Toponomical Practices of the New Turkey
Building Modern Turkey (Zeynep Kezer)
Militarism-Nationalism: Conscription of the Non-Muslims
"In contrast to a widely established consensus in nation-building processes, which recognizes military service as a vital instrument for constituting a horizontal comradeship, the mass conscription of non-Muslim men was a practice of segregation—and a very public one at that."
"But the mass conscription of 1941 was the enactment of the absolute conviction that non-Muslims could never partake in the horizontal comradeship comprising the nation."
Demographic Homogenization and Toponomical Practices
"The civilian violence that accompanied the First World War and the War of Independence had destroyed large swaths of the fabric of many Anatolian towns. Entire neighbourhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants with the First World War deportation of Armenians and the subsequent departure of Orthodox populations. [...] Gradually non-Muslim landscapes were reinscribed with new uses and meanings."
"As the representative sampling examined in this section reveals, this process the absence of people and the ebb of activities reduced their visibility. As the representative sampling examined in this section reveals, this process of gradual erasure was central to constructing and maintaining a nation-the representative sampling examined in this section reveals, this process of gradual erasure was central to constructing and maintaining a nationalist narrative of demographic homogeneity in Turkey."
"As early as December 1920, even before the outcome of the War of Independence was known, deputies gathered in the first Grand National Assembly expressed their disapproval of the “unnational” character of certain place names despite “our dominance over this land, for more than six hundred years.”
"Ankara’s Jewish Quarter (Yahudi Mahallesi) became İstiklal (Liberation). Tatavla, a heavily Greek neighbourhood in Istanbul, was renamed Kurtulus (also meaning Liberation) [...] the Thracian border province of Kırkkilise (based on the Greek original Saranta Eklesia, meaning Forty Churches) was renamed Kırklareli, Land of the Forty. Similarly, when the neighbouring town of Tekfurdağı was promoted to the status of a province in 1927, it was renamed Tekirdağ, meaning tabby-striped mountain."
"When the CUP came to power, its leaders embraced toponymic interventions with a new zeal. In 1915, they issued a decree to replace existing place names in Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, or other ancient Anatolian languages with new Turkish ones."
"Although the majority of the changes they made in the first decades of the republic were to Armenian and Greek toponyms, they also targeted Arabic and Kurdish names and anything else that did not sound Turkish enough."
"In sum, within less than sixty years, what had started as a series of localized and sporadic interventions turned into a systematic project in which the names of twelve thousand out of the nearly forty thousand village names and almost two thousand landforms in Turkey were changed."
"The dismantling of non-Muslim landscapes was remarkably similar to the dismantling of heterodox Islamic landscapes outlined."
"Neighboring young nation-states such as Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania, which, like Turkey, were still reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the reconfiguration of the region’s human and political geography, faced similar challenges to national integration and implemented comparable strategies including minoritization, appropriation and repurposing of the built environment, and toponymic erasure."
"Kemalists regarded the public sphere and its institutions not as platforms for true political negotiation and exchange of ideas but as sites that had to be dominated. [...] This resulted in the suppression of religious activities, purges of political rivals, and the demise of ethnic and religious minorities."
"Despite their (Early Republican Leaders and RTE) profound ideological differences, ultimately they both preferred a heavily monitored public sphere with little room for dissent or deviation from prescribed modes of association."-- KEMALİSM ve ERDOGANISM aynı bokun laciverdi
"In the late 1980s, however, rumors of a proposed grand mosque in Taksim began to circulate as the first signs of a sea change indicating the rise of Islamist politics, which over the next couple of decades would pave the way to the AKP’s election victories." -- TAKSİM CAMİ
"Remarkably, there were two inherent ironies in this posturing, both expressed through architecture: first, by embracing and building on this imagined Ottoman legacy, Erdoğan defined himself in full opposition to the republican leadership who had so categorically sought to repudiate it. But the spectacular performance of religiosity notwithstanding, his rewriting of history replicated the republican desire to edit the empire’s non-Muslim subjects out of its history. That the barracks and, later, Gezi Park stood on a former Armenian cemetery and that the park’s marble stairs were made of gravestones from surrounding Armenian cemeteries displaced by republican urban renewal were not lost on the protestors, who had allied themselves with some of the city’s key non-Muslim communities.
Second, by 2013, the AKP’s urban moves, largely portrayed as heritage preservation, were failing to mask the neoliberal crony capitalism underlying various transactions that transferred public land to political supporters in direct contravention of Ottoman state tradition, which the party claimed to faithfully uphold and emulate. Indeed, the increasing rejection of these narratives by a growing critical mass was what ultimately sparked the protests of 2013."
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1908-2020 Türkleştirme (İTC+Kemalism) + 1980-2020 İslamlaştırma (Siyasal İslam+AKP)
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Crafting Symbolic Geographies in Modern Turkey: Kurdish Assimilation and the Politics of (Re)Naming
Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State (bulamadık)
Militarism-Nationalism: Conscription of the Non-Muslims
"In contrast to a widely established consensus in nation-building processes, which recognizes military service as a vital instrument for constituting a horizontal comradeship, the mass conscription of non-Muslim men was a practice of segregation—and a very public one at that."
"But the mass conscription of 1941 was the enactment of the absolute conviction that non-Muslims could never partake in the horizontal comradeship comprising the nation."
Demographic Homogenization and Toponomical Practices
"The civilian violence that accompanied the First World War and the War of Independence had destroyed large swaths of the fabric of many Anatolian towns. Entire neighbourhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants with the First World War deportation of Armenians and the subsequent departure of Orthodox populations. [...] Gradually non-Muslim landscapes were reinscribed with new uses and meanings."
"As the representative sampling examined in this section reveals, this process the absence of people and the ebb of activities reduced their visibility. As the representative sampling examined in this section reveals, this process of gradual erasure was central to constructing and maintaining a nation-the representative sampling examined in this section reveals, this process of gradual erasure was central to constructing and maintaining a nationalist narrative of demographic homogeneity in Turkey."
"As early as December 1920, even before the outcome of the War of Independence was known, deputies gathered in the first Grand National Assembly expressed their disapproval of the “unnational” character of certain place names despite “our dominance over this land, for more than six hundred years.”
"Ankara’s Jewish Quarter (Yahudi Mahallesi) became İstiklal (Liberation). Tatavla, a heavily Greek neighbourhood in Istanbul, was renamed Kurtulus (also meaning Liberation) [...] the Thracian border province of Kırkkilise (based on the Greek original Saranta Eklesia, meaning Forty Churches) was renamed Kırklareli, Land of the Forty. Similarly, when the neighbouring town of Tekfurdağı was promoted to the status of a province in 1927, it was renamed Tekirdağ, meaning tabby-striped mountain."
"When the CUP came to power, its leaders embraced toponymic interventions with a new zeal. In 1915, they issued a decree to replace existing place names in Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, or other ancient Anatolian languages with new Turkish ones."
"Although the majority of the changes they made in the first decades of the republic were to Armenian and Greek toponyms, they also targeted Arabic and Kurdish names and anything else that did not sound Turkish enough."
"In sum, within less than sixty years, what had started as a series of localized and sporadic interventions turned into a systematic project in which the names of twelve thousand out of the nearly forty thousand village names and almost two thousand landforms in Turkey were changed."
"The dismantling of non-Muslim landscapes was remarkably similar to the dismantling of heterodox Islamic landscapes outlined."
"Neighboring young nation-states such as Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania, which, like Turkey, were still reeling from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the reconfiguration of the region’s human and political geography, faced similar challenges to national integration and implemented comparable strategies including minoritization, appropriation and repurposing of the built environment, and toponymic erasure."
"Kemalists regarded the public sphere and its institutions not as platforms for true political negotiation and exchange of ideas but as sites that had to be dominated. [...] This resulted in the suppression of religious activities, purges of political rivals, and the demise of ethnic and religious minorities."
"Despite their (Early Republican Leaders and RTE) profound ideological differences, ultimately they both preferred a heavily monitored public sphere with little room for dissent or deviation from prescribed modes of association."-- KEMALİSM ve ERDOGANISM aynı bokun laciverdi
"In the late 1980s, however, rumors of a proposed grand mosque in Taksim began to circulate as the first signs of a sea change indicating the rise of Islamist politics, which over the next couple of decades would pave the way to the AKP’s election victories." -- TAKSİM CAMİ
"Remarkably, there were two inherent ironies in this posturing, both expressed through architecture: first, by embracing and building on this imagined Ottoman legacy, Erdoğan defined himself in full opposition to the republican leadership who had so categorically sought to repudiate it. But the spectacular performance of religiosity notwithstanding, his rewriting of history replicated the republican desire to edit the empire’s non-Muslim subjects out of its history. That the barracks and, later, Gezi Park stood on a former Armenian cemetery and that the park’s marble stairs were made of gravestones from surrounding Armenian cemeteries displaced by republican urban renewal were not lost on the protestors, who had allied themselves with some of the city’s key non-Muslim communities.
Second, by 2013, the AKP’s urban moves, largely portrayed as heritage preservation, were failing to mask the neoliberal crony capitalism underlying various transactions that transferred public land to political supporters in direct contravention of Ottoman state tradition, which the party claimed to faithfully uphold and emulate. Indeed, the increasing rejection of these narratives by a growing critical mass was what ultimately sparked the protests of 2013."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1908-2020 Türkleştirme (İTC+Kemalism) + 1980-2020 İslamlaştırma (Siyasal İslam+AKP)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Crafting Symbolic Geographies in Modern Turkey: Kurdish Assimilation and the Politics of (Re)Naming
Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State (bulamadık)
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