Abstract
This article examines contemporary Turkish scholarship on the Great Silk Road and identifies the philosophical meanings underlying historical, economic, and cultural interpretations of the phenomenon. The core corpus consists of 15 Turkish-language studies published between 2012 and 2024; selected works from Kazakhstan, Europe and China are used as a comparative context rather than as part of the Turkish corpus. Diachronic, comparative-contextual, textual and hermeneutic approaches reveal three interpretive directions: historical-geographical and economic, cultural-symbolic, and civilizational-hermeneutic. The comparison also shows the internal heterogeneity of Turkish historiography: earlier works tend to foreground routes, trade and political control, whereas later studies more often emphasize urban culture, symbolic exchange, heritage and cultural mediation. Four philosophical functions of the concept of “road” are distinguished: spatial, mediative, historical and interpretive. Comparison with Kazakhstani, European and Chinese scholarship situates this model within archaeological-urban, network-landscape and source-based contextual approaches. The article concludes that the Silk Road is best understood as a dynamic polycentric communicative space in which material exchange, power, cultural memory and the transformation of meanings interacted.