The Hittites, who were the continuation of the Hatti community in Anatolia, are a civilization that left its mark on history in a cultural sense. In these lands approximately B.C. The Hittite Civilization, which developed in the early 2000s and produced the most important findings of the Bronze Age culture, has an important place in the history of art. (Eczacıbaşı vd, 1997: 769). Hattusha, the ancient city that was the capital of the Hittites and carries the cultural values of five different civilizations to the present day, was included in the World Heritage list by UNESCO in 1986. Hattusha has brought the works of art and civilizational information of the Hittites, the most magnificent empire of the period, to the present day, with its monumental works and architecture (Kadı, 2023: 156). Our artist from Çorum, who was born in the geography of this deep-rooted Civilization and spent his childhood and youth with the heritage of this culture, interprets the Hittite images he was inspired by in his works painted with fantastic abstractions in an original way. Artist Bünyamin Balamir frequently includes the Hittite civilization's cultural heritage that has survived to the present day, such as ritual objects, idols, monuments and animal figures, in his works. He portrays his longing for this fairy-tale nature in Anatolia, where he spent his childhood, in an abstract-concrete relationship, carrying his dreams and emotions to endless spaces, with the rhythm of extraordinary colors. Bünyamin Balamir says, “The heart of art is local, its language is universal” (Balamir, interview, 2024) and he reflects his own cultural values in his art by bringing them to a contemporary dimension. He combines natural scenes with objects belonging to a civilization that lived thousands of years ago in his paintings. The Hittite images discussed as a subject in this article are limited to the images included in the artist's works. In this study, the works with Hittite images combined with fantastic places by the academician artist Bünyamin Balamir, who spent years in artistic production, are investigated and 5 of them are tried to be evaluated with the method of artwork analysis as a sample. Through research, an important example of the reinterpretation of historical images in contemporary Turkish art is presented, revealing how artists transform cultural heritage. At the same time, by examining the place of Hittite images in contemporary art practice, a contribution is made to Turkish art history through the example of Bünyamin Balamir’s works.
Keywords: Bünyamin Balamir, Hittite Civilization, Contemporary Turkish art, image