Summary: During the interwar period, nationalist and socialist movements throughout the world looked to the peasant as both the source and object of state programs wherein establishing a link between the center and the provinces was a critical part of fostering the sense of nation devised by elite intellectuals. In Turkey, the ideas of Ziya Gökalp regarding the importance of the Anatolian villager in the development of Turkish national culture are a prominent example of how interwar nationalists saw the peasant as the stuff of the nation. Within this context, various programs designed to link the center and the periphery both economically and culturally emerged, and in this episode, Seçil Yılmaz discusses one such project, which sent professionally-trained Turkish painters into the Anatolian countryside over the period of 1938 to 1943 to create artistic depictions of the Turkish nation.
