The study’s theoretical engine is the field theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu described culture as a set of semi-autonomous fields—art, literature, academia, the mass media—each governed by its own rules, hierarchies, and forms of capital. Economic capital, the straightforward currency of money, can be converted into symbolic capital, the accumulated prestige that confers legitimacy, and back again, but only through mechanisms specific to each field. Consecration, in Bourdieu’s vocabulary, is the process by which institutions such as museums, festivals, critics, or state heritage bodies certify an object or practice as valuable. Sağlam’s central claim is that Şahmaran has been consecrated three times over, in three different registers, and that each consecration has recoded what the figure fundamentally means.

The first regime the study maps is artistic production. Livaneli’s 1993 film represents an auteur-driven engagement with the myth, one in which the figure is translated into the conventions of art cinema and positioned within a national cultural canon. In this field, value is attributed through authorial reputation, festival visibility, and critical discourse rather than through mass viewership. The myth’s serpent imagery and its associations with wisdom, healing, and hidden knowledge become raw material for an aesthetic project, and the resulting work accrues symbolic capital that can later be mobilized by other institutions. Sağlam treats this film not as a static adaptation but as an early act of legitimation that established Şahmaran as a figure worthy of serious cultural attention.

The second regime is heritage-oriented discourse, exemplified by the 2011 documentary Yarısı İnsan Yarısı Yılan. Here the mechanism of value attribution shifts from aesthetics to authenticity. Documentary framing, ethnographic authority, and the vocabulary of intangible cultural heritage recode Şahmaran as a piece of patrimony—something rooted in place, tradition, and collective memory that deserves preservation and recognition. This is a familiar maneuver in contemporary cultural politics, where folklore is converted into heritage and heritage into a resource for tourism, education, and national or regional identity. The study’s point is technical as much as interpretive: the same narrative figure that functioned as art-cinema material becomes, under documentary conditions, an artifact whose value lies in its claimed origins rather than in its formal innovation.

The third and most contemporary regime is platform-mediated popular media, represented by the Netflix series Şahmaran. Streaming platforms operate according to a different logic of consecration altogether, one in which value is measured through global reach, algorithmic visibility, subscriber engagement, and the branding power of a transnational service. When a local myth is translated into a prestige-style fantasy series for a worldwide audience, its signifiers are retooled for legibility across cultures: romance, spectacle, and genre conventions take center stage, while the figure’s regional embeddedness is packaged as exotic distinctiveness. Sağlam’s framework captures this as a conversion of cultural specificity into platform capital—the myth becomes valuable precisely because it can be simultaneously local in flavor and global in distribution.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is its insistence that Bourdieu’s model, developed in an era of national publishing houses and state cultural institutions, needs an upgrade for the streaming age. Bourdieu did account for the transformation of meaning as works moved between fields, but he did not treat media form itself as a structuring force in capital conversion. Sağlam argues that in contemporary media environments the format—a feature film, a documentary, a serialized platform drama—is not a neutral container. Each format carries its own institutional conditions, aesthetic conventions, and mechanisms of value attribution, and these shape what a translated myth can mean before a single interpretive choice is made. Media form, in this account, functions as a co-author of value.

The word translation in the study’s title is doing deliberate double duty. As a scholar based in a translation and interpreting department, Sağlam frames adaptation across media as translation in the broadest sense: not the word-for-word transfer between languages, but the recoding of a cultural figure as it passes between sign systems, genres, and institutional regimes. Each version of Şahmaran is a translation of prior versions, and each translation performs work that goes beyond fidelity to the source. It selects, amplifies, suppresses, and re-weights elements of the myth to satisfy the demands of the receiving field. The serpent queen who embodies esoteric knowledge in one regime becomes an emblem of heritage in another and a globally marketable fantasy property in a third.

This perspective has implications that extend well beyond a single myth. Scholars of adaptation have long noted that retellings reveal as much about the societies producing them as about the sources they adapt. Sağlam’s contribution is to give that observation a sociological mechanism: the production of value can be traced, field by field, through identifiable acts of consecration performed by identifiable institutions. The approach offers a template for studying other mobile cultural figures—folk heroes, legendary creatures, canonical epics—as they circulate through art houses, museums, heritage boards, and streaming catalogs. It also illuminates why contemporary folklore revivals so often feel contradictory: the same figure can be simultaneously preserved as authentic tradition and commodified as global content, because different fields are conferring different kinds of value on it at the same time.

The timing of the research is notable. The Netflix series concluded its run in 2024, and its international visibility made Şahmaran a household name far beyond the regions where the legend originated, from the Tarsus narratives associated with the figure to the wider Anatolian and Mesopotamian storytelling traditions. That global moment created the conditions for a retrospective analysis of the whole media trajectory, from the art cinema of the early 1990s through documentary heritage discourse to platform-era fantasy. The study, published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, was supported by the Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit of Firat University under project number İSBF.26.17, and the author declares no competing interests.

Ultimately, the research suggests that myths do not survive modernity by remaining unchanged; they survive by being useful. Each institutional regime that adopts Şahmaran extracts from the figure the kind of value it knows how to produce—prestige, authenticity, or reach—and in doing so adds a new layer to the character’s cultural biography. The half-human, half-serpent queen, a being of thresholds and hybridity, turns out to be an unusually apt symbol for this process, since her own dual nature mirrors the dual economies, local and global, symbolic and economic, that every adaptation must navigate. In tracing her passage across three decades of Turkish media, the study offers a compact demonstration of how culture is not merely transmitted but continuously re-priced, and how the price is set less by storytellers than by the fields in which they work.

Subject of Research: The transformation of the mythological figure Şahmaran and its cultural value across three Turkish media regimes

Article Title: Translating the myth: Şahmaran and the production of value across Turkish media

Article References: Sağlam, N. (2026). Translating the myth: Şahmaran and the production of value across Turkish media. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09347-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09347-6

Keywords: Şahmaran, Turkish media, Bourdieu, field theory, cultural value, adaptation, translation studies, heritage, Netflix, mythology, capital conversion, media form