Related: I recently watched the amazing Turkish Netflix series Atiye (2019-21), in which Göbekli Tepe features centrally. The main character, Atiye, is a painter who's painted the same symbol all her life, and one day sees it in a news story about Göbekli Tepe, and feels compelled to travel there immediately. The epic story involves time travel, alternate realities, spirituality/mythology, archaeologists, academics, history, family, love etc. Also you get to see a lot of the Turkish countryside. I and the SO thought it really wonderful, highly recommended. (Warning: Season 3 is a kind of new story and loses the addictive watchableness of the first 2, but is not terrible.)
I enjoy ethos greatly. I saw Atiye as well. Enjoyed both, but ethos to me was a eye opening and pretty deep. I knew about Kemalists (seculars) vs Muslims (supported by Erdogan) and was kinda fascinated by the division and how different is
from Greek division (left vs right) but also by similarities.
In Ethos, the seculars are a caricature of what is known as "White Turks", i.e. the well educated middle class Turks with Western values who live in affluent neighbourhoods. Many people felt offended by it because it's also a political message from the conservatives about the "elites" being disconnected from the rest of the population. There was a culture and class war and the conservatives won, only to reduce their conservative values to clothing and alcohol, becoming the new "White Turks" who are detached from the rest of the society.
Anyway, the Turks and the Greeks are much more similar to each other than let's say, the French or the British. When a Turk and a Greek meet in western Europe they find relief as they understand each other much better than anyone else. Turks and Greeks are huge frenemies, in a sense that on state level they have never ending disputes over territories and things can quickly heat up but on social level they are almost like the same people and they love each other. When a disaster strikes, Greeks would be among the first to help the Turks and vice versa.
In Turkey, there's also Left&Right but the leftist were slaughtered during military coups(which happen every 20 years!) in the past, there's no sizeable movement by the left. Instead, the society is divided by many other things like ethnicity(Kurds vs Turks) and religion(sunni muslims and alawi muslims), cultural alliance(west v.s. russia among the seculars), values(liberals v.s. nationalists) or any other thing, including even cuisine!
Tangentially, I wasn't aware of Turkey as an exporter of TV until I recently traveled in Cambodia and everyone I spoke to went on about the Turkish dramas they were watching. Thanks for the recommendation! this sounds like a good starting point for me to get into Turkish shows.
Sounds like something copied from Battlestar Gallactica. One of the characters paints the same symbol her whole life and eventually discovers it means something significant for her and all of humanity.
Which in turn sounds a bit like the Star Trek:TNG episode "The Chase" where a symbol seen all over the universe brings four alien species together to find a message from an ancient race they all descended from.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) has a similar element: several people obsessing over a mountain-like shape, they paint it, sculpt it, etc, and want to travel there. Later it turns out to be the place where the UFOs arrive.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10075318/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Turkish_TV_series)
p.s. Bir Başkadir (aka Ethos, 2020-) and Fatma (2021-) are another two excellent Turkish Netflix series.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11301642/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11961378/