Victims of Commemoration in Turkey

Realms of Memory

A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past. In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the regime were slated to become memorials and museums. What inspired this desire to confront the past? What were these sites of memory? How did the violent histories of these sites complicate these initiatives? These are the questions Professor Eray Çaylı examines in his recent book Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.