In Turkey today, the material past lies very much at the center of possible futures. Following the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the state devoted the organization and presentation of material cultural heritage to the project of imagining a coherent nation. State officials implemented a nationwide ‘museumification’ process, which involved gathering and displaying antiquities from throughout the country at regional archaeology museums in order to construct a sense of shared past and future. Today, however, in the context of intense neoliberal restructuring, the Turkish government is calling on heritage to play a different role in society. Archaeological sites and antiquities, including those recovered through high profile cases of repatriation, are now recognized as a significant draw for tourism. Heritage has become an asset to be invested and managed. To that end, as crowds flock to take in Turkey’s history and culture, the Turkish government is introducing more commercial activities and services at museums and archaeological sites. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has enthusiastically adopted the perceived link between museums, cultural tourism, and ever expanding revenues. With hundreds of millions of euros potentially at stake, the Ministry is now overseeing the construction and renovation of dozens of museums across the country, including “archaeological site museums,” to draw crowds and raise money. The Ministry intends for new archaeological site museums to contribute to the transformation of archaeological sites into tourism products. Nowhere are the expectations for what a site should look like and what it should yield higher than at Troy, one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world. Despite Troy’s storied history, the site remains lacking in tourism infrastructure. Located in northwestern-Anatolia, Troy is one of many archaeological and historical sites in the Troas Region and there has long been the sense that the region has great potential for archaeological tourism development. To harness that potential, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is moving the region’s antiquities to a new site museum under construction at Troy. Trading on the site’s notoriety, the Troy museum will now speak for the entire region. In response to these efforts at tourism and branding, this paper asks: how does the monetization of museums impact the way material culture is collected, organized and used? It is a question with particular salience in Turkey but that resonates throughout societies looking to make heritage profitable.

This paper aims to focus on the negotiation processes involved in re-arranging the Holy Relics Department in the Topkapi Palace Museum in 2007. The section includes “sacred” items that were dispatched to Istanbul from Mecca during the 16th-18th centuries for the sake of “protection” under the Ottoman caliphate. The museumification of the Topkapi Palace under the new secular Republican government in 1924 endowed the section with a dual duty of protecting and exhibiting the Holy Relics. Since 1924, the Holy Relics Department has been re-organized only twice, in 1996 and in 2007: both during times of political flux in Turkey arising primarily from Islamic politics of identity and Neo-Ottomanist zeal expressed in the nostalgia for the multi-ethnic and Islamic Ottoman imperial past (Sen 2010: 62). While the first re-organization of the section in 1996 was limited to a renewal of display cases, the 2007 re-organization was more elaborate. It was by all accounts a “political show” marked by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opening speech, which highlighted that the Holy Relics Department was a reflection of “our elegant line of civilization” and “faith…in the service of all humanity”. Focusing on the 2007 renovation, the paper asks how the notion of “sacredness” is represented, challenged and contested through the re-organization of this section in the “neo-Islamic” (Keyder 2004) politics of the present. The paper scrutinizes the ways in which competing claims define the “sacred” in a “profane” palace-museum at a time when there is a greater tendency to re-link the contested notion of “Turkishness” with the long forgotten Ottoman past. This paper is the product of a nine-month ethnographic study, where semi-structured interviews with museum curators, architects, and museum experts were conducted in addition to a review of museum catalogues and publications by museum staff. The fieldwork has yielded information that suggests the new organization of the exhibit was driven by the desire to find a smooth balance between protecting “sacred” items and narrating “profane” stories that question the “Turkishness” of these items. While the Ottoman tradition to take care of the Holy Relics was inherited once again, the worldliness of these items was conveyed. This simultaneous sacralisation and de-sacralisation of the Holy Relics department highlights Talal Asad’s (2003) argument on the inextricability and multiplicity of the “sacred” and the “secular,” and questions the place of the Topkapi Palace; and consequently, Ottoman history within “Turkishness”.

The Hagia Sophias of Istanbul, Iznik and Trabzon shared similar conversion histories. All three were built as Byzantine churches, converted into mosques under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and functioned as museums in the 20th century. Transforming such emotionally charged spaces, either into buildings reserved for the practices of another religion or into public museums open for visitation, requires major physical and conceptual changes, which are closely related to the political, historical and social contexts in which they take place, and are deeply embedded in long-term contestation over these sites. The Hagia Sophia of Istanbul has been the site of prolonged controversies since it was closed as a mosque in 1931 and opened as a museum in 1935. Both Muslims and Christians venerate the museum as sacred, and some groups have been demanding its opening for religious practice. The debates over these museumified sacred sites have increased through recent developments. Unexpectedly, in November 2011, the Hagia Sophia of Iznik was opened as a functioning mosque. In January 2013 the Directorate of Pious Foundations announced plans of converting the Hagia Sophia of Trabzon back into a mosque. This paper focuses on the debates around the museumification and de-museumification of these emotionally charged buildings, analyzing the historical, political, social, religious, and institutional factors in the manifestation of major structural and conceptual changes related to the museumification and de-museumification practices.

The Atatürk Museum in Istanbul today is only one museum among the over forty now located across the country that bear the name of this modern state’s founder. The active museumification of private, public, official, domestic, temporary, permanent, and semi-permanent venues occupied by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk during the course of his life has been taking place since his death in 1938. Istanbul’s Atatürk Museum was the first of its kind to be established in 1942, although plans to convert it to a museum were in existence since the late 1920s. This museum initiated the establishment of permanently marked spaces honoring Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Republic that were as commemorative and ceremonial as they were educational. Each house museum is located in a different corner of the country, connecting local history to the leader and the nation. These “house” museums also reflect a broader interest in creating domestic settings to associate with the founder of the state, by appropriating an easily identifiable familial visual motif that conveys his role as father, and leader, of the Turkish nation. This study investigates the various ways in which the Istanbul Atatürk Museum serves as a historically charged ceremonial space for the commemoration of the modern state of Turkey and its founding father. The grounds it occupies are considered sacred and indeed constitute the museum’s raison d'être. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk lived in this house during the six months prior to his move to Anatolia in 1919 when he began organizing a nationalist uprising against the foreign occupying forces. Thus, this museumified house is where Atatürk conceptualized the new free nation-state of Turkey. The museum displays consist of an assortment of Mustafa Kemal’s clothes and personal belongings, narrative paintings of the War of Independence, soil from his birth place and from Anitkabir where he is buried, and extensive explanatory texts to accompany the objects. Drawing from a systematic analysis of the materials on display, their arrangement and exhibition methods and the accompanying didactics, this paper seeks to reveal how the Atatürk House Museum embodies and communicates Turkish Republican secular civil religious values through the life and deeds of its first civil saint and national father. This Atatürk Museum and the numerous Atatürk museums established across the country constitute additional ceremonial spaces in which to celebrate, commemorate, and venerate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the state he founded.