Worldwide, the architects of nationalist projects and the “burning souls” (Livingston 2014) of folk music revivals have long turned to imagined rural pasts as wellsprings of cultural authenticity. At Müzik Köyü (Music Village), a summer music seminar founded in 2017 in Türkiye, amateur and professional musicians alike derive belonging, emplacement, and meaning through music-making in various rural sites around the country while negotiating two seemingly opposed entities: the Turkish state on one hand, and anti-nationalist sentiments valuing pluralism and diversity on the other. Both positions uphold a phantasmic vision of rural Anatolia as the pure source of authentic folk music.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Müzik Köyü in 2023 and 2024, this paper explores the experience of musicking through the lenses of the phantasm (Agamben 1993; Favero 2003; Girgis 2007), diasporic nostalgia (Boym 2001), and Alevi cosmology as it is expressed in the lyrics of various Alevi song forms frequently played at Müzik Köyü such as nefes (hymn; lit. breath), deyiş (lit. saying) and unattributed songs like “Heredîya.” The paper further examines how these Alevi musical-poetic forms articulate an affective orientation toward longing, non-arrival, and ongoing seeking. I argue that this orientation helps explain both the centrality of Alevi repertoire at Müzik Köyü and its broad resonance among participants of all backgrounds. More broadly, this paper situates music seminars within scholarship on nationalism, rural imaginaries, and folk music revivals, demonstrating how phantasmic yearnings continue to shape musical practice far beyond the Turkish context.