Mahallah

The word was brought to the Balkans through Ottoman Turkish mahalle, but it originates in Arabic محلة (mähallä), from the root meaning "to settle", "to occupy".

In September 2017, a Turkish-based association referred to the historical mahalle by organizing a festival with the title "Mahalla" in the frame of parallel events of the 15th Istanbul Biennial.

The festival in Istanbul features cultural initiatives of civil society and artists from the Middle East, Europe, the Balkans and Turkey.

The second Mahalla Festival took place 2018 in Valletta, Malta, in the frame of European Capital of Culture[2] under the title "Generating New Narratives".

The third Mahalla Festival took place in 2020 under the title "Wandering Towers" with online and physical events due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In ancient cultures, hospitality involved welcoming a stranger at the host location and offering him food, shelter and safety.

The township of Szentendre lost most of its population during the Ottoman era, and was repopulated by various migrant groups from the Balkans - Serbs, Dalmatians, Bosniaks and the like.

They called them mahala or mehala, using the Ottoman nomenclature, and the word is still in use to describe these small quarters of the town today.

In Romanian, the word mahala has come to have the strictly negative or pejorative connotations of a slum or ghetto[7] that are not present (or not as strongly implied) in other languages.

Religious rituals, life-cycle crisis ceremonies, resource management, conflict resolution, and many other community activities were performed at the mahalla, in other words, on the neighbourhood level.

Mahalla level state-society relationships were more complex, however, as their leaders could serve as henchmen as well as act as buffers between the local community and the state.

[10] In Turkey, mahalle, which may be translated as 'neighborhood', was traditionally a kind of sub-village settlement, one that could be found in both rural settings and in towns.