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What Trees May Remember: Absence, Architecture, and Environment in the Upper Euphrates
Abstract
The rupture of 1915 in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world has been an object of study for an interdisciplinary audience within a broader human rights discussion. The ‘evidence’ has constituted one of the most important discussions in weaving a history where the absence -of people, archive, and common sense- has been more dominant than what is present. In this context, my research on the architectural manifestation of forced displacement and dispossession brings the material and environmental fragments to the foreground. Through findings from oral history, fieldwork, plant samples, memoirs, and state archives, I focus on the three connected villages in the eastern border of Divriği (today in Sivas - Turkey) and Erzincan (Turkey) in Eastern Anatolia. In the absence of their local Armenian residents, I narrate the architectural and environmental history of Kürtdallı (now Çobandurağı) and Gasma (now Kesme) and Pingan (now Adatepe) through decaying construction materials and the vegetation that emerges in the ruins of vernacular architecture. Keeping Anna Tsing’s question “what emerges in damaged landscapes” at the center of this research, I replace the material ruins, endemic plants, and geographic maps with the unfulfilled expectation of an archival document. The damaged landscape, in my research, is not harmed by industrial or natural disasters, but by a series of forced displacements that took place roughly in twenty years during and after WWI. These three formerly Armenian majority villages of Divriği provide a lens through which I theorize the intertwined relation between vernacular civic architecture and modernity, through displacement and dispossession. While for this study I look at the rural peripheries of Divriği and architectures that are generally referred to as the “vernacular,” this work is part of a broader attempt at historicizing the displacement, migration, and dispossession as an inherent episode of architectural history in Turkey.
Discipline
Archaeology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries