Therapeutic forgetting,agonistic remembrance: Conflicting memories of Izmir’s Kültürpark and contested narratives in contemporary Turkey

Introduction

Inaugurated in 1936, Izmir’s Kültürpark is a significant urban landmark of Turkish modernization and nation building. Built on land cleared by the Great Fire of 1922, Kültürpark was conceived as a recreational public space devoted to the creation of a new citizenry schooled in the newly implemented social and political reforms of the young Turkish Republic. In addition, the park was meant to serve as the permanent home of the Izmir International Fair, a high-profile annual event that was conceived as a staging platform for the industrial and economic ambitions of the new regime. Both the annual fair and the urban park were institutions crucial to the newly forged urban identity of the once multicultural port city of Izmir. While Kültürpark became a planning tool to regenerate the urban fabric of war-ravaged Izmir, the month-long fair was meant to rehabilitate the city’s economic life and, on broader level, the national economy of the young Republic.

Kültürpark is one of the most striking examples of the ambitious urban projects carried out in the 1920s and 1930s by early Republican reformers who wanted to effect a clean break with Turkey’s Ottoman past through a modernist rebuilding of cities and towns across the country. Accordingly, histories of Turkish modernization present the park as a celebration of the forward-looking ethos of Republican ideals and the nationwide industrial mobilization. Kültürpark is hailed as a tribute to the regenerative spirit of the Turkish Revolution led by Mustafa Kemal as it lifted Izmir from the ashes of destruction and transformed it into a front line of Turkish modernization and nation-building cause. What often gets left out is the history of the very site of Kültürpark prior to its being razed by the Great Fire of 1922 and subsequently christened as a modern landmark of national importance, namely the fact that this area was once home to the city’s Greek and Armenian communities whose total population was above the mark of 100,000. We propose to read Kültürpark’s history as symptomatic of Turkey’s troubled relationship with its political past and urban heritage which stand witness to the once multicultural coexistence of different religious and ethnic communities. Architectural and urban histories have often portrayed this heritage as essentially Turkish, overlooking the role of non-Muslim agents and communities in shaping urban space.

Today many scholars concur that this scholarly and historiographic agreement can be viewed as an extension of the official narrative of the Turkish Republic that has suppressed not only the multicultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire but also the legacy of past wrongs and conflicting memories (Göçek, 2007: 340, 350; Özyürek, 2007: 3; Ugur Cinar, 2015: 17; Üngör, 2014: 150–153). Özyürek (2007), in a pioneering collection of essays on Turkish memory debates she has edited, argues that the process that led to the formation of the Turkish Republic included unprecedented levels of mass violence in which unwanted communities were ‘massacred, deported, or encouraged to migrate in the name of establishing a homogenous national identity’ (p. 11). One of the priorities of the new Republic was to construct an official memory narrative in which this violent past is muted. As Sancar (2007) remarks in his compelling book, which is the first comprehensive study written in Turkish on the topic of coming to terms with the past, based on selective and positive memory constructs, this official narrative is marked by a continual denial of past wrongs and serious conflict within collective memory. It has occupied centre stage in public consciousness within much of Turkish Republican history primarily because it has been disseminated through public education, mass media, national celebrations, memorials, and museums. Different versions of it have been told and retold by politicians, diplomats, historians, journalists, writers and artists in every generation. And consequently, it has become firmly established as the master narrative within scholarly historiography and public consciousness.

The objective of this article is threefold. First, referring to the history of the park, it seeks to examine how Kültürpark rose on a foundation of traumatic loss and wilful forgetting. That the park came to be associated with a festive event of nationwide significance presents a stark contrast to the catastrophic destruction of the city, which resulted in the physical uprooting of the city’s non-Muslim communities from their homeland and the complete disappearance of their cultural traces from collective memory.

Second, since the 2000s, we argue, this collective amnesia has been scrutinized and the overarching master narrative has been contested by critical voices and formerly silenced memories. Drawing on the works of a number of contemporary Turkish artists and civic initiatives dealing with the themes of remembrance and coming to terms with the past, we explore the ways in which these interventions can contest highly selective and exclusionary memory constructs of the official master narrative, thereby contributing to the gradual formation of a more inclusive vision of collective memory and urban heritage. These artistic and civic interventions (which, as we will point out, are by no means limited to Izmir) are symptomatic of the growing public contestations over the national past and the mutations occurring in Turkey’s memory culture as they call attention to past wounds and injustices that were previously silenced and ignored. In doing so, they tap into a culture of remembrance that is currently in the making by a new generation of artists, activists, journalists and academics across Turkey who increasingly question past atrocities that haunt the Turkish nation-building project.

Third, we would like to raise the question of whether these debates about the national past might open up a new memoryscape and perhaps even signal a relatively late ‘memory turn’ in Turkey. If so, might this shed new light on the theoretical disputes in the field of memory studies? For the last two decades, many critics and commentators have paid particular attention to two different styles in which societies remember the past. Some scholars argue that the worldwide spread of Holocaust consciousness has facilitated the emergence of a cosmopolitan mode of remembering that has gradually given way to the formation of transnational solidarities and mutual responsibilities transcending territorial and national boundaries (Bernstein, 2004; Levy and Sznaider, 2002; Torpey, 2003). ¹ For some others, the global spread of a cosmopolitan memory culture, far from having led to a complete supersession of national and exclusionary narratives, has opened up a deeply contestatory memoryscape with an agonistic mode of remembering, characterized by an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of conflicting historical narratives (Bell, 2008; Cento Bull and Hansen, 2016). ² In response to this debate, Huyssen (2018) argues that it would be quite misleading to juxtapose these two modes of remembering in this way, and that ‘an emergent planetary sphere of memory actually depends on the diversity of national (and regional, group-specific) memory spheres for its effectiveness in transnational human-rights struggles and cross-cultural understandings and contacts’.

In a similar vein, we suggest that the recent memory turn Turkey has been experiencing demonstrates that these two modes of remembering are not mutually exclusive. Let us explicitly stress that our intention in this article is not to provide an in-depth analysis of the scholarly debates on cosmopolitan or agonistic modes of remembering. Rather, the scope of our discussion is restricted to a particular facet of each perspective and their coexistence in Turkish memory debates: growing acknowledgement of past wrongs and solidarity with silenced victims on the one hand, and competing claims and rival narratives about the national past on the other hand. Our central thesis is that the coexistence of these two modes of remembering might sharpen our understanding of the challenges we confront in the transition from what we term a ‘therapeutic phase’ in which highly selective memory constructs were uniting the nation around an edifying account of the past to an ‘agonistic phase’ in which the underlying consensus about the past gives way to a conflict of interpretations and rival narratives. But at the same time we now see, among a marginal but influential part of Turkish society, a shift in perspective from patriotic identification with the national heroes to solidarity with the forgotten non-Muslim communities, which implies a transition from nationalistic narrative styles to a more cosmopolitan mode of remembrance that does not shy away from acknowledging past wrongs and victims.

As its title indicates, this article aims to explore Turkey’s memory turn from a duo-focal perspective that places the notions of therapeutic forgetting and agonistic remembrance at the centre of analysis. But what makes forgetting ‘therapeutic’ and remembrance ‘agonistic’, and why do we choose these two qualifying adjectives to assess Turkish memory debates? Let us briefly elucidate the meaning of these two concepts before turning to the scholarly debates about collective memory in Turkey.

Building on the works of scholars such as Rousso (1991) and Booth (2001), we use the term therapeutic narrative in connection with acts of silence and policies of forgetting that intend to minimize the intensity or significance of past wrongs especially in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events. It should be noted that the term therapeutic in this context by no means implies an ethically and politically meaningful way of dealing with the past. ³ Rather it should be viewed as a metaphor, since what we actually see here is a type of repression or an attempt to bury ugly aspects of the past in order to be able to invest all collective energy in building a new future (Booth, 2001: 777; Stone, 2010: 115). The therapeutic or restorative function of national narratives is not a recent discovery. A similar insight can be found in a classic text by Ernest Renan (1882) on the concept of nation where the French historian argues that national narratives often ignore some events and highlight others. This filtering process fosters the confidence of its members and creates a positive self-image that enables the national group to avoid being reminded of its own implication in massive atrocities and collective violence. Such silencing attempts resemble what Connerton (2008: 60), one of the leading scholars in the field of memory studies, calls ‘repressive erasure’ which is a particular type of forgetting implemented mainly by the state to bring about a historical break with the unwanted memories of an irreversible past. But unlike repressive erasure, the agent of therapeutic forgetting in Turkey has not been the state alone. On the contrary, the tendency to forget and silence has been manifest as a widespread phenomenon in artistic, intellectual and academic circles as well as in public life in general. How is this colossal collective forgetting to be explained? A full-blown response to this question goes far beyond the scope of our article. But part of the answer lies in the fact that the destruction caused by World War I in Anatolia, and particularly in our context by the catastrophic fire in Izmir, was followed soon thereafter by the founding of the new Republic. The entire memoryscape of the Turkish Republic was to be predicated on an extremely edifying and celebratory narrative that not only repudiated any continuity with the Ottoman past, but also nurtured and strengthened a predisposition to forget all the injustices committed by the Turkish state and nation against non-Muslim communities of Anatolia (Göçek, 2007: 359).

We argue that when this officially sanctioned narrative of forgetting past injustices comes under attack by a variety of artistic, academic and civic voices, which indeed seems to have been the case in Turkish memory debates for the last two decades, the entire landscape of memory becomes a site of contestation and public debate. This is precisely the reason why we argue that we need to turn our face to the agonistic mode of remembering. The agonistic turn in the field of memory studies has its roots in the revival of agonism in political theory in the 1990s which in turn was a critical response to contemporary liberalism’s stress on procedures and institutions designed to achieve consensus. ⁴ Agonistic political theorists, by contrast, draw attention to the centrality of conflict and contestation in public life and within democratic politics (Villa, 1999: 108). Inspired by political agonism, many scholars (Schaap (2005), Bell (2008), and Cento Bull and Hansen (2016) among them) have argued that this emphasis on conflict can introduce previously unexplored issues into memory studies and shed new light on the dilemmas of national narratives. We do not of course need to subscribe to a too rigid and essentializing dichotomy between consensus and conflict, or cosmopolitan versus agonistic modes of remembering. What matters, as far as our analysis is concerned, is the central place accorded to the clash of competing interpretations about the national past that is more often than not saturated with a history of violence and conflict, which leads to irreconcilable perspectives, conflicting narratives and divided memories. Our emphasis on agonistic remembrance stems from an acknowledgement of this continual confrontation with and reflection about the national past.

One last point is in order before we conclude this introductory section and it concerns the main focus of our inquiry: Kültürpark and, in a larger sense, the city of Izmir. Turkish memory debates have primarily centred on Ankara and Istanbul, the former being conceived as a monument to Turkish nation building while the latter embodied all that was Ottoman from which the Republic wanted to distance itself. Recent scholarship has shifted its focus away from these two cities to explore how Republican narratives of the past have shaped the way communities in locations far from Turkey’s old and new capitals forget and remember. The ensuing discussion on Izmir adds to this growing body of scholarship as it shifts the attention away from the two major epicentres of Turkish memory debates to explore an important aspect of the diverse terrain of public memory in Turkey. Moreover, the almost wholesale destruction of Izmir’s city centre and the subsequent development of Kültürpark define a unique instance of collective amnesia, distinguished not only by its extent and severity, but also by the very fact that it had become manifest in physical form in the shaping of the built environment. The significance of Kültürpark is paramount as it illustrates how memory is negotiated in modern Turkey in built form as well as in social values, rituals and institutions. For Turkish memory debates, the park is both unique and representative; unique as the physical embodiment of a collective amnesia of massive proportions, representative as it has inspired contemporary artistic and civic practices – practices that are not limited to Izmir, but that appear elsewhere in cities like Istanbul – which explore Turkey’s built heritage in their attempt to come to terms with the country’s troubled past.

Turkey’s memory turn

The origins of the rise of interest in memory in Turkey, as Özyürek (2007: 2–4) argues, can be traced back to the 1990s. The initial interest, accompanied by commodification of nostalgia and popularization of history, was mainly a reaction to the ‘administered forgetting’ of the Ottoman past by the Republican reformers who entertained a decidedly modernist, future-oriented and progressive vision. Nevertheless, as the growing interest for the past since the 1990s demonstrates, the systematic efforts to establish a unitary official narrative and ‘to foster forgetfulness’ failed to erase past memories altogether (Özyürek, 2007: 6; Üngör, 2014: 149). This public upsurge of memory has taken many forms: growing interest in genealogical roots; different kinds of national commemorative events and new museums; explosion of interest in memoirs, historical novels and films; and emergence of a greater attention to the multicultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire and, particularly among the conservative segments of Turkish society, its stress on Islam. Over the past decade, scholars examining this rising interest in the past in the Turkish context have also drawn attention to the resurgence of neo-Ottomanism as yet another form of state-sanctioned historiography that glorifies the Ottoman past in the service of the present, and which aims to replace the founding memory framework of the Republic with a new official narrative (Bakiner, 2013: 692; Kechriotis, 2011: 102). Fully in line with the interdisciplinary nature of memory studies, scholars from various fields of study have made contributions to this debate. The sociologists Ergin and Karakaya (2017), in looking at the social and political sources of this nostalgic take on the past, identify two interrelated, analytical categories: ‘neo-Ottomanism’ and ‘Ottomania’. While the former refers to a project led by the ruling Justice and Development Party, ‘geared toward promoting nostalgia via an emphasis on the Ottomans’ multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance’, the latter ‘embraces popular culture with an emphasis on consumption of a wide spectrum of products, from bath packages to television series’ (Ergin and Karakaya, 2017: 36). Dwelling on this selective multiculturalism in her analysis of the museumization of memory narratives, Iğsız (2015: 327) sees neo-Ottomanism as ‘a discourse on the past intended to legitimize contemporary neoliberal and cultural policies by drawing on anachronistic reinterpretations and the glorification of the Ottoman past’. Furthermore, this new official narrative, motivated by strategic concerns, either promotes uncritical interpretations of the past or enforces silence on critical voices that challenge its hegemonic memory project (Ayata and Hakyemez, 2013: 131–133; Bakiner, 2013: 691–694). In addition to these perceptive observations, we would like to add the following argument: the resurgence of neo-Ottomanism should be seen as a continuation of the memory boom that started in the 1990s precisely because it is devoid of a self-critical dimension. That said, it should be quite obvious that the coexistence of nostalgic neo-Ottomanism alongside both the founding memory framework of the Republic and contemporary critical interventions deepens the intensity of memory conflicts in the present.

While not wholly unrelated to the ‘memory boom’ of the 1990s, what we call the recent ‘memory turn’ in Turkey has an entirely different ethical and political orientation, one that is characterized by an awareness of the catastrophic experiences of the national past and a novel sensitivity to collective atrocities, and which draws attention to the once-neglected suffering of the previously voiceless victims. The proliferation of academic and journalistic works on the Armenian Genocide, the massacres and deportation of religious and ethnic minorities, the infamous wealth tax of 1942 imposed on Christian and Jewish citizens, and the Istanbul pogrom of 6–7 September 1955 is representative of this turn. The emergence of this new preoccupation with historical injustices squarely places contemporary memory debates in Turkey in the global spread of processes of coming to terms with the past. ⁵ This turn in Turkish memory debates has been facilitated by a series of events that include taboo-breaking academic conferences, apology campaigns and reconciliation statements, commemorative gatherings, the screening of documentaries and feature films, and the publication of autobiographies and memoirs by members of minority communities. ⁶ As Kaya (2015: 683) points out in her meticulous analysis of the Turkish memory debates of the 2000s, ‘what renders this decade distinct compared to the earlier period, however, is the deployment of the discourse of “coming to terms with the past”’. In a similar vein, in the final chapter of an extremely illuminating study of the construction of the ‘Armenian question’ narrative in Turkey, the political scientists Turan and Öztan (2018) focus on the proliferation of perspectives as well as of fault lines in Turkish memory debates in the post-2000 period. They too draw attention to the growing number of actors who explicitly challenge hegemonic memory narratives. Unlike those works that primarily examine either the memory boom of the 1990s or the resurgence of neo-Ottomanism, these two studies shift the scholarly discussion away from selective memory constructs of hegemonic narratives to critical interventions.

Needless to say, critical memory narratives that have emerged since the 2000s have not replaced the older ones. Furthermore, given the coexistence of a diversity of worldviews and consequently of a multiplicity of alternative memories across Turkey, these interventions certainly do not always receive much public attention or widespread acknowledgement. And they are more often than not accompanied by bitter struggles, spark ‘memory wars’, or trigger reactions in the form of denial of past wrongs. But at the same time, such attempts ‘unsettle the hegemonic appropriation[s] of the past’ (Bakiner, 2013: 691), ‘transgress nationalist boundaries’ (Kasbarian and Öktem, 2014: 123), contribute to the ‘discursive widening of the public sphere’ (Ayata and Hakyemez, 2013: 132), and create ‘a space for innovative contention’ (Kechriotis, 2011: 116). The emphasis we place on the agonistic aspects of remembrance as well as our reading of the artistic and civic interventions in this article should be read in the light of these public and scholarly debates. While all of the earlier scholarly contributions have sharpened our awareness of the complexity of Turkey’s memory landscape, the relevance of neither Izmir’s multicultural urban heritage nor contemporary artworks to the dynamic between forgetting and remembrance has received much scholarly attention. ⁷ We focus on this relatively unexplored territory in our article.

Silencing the past

The first question that we need to ask is why the history of the site of Kültürpark is systematically overlooked in urban histories of Izmir. The answer lies, in part, in the way in which the writing of history in modern Turkey had come to be intimately connected to the project of nation building. The founding of the Republic marked a new beginning, a sort of a revolutionary zero hour which served as the starting point for constructing homogeneous narratives of national identity and unity. The social and cultural institutions of Republican Turkey took it upon themselves to construct a new public memory that facilitated the creation of a national tradition and celebrated the founding narrative of the new Republic. The result was the weeding out from canonical histories of cultural production the contribution of non-Muslim Ottoman citizens. ⁸ In architecture, in particular, the names of Armenian and Greek architects were for a long time conspicuously absent from histories of Turkish architecture with historiography starting with the professionally trained foundational figures of Vedat Tek and Mimar Kemalettin, who themselves were often marginalized as their historicist vocabularies did not sit well with the early Republican regime’s intention to break with the Ottoman past. ⁹ Likewise, the physical fabric of cities had undergone a similar impoverishment with the gradual loss of visibility of non-Muslim communities, whose built heritage – so prominent a part of the Ottoman cityscape – had by and large been eliminated through destruction, confiscation of property, renaming of streets and places, simple neglect or urban redevelopment (Balakian, 2013; Bevan, 2006; Üngör and Polatel, 2011). As the architectural historian Kezer (2015: 151) remarks in her comprehensive account of the subject,

the transformation or deterioration of non-Muslim structures beyond recognition – coupled with their conscious omission from most historical accounts, as evidenced by their absence on maps and in local histories and textbooks – was part of an effort to edit non-Muslims out of Turkey’s heritage as well.

Similarly, Üngör (2013: 309) suggests that the urban policies and plans of the interwar years can be interpreted as memory politics: ‘the historical imagination of the regime determined which aspects of a city’s history would be accentuated and which aspects silenced’. The widespread disregard for what once stood on the site of Kültürpark, thus, has very much to do with the mental habits of a people bent on disowning the past while forging a new polity and a sense of national unity.

A second, and perhaps more important, factor that occasioned this void in public memory is the Great Fire of 1922. On 13 September, a mere four days after the Turkish cavalry entered Izmir bringing the Greek occupation of the city to an end, a number of disparate fires joined in one huge conflagration that eventually swept across three quarters of the city destroying the Frank, Armenian and Greek districts. Who was responsible for the fire? The debate is a sensitive one and had too often suffered from nationalistic biases. While most Turkish historical accounts place the blame on Armenian revolutionaries, the Greek and Armenian accounts, citing numerous eyewitness testimonies, hold the Turkish army responsible for the fire and the ensuing humanitarian tragedy. ¹⁰ Sifting the truth from claims made by different sides of the argument is beyond the scope of this article. What we seek to highlight, instead, is the opportunistic seizing of the city’s destruction by fire to build a new public memory upon the forgetting of wrongful acts of dispossession, confiscation, forced expulsion, pillaging and violence against civilians.

Over the last two decades, a sizable literature has grown that aims to shed light on the collective forgetting of this painful episode in Izmir’s history. The scholarship ranges from investigations into the historical factors that served as the backdrop of the city’s destruction (Doumanis, 2012; Kasaba, 2002) to studies on the social and political dynamics of forgetting (Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, 2005; Neyzi, 2008b), from works that attempt at keeping a record of the witness accounts of a fast fading past (Böke, 2006; Neyzi, 2008a) to scholarly examinations of Izmir’s reconstruction as the city became a showcase of Turkish nation building (Bugatti, 2013; Hastaoglou-Martinidis and Pallini, 2013; Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, 2002). Scholars concur that a culture of silence prevailed in Turkey where virtually no mention of the fire was found in both official and popular discourse. Politicians and authorities barely acknowledged the catastrophe that came close to wiping out the city in its entirety, while scholars, writers and artists shied away from exploring the issue in their works altogether. What are we to make of this collective forgetting? In her seminal analysis of the public memory of the Great Fire, Kolluoğlu-Kırlı (2005) argues that the erasure of the memory of the fire from official history and collective memory proved instrumental in ridding the city of its multicultural Ottoman past and helped prepare the ground to build anew in keeping with the emerging nationalist imaginary in Turkey. ‘The way in which fire is deliberately overlooked’, she further observes, ‘implies the presence of an offence, a violence, and the concerted effort spent to forget it speaks to an attempt of amnesty and reconciliation’. Yet, Kolluoğlu states that this was not merely an offence against non-Muslim Izmirians who were victims of widespread violence, but also ‘against the city, the chastising of Smyrna . . . the taming of its “foreignness” . . . [and] the violation of its continuity’ (p. 41).

It may also be argued that the silence that surrounds the fire might suggest a willingness on the part of Turkish officials and public alike to have the memory of the catastrophe fade, perhaps in an attempt to avoid any charges of complicity that might be directed at them. New research on urban conflagrations in Anatolian towns during and immediately after World War I hints at the possibility of systematic use of fires by local authorities as extensions of the Young Turk government’s ethnic cleansing policies (Esin and Etöz, 2015). Was the Great Fire of Izmir one such case? To be sure, fire was a common occurrence in Ottoman cities. In the nineteenth century, it was embraced as a planning tool (Gürses Söğüt, 2016). When a neighbourhood was struck by fire, it presented local authorities with an opportunity to bring order, however incremental, to the physical fabric of the city, which otherwise would have never benefitted from a more comprehensive intervention given the limited resources at administrators’ disposal. Thus, fire became synonymous with opportunity for rebuilding.

The notion of the fire as an impetus for rebuilding also appears as an evocative and oft-used metaphor in the literary canon of the early Republican era. Works of literature from this period, invariably motivated by nationalist sentiment, frequently invoke the image of the country under allied occupation as a fire scene engulfed in flames. ¹¹ There was truth to the widespread destruction following the Ottoman defeat at World War I. ¹² What interested early Republican authors, however, was not so much to chronicle and keep a record of the ravages of war, but rather to call attention to the spiritual renewal and physical regeneration that would ensue following the founding of the Turkish Republic upon the so-called rubble of the Ottoman past. Fire was a rhetorical instrument to highlight the metaphysical and mystical origins of the nation’s spiritual renewal at the moment of the founding of the new Republic. The place of the burning of Izmir in Turkey’s national consciousness was thus commensurate with its significance as part of the greater narrative of national renewal and modernization. It is crucial at this point to recall Izmir’s unique status in this narrative. What eventually came to be termed as the Turkish War of Independence was triggered by the Allied-sanctioned Greek occupation of the port city in May 1919; and it was the Turkish recapture of Izmir in September 1922 that brought the war to a close. Izmir’s place was thus firmly embedded in the founding narrative of the Turkish Republic, and the city’s trial by fire became a convenient episode in the larger narration of reconstruction and quest for national identity. It is therefore not surprising that the fire zone has received little attention in historical accounts of Kültürpark, for the traumatic memory of the fire ran the risk of competing and conflicting with the jubilant memory of the city’s deliverance from Greek rule and of further contaminating the officially sanctioned master narrative of Republican memory with the troublesome question of who started the fire.

The therapy of forgetting and building anew

We would like to stress two essential characteristics of the history of collective memory that are highly relevant to the prevailing memory practices regarding Izmir’s cultural history, and which inform our analysis of the recent memory turn that has been underway in Turkey since the 2000s. First, as Assmann (1997: 9) writes, ‘mnemohistory’ differs from history proper in that it is not primarily concerned with the past as such, ‘but only with the past as it is remembered’. More specifically, collective memory refers to a dynamic and fluid process, namely the formation and representation of widely shared perceptions of a public past that are recollected and kept alive in the present through the ‘ongoing work of reconstructive imagination’ (Assmann, 1997: 10). Second, collective memory plays a vital role in the constitution and reproduction of national identities and founding narratives. Such identities and narratives are almost always based on an extremely selective representation of the past which not only engenders emotional bonds and ‘loyalty to the imagined community’ but also silences and suppresses memories of collective injustice (Bell, 2006: 5).

One of the clearest expressions of this dynamic of inclusion and exclusion, remembrance and forgetting, can be found in Renan’s highly influential text. Forgetting, Renan (1882) remarks, is an essential ingredient in the creation of a nation: ‘The essence of a nation is that all of its individual members have a great deal in common and also that they have forgotten many things . . . Every French citizen has forgotten St. Bartholomew’s Day’. Is the Great Fire of Izmir Turkey’s or perhaps more specifically Izmir’s Saint Bartholomew’s Day? ¹³ Although many Izmirians celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of Izmir as a Republican narrative of pride, glory and independence every September, they easily ignore the uncomfortable memory of the Great Fire which destroyed much of the city in September 1922. ‘All profound changes in consciousness’, as Anderson (2006: 204) argues, ‘bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives’.

This dialectic between forgetting and remembrance particularly becomes manifest in the founding narratives of nations that have recently experienced the trauma of war and genocide, intercommunal conflict and violence or regime transformation. During such periods of catastrophe and/or transition, nations display a tendency to assume the roles of victim and resister which provide a basis for a new civic identity with an honourable past and a hopeful future. In doing so, they also tend to memorialize heroic deeds of their own and to bury ugly memories of past wrongs (Assmann, 2007: 15–16). Thus, national collective memory is simultaneously rooted in a form of collective amnesia and selective memory, which, on the one hand, allows society to ‘clean the slate’, start afresh without inherited wrongs and make a successful transition and, on the other hand, serves to form a positive self-image by suppressing uncomfortable memories, particularly the memory of crimes and their victims as well as the voices of dissident and minority groups (Wolin, 1989: 33–38).

These selective memory constructs provide the national community with what we would like to call a ‘therapeutic narrative’. Particularly in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events and collective wrongs, many societies take shelter behind a collective amnesia and/or a selective memory, since forgetting can be a form of ‘therapy, a way to minimize the aftershocks of trauma’ (Booth, 2001: 783). For instance, in the early post-war years of Germany, ‘the most common public attitude towards the crimes of the Nazi past was silence, avoidance, premature amnesty, and delayed and denied justice’ (Herf cited in Bell, 2006: 13). Consequently, throughout the 1950s, all social energies were channelled into the service of rebuilding the nation (Wiederaufbau) and the Nazi period was thus largely left in silence (McCarthy, 2002: 624). In France, another form of repression of past wrongs took place when De Gaulle, with the aid of political elites and various ideological groups, managed to create the official narrative of the Vichy regime as a short parenthesis in an otherwise honourable Republican history and of a national resistance to the Nazi occupation – a therapeutic narrative that ‘sought to minimize the importance of the Vichy regime and its impact on French society, including its most negative aspects’ (Rousso, 1991: 10). Such a therapeutic national narrative is primarily formed and disseminated through ‘mnemonic institutions and devices’ of the state such as national archives, monuments and museums, ceremonies and rituals, the names of streets, works of art and architecture, the educational curriculum, literary and scholarly works as well as the rhetoric and memoirs of political authorities and public figures (Margalit, 2002: 54). This is the institutional and discursive space in which a selective memory is forged and transmitted from generation to generation and becomes established as an official master narrative of the national collective. ¹⁴

In Izmir’s case, this therapeutic narrative assumed a spatial dimension. After remaining untouched for almost a decade and a half, the fire zone was cleared and redeveloped during the mid-1930s according to the much-altered 1924 plan of French planners René and Raymond Danger working in consultation with Henri Prost. The Danger-Prost plan proposed a network of squares and radial boulevards overlain on the tight urban fabric of pre-fire Izmir (Bilsel, 1996: 17–18). In 1925, changes were introduced to the Ottoman Building Law of 1882 that gave local administrators a free hand in arranging the fire zone as they saw fit, while avoiding having to deal with the complex ownership status of burnt areas (Serçe et al., 2003: 84). ¹⁵ Scholars (Bugatti, 2013; Çetin, 2005; Hastaoglou-Martinidis and Pallini, 2013; Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, 2002) argue that the rebuilding of Izmir was ideologically informed; new boulevards and squares proved instrumental to the consolidation of a national urban identity that helped exorcize the memory of the city’s multicultural past. ¹⁶

Kültürpark (Figure 1) was a central component of this rebuilding work (see Baran, 2003: 97–103; Bozdoğan, 2001: 140–147; Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, 2002: 17–23; Serçe et al., 2003: 151–207). What was initially a proposal for a relatively small urban park in the Danger-Prost plan grew to become a public space of unprecedented proportions after a proposal put forward by the city’s newly appointed deputy mayor Suad Yurdkoru who, having made a trip to Moscow, was singularly impressed with the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest completed there in 1928 (Özgünel, 2000). Gorky Park was conceived as a socialist landmark where various sports and cultural activities were brought together to fashion the new Soviet citizen at leisure (Shaw, 2011). Local authorities were quick to recognize the pedagogical implications of having such a recreational space at the heart of the city, which was in the process of being re-imagined as a showcase of Turkish modernization and nation building. While meeting the needs of urban recreation, the park would also ‘be utilized by the new generations to achieve the cultural tasks of the revolution’ (Yurdkoru cited in Serçe et al., 2003: 158–159). Accordingly, in addition to extensive sports and entertainment facilities, the grounds featured small museums devoted to Atatürk’s reforms, public health and agriculture. Furthermore, Kültürpark would serve as the permanent home of the Izmir International Fair. The annual trade fair, whose beginnings are traced back to the ‘Domestic Goods Exhibition’ of 1923, was crucial to rebuilding the city’s impoverished economy after its destruction by fire and the departure of its non-Muslim commercial class (Baran, 2003: 99). Together, the Izmir Fair and Kültürpark came to represent a unique melding of civic pride and belief in industrial progress. The fair and its purpose-built venue simultaneously served political, economic and educational purposes. They defined at once a podium upon which the Republic’s achievements could be displayed; a school where its citizens could familiarize themselves with modern technology and lifestyles while being kept informed about the various aspects of the state’s founding ideology; and an international platform where Turkey’s economic and industrial progress could be compared with the accomplishments of other nations.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Aerial view of Kültürpark with burnt areas still visible in the distance, ca. 1936.

Kültürpark initially covered an area of 360,000 square metres. Its polygonal plan was fully entrenched in the newly built network of boulevards and squares. The park was surrounded by a wall and accessed by five imposing gates which were named with specific reference to the Republican founding narrative. One was called the Republic Gate, a direct allusion to the regime change Turkey had gone through. Two major gates were named after the treaties that brought peace to the region and restored Turkey’s dignity as a sovereign nation. One other was named the Gate of 26 August after the launch date of the final Turkish military offensive in the Greco-Turkish war. And finally, Kültürpark’s principal gate was named the Gate of 9 September after the day on which the Turkish Army entered Izmir, and which has since been celebrated as the anniversary of Izmir’s liberation. There was no mistaking the christening of this public landmark with nationalist imagery. Within the walls of the park, no traces of the houses and buildings that used to stand on the site were left. Even the Orthodox St Catherine (Agia Ekaterini) Church, which had escaped the fire thanks to its high walls, was razed to the ground in the coming years to make way for the park (Levantine Heritage, 2011). The design of the grounds had a ceremonial feel to it, with monumental gates leading visitors along tree lined pedestrian avenues that culminated in some public monument, modern exhibition hall, restaurant or fountain. Kültürpark particularly came alive at the end of each summer when the Izmir International Trade Fair took off attracting visitors in the hundreds of thousands. It was a place where the citizens of the new Republic ‘can enjoy the fruits of modernity and nationhood in a festive atmosphere’ (Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, 2002: 23). This ambiance of joyous celebration completely glossed over the memory of physical destruction – along with acts of violence committed against persons or property – upon which the social rituals and political ideals of the Republican regime flourished. As Izmir Mayor Behçet Uz made clear in his speech closing the 1937 fair, the rebuilding effort outweighed all other concerns:

It is not an easy task to create a modern work among ruins. . . . Kültürpark and the Izmir Fair . . . rise on . . . the rubble of 14.500 homes . . . This great work of civilization that today rises on yesterday’s ruin is a work worthy of praise and admiration not only by the Turks or by the residents of the city, but by everyone who has a high regard for civilization and humanity. This work is an example and an evidence of the Republic’s success in the field of public improvements. (cited in Baran, 2003: 101)

The fire thus held no significant place in public memory. Reduced to a metaphor devoid of suffering and loss, it was remembered as a necessary evil for the promise of spiritual renewal and physical regeneration it occasioned, playing midwife to the rebirth of both Izmir and Turkey from the ashes. ‘Modern neighbourhoods are built among these ruins’, reflected Uz at the park’s inauguration in 1936. ‘Parks, boulevards are created. With the opening of Kültürpark, the fire zone is no more’ (cited in Serçe et al., 2003: 182). ¹⁷

Agonistic interventions into collective memory

The influence exercised over collective memory by the official master narrative of the founding events never remains uncontested. As Booth (1999: 254) argues, the landscape of memory is ‘uneven, marked by trauma, conflict, and guilt’. Put differently, the content of collective memory is not entirely shaped by the mnemonic institutions and devices of the state. Nor does it have an immutable substance or a fixed structure precisely because memory practices and therapeutic narratives are almost always open to contestation and plural readings which link the nation’s origins to the suffering of others, past wrongs and catastrophes (Ricoeur, 1996: 7). No society can, therefore, continue to repress the dark pages of its past forever, as the memory of past wrongs, perpetrators and victims cannot be made to disappear and has the ability to return in one way or another. By extending the meaning of a well-known theme from Freudian theory and applying it to the study of collective memory, the French historian Rousso (1991: 10) calls this phase a ‘return of the repressed’. It is in this phase that the official master narrative of a nation comes under attack and the underlying consensus about the national past gives way to a conflict of interpretations and rival narratives. To reiterate the fundamental argument of our article, the recent memory turn Turkey has been experiencing can be seen as a painfully slow and relatively late transition from a therapeutic to an agonistic phase, whereby highly selective and positive memory constructs that were uniting the entirety of the nation around an extremely conciliatory and edifying account of the past are being increasingly contested by critical voices and subterranean or formerly silenced memories.

With the European debates about collective memory in the 1980s and 1990s in mind, it is vital to realize that this transition has only just begun in Turkey, and that it would be quite premature or misleading to suggest that the protective shields of the official master narrative are on the brink of collapse. A number of different reasons can be offered as to why Turkey is a latecomer to European memory debates. First, as the victor in 1922, the new Turkish regime saw the Anatolian Greeks and Armenians as the others of Turkish nationalism and considered 9 September 1922 as the ‘crowning event in their successful war of deliverance from the occupying Greek and Allied forces’ (Kasaba, 2002: 207, 222). To this day, this officially sanctioned narrative of liberation has been passed down, largely unchallenged, through generations. Second, and closely linked with the first, in Turkish society, there appears to be an unequivocal public preference for a historical narrative that confirms rather than challenges positive accounts of the nation’s past. ¹⁸ The recollection of the occupation of Anatolia by Greece and the European powers in the aftermath of the World War I still functions as a defensive shield against recalling the Greek and Armenian victims of the Great Fire of Izmir in public historical consciousness. One might be tempted to say that forgetting or covering up uncomfortable memories which make the members of the national community feel tainted by a kind of direct or indirect complicity in past wrongs done in their name has thus become ‘a rite of passage’ and a condition for patriotic identification with the Turkish Republic. ¹⁹ And this, indeed, seems to be yet another empirical vindication of Renan’s emphasis on the dialectic between forgetting and remembrance. ²⁰

How to challenge this monolithic conception of history and make room in public memory for voices and narratives that had effectively been suppressed? This question brings us to the transformative power of art and its distinctive role as a mediator between different mnemonic communities. In her analysis of European memory debates, Rigney (2012) argues that, thanks to its potential to generate a more expansive sense of solidarity with hitherto unfamiliar voices in particular historical circumstances, art plays ‘a key role in involving people in “the lives of others”’, thereby bringing into play new narratives ‘that fall outside dominant discourses’. Precisely because of its ability to give imaginative access to stories and experiences that cross borders, along with the surplus aesthetic pleasure it offers, art has the power to transcend the boundaries of top-down official memory narratives (Rigney, 2012: 621–622). Furthermore, Huyssen (2018) calls attention to the special contribution the arts can make to a transnational memory culture. He argues that contemporary artistic practices can help ‘train the imagination in how to live in an ever more interconnected world’. Perhaps more so than literature which relies on translation to circulate, or the institutional representations of the past in the form of memorials, museums and sites of conscience whose focus tends to be on local events, the arts ‘have a planetary role to play in exploring tensions between national and transnational memory discourses, tensions which only they can overcome in paradigmatic and future-oriented ways’. ²¹

It is in this context that we would like to refer to the work of four contemporary Turkish artists who probe into the country’s troubled past and explore issues of forgetting and remembrance. These artists exhibit internationally and their works frequently engage with various aspects of Turkish Republican memory. All four artists participate in a nascent culture of remembering and contribute to a vibrant public debate shaped by literary works, academic scholarship and activities, films, other artistic practices, and countless cultural programming initiatives led by NGOs. The works in question, we argue, are representative of the memory turn that is currently underway in Turkey. What makes them significant for the purposes of this discussion is the fact that, in their attempt to address and come to terms with past wrongs, all four artists engage with the country’s multicultural built heritage. Our selection is not limited to works that deal directly with Izmir’s urban heritage. We also discuss examples from Istanbul to demonstrate that Kültürpark does not represent a unique case of forgetting and remembering, but that it exemplifies the wider consolidation of a culture of forgetting at whose foundations contemporary artistic practices are currently chipping away by recalling dark memories. These works and other similar public, artistic and academic interventions do not lead to the collapse of official and hegemonic memory narratives. But they are certainly symptomatic of the mutations currently taking place in Turkish memory culture as they bring multiple aspects of a suppressed national past into a heterogeneous and pluralistic present. In this respect, they seem to have a close affinity with what Rothberg (2009: 14) calls ‘multidirectional memory’ which ‘juxtaposes two or more disturbing memories and disrupts everyday settings’.

The first work that we want to discuss explores the theme of fire as a moment of radical transformation. Istanbul-based artist Sibel Horada’s Fire Chronicles (2012–2014) is a process-based installation piece that consists of found objects, burnt objects, archival images, written and visual documentation of performative situations, and voice recordings (Sibel Horada, 2013). While Horada treats fire as a metaphor for oblivion and erasure of cultural memory, countless examples of which abound across the world at different periods in recent history, the idea for her work came from a chance encounter in an Amsterdam bookshop with a number of old photographs documenting the Great Fire of Izmir. Moved by the fact that she had until then no knowledge of the fire, Horada set out to restore the affective experience of ‘this event that has been left out of the official narrative of history so as not to cloud the joy of victory’ (Radikal, 2012). Exhibited in a number of cities including Izmir, Fire Chronicles is centred around charred wooden crates – a loose reference to Izmir’s once vibrant commercial life – which give off a lingering burnt smell immersing visitors in a sensory experience that conjures up the faded memory of the fire (Figure 2). The installation further features a number of items demanding visitors’ engagement at both cognitive and affective levels. Historic images of Kültürpark and Izmir’s modern neighbourhoods appear side by side with charred objects, eyewitness accounts of fires that had taken place elsewhere, and Horada’s meditations on unmourned loss typed by the artist herself on a typewriter with an inkless ribbon. The installation culminates in a ritual burning of the wooden crates and the subsequent display of their remains. Fire Chronicles enacts a mourning process. As Horada (Radikal, 2012) suggests, ‘there may be a sense of potent vitality inherent in building anew from scratch, rising from the ashes. But mourning needs to come first’.

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Figure 2.

Sibel Horada, Fire Chronicles, 2012–2014. Installation view, ‘Signs Taken in Wonder: Searching for Contemporary Istanbul’, MAK Exhibition Hall, Vienna, 2013.

The second work to which we would like to call attention takes us to Istanbul, a city distinguished by its rich multicultural past and diverse cultural traditions. This work too digs into an aspect of Turkey’s built heritage in an attempt to come to terms with a troubled, disrupted history. Exhibited in Istanbul in 2014, Cemetery of Architects by Istanbul-based artist Tayfun Serttaş (Figure 3) is an installation consisting of name plaques inscribed with the names and signatures of Greek, Armenian and foreign architects who were active in Istanbul around the turn of the nineteenth century (Columbia Global Centers, 2014). The plaques are reproductions of the originals found on buildings across Istanbul. They are arranged on plinths giving one the uncanny feeling of walking among gravestones. Serttaş’s work is at once an archive and memorial that documents and commemorates the names of architects who were responsible for shaping the built heritage of modern Istanbul. These names had largely been forgotten, having gone virtually unmentioned in histories of Turkish architecture that had mainly concentrated on mapping out an essentially Turkish tradition of architectural modernity congruent with the nation-building efforts. Cemetery of Architects can thus be looked upon as a gesture of mourning that seeks to restore the authorship of those who had been written out of the history of architecture in Turkey.

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Figure 3.

Tayfun Serttaş, Cemetery of Architects, 2014. Installation view, STUDIO-X Istanbul.

Third, we discuss Istanbul-based artist Gülsün Karamustafa’s work The Apartment Building (Figure 4), which was first exhibited at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) in 2012. Karamustafa’s work is a 1:15 scale model of the apartment building she resides in (Berk, 2014). The building was originally built for the Vaslamatzis Family in 1931. The Vaslamatzis Family left Istanbul for Athens in 1957 two years after the disastrous pogrom of 6–7 September 1955, which resulted in the flight and emigration of Istanbul’s Greek community. The Bazlamacı Apartment Building, still retaining its original name, changed hands with only one member of the family continuing to reside in the building well into the 1980s. Karamustafa’s work originates in a chance encounter, when in 2000 she ran into Grigoris and Georgia Vaslamatzis right at her doorstep. On a short trip to Istanbul, the couple wanted to pay a visit to the family residence, where Grigoris Vaslamatzis was born and raised. They were invited into Karamustafa’s home and were surprised to find that her flat retained most of its original features down to the window handles. The encounter marked the beginning of a friendship between the artist and the couple, and when EMST approached Karamustafa for a new artwork to be included in the museum’s permanent collection, she came up with the idea to exhibit a two-metre tall model of the Bazlamacı Apartment Building alongside photographs illustrating the life of the Vaslamatzises in Istanbul. The installation was meant as a gift to the Vaslamatzis Family who had to flee their home and start a new life in Athens. The artist’s intention was ‘to reinstate a real property to its owners who were to leave it behind with no good memories, at least as a work of art’ (Karamustafa, 2011). This was not only a symbolic act of material restitution of property, but also an honouring of one’s right to memory – both rooted in a one-to-one encounter and motivated by the artist’s humble attempt to make amends for past wrongs.

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Figure 4.

Gülsün Karamustafa, The Apartment Building, 2012. Installation view, ‘A Promised Exhibition’, SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul, 2013.

The last work that we want to discuss takes us back to Izmir and delves directly into Kültürpark’s past. Izmir-based artist Hakan Kırdar’s Memorial Forest is a gallery-wide installation consisting of found ephemera, organic materials, drawings and artefacts made of moulded ash and charcoal (SANATORIUM, 2016). Kırdar engages in memory work by peeling off layers of history to reveal the trauma that underlay Kültürpark’s cheerful celebration of national identity and Republican achievements. When the work was exhibited in Istanbul in 2016, visitors were first greeted with photographs, publicity materials and memorabilia that attested to Kültürpark’s place in public memory as a source of civic pride and a boost to national confidence. Proceeding to the basement level of the gallery, however, they encountered a different aspect of the park’s past. Spread across the floor, they saw a reproduction – made of ash – of the Ghazir Rug, better known as the Armenian Orphan Rug woven by orphans of the Armenian Genocide in Ghazir, Lebanon (Figure 5). A few metres away from it was written in charcoal powder the word Haynots, the name of the Armenian quarter that once stood where Kültürpark was built and the original spot where the fire began (Figure 6). On the walls were hung building artefacts made of charcoal, an unmistakable reference to the wreckage of the Great Fire of 1922. As visitors moved between the two levels of the gallery, they left behind them the robust artefacts of a celebrated past only to be confronted by the frail memories of destruction etched in ash and charcoal powder. It was as if this basement level contained what was suppressed in public consciousness, namely the fact that a symbolically charged site of Republican memory – simultaneously on display on the upper level – rose upon the convenient foundation of collective forgetting. Kırdar’s work is at once an excavation into the past and an invitation to remember past wrongs.

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Figure 5.

Hakan Kırdar, Memorial Forest, 2016. Installation view, SANATORIUM, Istanbul. From left to right: The Ghazir Rug and Gates of Kültürpark (9 September).

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Figure 6.

Hakan Kırdar, Memorial Forest, 2016. Installation view, SANATORIUM, Istanbul. From left to right: Scene of Fire, Haynots, Gates of Kültürpark (Lausanne), Buttresses.

It should be stressed that these artworks have a somewhat limited audience and reach, accessible primarily to an art-going public who would already be familiar with contemporary art’s engagement with contentious social and political issues. The challenge they pose to the dominant memory narrative might be less influential when compared with initiatives that make use of other, less mediated ways of engaging with public opinion such as social media and street art. ²² Yet, the artworks discussed here should not be judged by their immediate impact, but by their power to create arresting images with lasting poetic resonance which would help recall troublesome events that had been pushed out of public consciousness. ²³ In their introduction to a recent special journal issue on the role of imagination in facilitating the critical engagement of the public with violence, political theorists Mihai and Thaler (2019: 502–503) make a similar point. They argue that while artistic and civic endeavours that address political violence may fall short of effectively dismantling ‘institutionalised patterns of exclusion and recalcitrant hierarchical social imaginaries’, they may still mobilize the imagination by ‘expanding our sense of justice to include various victimised beings’ and help us ‘draw hope and learn how to cultivate political solidarity’.

These artistic interventions are linked to what might be called the democratization of public memory in Turkey and are therefore indicative of a larger transformation in historical consciousness that deprives the state of the monopoly it hitherto enjoyed in interpreting the past. This transformation is a civic process primarily because it is the fruit of initiatives emanating from civil society rather than policies designed and implemented by the state. In her thoughtful proposal for a post-nationalist framework for Turkish historiography, the sociologist Göçek (2007: 361) directly addresses this issue and rightly underlines the significance of civic initiatives for an ‘alternate post-national recognition of the past’. Indeed, as Assmann (2007) remarks, in societies where there exists a clear official and popular preference for a collective memory that confirms rather than challenges the nation’s past, it falls to civic initiatives to confront collective amnesia and selective representations of the past. For instance in the Russian context, Assmann (2007) maintains, where the victory over the Nazi regime has officially acted as a ‘defensive shield against recalling the victims of Communist terror’ (pp. 17–18), the civic initiative Pamyat aims to dig into that past to uncover the crimes of totalitarian communism and ultimately keep alive the buried memory of its victims.

In a similar vein, and in line with this emphasis on civic action and engagement, we have witnessed in Turkey over the last decade the proliferation of associational initiatives dealing with the themes of remembrance and coming to terms with the past. Hrant Dink Foundation, founded immediately after the assassination of Hrant Dink in 2007, is the first of its kind that aims to facilitate the remembrance of the multicultural heritage of Anatolia by tracing the contributions of Armenian, Greek, Jewish and Syriac communities to Turkey’s urban and cultural history. Organizing national and international conferences and workshops as well as publishing books on the subject, it set the stage for similar initiatives that aim to foster public debate about issues which have been pushed either to the margins or completely out of collective memory. Some of these civic initiatives have been national in reach and scope such as Hafıza Merkezi (Memory Center, founded in 2011), Beraberce Derneği (Beraberce Association, founded in 2017) and Sivil ve Ekolojik Haklar Derneği (Civil and Ecological Rights Association, founded in 2019), while others have a more local orientation addressing dynamics of forgetting and remembrance in a particular city or region such as Hafıza Kaydı (Memory Chronicles, founded in Ankara in 2015) and Diyarbakır Hafızası (Diyarbakır’s Memory, a trilingual – Turkish, Kurdish, English – online platform founded in 2019). ²⁴ More specifically, they organize memory walks in different cities across the country, initiate international exchange programmes and host experience-sharing workshops on sites of memory and difficult pasts for students, researchers, and activists, thereby introducing new practices and transcultural narratives to Turkey’s gradually evolving memory culture.

Yüzleşme Atölyesi (Workshop for Facing the Past), one such Izmir-based civic initiative dedicated to the remembrance of past wrongs, organizes workshops, seminars, documentary screenings, and memory walks in the former Greek and Armenian neighbourhoods of the city (Figure 7). Founded in 2012 and inspired by similar examples in Germany, Spain and Latin America, the group critically engages with Turkey’s official master narrative and aims to reveal multicultural layers of Izmir’s urban and cultural history. ²⁵ More significantly, fully in the spirit of European memory debates, this group also organizes an annual public event in September commemorating the sufferings of the Greek and Armenian victims of the Great Fire, which explicitly represents a critical intervention to the official master narrative that celebrates 9 September as the liberation day for Izmir. These public events are not designed as political demonstrations with an explicit agenda in favour of this or that political party, but as inclusive public gatherings aiming to question and transform mainstream perceptions of the national past. In this way, the memory activists in Izmir aim to raise awareness about the obliterated multicultural heritage of the city and contribute to the gradual formation of a cosmopolitan memory culture.

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Figure 7.

‘We remember our fellow Izmirians whom we have lost in the Great Fire of Izmir’. Memorial gathering at the Greek Orthodox Church of Agios Vouklos during ‘Izmir Remembers’ commemoration days, 13–20 September 2014.

Critics might caution us against the all-too-optimistic expectations about the immediate social and political impact of the activities of Yüzleşme Atölyesi. Indeed, a healthy dose of scepticism is necessary here for three main reasons. First, most of their public events seem to reach a very limited audience composed by and large of leftist and libertarian segments of the society. As Assmann (2018: 295) notes in her discussion of an Israeli NGO (Zochrot) trying to raise awareness of the Palestinian Nakba among Israelis, civic initiatives like Yüzleşme Atölyesi are in danger of remaining ‘interesting projects’ without much impact on established social and political attitudes unless they succeed in bringing these issues into the attention of a wider public. Second, since the activities organized by Yüzleşme Atölyesi aim to uncover the hidden fault lines in the national memory of the country, they usually trigger reactionary and nationalist attitudes. ²⁶ Last but not least, Turkey’s authoritarian drift since 2013 has led to the rise of an anti-democratic political climate in which many civic initiatives critical of the official master narrative are criminalized as enemies of the state. Given these difficulties it is indeed hard to anticipate future shifts in memory culture.

Nevertheless, the import of these critical interventions may have less to do with their short-term impact than with the new issues and practices they introduce to public debate and memory culture. More specifically, we view the very emergence of such artistic practices and civic initiatives as a novel phenomenon prompting previously unasked questions and posing new challenges to existing representations of the past. It is important to emphasize that these critical interventions do not receive any material or symbolic support from central or local political authorities and are by no means representative of the sensibilities of the majority. Yet, they certainly set in motion a social learning process that creates fissures on the therapeutic and selective memory constructs of the nation by publicly exposing the hidden injuries and tensions within the foundations of the Republic, and which might eventually lead to the gradual weakening of the hold of the official master narrative on present generations. Public debates about historical topics, in particular those that aim to clear national memory blockages or confront collective amnesia, have an agonistic nature because ‘they open up a space of contestation and disagreement’ (Muldoon and Schaap, 2012: 182). Such disagreements are an explicit manifestation of the fact that representations of the past are almost always ambiguous, tension-ridden and open to rival interpretations and hence may be, in a democratic context, publicly contested (McCarthy, 2002: 628). As Bell (2008: 151) has noted, ‘the struggle over interpretations of the past comprises a core dimension of agonistic politics’.

This new memoryscape in Turkey, as Göçek (2003: 227) remarks, ‘is in the making by a new generation that has come of age not during the foundation of the Republic but rather during its contestation and critique by the currents of opposition’. What is equally striking about these agonistic interventions into the politics of memory in Turkey is that they promote an ethical duty to remember the forgotten non-Muslim victims, thereby initiating a shift in perspective not only from amnesia to anamnesis (recollection), from forgetting to remembrance but also from patriotic identification with the heroes of the Turkish Republic to solidarity with or ‘fidelity to the [silenced] victims’ (Booth, 2001: 785). This shift in ethical and political orientation is not limited to Turkey. For it was also the common basis of the European memory debates of the 1980s and 1990s (Assmann, 2007: 21). Referring to Walter Benjamin’s notion of reversing the identification with the victors of history for an ‘anamnestic solidarity’ with its victims, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1989), in the context of the well-known German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, writes, ‘There is the obligation incumbent upon us in Germany . . . to keep alive, without distortion, and not only in an intellectual form, the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands’ (p. 233).

Conclusion

Our thesis in this article is that the real thrust of the aforementioned artistic and civic interventions can only be realized in the context of this growing acknowledgement of past wrongs and the suffering of other victims. The built heritage of Turkey’s multicultural past provides ample opportunities for such memory work to be conducted by present generations. Indeed, as we have shown, civic and artistic initiatives revisiting the voids left in the country’s urban memory have grown in number over the past decade. ²⁷ Their activities open up new territories and avenues for memory scholars across disciplines and suggest a new research agenda. Such a research agenda would require an exacting focus on the type and reach of mnemonic practices undertaken by artists and associational initiatives. Scholars may interview artists and members of civic initiatives to pinpoint the aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments that motivate such practices. They may further explore how these practices feature in public debate, political discourse and academic and artistic discussions. More significantly, scholars may assess whether civic interventions, on the one hand, and artistic practices, on the other hand, contribute to the creation of a new and shared political imagination from which each side draws its inspiration. In doing so, they may shed light on the possible points of interaction between the realm of artistic creation and that of civic activism. While these questions are well beyond the scope of this article, they provide new directions for future research on public memory and coming to terms with past wrongs in Turkey.

That being said, the agonistic implications of politics of remembrance have led some authors to conclude that it would be better to forget the past, and that remembering historical wounds neither remedies past wrongs nor generates reconciliation (Rieff, 2017). ²⁸ However, ‘truthful memory’, as Sennett (1998) remarks, ‘opens wounds which forgetting cannot heal’ (p. 11). In the light of this paradox, it might be helpful to recall Rigney’s (2012) argument that agonistic controversy and dialogue, rather than monolithic consensus, contributes to the ongoing evolution of memory narratives and allows the multilayered expression of conflicting memories in the public sphere. More significantly, these public controversies can also transform the relations between opposing parties and generate newly integrated memories as well as a novel sense of connectedness between different mnemonic groups who have previously been excluded from each other’s memory narratives (Rigney, 2012: 620).

Needless to say, therapeutic national narratives or collective amnesia do not immediately disappear when they are confronted with rival and critical interpretations of the past. It would equally be naive to assume that a general public consensus about past wrongs and traumas is likely to be achieved in the foreseeable future in Turkish memory debates. However, as we have pointed out, a unanimity around one single representation of the past is neither possible nor necessary, particularly in radically divided and diverse societies like Turkey where there is usually ‘a polyphony of voices . . . of resisters and collaborators, of those directly involved and those who were born later, of different regions and cultures, . . . political ideologies and religious convictions’, all of which are, inevitably, to be reflected in the agonistic disputes about collective memory – ‘in rival narratives, conflicts of interpretation, and other forms of cultural-political contestation’ (McCarthy, 2002: 628, 636; Schaap, 2006: 255–277). What remains to be a realistic option, though, is the possibility of slowly winning over an ever-increasing portion of the Turkish public to different versions of the critical narrative with the support of similar civic and artistic (and academic) interventions which might simultaneously contribute to both Turkey’s painful coming to terms with its past and the democratization of its political culture. This brings us once again back to Kırdar’s Memorial Forest. True, the construction of Kültürpark sealed over the memory of a troubled past. But as Kırdar’s work suggests, the grounds, which remain largely free of buildings to this day, have transformed into a thriving urban forest that defines an open space where the memories of lives once upturned may take root again.