Violence does not end when commemoration begins, Eray Çaylı argues in Victims of Commemoration. Rather, histories of violence and spaces of memorialization are enmeshed in ongoing, interrelated patterns of repression and erasure. In this illuminating monograph, Çaylı explores the spatial politics of memory in Turkey and challenges the perception that commemorations, museums, and memorials exist outside of violence and after the cessation of conflict. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey conducted between 2010 and 2013, the author presents a study of the spatial and architectural manifestations of past violence in the present and excavates how contemporary contestations between state officials and memory activists over violent histories are negotiated through material space and the built environment.
Victims of Commemoration is interdisciplinary and multi-sited in its methodology. Çaylı conducts fieldwork in three cities in Turkey—Ankara, Sivas, and Diyarbakır—each of which represents a site of violence associated with communities that have been historically positioned by state actors as political, ethnic, or religious outsiders. Each location provides a window into a distinct history of violence against marginalized groups in Turkey—including leftist activists, Alevis, and Kurds—and sheds new light on the contemporary politics of commemoration in relation to the shifting political climates of Turkey's recent past. Through these spaces, Çaylı highlights how violence is inherent in cultures of commemoration and manifested in the built environment.
The first site, which receives the most thorough exploration in the monograph, is the former Madımak hotel in Sivas, in Central Turkey, which was the location of an arson attack in 1993 that killed thirty-five people, including many prominent artists and intellectuals, during a festival associated with Alevi culture. The attack, carried out by an angry mob while police looked on, was broadcast live on national television to millions of viewers. While activists sympathetic with the victims of the attack have long campaigned for the former hotel to become a memorial museum, the AKP government instead renovated the space and opened it as a “Science and Culture Center” in 2011. The largely empty building includes only a modest “Memory Corner” to commemorate those who lost their lives in the attack. The second site to which Çaylı turns is the Ulucanlar Prison in Ankara, the site of the military-endorsed hanging of leftist youth leaders in 1972 and the government's violent crackdown on socialist prisoners carrying out a hunger strike in 2000. Closed in 2006, the prison was transformed by the Turkish government into a memorial museum in 2011. The final site Çaylı covers is the Dıyarbakır Prison, where Kurdish political prisoners were tortured following a violent coup by a military junta in 1980. Despite ongoing calls by local activists to close the prison and transform it into a memory museum, the prison continues to function as a penitentiary in the Kurdish-majority city. By investigating these three distinct, yet complementary sites, Çaylı addresses the politics of commemorating violent histories in Turkey and demonstrates how narratives about past violence are negotiated through public space and architecture.
In three thematic sections, bookended by an introduction and a coda, Çaylı explores the histories and contemporary uses of the above sites, as well as their transformation over time and the ongoing contestations between memory activists, government officials, and local residents. In the introduction, he orients the reader to Turkey's recent political history and reflexively discusses his positionality as a researcher from Turkey. In Part One, “Nationalizing Victimhood,” the author deconstructs the conspiracy theories that underpin official narratives of violent episodes in Turkey's recent past. In Part Two, “Protesting Victimhood,” he further demonstrates how commemoration and violence become entangled in public space. Part Three, “Self-Reflexive Victimhood,” explores questions of shame, witnessing, and martyrdom in relation to memory activism and space. In the coda, Çaylı reflects on political developments in Turkey since the conclusion of his research in 2013 and analyzes an unexpected altercation that predicated his sudden departure from his field site and an abrupt end to his research.
In the case of Sivas, Çaylı excavates how the language used by officials and in the text in the “Memory Corner” at the “Science and Culture Center” positions the whole nation as a victim of the arson attacks. This formulation, the author argues, serves to exculpate both the perpetrators of the attack and the state from responsibility, thus excluding the already-marginalized ethnic and religious minority communities that were targeted from the national whole. Through a spatial analysis of the annual commemorations-cum-protests at the site of the attack, the author demonstrates how official responses to the protests, which include setting up police barricades to prevent activists from approaching the building's facade and firing teargas into the crowd, serve to further position those identifying with the victims of the attack as outside provocateurs.
With respect to Ulucanlar Prison in Ankara, Çaylı shows how, through the government's renovation of the prison as a museum and the inclusion or exclusion of the photographs and biographies of former inmates, the history of the site is depoliticized, and the space is transformed into a vehicle for the promulgation of a government-approved narrative. The author underlines how certain sections of the prison were renovated, while the ward associated with leftist prisoners was demolished and replaced with a decorative garden. Through such examples, Çaylı convincingly demonstrates how both presence and absence contribute to processes of erasure and the production of a space of selective commemoration.
As for Diyarbakır Prison, Çaylı argues that through the mobilization of symbolic dates by memory activists during protests and the subsequent violent reaction by authorities, space is temporalized and time becomes spatialized. He analyzes the recent murals painted on the outside walls of the prison by Kurdish art students from the local university and compares this beautification campaign with histories of torture and forced labor in the prison, as prisoners were made to paint the hallways and interior walls with nationalist and racist slogans, in addition to scenes from Turkish history. This painting-as-torture culminated in the self-immolation of four prisoners in 1982, who secretly collected the highly flammable painting materials and used them to burn themselves alive in protest of the ongoing torture at the prison.
While Victims of Commemoration is thoroughly researched and convincingly argued, at times some stylistic points hinder the flow of the narrative. The book relies on extensive footnotes to furnish important background, some of which might have been integrated more seamlessly into the text. In the introduction to the book as well as in the individual introductions to each of the three parts, the author departs on sometimes dense theoretical explications, which, while situating the arguments within relevant literature, could have been layered with ethnographic material to further illustrate the arguments. While the ethnographic material presented is rich and evocative, the inclusion of additional descriptions of the author's fieldwork experiences and the narratives of local interlocuters would have further enriched the overall story. Finally, some ethnographic anecdotes, such as the story about the aftereffects of the 1915 genocide as symbolized in apricot trees, would have benefited from further discussion and analysis.
Overall, Victims of Commemoration provides a rich exploration into the politics of violence and memory in Turkey with a focus on the spatial and architectural aspects of commemoration. Çaylı's contribution is a valuable introduction to recent histories of violence against marginalized groups in Turkey through the in-depth exploration of three important sites of memorialization, and demonstrates how these sites become spaces of contestation between state actors, memory activists, and locals. This book joins a growing body of literature on the intersection of memory, violence, space, and place in post-Ottoman lands and will be of interest to scholarly audiences in multiple fields, from anthropology and geography to history and Middle East studies.
