Sounds of Silence?-Kurds in the Kemalist City Prime Minister Erdo?an recently reminded protestors in Diyarbak?r, the “unofficial Kurdish capital,” that, in Turkey, there is still, “tek millet, tek bayrak, tek vatan, tek devlet”-one nation, one flag, one motherland, one state. The Turkish leader’s warning is an updated version of the phrase “tek dil, tek halk, tek bayrak”-one language, one people, one flag-that Kemalism has inscribed on mountains and public buildings throughout “Eastern” Turkey since 1923. However, despite the embedding of Turkish “modernity” into the material environment and the simultaneous “destruction of historical artifacts or monuments that in anyway…indicated a Kurdish presence” (Zeydanl?o?lu forthcoming) in Turkey, 80 years after the formation of “modern” republic, 300 000 people attended Kurdish musician Ciwan Haco’s concert in Batman. “Ciwan Haco vallahi geliyor,” (“finally, Ciwan Haco is coming”) announced the headline in the newspaper Radikal after the singer was given permission to “return” to Turkey. While Haco was born in Syria, and currently lives in Europe, his ancestral home is Mardin, a city approximately 100 kilometres southeast of Diyarbak?r. Haco’s song “Diyarbak?r Mala Mina” (“Diyarbak?r My Home”) has become the “unofficial” anthem of the “unofficial” Kurdish capital. In another song about the “Eastern” city, Haco sings: I am the elder Sheikh Said and Sheikh Fuad I am the unknown Kurdish fighter without name I died for my country, I wasn’t born today I carve my name on the wall of Diyarbak?r By following Haco’s music as it “zigs and zags” its way through the “implacable” landscape of the Kemalist city, this paper argues that Kurdish aural resistance to the “hypervisuality” of Turkish nationalism (Houston 2008) has “carved” a space for Kurdish identity within the walls of the Kemalist city. While some scholars seek to make room for Kurds in the “cosmopolitan” city, I argue that as Kemalism’s “other victims”, Kurds use their voices not to “haunt” the city’s old European quarters but to resist current Kemalist urban planning projects. My examination of the Kurdish “soundscape” in Diyarbak?r, using Haco’s songs, YouTube images of the city during Newroz (Kurdish New Year), guerrilla music videos, the prison writings of Mehdi Zana, and oral history interviews, re-maps Diyarbak?r as a “counterspace” of Turkish “modernity.” In the process, my “aural” history of Diyarbak?r recasts the Turkish nation as an “object of contest, negotiation, and…struggle, both historically and in the contemporary moment” (Burton 2003).