Migration, Politics, and the Limits of Multiculturalism in a Turkish Museum

ABSTRACT

The Bursa Immigration History Museum (BIHM) proudly celebrates the role that migrants have played in building a prosperous city. BIHM’s permanent exhibition aims to demonstrate that Bursa and Turkey’s multiculturalism has been and continues to be an important element of its strength. At the same time, as a state institution, BIHM creates a definitive version of the “migrant” that aligns with the vision of Turkey’s ruling party. In doing so, the museum emphasizes some migrants’ experiences, cast aspersions on others – and omits other entirely.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• homeland
• migration history
• migration museum
• integration
• citizenship
• Turkey

8,500 Years of immigration history

The Bursa Immigration History Museum (Bursa Göç Tarihi Müzesi, henceforth BIHM) is located in a park that takes its name, Merinos, from the merino sheep. Merino wool helped this city and its textile merchants, many of whom have been migrants, to prosper. Textile manufacture is one of the key tropes BIHM uses to weave the story of Bursa and its migrants into a single narrative: migrants have reaped the benefits of Bursa’s resources, but so too has Bursa reaped the benefits of migrants’ hard work and skills.

In 2014, I spent three months in Bursa conducting ethnographic research with Ahiska Turks, a forcibly displaced group from the former Soviet Union that has been settling in the city since the early 1990s and numbers in the tens of thousands. My Ahiska interlocutors frequently lamented their own invisibility – according to them, Bursa’s native-born Turks had no idea who they were or how they had suffered for their Turkish identity. When I learned that BIHM would open its doors on November 7, 2014, I wanted to find out whether Ahiska Turks would be included in its migration narrative and, if so, how their story would be presented. When I visited the museum just a few days after it opened, I had the galleries mostly to myself. None of my Ahiska friends had heard of the museum or seemed interested in visiting it. Like some of the other museums operated by the Bursa Metropolitan Municipality, BIHM does not charge an entry fee. In the text-heavy museum, almost all of the labels are given in Turkish only, signaling that it is almost exclusively geared toward a Turkish, or Turkish-speaking, public. This leaves out the vast majority of the most recent group to arrive in Bursa, Syrian refugees.

One of the first interpretive texts to greet BIHM visitors, and one of the few accompanied by an English translation, notes that while the last 150 years of “intense demographic mobility” have earned Bursa its reputation as an “immigrant city,” BIHM aims to shed light on an 8,500-year-old history of migration. BIHM offers its visitors the “definitive – not provisional or variable – interpretation and explanation”¹ of who these migrants have been, why they have chosen to make Bursa their home, and how they have been a part of both local and national history. Many comparable institutions around the world construct such authoritative narratives in order to fulfill their pedagogical missions and to live up to visitor expectations. Museums that eschew “simple, factual, and real” representations of culture and identity² and instead seek to “compel the ongoing negotiation of a contingent Self”³ may see their guestbooks filled with the bitter complaints of visitors who feel that they have “learned nothing.”⁴ In contrast, BIHM’s exhibits and interpretive labels present migrant Selves as utterly concrete and knowable. In its little-used online guestbook, several visitors simply thanked BIHM for being a quality institution and one visitor wrote that she was glad there was a new place to take her children to instill in them a love of culture.⁵

BIHM’s approach to narrating migration would be familiar to scholars who have written about similar institutions around the world. Writing on Belgium’s House of European History, anthropologist Susan Macdonald argues,

The constellation of difference that [it] produced . . . would send a clear message of non-recognition of the presence, histories, and concerns of minorities and new citizens. . . . The diversity of those minorities classified as European is . . . taken as fundamental and worthy of protection. Diversity resulting from migration from outside of Europe, especially from European colonies and former colonies, however, is often viewed as more problematic.⁶

Museums, Macdonald notes, are “part of the panoply of social technologies” supporting the making of “national citizenships and national publics.”⁷ Thus, “who and what are included or excluded . . . when a nation writes a major new version of its history into public spaces is clearly an important intervention into the . . . making of citizenship.”⁸ American studies and design scholar Allison Arieff argues that museology continues to engage in exclusionary practices while “presenting itself as an arbiter of truth and universality” and that “museum reform is inherently an incomplete project.”⁹ This critique, Arieff asserts, is not meant to dismiss museums, but to “sustain their viability and relevance for contemporary society.”¹⁰ Scholars like Peggy Levitt have found that while some curators and other museum professionals at institutions around the world are working toward such reinvention, others deny their role in nation- and state-building projects and declare “museums unsuitable places for social activism.”¹¹ In an Israeli museum on Bedouin Culture, the curator insisted, “the museum’s mission is a historical one,” adding, “the museum was not political, and that controversial issues were best left to the politicians.”¹² The exhibition team for Multiethnic Japan: Life and History of Resident Foreigners at Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology “refrained from making the Exhibition look seriously political, especially because they targeted children on spring school excursions” and “stressed the concept of tolerance to make the project sound politically neutral, or in their terms ‘mugai’ (innocuous).”¹³ BIHM also sought to avoid overt political content while performing the inherently political task of defining Turkish national identity, and thus citizenship, through migration narratives.

In analyzing the “politically neutral” vision of migrants and migration constructed by migration museums, scholars have noted a “striking mismatch between [museums’] valorization of immigration . . . and the political discourse and proposed legislation around limiting opportunities for immigrants.”¹⁴ For instance, educator and museum professional Keri Watson worked with her students to organize an exhibition on immigration in the wake of the 2011 passage of the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, “widely considered the strongest anti-immigrant legislation in the country.”¹⁵ The student curators sought to “help visitors realize that immigrants should not be viewed as Others, but welcomed as the newest additions in a long line of immigration of which we are all a part.”¹⁶ The creators of the Multiethnic Japan exhibition, discussed above, had the explicit “pedagogical objective of promoting the idea of multicultural living”¹⁷ in the face of traditionally negative public attitudes. Along similar lines, an interpretive label at BIHM informs visitors that Bursa’s migrants have been instrumental to Turkey’s development and modernization by engendering its “urban identity and the culture of coexistence.” Businessman and collector Ahmet Erdönmez, BIHM’s founding curator, General Secretary of Bursa’s Culture, Art, and Tourism Foundation, and Turkey’s representative to the European Museum Academy, published a brief article about BIHM in the Bursa Metropolitan Municipality’s online journal, writing, “After [these migrants] settled in Bursa they made important contributions to the city. They, too, have a share in Bursa’s abundance and affluence. . . . We await all of you at the museum that relates our history” (emphasis mine).¹⁸ Thus, Erdönmez asserts that because of migrants’ contributions to the city, Bursa’s migration history is the history of all of its residents. In Turkey, as in the US, Belgium, Japan, and elsewhere, while public and political discourse is often concerned with the assumed costs and dangers of migration, migration museums tend to treat it as a source of “economic, cultural, and social enrichment.”¹⁹ The objective of these and similar exhibitions seems to be engendering a positive shift in public perspectives on existing migrants while avoiding any topics that could lead to charges of politicization.

BIHM and its curator posit that Bursa in particular, as a place that “shared its unique blessings of fertile land indiscriminately” (emphasis mine), has benefitted from the presence of migrants. Yet, within this laudatory discourse, BIHM’s texts also evoke the potential pitfalls of migration: “unlike in other places, thanks to the people who arrived and how they were greeted by the state and its citizens, the product of migration is an organically formed multicultural gem,” not an “artificial mosaic.” This suggests that in other, unspecified places the wrong kind of migrants, or the wrong kind of states and citizens, have created unstable and dangerous combinations. Thus, visitors are led to understand that Bursa’s indiscriminate sharing has been made possible by its judiciously discriminating migration policies. As in Belgium’s House of European History, the “constellation of difference” produced at BIHM rendered some minorities as fundamental and others as problematic. Thus, I argue that while BIHM uses its permanent exhibits to enliven and even valorize the stories of ethnically Turkish migrants, it casts aspersions on the city’s once vibrant Armenian community – and omits Syrian refugees entirely. While the museum includes Ahiska Turks as ethnically Turkish migrants, it does not address their contemporary presence in Bursa – and the fact that thousands of them had no clear pathway to Turkish citizenship. Although both Syrian refugees and my Ahiska interlocutors were relatively recent arrivals, it is important to note that BIHM explicitly states that its goal was to “shed light on Bursa’s migration history from 8,500 years ago up to the present” (emphasis mine) and it does so for some migrant communities. As a state institution, BIHM’s inclusions and exclusions are not merely reflections of long-standing anxieties about Turkish national identity, but an active attempt to construct a definitive version of this identity. This version embraces certain migrants in ways that are both ostensibly apolitical and aligned with the policies of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, henceforth AKP).

Bursa and the AKP

With an estimated population of 1.8 million, Bursa is one of Turkey’s largest and most industrialized cities. Located in the northwestern part of the country, it lies across the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul. Although Bursa’s time as the capital of the Ottoman Empire was relatively brief (1335–1363), its combination of natural resources and urban development continued to draw in new inhabitants from inside and outside the Empire, as well as during Turkey’s Republican period (1923-present day). BIHM’s allocation of square footage clearly signals that nineteenth- and twentieth-century migrations are its primary focus.²⁰ Today, while only small numbers of foreign tourists are drawn to Bursa, internal migrants from the country’s rural northeast regions, immigrants from post-socialist countries, and Syrian refugees have found work – some with official sanction and others not – at its numerous construction sites, automotive and tire plants, furniture manufacturers, and, of course, textile factories.

Work on BIHM officially began in 2009 under the administration of the Bursa Metropolitan Municipality’s AKP (now former) mayor, Recep Altepe. BIHM curator Erdönmez credited the mayor for his keen interest in BIHM and Bursa’s other museums.²¹ The AKP, which came to power at the national level in 2002, enjoys widespread popularity in Bursa. Over the course of the past sixteen years the AKP has de-emphasized secularism, one of the six founding principles of the Turkish Republic, and correspondingly increased the public role of Islam and Islamic institutions. With regard to national identity and the related issue of immigration, the AKP’s positions have been unsettled and reconfigured numerous times over the years. Initially, the party signaled a move toward a more inclusive and less narrow definition of Turkish identity, making overtures to minority communities such as Alevis, Armenians, and Kurds. It seemed to be constructing a more “cosmopolitan nationalism” by recognizing Turkey’s internal diversity and presenting it as a strength.²² However, as BIHM was opening in 2014, the AKP’s positions were shaped by increasingly complex domestic and foreign policy considerations. One of the most urgent among these was the growing conflict in neighboring Iraq and Syria. Turkey’s strategic considerations put it alternately at odds and in uneasy cooperation with the European Union, the United States, and Russia. As Turkey became a target of terror attacks by the Islamic State and its economy faltered, the AKP’s rhetoric became more traditionally nationalistic and its relationship with the minority communities grew increasingly fraught. At the same time, over a million (and, by 2018, more than three million) Syrian refugees had fled their homes and crossed the border into Turkey.

In relating Bursa’s migration history, BIHM makes no explicit mention of these issues or the AKP’s unprecedented re-appraisals of secularism and Turkish identity. However, the AKP’s vision for Turkey’s future inevitably necessitated a re-imagining of its past. As an institution founded and funded by AKP administrations, BIHM evokes Bursa’s cosmopolitanism to present a migration history that, in its inclusions and exclusions, is responsive to the party’s priorities and predicaments.

The (im)migrant, the refugee

In its own English translation of its name, the Bursa Göç Tarihi Müzesi renders the word “göç” as “immigration.” However, the Turkish word covers a range of human movements: “immigration,” “emigration,” and “migration” in general. Yet in common usage the related “göçmen,” “immigrant,” “emigrant,” or “migrant,” implies a very specific kind of person and movement: an individual of “Turkish ethnic descent and Turkish culture” who has migrated to Turkey.²³ Historically this description has had no official definition, but referred to constellations of features including language (Turkish or Turkic), religion (Islam), genealogy (belonging to a tribe or clan recognized as Turkish or Turkic), location (origin in place where Turks were known to have settled), and custom (hospitality, marriage, and others).²⁴ At BIHM a göçmen is specifically one who is “forcibly removed from the homeland with a heart full of longing and fear” (emphasis mine). Some labels substitute the word “muhacir,” which is often translated as “national refugee,” one with ethnic, historical, and religious ties to Turkey.²⁵ Mülteci and sığınmacı, the standard words for refugees in general, are never used. This is because in Turkey the göçmen and the muhacir – the national immigrant and the national refugee – are the only kinds of acceptable migrant. The 1934 Law on Settlement declared that such persons were entitled to settle in Turkey and receive Turkish citizenship and “explicitly barred the settlement in Turkey of refugees who did not belong to the Turkish culture.”²⁶ BIHM’s interchangeable use of göçmen and muhacir is not only a reflection of this history and contemporary realities, but a pedagogical technique to elicit boundless sympathy for an ethnically and culturally bounded category of persons – migrants who had become Turkish because they were already Turkish to begin with.

The 1934 Law on Settlement was a significant shift from earlier Ottoman policy and practice, which used a variety of techniques to incorporate peoples of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in order to strengthen and enrich the imperial state. However, it merely codified a pattern that had been established in the nineteenth century. BIHM presents a quote from Sultan Abdulhamid II, who reigned from 1878 to 1909, that presaged the migration policy of the future Turkish Republic. The Sultan wrote,

We will only accept into our state borders those of our own nation and those who share our religious beliefs. We must be careful to strengthen the Turkish element. Migration will not only increase our national strength, but our empire’s economic strength.

Though the 1934 Law on Settlement has seen a number of amendments, this principle continues to shape Turkey’s migration and citizenship regulations. Sultan Abdulhamid II and the leaders of the Turkish Republic continued to value migrants for their potential to shore up the state with their industrious labors, but they had grown convinced that the state could only count on Turkish migrants for their loyalty.

Who are these persons of Turkish ethnicity and culture and how did they end up outside of Turkey’s borders in the first place? How does BIHM mold their experiences into a definitive and definitively AKP-friendly migration narrative? Finally, will the AKP and BIHM refashion the category of göçmen to include Bursa’s more recent newcomers, including Ahiska Turks and Syrian refugees?

Turks from distant lands

BIHM exhibits are organized in a loosely chronological order. First, early Muslim and Turkic newcomers to the region are recognized for their contributions to Bursa. Migrants from the Middle East, Central Asia, and Iran are noted as artists, scholars, and dervishes who accelerated Bursa’s urban development by establishing mosques, dervish lodges, new neighborhoods, and religious foundations. In its accounts of non-Muslim and non-Turkic peoples, such as Jews and Armenians, BIHM stresses that the Ottoman state offered them protection when Christian rulers threatened their way of life and very existence. These exhibits are dominated by interpretive texts and artists’ renderings, featuring few, if any, objects. The exhibit on Armenians, whose history in Bursa spanned back to its days as a fourteenth-century Ottoman capital, consists entirely of four paragraphs and a painted street scene. The label notes that Armenians began coming to Bursa again in the nineteenth century “when they were unable to bear Russian oppression.” BIHM gives them their due as key players in Bursa’s development – from pioneering silk cultivation and manufacture, to leading various political and diplomatic institutions. However, the story of Bursa’s Armenians ends during “the crisis of Greek occupation” in the early 1920s. According to BIHM, “Armenian gangs harmed people” and, after the Turkish military regained control of the city, all Armenians were “forced to leave by boat.” Visitors learn that, unlike the Muslim and Turkic migrants, Armenians had never become Turkish – they were, for a time, part of an “artificial mosaic,” but never became part of the “organically formed multicultural gem” that is Turkey’s destiny. BIHM renders Armenian presence in Bursa as a kind of cautionary tale, demonstrating that the state must remain ever vigilant in policing the boundaries of belonging. This lesson is politically useful to the AKP as it declares certain individuals and communities within Turkey “marginal” and “traitors of the homeland.”

In the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman state was forced to retreat from its territories in the Balkans and the Caucasus, ethnic Turkish migrants often followed, some of them settling in Bursa. As disputed territories changed hands in the 1820s and 1870s, millions of Turkish Muslims suddenly found themselves under the sovereignty of Christian rulers. According to political scientist Kemal Kirisçi, “an estimated 1,445,000 persons of Turkish and Muslim descent returned to Anatolia [Turkey’s ‘heartland’] as the geographical size of the Empire in the Balkans shrunk.”²⁷ Both the Ottoman and Turkish Republican states “accepted a certain responsibility for ethnic Turks who were left behind” in the wake of territorial losses.²⁸ According to BIHM, the state expressed its devotion to these göçmen by providing them with both material and spiritual resources. In narrating their experiences, BIHM emphasizes both these migrants’ suffering as innocent people who were deprived of their homeland and their relief as Turks who were allowed by the state to reunite with their true Anatolian homeland.

Göçmen from the Balkans have generally been at the “top of the ethnic kin (soydaş) hierarchy.”²⁹ That is, for the Ottomans and the leaders of the Turkish Republic, as well as the general public in Anatolia, Turks from the Balkans have been the most desirable kind of migrants – exalted in political rhetoric, literary and popular culture, and everyday conversation. It is no surprise then that BIHM devotes a great deal of floor space and resources to the Balkan migrations spanning from 1878 to 1990. Displays on göçmen from the Balkans feature numerous interpretive texts, mannequins dressed in a wide array of national costumes, enlarged historical photographs, and multiple life-size dioramas of migrants’ arrivals in Turkey by foot, by train, and, in later years, by boxy Soviet automobile. These dioramas are populated not only by three-dimensional human figures, but by a wide array of everyday objects – traditional cribs, hats and headscarves, wash tubs, embroidered quilts and handkerchiefs, dishes, suitcases, and thermoses. Many of these objects are not labeled and BIHM makes no claims as to their provenance. Yet they are meant to look authentic to their times and places, conveying the stories of the migrants’ particular journeys and, with their recognizably Turkish features, allowing visitors to relate to their owners as people very much like themselves.³⁰

Interpretive texts make clear that the soydaş migrants were forced to flee because of their religious and ethnic identity. According to a label on migrations from Bulgaria during the early Republican era, “the calling into question of Turkish language, religion, and culture created a new migration movement.” The label on “Ethnic Kin Fleeing from the Oppression of the Communist Regime (1989–1990)” is even more explicit:

The Bulgarian Communist regime banned Muslim-Turkish religious traditions, beliefs, and practices like circumcision. . . . Defenseless under the thumb of Bulgarian law enforcement, our ethnic kin could not bear this and were forced to abandon the lands they considered their homeland.

The labels also sought to demonstrate how the support of the Turkish state enabled these soydaş migrants, who had left so many of their resources behind, to become productive members of society. Thus, BIHM’s text on the Greek-Turkish population exchange states that the 33,215 people who were resettled in Bursa “were given 5,315 houses, 719 stores, 15,221,000 meters of land, 4,445,000 meters of orchards, and 33,885,000 meters of olive groves.”

After the Balkan migrations, BIHM devotes a comparable amount of attention to the Caucasus and Crimean migrations, spanning from 1783 to 1923. Migrants from the Caucasus, like those from the Balkans, are recognized as soydaş, but have generally been less visible and widely known in Turkish society.³¹ At BIHM, a label notes that while the Caucasus is a large geographic area that contains many people and languages, these communities were all “united under the framework of Islamic brotherhood.” In addition to national costumes, historical sketches and photographs, impressive embroidery work, and elaborate dioramas, the displays on the Caucasus also featured reproductions of Ottoman-era maps to help Turkish visitors locate this region and envision it as part of their history. While BIHM emphasizes the proximity of the Balkans and foregrounds the remoteness of the Caucasus, in both cases its objective is to inscribe the göçmen from these areas into a definitive Turkish national identity.

The labels establish that migrants from the Caucasus, like their Balkan brethren, were forced to flee due of their Muslim and Turkish identity. On the migrations that followed the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829, BIHM wrote:

Of the 1.2 million Caucasian migrants who were forced to abandon their ancient lands . . . only 800,000 were able to reach Ottoman lands. . . . The Russians closed Muslim schools, dismantled religious foundations, and sent a portion of the Muslim population to its frigid regions. . . . As with all muhacirs to their lands, the Ottoman authorities opened their doors to the Caucasian peoples.

In teaching its visitors about göçmen from the Caucasus, BIHM seeks to convince them that, while these people came from distant lands and spoke a confusing array of languages, their essential Turkishness – and the suffering they experienced to hold on to it – made them a part of Turkey’s “multicultural spiritual treasure.” In doing so, it also legitimizes the migration and provisioning strategies of past Turkish governments, lending support to the notion that the current, AKP-led state will continue to move Turkey in the right direction.

The limits of multiculturalism

Through its exhibits on the Balkans and the Caucasus, BIHM showed its visitors how people of Turkish ethnicity and culture ended up outside of Turkey’s borders and were compelled to become göçmen or muhacirs. The migrants’ Muslim identity is emphasized in these accounts – both as the pretext for their unjust displacements from their various homelands and as the key to their integration into a singular Turkish homeland. Indeed, in his summary of BIHM’s exhibitions, curator Erdönmez mentions only Turkish göçmen: “And then there is the narrative of return to the homeland; migration from the Balkans, migration from the Caucasus, migration from the Crimean region.”³² BIHM celebrates these migrants both for their steadfast attachment to their Turkish roots and their contributions to Bursa’s economic development. Other arrivals, such as Jews and Armenians, are acknowledged, but their stories are told as part of the distant past. In the case of Armenians, a narrative that concludes in disgraced departure demonstrates the hazards of welcoming non-Turkish migrants. The small exhibits on these communities do not feature national costumes, everyday belongings, three-dimensional human figures, or anything that would encourage visitors to imagine the lives the migrants led before and after their arrival in Bursa. BIHM relies on interpretive texts and an array of exceptional and everyday objects to establish the Balkan and Caucasian migrants’ Muslim identity, their suffering at the hands of Christian and later Communist states, and their ethnic kinship to its Turkish visitors. Thus, BIHM’s göçmen narrative is not only definitive, but definitively compatible with both the continuities and the ruptures within the AKP’s ongoing efforts to refashion Turkish national identity.

BIHM opened its doors in the midst of yet another notable migration into Bursa, that of thousands of Syrian refugees. This new population was generally a cause of discomfort and contention for Bursa’s residents. Public and political rhetoric against their inclusion and presence in the country revolved around often racialized concerns about terrorism, incompatible social values, and untenable economic burdens.³³ Inside the museum, however, there was no indication that the city’s migration history was currently in the making. As the AKP sought to reassure its constituents that their social and economic interests would remain the party’s top priority, AKP leaders presided over the acceptance of increasing numbers of Syrian refugees. Starting with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the summer of 2016, AKP leaders began to speak of offering citizenship to some Syrian refugees.³⁴ Syrians were fellow Muslims and, as AKP politicians often pointed out, unwelcome in many Christian countries, much like the göçmen of the nineteenth century. At the same time, these countries were said to be “offering citizenship to well-educated Syrians while neglecting the large masses who were less qualified.”³⁵ In parliament, Interior Minister Efkan Ala said that Turkey would consider granting citizenship to Syrians “whose citizenship would benefit both us and them, I mean, [those] who wouldn’t constitute a problem for social integration.”³⁶ The AKP was thus advocating only for “qualified” Syrians who would enrich and not burden Turkey. However, the non-Turkishness of these migrants meant that these citizenship proposals garnered harsh criticisms from opposition party leaders – and from many AKP voters – who insisted that the state must be discriminating in order to share indiscriminately. In this unsettled context, in December of 2017 BIHM held its first Immigration and Empathy Exhibition, a competition that featured works by artists from around the world, including Syria.³⁷ Syrian calligraphic artist Osama Muhammed Alhamzawy spoke during the award ceremony. He noted that, in Bursa, he had found a comfortable place to work on his art and, thanking the Turkish people, explained that he never felt himself to be an immigrant, a göçmen, in Turkey.³⁸ In other words, Turkey was like a homeland for him, too. The competition, and the decision to feature a Syrian artist as a speaker during the ceremony, were surely signs of BIHM’s and the state’s support for Syrian refugees. Yet, as in 2014, BIHM could not definitively present Syrians as an integral part of Turkey’s multicultural landscape. Even as they worked to instill empathy for a broader range of immigrants through the Immigration and Empathy competition, the curators continued to avoid this delicate issue in their as-yet-unchanged permanent exhibition.

Ahiska Turks are a smaller and less controversial group in Bursa. BIHM acknowledges them with a small display in the Caucasus section entitled “Bursa’s Exiled Guests: Ahiska Turks.” This title would have offended most of my interlocutors; following their forced displacement in the Soviet Union, they had been unwilling “guests” in numerous places. In coming to Turkey, the Ahiska I spoke with expected to find themselves finally at home. The labels noted that this population had come under Russian sovereignty in 1829, causing large numbers to migrate to the Ottoman Empire in order to escape oppressive conditions. Those who remained on their ancestral lands would fall victim to the mass removal of 1944 and further displacements during and after the period of Soviet collapse. However, while BIHM follows the narrative of Bulgarian göçmen up to their resettlement in Bursa in the early 1990s, the fate of Ahiska Turks in the twentieth century does not even mention Bursa, but rather trails off to “other Turkic republics.”

In 2014, thousands of Ahiska Turks, and especially those who had arrived after 2010, lacked Turkish citizenship and questioned the state’s devotion to them. Where, they demanded, were the material and spiritual resources that were their due? AKP leaders validated such claims to ethnic kinship and promised that all Ahiska would eventually get citizenship. Notably, the question of their education or other qualifications was never broached. As discussed above, Turkishness has been, and continues to be, understood as the primary qualification for migrants’ proper integration. Yet, the citizenship promises did not soon materialize and, in the meantime, similar ones were being made to Syrian refugees. In a newspaper interview, Ziyatdin Hassanov, the head of the World Union of Ahiska Turks, said, “Ahiska Turks have a natural right [to citizenship]. . . . Today, while they make things easier for those who come from Syria, they create more obstacles for Ahiska.”³⁹ While Hassanov shrewdly avoided direct criticism of the AKP, “they” were the ones in power. In parliamentary debates, opposition party members sometimes used the issue of Ahiska Turks’ citizenship woes to taunt their AKP colleagues.⁴⁰ Starting in 2015, the AKP moved to take up the historical mantle of responsibility for ethnic Turkish suffering outside of Turkey’s borders by taking in several hundred Ahiska Turks imperiled by the war in eastern Ukraine. Yet, even by mid-2018, the citizenship process for those living in Bursa was still ongoing and the subject of pointed critique. In this context, BIHM avoids presenting any information about contemporary Ahiska Turkish life in Turkey that could be construed as critical of the ruling party and focuses on their nineteenth-century migrations to the Ottoman Empire.

In their analysis of Turkish museums, museum scholars Christopher Whitehead and Gönül Bozoğlu assert, “As with any map, the museum’s cultural cartography is political, even, or perhaps especially, where it seems to aspire to the status of description.”⁴¹ The cultural cartography of BIHM champions Turkish multiculturalism while also delimiting it to the productive presences of ethnic kin migrants from the Balkans and the Caucasus. It does so in ways that, while ostensibly apolitical, aligned with Turkey’s ruling party’s visions of a cosmopolitan Turkish national identity – augmented by the presence of the right kind of göçmen, more Islamic, and perhaps, but not necessarily, more inclusive. In the context of a volatile political landscape in which the AKP faces terrorism threats stemming from the conflict in Iraq and Syria, complicated relationships with fickle foreign allies, and various constituencies of disgruntled citizens, BIHM avoids any migration narratives that could be construed as critical of the ruling party. As a state institution primarily aimed at presenting a sympathetic and patriotic migration narrative to the Turkish public, it puts forward an uncontroversial – and incontrovertible – version of the AKP agenda. However, if the AKP eventually makes good on its promises of citizenship to Syrian refugees and Ahiska Turks, their stories could be woven into the tapestry of Bursa’s 8,500-year-old migration history and enlivened with dioramas of their own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Irina Levin is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Her research with forcibly displaced people has focused on issues of citizenship, belonging, nationalism, and state sovereignty. In 2018–2019, Irina is the postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University’s Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from New York University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation: [Grant Number 1323761].

Notes

1 Arieff, “A Different Sort of (P)Reservation,” 78.

2 Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances, 34.

3 Bunzl, “Of Holograms and Storage Areas,” 441.

4 Ibid., 444.

5 The online guestbook for BIHM can be accessed via: http://bursagocmuzesi.com/?page_id=95.

6 Macdonald, “New Constellations of Difference,” 6–8.

7 Ibid., 6.

8 Ibid., 8.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances, 35.

12 Greenberg, “Representing the State,” 20.

13 Tai, “Redefining Japan as ‘Multiethnic’,” 47.

14 Whitehead et al., “Place, Identity and Migration,” 48.

15 Watson, “Before We Were Us, We Were Them,” 96.

16 Ibid., 98.

17 Tai, “Redefining Japan as ‘Multiethnic’,” 45.

18 Erdönmez, “Bursa’s New Museum: Immigration History.”

19 Whitehead et al., “Place, Identity and Migration,” 48.

20 See note 2 above.

21 Erdönmez, “Bursa’s New Museum.”

22 Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances, 32.

23 1934 Law on Settlement, as cited in Kirisçi, “Refugees of Turkish Origin,” 388.

24 At the same time, as noted by Kemal Kirisçi and others, “there are no clear criteria defining Turkish ethnicity and culture” (388).

25 Kirisçi, “Refugees of Turkish Origin,” 401.

26 Kirisçi, “Refugees of Turkish Origin,” 386.

27 Kirisçi, “Refugees of Turkish Origin,” 385. Kirisçi refers to this movement as a return, but while some of these migrants may have traced their roots to Anatolia, the territory at the heart of the Empire, many of them considered the places they had fled to be their homelands.

28 Kirisçi, “Refugees of Turkish Origin,” 387.

29 Danış and Parla, “Nafile Soydaşlık,” 134.

30 Tai, “Redefining Japan as ‘Multiethnic’,” 47.

31 In recent years, soap operas and mini-series such as Kurt Seyit and Shura, about a Crimean Tatar man and his Russian beloved escaping to Turkey in the wake of the Russian revolution, and The Great Caucasian Deportation, about the Soviet Union’s 1944 mass removal of Ahiska Turks from their homeland in the Republic of Georgia to collective farms in the Central Asian republics, have sought to popularize (and capitalize on) the fate of these göçmen.

32 Erdönmez, “Bursa’s New Museum: Immigration History.”

33 Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency, “The Opposition’s Reaction to ‘Citizenship for Syrians’”; Doğan News Agency, “Kılıçdaroğlu.”

34 Zeyrek, “Qualified Syrians Are the Priority.”

35 Anadolu Agency, “Meskhetian Turks, ‘Beneficial’ Syrians to Get Turkish Citizenship.”

36 Quoted in Anadolu Agency, “Meskhetian Turks, ‘Beneficial’ Syrians to Get Turkish Citizenship.”

37 Son Dakika, “The Migration and Empathy Exhibition Has Opened in Bursa.”

38 Ibid.

39 Quoted in Özmüş, Sinan. 2014. “The 70 Year Anniversary of Ahiska Turks’ Exile.”

40 See note 35 above.

41 Whitehead, Christopher and Gönül Bozoğlu, “Constitutive Others and the Management of Difference,” 255.