Torsten Janson

How is Turkish official memory negotiated locally in Izmir, a city celebrated as a symbol of national becoming, yet (im)famous for its scepticism of central power? How is the past of the city narrated, conceived as an epitome of progress, yet built on a systematic forgetting of trauma and violence? And how does the secularist legacy of Izmir, accentuated in contrast with the Islamisation of memory in state discourse, affect its memory-performances in the present?

Since its proclamation in 1923, the Turkish Republic developed in ambiguous relationship with religion. Guided by modernist secularism, the ‘Kemalist’ state disconnected from the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and Islam as a guiding principle for citizenship and public culture. Yet religion was never banished from nationhood. Rather, (Sunni-Hanafi) Islam was subsumed under the national-republican-cultural canopy of ‘Turkishness’, and regulated through the Religious Department. With the ascendancy of the religio-conservative AKP-government since the 1990s, however, tacit acceptance and control morphed into explicit encouragement and patronage, as the government embraced Islam as a matrix for citizenship and social life, while remaining pledged to secular constitutionalism. Today, under the sway of populism, authoritarianism, and repression, political polarization in Turkey is rampant, marked by exceeding bitterness, precarity, and fear.

Polarization has found expression in public memory-culture and counter-memory. ‘Islamic/Ottoman’ memory-agents compete with ‘Kemalist’ strands, while alternative memory activism opts for translocal and humanitarian memory work beyond party structures, triumphant nationalism, or memory-taboos. This paper proposes that such multidirectional memory trajectories became particularly prominent in the context of the national centenaries sweeping Turkey 2019-2023. Discussing the performances and counter-performances locally staged in commemoration of Republican Izmir, it makes a case for exploring the spatio-temporal dynamics guiding secular/religious national imaginaries (in Turkey and beyond).