Archaeology, History and National Narrative in Turkey’s Museums: A Passing Glimpse
John Wright
In September, APC Research Associate John Wright joined an 18-day tour of archaeological and historical sites in southern and eastern Turkey organized by the South African Archaeological Society. Here he reports.
Our tour took us from Konya, a former capital of the Seljuk kingdom, which lies 180 km south of Ankara, the Turkish capital, on a zigzag route east and south towards Syria and then northeast to Kars near the Armenian border. NevÅehir, Adana, Gaziantep, Åanliurfa, Malatya, Diyarbakir, Mardin, Batman, Van, Dogubayazit (you don’t pronounce the ‘g, which for a South African eye takes some getting used to): these were the major centres we visited along the way.
The political situation in Turkey was stable after the attempted coup in July, but the climate at the time of our visit, which had been planned months beforehand, was tense. In the areas we visited it was made even more edgy by the ongoing bombing campaign against soft targets which has been carried out by the Islamic State, operating from Syria, and by the renewed bombing campaign against the Turkish security forces conducted by the Kurdish nationalist organization, the PKK, from Syria and Armenia. On top of all this, Turkey has become a refuge, especially in its southern regions, for three million people displaced by the wars in Syria.
We had to change our programme several times to avoid areas closed off by the security forces. There had been a major bombing in Gaziantep two weeks before we passed through, and another bombing took place in Van the day before we arrived, fortunately with only minor casualties.
Later in the tour we heard that the mayors of 28 towns, including some on our route, had been summarily sacked as part of the Erdogan government’s move to get rid of individuals in the army, police force and civil service seen as political opponents. Along the roads near the border with Syria, and again in the east as we neared Armenia, our bus had successive police escorts.
Tourism in Turkey, which is a major industry, has been hit very hard by the bombing campaigns. In the more remote areas that we visited in the south and east, it was down by 90 percent. We encountered a few individual Westerners but no large parties on the entire tour, though there were numbers of Turkish tourists at the major sites we visited.
Representing the ‘pre-modern’ past
Viewing Roman mosaics at Zeugma, once an important
trading city and crossing-place on the Euphrates.
Thus, the tour had a certain fraughtness to it. But for this historian, who had not visited Turkey before, the several dozen archaeological and historical sites and museums that we visited were of deep interest for another kind of current politics: that of representing the ‘pre-modern’ past. (Here, as a particular kind of museum-goer, I should declare an interest. After a few minutes of gazing at ranks of Artfully Lit Beautiful Objects in display cases, my eyes glaze over. I am much more attuned to engaging with the verbal texts that I hope to find accompanying them, and have to leave analysis of the visual material to my art historian colleagues.)
I say ‘kind of politics’ in the singular, because, standing at odds with the rich variety of sites and museums that we visited, there was a high degree of uniformity in the narrative that emerged from their display texts. And I use the term ‘pre-modern’ deliberately, because, by the same token, the contrast between pre-modern and modern was a theme that was highlighted everywhere.
Modern history is seen very specifically as beginning with the demise of the Ottoman empire in World War I and the establishment of the Turkish Republic (with a large ‘R’) in 1923, in the face of attempts by Britain, France, Greece and Italy to carve out pieces of the old empire for themselves.
The Muslim Ottoman rulers showed little interest in archaeology until the later 19th century, so for decades European entrepreneurs had a rich field very much to themselves, digging up artefacts and making off with them to fill museums and private collections in western Europe and North America.
The first Turkish-led excavation began in 1883, and a Museum of Archaeology was established in Istanbul in1891, but it was not until the establishment of the determinedly secular Republic by forces led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that archaeology became an important field of academic work. Atatürk, who was president from 1923 until his death in 1938, was a bruising intellectual as well as an able soldier and consummate politician, and saw the value of harnessing archaeological and historical research to the development of Turkish nationalism.
Under his auspices, archaeology became an established discipline in Turkish universities, which were themselves undergoing a major overhaul. The Turkish Historical Society was established in 1931 and the Turkish Institute of Archaeology in 1934. Before Atatürk’s death, more than 20 archaeological and historical museums had been set up to display the achievements of successive ‘civilizations’ in Turkey.
The close involvement of government at various different levels in setting up archaeological and historical museums continues in the present, partly to promote tourism but also, given the deep political divisions in Turkey, to underscore the notion of the country as long having been a meeting-place of numerous different cultures and ‘civilizations’—Turkish, Arab, Armenian, Kurdish; Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and others. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ankara plays a major role in funding and setting up high-profile, architecturally eyecatching museums, with sophisticated display Viewing Roman mosaics at Zeugma, once an important trading city and crossing-place on the Euphrates. 29 techniques, in the bigger towns and cities. In all the sites and museums that we saw, display texts were invariably written in both Turkish and (not always easily comprehensible) English: the tourist industry is clearly aimed at the international market as much as at the local. Business enterprise is also heavily involved in promoting it, particularly through bodies like TÅ°RSAB, the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies.
The establishment of public museums is also a way for rich families to enhance their status. We saw a good example of this in Mardin, where, from 2000 onward, the Sabanci family and the Sabanci Foundation were prominent in setting up the Mardin City Museum, one of the most absorbing that we visited.
Atatürk’s influence in promoting what in South Africa would be called ‘national heritage’ is still strongly felt today. Thus in the glossy bilingual (Turkish and English) magazine Müze (issue 5, 2012), the president of TÅ°RSAB, could reverentially quote Atatürk’s words, ‘The path of forming a nation passes through the acknowledgement and preservation of the various civilizations having flourished on our soil’, and state that it was the organization’s responsibility to fulfil his legacy. So it is not surprising that a clear patriotic message emerged from most of the displays that we saw—which matched the message being signalled by the display of the Turkish flag on many houses and shops in the all the centres we passed through.
No doubt some of this public demonstration was made in response to the attempted coup in July, but it is a sentiment that, as far as we could judge, runs deep in the society. In a low-keyed way, it was articulated to our group in the talks given to us on the bus by our guide, an educated and thoughtful professional who, in his time off, writes about geopolitics for a Turkish newspaper.
Civilization and its evolution
Intertwined with the notion of ‘civilization’ in Turkey, or more specifically Anatolia (roughly, the Asian part of Turkey), is a strongly evolutionist notion of its ‘development’ over time, from the earliest pre-Neolithic settlements, such as the now famous Göbekli Tepe (the site was specially opened for us to visit), which dates back 11 500 years, through early Neolithic villages like Boncuklu Höyük and the nearby and better known Çatal Höyük (we visited both sites), to the emergence of kingdoms and empires after about 5000 years ago—Sumerian, Hittite, Assyrian, Urartian, Greek, Roman, Abbasid, and others. (For readers interested in this kind of thing, the Turkish names are distinctly unromantic. Göbekli means ‘potbelly’, tepe means ‘hill’, boncuklu means ‘bead’ or ‘beaded’, höyük means ‘mound’, and çatal means ‘fork’ or ‘forked’.)
Unlike numbers of museums in South Africa, such as those at Maropeng and Sterkfontein in the Cradle of Humankind, and the Origins Centre in Johannesburg, which give a great deal of attention to the evolution of hominins and Homo sapiens in this part of the world, the Turkish museums we visited give very little attention to the long Palaeolithic era, when early humans in southern Europe and southern Asia lived by hunting and gathering. Much more important is the period of history which sees the beginnings in Anatolia of urban life, crafts, architecture, writing, centralized government, and organized religion—supposedly the hallmarks of ‘civilization’. Highlighted along with this is the point that civilization of this kind began earlier in Turkey than anywhere else in the world.
All of this is seen as a preliminary to the advent of the Seljuk Turks in the 11th century CE (attempts are now being made, on what seem to me flimsy grounds, to argue that the first Turkish-speaking peoples arrived much earlier) and of the Ottomans a little later, their rolling back of the Byzantine empire, the rise of the Ottoman empire, its decay and now littlelamented decline in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in 1923, the triumphal establishment of the Republic. The only exception to this narrative that we came across was at the site of Arslantepe (‘Lion Hill’) near Malatya, where evidence of the emergence of clearly hierarchical societies dates back at least 5000 years. Teams of Italian archaeologists have been working at the site for more than fifty years: it is presumably they who have produced conceptually informed and incisive display texts which focus on the nature of politics in such societies rather than on their place in the unrolling of ‘civilization’ in Turkey.
National narratives
In many ways this master narrative of Turkish history reminded me of the one that emerged from the displays—also in government-funded and visually striking prestige buildings—that participants saw on an SA Archaeological Society tour of western China in 2015. Here the story is of the steady evolution of Chinese civilization from origins three or four thousand years ago, to the growth of a great empire, its major cultural achievements, its eventual decay under the impact of Western capitalism and imperialism in the 19th century, and the inauguration of a new era of development, and of history, with the triumph of the communist-led revolution in 1949. But, at least in the regions we visited in China, displays are aimed at the huge internal tourist market rather than at international visitors, with comparatively few display texts in English. One of the museums that we visited in the Gansu Corridor, along the old Silk Road, had opened two years previously: we were the first ‘Western’ tourists the staff had seen there.
Both the Turkish and Chinese narratives stand in sharp contrast to what I saw in Iran—another Muslim country—on another SA Archaeological Society tour in 2010. The situation may have changed a little since then, but six years ago sharp disjunctions were visible between displays that sought to root Persian/Iranian culture in an ‘ancient’ past, and others that sought to efface the history of the country before the advent of Islam in the 600s. At the few sites that had texts in both Farsi and English, it was not uncommon to find the English texts defaced.
The Turkish national-patriotic narrative, as we saw it, makes frequent mention of minorities like Kurds and Armenians, but, by paying very little attention to details of their history, in effect largely effaces it. It largely effaces the histories of peasants and of working people— were there no popular rebellions in Turkish history? It largely effaces the history of women— leaders of empires, kingdoms, and the 20thcentury nationalist movement are invariably men. (A great paradox, this, in a country where the discipline of archaeology is dominated by women.) Which is not to say that this narrative is uncontested. A quick sortie into the Internet reveals that since at least the 1990s academics and various political figures have actively challenged it on many counts,ii but very little of this shows in the displays that we examined. The broad consensus view remains firmly in place. The big question becomes how that consensus has been manufactured historically—but this of course is a question that the narrative itself has to efface.
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An excellent study in this field is Marzia Varutti, Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao, Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014.
See for example Mezmet Özdogan, ‘Ideology and archaeology in Turkey’, in Lynn Meskell, ed., Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, London: Routledge, 1998; Yilmaz Çolak, ‘Ottomanism vs. Kemalism: collective memory and cultural pluralism in 1990s Turkey’, Middle Eastern Studies, 42, 4 (2006); Çigdem Atakuman, ‘Value of heritage in Turkey: history and politics of Turkey’s Word Heritage nominations’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 23, 1 (2010). My thanks to Cynthia Kros for pointing me towards these articles.
The remains of the former bridge over the Arpa river at
Ani, which was a thriving town on a branch of the Silk
Road before being sacked by a Mongol army in 1237.
Today the river forms part of the closed border between
Turkey (to the left in the photograph) and Armenia (to
the right).