This paper will provide an assessment of rural studies in Turkey and explore how this tradition can be blended with new theoretical approaches in anthropology and sister disciplines. In societies without a colonial past, like Turkey, ethnographic research is not limited to anthropology. In this context, it is possible to start the rural ethnographic research tradition with the Hygenic and Social Geography of Turkey series of the 1920s. The peasantism movement of the Kemalist period was followed by the tradition elaborated by Paul Stirling, and rural studies went through their heyday with the village monographies of the 1960s and 1970s. These years also witnessed the shift from villages to towns as the unit of research. Ethnographies of Turkey have recently gained momentum both in Turkey and in academic circles abroad. However, parallel to this development, the weight of urban centers in research has practically created an urban-rural divide, concealing the connections between the urban and the rural. This paper will explore the legacy and the future of rural studies in Turkey by investigating the representations, uses and management of forests in Turkey throughout the 20th century. The silence in social science research with regard to forest villagers who make up half of the rural population is perhaps one of the most striking examples of this divide. Yet forestry is closely tied to the Turkish modernization project of nationalism and economic development. Moreover it is situated at the junction between the urban and the rural. Through the case of how forests are imagined, experienced and managed, this paper will investigate the processes of citizenship and state making in Turkey in the twentieth century, thereby emphasizing the need for a new generation of rural research in ethnographies of Turkey. Combined with the proliferation of new research trends in rural, agricultural and environmental matters carried out in the world today, a critical look at this tradition in Turkey will form the basis for a new rural studies tradition. This new tradition will also serve as a channel for environmental anthropology, an inter-disciplinary approach that has recently established itself in academic circles to take a hold in anthropologies of Turkey.