Constructing, Remaking and remembering: Historic Preservation in the Early Decades of the Turkish Republic

When the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, it was a project to create a modern secular nation-state out of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire which was an Islamic state ruled with dynastic monarchy. For the success of this project, the Republic had to distance itself from the Ottoman memories. Ottoman institutions and daily life practices were steadily abolished; the Ottoman capital of İstanbul was replaced with Ankara; new modern cities were planned; European architects and experts were invited to design state-funded large-scale public projects and to teach in academia. Old structures were already in a bad condition after a decade of wars before the foundation of the Republic, and their condition became even worse during the first decades of the Republican era. Especially in İstanbul, there were efforts for the protection of these old structures; however, they were not powerful enough to echo in Ankara. In this given context, this paper will focus on the historic preservation efforts during the early decades of the Turkish Republic to understand how ‘cultural heritage’ was conceived by this young state during this intense period of modernization.