Culture is the fundamental building block of society, encompassing elements transmitted across generations and instilling a sense of nationhood. Turkish culture has persisted across diverse geographies for centuries, integrating with Islam to form a distinctive identity in Anatolia. Among the key institutions of Turkish-Islamic civilization, Sufism produced one of its most influential manifestations, Mevlevism, which emerged as a concrete expression of Islamic mysticism in Anatolia. Like other belief systems, Mevlevism possesses unique rituals and attire, embodying tangible and intangible elements of cultural heritage and conveying multiple layers of symbolic meaning. Contemporary research increasingly explores how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can analyze, interpret, and reconstruct cultural phenomena. This study employs ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek to conduct a semiotic analysis of Mevlevi attire using Roland Barthes’ three-level framework (signifier, signified, myth). To verify the cultural and terminological accuracy of the findings, additional AI tools Google Gemini, Le Chat Mistral AI, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude were used. The results show that Mevlevi garments are not merely clothing items but carry profound cultural and religious symbolism. Moreover, this study demonstrates the feasibility of applying AI-assisted digital methods to cultural artifacts, presenting an interdisciplinary approach bridging traditional semiotics with modern technological tools. The study is very important and contributes to the field because it sets an example for the integration of artificial intelligence into cultural analysis and because there is no interdisciplinary study done before in this sense.
Semiotic, Mevlevi attire, artificial intelligence.