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ABSTRACT
After coming to power in 2002, the Justice and Development Party evoked the ‘glory’ of the Ottoman past, seeking to expand Turkey’s cultural sphere of influence to the former territories of the Ottoman Empire – a phenomenon commonly referred to as neo-Ottomanism. While neo-Ottomanism is generally discussed as a component of foreign policy, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency’s (TIKA) intervention in the heritage dynamics of foreign countries was intimately linked with domestic policies. This paper discusses how neo-Ottomanist policies selectively created transnational heritage sites, and how these sites have dialectically become instruments of domestic politics.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ACHS 2020 FUTURES – Association of Critical Heritage Studies 5th Biennial Conference, August 26–30, 2020, London (online) as ‘Multiple neo-Ottomanisms in the Construction of Turkey’s (Trans)national Heritage.’
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Pınar Aykaç
Pınar Aykaç is a conservation architect with an MSc in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage from the Middle East Technical University and a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture. She has been involved in various conservation projects in Turkey including the Presidential Ataturk Museum Pavilion Conservation Project and the Commagene Nemrut Conservation and Development Programme. Her research interests are museums’ role in urban regeneration and heritage politics. She was a Weinberg Fellow at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America during the fall semester of 2017–2018. She is currently an assistant professor at the Middle East Technical University’s Department of Architecture in Ankara, Turkey.