1,720,982 research outputs found
‘From hunter to hunted’ : (temporary) marginalisation in Muslim men’s memories of the allied occupation period in Turkey (1918–1922)
No full textIn this article, I study memories of the Allied occupation of Maraş, Mersin and İzmir that were published in local newspapers between the 1920s and 1960s. Apart from one earlier text, the stories were published during the first decades of the Turkish republic, when Muslims had re-gained political hegemony and forced both the occupying armies and most local non-Muslims to leave the country for good. The texts I use were published in the dailies Sebilürrreşad in 1921 (in Istanbul), in Ahenk in 1926, in Ege Ekspres in 1958 (both in İzmir), and in the late 1960s in Kuvayi Milliye, a monthly veterans’ magazine published in Mersin. Their authors were ordinary insofar as they were relatively low ranking clerks, former reserve officers, and readers of the İzmir papers . As literate Muslim males able to pen their own memories, however, they certainly held a certain degree of privilege over less educated and illiterate people, women and non-Muslims. In order to analyze their narratives, I use concepts developed by Maurice Halbwachs and Jan and Aleida Assmann
Not all quiet on the Ottoman fronts: neglected perspectives on a global war, 1914-1918 / Mehmet Beşikçi, Selçuk Akşin Somel, Alexandre Toumarkine: Baden-Baden, 2020
No full textFear and Loathing in "Gavur" Izmir : Emotions in Early Republican Memories of the Greek Occupation (1919-22)
No full textBased on a series of recollections published between January and April 1926 in the Izmir-based daily newspaper Ahenk (Harmony), this article explores howindividualMuslim Turks remembered their emotional responses to the Greek occupation of that city (May 1919–September 1922). Analyzing these recollections, it considers why certain events were remembered while others were almost completely left out. By studying how Muslim Turks described their feelings towards the occupying forces, local non-Muslims, and the eventually victorious Turkish army, the article makes an initial contribution to the history of emotions in early republican Turkey. I argue that the composition and consumption of memories were avenues for connecting emotionally to the Turkish nationalist project. This finding challenges the widespread notion that the early republican period was characterized by collective amnesia of the immediate past, and contributes to the growing body of scholarship on popular participation in early republican nationalism
Demiriz, Sara-Marie, Vom Osmanen zum Türken: nationale und staatsbürgerliche Erziehung durch Feier- und Gedenktage in der Türkischen Republik 1923-1938: Baden-Baden, 2018
No full textEmine Yeşim Belek, Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey. Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Atatürk: London, 2016
No full textSquatting and Urban Modernity in Turkey
No full textGecekondu are informal settlements that have been at the heart of the rapid urbanisation of modern Turkey, especially in Istanbul and Izmir. Gecekondu squatting started in the 1940s as a need-oriented practice of poor rural migrants who needed cheap accomodation in Turkey's growing cities. Over time, gecekondu neighborhoods were legalized, and their dwellers became part of the urban middle class by erecting apartment buildings on their plots. In the 1980s, it became common to buy, and later to steal, privately owned agricultural land in order to construct apartment buildings on it. Appropriation was no longer geared towards need, but towards profit.
Appropriation of state-owned (agricultural) land was already a common practice in Ottoman times, and so was rural work migration to major cities, such as Istanbul and Izmir. In the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide and the Population Exchange with Greece, private property of Armenians and Greeks was appropriated and squatted by Muslims. This article argues that these historical precedents informed the way in which gecekondu dwellers legitimated their need-oriented appropriation of state land. With the arrival of neoliberalism, however, appropriation of state property no longer served to alleviate poverty, but became big business. Today, it is major real estate firms and the state-owned public housing authority (TOKI) that privatize state land in order to build gated communities for the upper middle class
Das Jahr 1917 in der türkischen Historiographie
No full textDieser Beitrag bietet einen Überblick über die Erinnerung an das Jahr 1917 in der türkischen Historiographie von ca. 1922 bis heute. Ohne Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit zu erheben, betrachtet er ausgewählte Beispiele aus der türkischen Erinnerungsliteratur sowie geschichtswissenschaftliche Werke, die für ein breiteres Publikum geschrieben wurden, und erläutert den jeweiligen Entstehungskontext sowie die politischen Positionen der Autoren. Einige verorteten sich noch in einem osmanischen Rahmen und betrachteten den Verlust der arabischen Gebiete als schmerzlichen Verlust. Die meisten Werke der Republikzeit bezogen sich jedoch positiv auf den neuen Nationalstaat und seine Grenzen. Die Revolutionen in Russland und der amerikanische Kriegseintritt werden bemerkenswert wenig diskutiert, insbesondere kaum mit Hinsicht auf ihre Bedeutung für die spätere Entstehung der modernen Türkei
Expropriating the dead in Turkey : how the Armenian quarter of İzmir became Kültürpark
No full textThe İzmir fire of 1922, as well as the subsequent re-building of the fire area according to a new master plan, have been studied quite extensively, but so far, nobody has looked into the politics of expropriation and compensation surrounding them. This article studies the expropriation of the İzmir fire area in the late 1920s and the subsequent urban renewal project of the 1930s by contextualizing it within the history of the dispossession of Armenians and Orthodox Greeks in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. As I show, some property owners in the fire area were able to negotiate much better terms for their expropriation than others. Those who had been killed or expelled in 1922 and whose physical property had been destroyed in the fire were also expropriated, but never compensated. Their physical dispossession was thus repeated in the legal realm. Based on a variety of archival sources from Turkish and Western archives, this article shows that Armenian compensation claims were pocketed by the İzmir municipality and other state agencies. This, however, aroused the interest of the treasury, which in 1941 claimed those compensation sums that should have been paid for plots in the the former Armenian quarter now covered by kültürpark. I argue that the treasury did so because the abandoned property law of 1922 had officially made the treasury the universal custodian of “absent” property owners
Compensation Schemes Following Forced Migration Movements in the 20th Century : A Comparative Perspective on Ottoman Greeks, Greek Muslims, East Germans, Palestinians, and Iraqi Jews
Full text linkThis article compares the policies of compensation implemented after five cases of forced migration in the 20th century. Compensation for property left behind was discussed in all these cases, but only implemented in some. One might think that compensation may have been easier when “abandoned” property was available and some form of “exchange” was engineered, but the relative failure of the Greek, Turkish, Palestinian, and Israeli cases and the relative success of the German ones suggest that the opposite may be true. This may be due to compensation systems being based on the principle of redistributory justice, rather than restoration of pre-conflict levels of wealth. Moreover, I argue that unilateral compensation schemes worked better than multilateral ones. However, in the long run, the most important factor impacting refugees’ successful integration does not seem to be compensation, but the granting of citizenship, civil rights, and eventual economic development
Expropriating the dead in Turkey: how the Armenian quarter of İzmir became Kültürpark
Full text linkThe İzmir fire of 1922, as well as the subsequent re-building of the fire area according to a new master plan, have been studied quite extensively, but so far, nobody has looked into the politics of expropriation and compensation surrounding them. This article studies the expropriation of the İzmir fire area in the late 1920s and the subsequent urban renewal project of the 1930s by contextualizing it within the history of the dispossession of Armenians and Orthodox Greeks in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. As I show, some property owners in the fire area were able to negotiate much better terms for their expropriation than others. Those who had been killed or expelled in 1922 and whose physical property had been destroyed in the fire were also expropriated, but never compensated. Their physical dispossession was thus repeated in the legal realm. Based on a variety of archival sources from Turkish and Western archives, this article shows that Armenian compensation claims were pocketed by the İzmir municipality and other state agencies. This, however, aroused the interest of the treasury, which in 1941 claimed those compensation sums that should have been paid for plots in the the former Armenian quarter now covered by kültürpark. I argue that the treasury did so because the abandoned property law of 1922 had officially made the treasury the universal custodian of “absent” property owners
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