“The jandarma knew,” my elderly informants affirmed that unofficial imams were teaching the children. “They came into the village to break up the Koran classes.” In one village where a strong link to Ottoman Islamic society remained, “the imams would continue secretly, once the jandarme left.” But in other villages where people were afraid, young people did not learn to read the Koran in Arabic. Some fear they will be damned for this failing. “I can read neither the new nor old script. I will burn,” said one elderly woman. These descriptions of the efforts of the Inonu (1938-1950) government to control the activities of rural imams in a region of Turkey north of Manisa are remembered and retold as villagers reflect upon the fickleness of the government and the status of Sunni Islam as a state-constructed religion. The stories contribute to a local distrust of governments and politicians and question the legitimacy of state-imposed secularization. Though implicitly the argument is made, villagers do not explicitly criticize the government or Ataturk because this is a crime. In their behavior, however, as well as the practice of telling and retelling and at times not telling, they demonstrate their sense of ambivalence about the state control of Islam and the effects of radical secularization policies. The contemporary effect is to educate children and grandchildren to read the Koran in Arabic. While some choose to send their children to the official imam for instruction during summer classes, others rely upon unofficial imams who tutor children and women, or boarding Koran courses run by the Suleymanci tarikat. Employing Roy’s conceptualization of global Islamic movements (2004), this “neo-fundamentalist” Islamic brotherhood was founded during the early years of the republic to address the state control and subjugation of Islamic learning and training. While this group is illegal, its activities are tolerated by the post-Islamist, AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinlar Partisi, Justice and Development Party) government. The paper, based on a decade of ethnographic research, addresses the link between stories from elderly informants and the development of Islamic movements, as well as the motivations of those who support the state construction of Islam in the Diyanet, Presidency of Religious Affairs, and those who comfortably combine both approaches, which otherwise appear ideologically opposed.

Over fifty years after the “Thrace Events” in Turkey (1934) a Jewish émigré describes the violence he experienced: “For a certain time in all the part where we used to live, it start(ed): anti-semitism, and they want(ed) to kill all the Jewish people to deport them at that time in (1934). Hitler time. We escaped….” Remembering the boycotts and violence against Jews in Thrace through an arguably post-Holocaust narrative of Nazi anti-Semitism, this informant’s account contrasts sharply with recent scholarship forging a link between such local violence and the Settlement Law (also 1934) that reflected wider state security interests targeting not only Turkish Jews, but also Muslim minorities such as Balkan immigrants and Kurdish tribes in the east. Effectively silent about the Turkish state’s role in the violence, the informant draws attention to a normative public and scholarly narrative about Jews as protected minority in Turkey, as well as the association of anti-Jewish violence not with Turkey, but with Nazi Germany. What is significant about such divergent stories of the state and how can they illuminate historiographies that take shape and circulate in a variety of venues as ‘public history’? Drawing upon oral interviews with older Turkish Jews in Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne, this paper will explore the effective and real silences in their testimonies for what they can tell us about wider neighborhood, national and interethnic contexts, as well as the degree to which they undergird commonplace historiographies of the nation and academy. As well, the paper will engage with ethical dimensions of the ethnographic sources under discussion, tangling with the often divergent explanatory interests of interviewer and interviewee. Building on the emergent literature on ‘reminiscence work’ among scholars of history and social welfare, in addition to age as a missing category in cultural studies, the paper will probe silence and speech from a variety of perspectives, investigating discordant narratives of public history not simply as subordinate to disciplinary theoretical discourses, but as multiple ‘usable pasts’ of informant, community, state and scholar.

The Tenth Anniversary celebrations of the Turkish Republic (1933), one of the largest public gatherings in Turkish history, had a nearly limitless creativity to invent, to adapt, to import, to convert and to nationalize any symbol. The celebrations acted as a “rite of passage” in mass politics, staging the transition from a multiethnic empire to a nation state. Although various primary sources exist, the Tenth Anniversary celebrations are still an understudied phenomenon in Turkish historiography. Indeed, these three days of celebration offer one of the best case studies to understand the state’s control over its subjects and the political discourse used in the making of the “ideal Turkish citizen.” In this study my aim is twofold. On the one hand, I observe the state’s ideology and iconography by scrutinizing the Tenth Anniversary celebrations (1933) per se, and on the other, I examine the reception of these celebrations by the children of different social and ethnic classes via observing a number memories of the celebrations, narrated for an oral history project in 1998. In order to understand the nationalist iconography used by the early republican politicians, and identify the invented, imported and adopted symbols used both for the Turkification of non-Muslims and the nationalization of Islam, I use a number of sources, such as newspapers (Cumhuriyet, Aksam, Yeni Asir), Journals of People’s Houses, Tenth Anniversary publications, governmental records, and the “Guideline for the Celebrations of the Tenth Anniversary” (1933). While these accounts display the state’s efforts to Turkify and homogenize different ethnic and social groups ideologically, the oral narratives on the celebrations (narrated in 1998) show the failure of this project to eliminate cultural and political diversity between various social and ethnic classes. By contrast, they demonstrate that the visual iconography used in the celebrations was indeed very influential over the masses, illustrating the success of materialistic aspects of the celebrations, specifically Kemalist iconography and various national symbols used in the celebrations. In sum, by scrutinizing both the officially-produced accounts of the celebrations and children’s narratives of the very same event, this study aims to examine the ways in which different narratives and personal experiences of the Tenth Anniversary celebrations depict state-society relations in 1930s and afterwards.

There is theoretical significance to studying states and nations at their metaphorical and literal ‘borders’. Focusing on the contested border region of southeastern Anatolia, this contribution highlights the tensions, contradictions, and recent shifts in state-society relations in the rural spaces of the southeast. As I detail, state delivery of irrigated agriculture represents a recent and significant chapter in the evolving state-society relations in this contested border area, with significant Arabic and Kurdish speaking minority populations. With contemporary changes associated with the large-scale Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), state influence in rural areas and encounters with the state by rural populations are intensified. This occurs both horizontally, in terms of infiltrating new spaces and life practices, and also vertically, in terms of intensified interaction, such as that associated with the increased incorporation of rural residents into the Turkish economy or the increased dependence of villagers on state services. Reading the state ethnographically through the differentiated responses of villagers to recent irrigation-related changes, and drawing on interviews and survey data, my aim is to analyze how the state is lived, in very real terms, in the fabric of everyday life, and to consider what this suggests for understanding state-society relations and the changing citizen subjectivities in the liminal spaces of Turkey’s southeast. Consistent with broader themes of interest to the panel, I will also consider the limits of ethnographic work of this type, in terms of attempting to situate and understand the stories that are told, or not, by informants. To do so, I will highlight several key moments of interest where there was more or less openness to ‘reading’, ‘speaking’ and ‘critiquing’ the Turkish state.

Ankara rose to prominence as the staging ground of the Turkish Independence War the nationalists waged to liberate the country from post-WWI occupation. In 1923, upon victory, the nationalists proclaimed Ankara as the capital of the new republic they founded. Building a modern capital was central to their efforts to reinvent Turkey, pronouncing a definitive break with the Ottoman past. As a minor provincial seat, which unlike Istanbul had few Ottoman institutional landmarks that could compete with or undermine the republican vision, Ankara was particularly suitable for this purpose. Moreover, in the preceding decades, Ankara had endured a string of disasters, experienced economic decline, and suffered significant population loss. The forced deportation of Armenians—with catastrophic consequences—during WWI, followed by the exchange of Orthodox Christians with Greece had decisively changed Ankara’s demographic makeup. Despite their ambivalences about the specifics of this process, the nationalists mistrusted non-Muslim communities as potentially divisive and saw in their departures an opportunity for reinforcing a sense of national homogeneity. Bereft of its diversity, they saw Ankara as a tabula rasa on which to inscribe the structural transformation of the state. Ankara, however, was far from being a tabula rasa. Consequently, the making of Turkey’s new capital was as much a process of physical and symbolic construction as it was of destruction. While in the aftermath of WWI, few non-Muslims remained to speak of Ankara’s multi-cultural history, the landscape they left behind continued to invoke their presence even in their absence. The nationalists considered the persistence of these diverse cultural artifacts as vessels of alternative memories that were incompatible with the unifying narratives of nationalism they promoted. Consequently, they moved to appropriate and reinscribe public and private sites pertaining to Ankara’s non-Muslim communities with new uses and meanings. A substantial portion of new development in Ankara occurred on land seized from these entities, erasing the physical traces of their existence. These deliberate acts were intended to create a homogeneous landscape by eliminating, if necessary by force, the sites and practices that belonged to the heterogeneous mosaic of cultures inherited from the Empire. Importantly, the continued omission of this process of destruction, concomitant to the process of creation, replicated the official silence on this matter. This oversight has long afflicted Turkish historiography, masking the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences.