In Turkey, new mosque construction has transformed the landscape, filling it with neo-Ottoman architectural forms in cast cement. Whether the structure proposes a new vision of Turkish Sunni Islam or one based on an Ottoman architectural heritage, all new official and therefore visible mosques are controlled by the state Presidency of Religious Affairs or Diyanet. These buildings thereby demonstrate state power in constraining and controlling the form of practice. Thus, in Turkey the view of mosques as essentially political expressions of Islamist movements needs to be reconsidered in light of the fact that these are both a local expression of practice and a state expression of the power to control and contain practice within a certain style of building. In this paper, I trace the long history of mosque construction, destruction and reconstruction in the rural Yuntdag region of western Anatolia as it relates to villager visions of Islam. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2000-2010. Here, men from a number of villages once gathered in a small prayerhouse on Fridays. This prayerhouse was in a wild pasture, also used for a threshing ground, appropriate to a community of shepherds. Though no traces of the building remain, an old cemetery continues to be used and villagers describe the power emanating from the graves of major spiritual leaders buried there. From this early collective and modest prayerhouse, villagers demonstrate how they became more involved with the Ottoman and later Republican orthodoxization of practice when they built mosques inside their respective villages. While some villages preserve their Ottoman mosque, with pitched roof and interior calligraphic decoration and regard it as a link to a legacy of Islamic scholarship and practice from the Empire, others critique theirs as "narrow" and "old." Impatient, forward-looking villages have destroyed their "old" Ottoman mosques to make way for bigger, urban-style, domed structures, which paradoxically reflect a popularization of Ottoman architectural style. I consider the stories of preservation and destruction to examine different paths of Sunni modernity: one preserved in an effort to maintain a visual link to a legacy of Islamic scholarship, and another designed to reference urban modernity and prestigious Republican practice, which references Ottoman architectural styles.

Borders not only demarcate domains by monitoring flows and controlling access between them; they also mediate the constitution of social hierarchies and the performance of otherness through the layout and use of very context-specific structures they comprise. This paper examines the emergence of Elaz??, a small Eastern Anatolian town, as an internal border within the national borders of Turkey in the 1930s when Kurdish tribes in the neighboring Dersim province, who had long-standing autonomous structures of governance and ethnic and religious solidarity, rose up against the state’s centralizing and assimilationist policies. Anxious to consolidate its authority, the government of the newly formed and still fragile Turkish nation-state responded with overwhelming force, mounting a devastating air campaign that destroyed a third of the villages in the province. It also cordoned off Dersim, forcibly evacuating survivors to Western Turkey. Thereafter, travel beyond Elaz?? into this combat zone required special military permits akin to an internal passport. Railroads, touted primarily as instruments of market integration and defense against foreign aggression, were used to ferry troops to battle and Dersimis out of their homelands. New surveillance and communication technologies—including reconnaissance flights surveying the land and tracking movements, gendarme stations equipped with searchlights for signaling across long distances—transformed the rugged terrain between Dersim and Elaz?? into a highly militarized landscape. Finally, Elaz??’s state-run cultural and educational establishments, which, despite their formal similarities to their counterparts elsewhere in Turkey, engendered distinctive practices of sorting, detention and public shaming, thereby reinforcing the asymmetries between the Turkish and Kurdish populations through enactment. A critical study of these military, infrastructural, and institutional structures and the functions they sustained establishes Elaz?? as a liminal site revealing the limits of the Turkish state’s central authority, the brittleness of its official ideology and the incoherence of its attempts to suppress Kurdish identities.

Istiklal Caddesi, once the Grand Rue de Pera during the Ottoman Empire, was renamed to stand for independence and liberty. Since at least the 18th century, the space of the avenue has been the site for viewing diverse peoples and experiences, and displaying mixtures of built forms and styles. It acts as an iconic indicator of the changing direction of Turkish modernity. This paper considers the long history of this street from the Ottoman era to the present and puts forth a framework for observing how street space takes part in creating urban identities bound and defined by architecture and the people who traverse and inhabit these places. Real estate development in the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries densely filled in open spaces or replaced the old with new buildings. Adding top the character of the area, sometimes a parcel, or several of them combined, was design with an ingenious interior passage, courtyard or arcaded space that served to join both the avenue and surrounding side streets. Stylistically, hybridizations of form, decoration and use blended to expose a cosmopolitan European sensitivity that was integrated within the Turkish and Levantine multi-story structures. This kind of integration is suggestive of an acceptance of outside secular activity in a Muslim Empire. The introduction of the Wealth Tax in 1942 eroded previous periods of transformation and acceptance by forcing ethnic and sectarian others out of their city spaces. This essentially halted outside influence, thereby censoring spatial use and urban development in Istanbul. By the 1960s, Istiklal Caddesi had fallen into disrepair and ill-repute. The rebirth came in the late 1980s under Ozal’s economic reforms, which boosted the Beyoglu district and invited outside retailers and fast food establishments into a mix of local businesses. In the 1990s, Turkish bank foundations, speculative commercial developers, and individual tenants began to develop and integrate cultural centers into the mix. Continuing in the 2000s art and commerce became even more connected, bringing about additional questions concerning issues of preservation, re-adaptation and re-making new local and global culture. At the same time,recent real estate development policy is threatening this newer urban character with large-scale commercial buildings such as Demiroren, which has inspiredstrong debate about the public values along with state intentions. A disproportionate breakdown of urban and architectural quality appears to be at stake in the name of progress.

This paper examines how Turkish retirees make lives for themselves in one of the most contradictory places of the Turkish state: a state-run retirement home for independent retirees. Only three such institutions exist, and they present a challenging puzzle to residents, even as the private sphere is starting to see the development of similar facilities. Although aging is often said in Turkey as being a fundamentally private family affair, it is shaped by state programs and projects in many ways. Most state discussions on aging concern the poor and destitute, and many in Turkey associate state activity with respect to aging specifically with those populations. Many younger people say that they could never see their parents in any kind of retirement home, out of shame and love; older people in them are aware that most huzurevleri (rest homes) serve those without the material and especially the social means to live elsewhere. A very few insitutions house civil servant retirees and in them one sees state intervention in creating a specifically middle, or even middle-upper, class of citizen whose class status is confirmed most strongly in leisure and consumption. In these institutions, as well, tensions between a “Father State” and family-based paternal and maternal status and practices are highlighted. Private institutions, and especially the new ones focusing on the wealthy, present more sharply the contradictions of a material poverty combined with social poverty, and a high-end leisure available only to those with considerable wealth. This paper draws upon research in one of the state retirement homes, where retirees live model lives of middle-classness in a hill-top facility that can look, to its residents and visitors, like a luxury hotel, a kind of “site” (or housing development, after the French cité), an urban neighborhood, a state residential compound, and a hospital or nursing home. Residents navigated the meaning of fulfilled lives, sometimes claiming and sometimes denying them, through activities, reflections on their pasts, and relationships with children near and far. Staff and residents tried to make sense of the contradictions the place posed by living a rewarding life in a place with a hospital for the gravely ill; living in a huzurevi geared towards producing middle-classness; maintaining autonomy and relations with children while in a subsidized facility with provided care; recreating active parenting in a context of state dependency; and sustaining local social and artistic creativity.