Ideological/socialist folk songs of Rhodope Turks.

Folk songs are oral culture products that contain the beliefs, world perceptions, living and behavior styles, and national and cultural codes of the societies from which they originate. Folk songs, which have changed and transformed as sung throughout history and passed down from generation to generation, multiply into versions and variants by adapting to new conditions. This is also the case with the folk songs of Rhodope. The Rhodope Mountains are the mountain ranges between Bulgaria and Greece, most of which are in Bulgaria. The Rhodope Turks living in this region tried to continue their life in the same area after the transition of the regime in Bulgaria to socialism. Rhodope Turks, one of the essential representatives of Turkish culture in the Balkans, sang several ideological folk songs related to socialism during the years of the socialist regime. These oral culture products, generally classified as work and labor folk songs, contain many elements of the Bulgarian socialist government. These folk songs are indicators of the processes of adaptation of Bulgarian Turks to socialism and how ideological assumptions can affect oral culture. In this study, examples of ideological folk songs collected from Bulgarian Rhodope Turks in 1962 are analyzed, and a cultural evaluation of the folk songs shaped within the framework of socialist ideology is made.