Protest, Bodies, and the Grounds of Memory: Taksim Square as ‘heritage site’ and the 2013 Gezi Protests

Abstract

This paper examines heritage representations within the 2013 “Gezi” protests in Turkey, focusing on the contest over the historical, social, and political significance of Gezi Park in Taksim, Istanbul. Gezi Park is a multi-layered urban space, once associated with the Armenian community, then with the Ottoman military and finally, from the 1930s, with the modernist urbanism of the secular Republic. Prior to the protests, the conservative Islamist administration planned to erase and refashion Gezi Park as a site of neo-Ottoman nostalgia. While the protests were associated with ecological and civil society concerns, the contest between protestors and state actors was also characterized by competing mobilizations of histories and notions of legitimate heritage over a range of representational sites and forms, from political speeches to protestors’ performances. Combining an analysis of these representations with interview data we explore Taksim-Gezi as a site of “ground memories” that are selectively articulated and strategically renewed by different groups. The state attempt to erase and remake place in a specific historical image was countered by people's diverse mnemonic and socio-ideological relations to place histories, that became repertories for reaction. We argue that civil crises like protests may help us to understand and problematize the spatio-temporal, multi-relational articulations of heritage, and, vice versa, a view through heritage and memory opens critical exposures of socio-political conflict.

keywords:

• heritage
• place
• protest
• memory
• identity
• Turkey
• Gezi
• neo-Ottomanism

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our interviewees — Ziya Azazi, Gürsel Göncü, and Sayat Tekir, as well as those who have been anonymized — for giving up their time and animating this paper. Further thanks are due to Azazi, Göncü, and Deniz Akgündüz for providing and allowing us to reproduce visual material. We are also grateful to staff at IKOS, the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, which hosted us as we began to study the Gezi Protests in Autumn 2014, and particularly to Bernt Brendemoen, Brita Brenna, and Einar Wigen. We extend thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers whose insightful comments helped to improve this paper for publication, to Sharon Macdonald at Humboldt University in Berlin, and to colleagues in Media, Culture, Heritage at Newcastle University, who offered comments on our ideas.

ORCID

Christopher Whitehead http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1645-7286

Gönül Bozoğlu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2048-5573

Notes

1 We undertook ten interviews, meaning that this is not intended as representative data, but of individual responses to and reflections upon the protests.

2 In Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi.

3 İstanbul 2 Numaralı Kültür Varlıklarını Koruma Bölge Kurulu.

4 The Order was later overturned after an appeal from the Istanbul Municipality. In June 2016 Erdogan revived the idea of razing Gezi Park in order to reconstruct the barracks building (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36567872).

5 This animation was released by the Municipality on its YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channe/UCdHLGlFVLXSF8avtflkMrHA accessed November 2014), followed by amended animations in February and then October 2012. These were removed during the protests on 6th June 2013 (Jost 2013).

6 http://www.mevlana.gov.tr

7 E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pATTupWIE1I

8 http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/mevlevi-sema-ceremony-00100

9 www.goturkey.com; http://www.mevlana.gov.tr/?_dil=2

10 In our interview Göncü stated that the publishers suggested that the magazine had been losing money and that this was the real reason for its discontinuation, but he rejected this as untrue. The magazine has subsequently been redeveloped under his editorship with new publishers under the name #Tarih (http://www.tarihdergi.com/hakkimizda).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Whitehead

Christopher Whitehead is Professor of Museology at Newcastle University. His research activities focus on both historical and contemporary museology and heritage studies. He has published extensively in the fields of museum history, interpretation practices in art museums and galleries and museums and migration. His last book was the edited volume Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe (Ashgate/Routledge). He currently works primarily on the cultural politics of memory, place, and contested heritage within social formations, primarily through large grant projects funded by the EU and national governments. He is currently the co-ordinator of the EU-funded CoHERE project (Critical Heritages, Performing, and Representing Identities in Europe).

Gönül Bozoğlu

Gönül Bozoğlu has a background in Art History, Archaeology, and Museum Studies, with experience of working in museums in the UK and on archaeological excavations in Turkey and the Middle East. She is a Research Associate at Newcastle University in the Media, Culture, Heritage department, working on projects relating to heritage, place, and identity in Turkey and Europe. Alongside this, she is completing a PhD at Humboldt University, Berlin, on the politics of history in modern-day Turkey. She works with approaches and ideas from museum, heritage and memory studies, visual culture, political science, and anthropology.