invented many new ones that circulate their ideologies and keep the discourse of the nation alive. These newly invented traditions had an essential function in terms of building national identity and gathering society together. Nation-states create a connection with a certain ethnicity during their construction process, and within that context they start historiography while they connect their origin with that ethnicity, bringing the old heroes and mythologies that belong to the territories on which they are built to light. Narratives about the origin, ancestry, heroism, and civilization rebuilt through the nation-state ideology thus create a legitimate ground for the new political ideology. Anthony D. Smith entitles those narrations as “mythomoteur”, and he adds that those narrations are the constructive myths of political unity. Ernst Cassirer calls the narratives as “modern political myths”. Smith analyzes constructive political myths into eight categories based on the motifs and elements that occur in the narratives.

 With the proclamation of the Republic and the departure from the political and social order of the Ottoman Empire, the construction of an envisaged nation-state began. The envisaged nation-state would be built upon the modal of western public institutions and Mustafa Kemal would be the leader of it. It would be a secular state and the new regime of the state of Turkey would be the Republic. Many different communities belonging to different beliefs and nations existed on the land where the Republic of Turkey was founded. Therefore, it was impossible to refer historically or culturally to only one ethnic culture or community, as the German nation modal does. The comprehensive nature of the French nation modal is more appropriate for the young State of Turkey. The idea of “everybody who calls themselves Turkish, are Turkish” no matter their ethnic origin, culture, or belief, was one of the main building stones of the newly founded Republic. Political myths, that have an essential function through building collective cultural identity, were the solution to this problem. A historiography came into being which proved that Turks had been living on that territory for years. The new state’s study of official history (Türk Tarih Tezi), for the construction of origin, corresponds to the myth of ancestry and the myth of origins in time and space that Smith categorizes. Official history (Türk Tarih Tezi) plays an important role in terms of establishing the discourse of Turkish within the new Republic. The main argument of the official history (Türk Tarih Tezi) is that Turks are the Arian race of middle Asia, that they migrated to several places in the world, and that the powerful civilizations in ancient times, such as Sumerians and Hittites that lived in Anatolia, were Turks. 

These political myths that maintained their existence in the social sphere during the process of dissemination of the views on national unity and nationalism, created the ideational background of productions in the theatre field. The political myths had the aim of grounding public understanding of single party ideology and they took shape in the embodied form of this ideology in the artistic activities of which they were subjects. Various theatre performances that had been performing under the roof of the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları) gained a corporate and systematic feature after the proclamation of the Republic and the establishment of People’s Houses (Halkevleri). Besides this, they also became the tool of propaganda of single party ideology.

For the historiography of the single party ideology, it was important to use the myth of origin and civilization as a subject in theatre plays. The founding board that ignored the history of the Ottoman Empire, used theatre to reach the glorious history that began from Middle Asia and reached to the masses, committing the success of the Turkish war of independence to the memories of the people. The recreation of symbolic people for Turkish society such as Atilla and Mete as heroic legendary figures, dressing the events that happened in the Turkish war of independence with surrealistic narrations of bravery, and praising the actions of the new regime became prominent features of the theatre works of the era. Those narrations, which are the political myths of the Republic, could be seen in many theatre plays, which were written in the Early Republican Era. For the reconstruction of the social memory of the single party ideology, the people were presented with a history and identity that they could boast of through works of theatre. In this context, I will try to discover the contribution of Early Republican era theatre art to the process of reconstitution and the relationship between state and theatre through the myth of origin and civilization. I will also try to make visible the effects of this myth on the playwrights of the era with examples from Vehbi Cem Aşkun’s Oğuz Destanı, Faruk Nafiz’s Akın ve Özyurt, İsmet Ulukut’s Sümer Ülkerleri, Behçet Kemal’s Çoban plays.