Museums, emotion, and memory culture : the politics of the past in Turkey 9781118829059

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Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture examines the politics of emotion in history museums, combining approaches and concerns from museum, heritage and memory studies, anthropology and studies of emotion. Exploring the meanings and politics of memory contests in Turkey, a site for complex negotiations of identity, the book asks what it means for museums to charge the past with political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations. Providing an in-​depth examination of emotional practice in two Turkish museums that present contrasting representations of the national past, the book analyses relationships between memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion. The museums discussed celebrate Ottoman and Early Republican pasts, linking to geo-​and party politics, people’s senses of who they are, popular memory culture, and competing national stories and identities vis-​ à-​vis Europe and the wider world. Both museums use dramatic, emotive panoramas as key displays and the research at the heart of this book explores this seemingly anachronistic choice, and how it links with memory cultures to prompt visitors to engage imaginatively, socially, politically, and morally with a particular version of the past. Although the book focuses on museums in Turkey, it uses this as a platform to address broader questions about memory culture, emotion, and identity. As such, Museums and Memory Culture should be of great interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, heritage, culture, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of emotion. Gönül Bozoğlu is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, where she undertakes research across heritage, memory, and museum studies.

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Routledge Research in Museum Studies

Titles include: An Ethnography of New Zealand’s National Museum Grappling with Biculturalism at Te Papa Tanja Schubert-​McArthur Museums and Photography Displaying Death Elena Stylianou, Theopisti Stylianou-​Lambert Museums and the Ancient Middle East Edited by Geoff Emberling and Lucas P. Petit Collecting Computer-​based Technology Curational Expertise at the Smithsonian Museums Petrina Foti Museums as Cultures of Copies Edited by Brenna Brita Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture The Politics of the Past in Turkey Gönül Bozoğlu www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Research-​in-​Museum-​Studies/​book-​series/​ RRIMS

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Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture The Politics of the Past in Turkey Gönül Bozoğlu

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First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Gönül Bozoğlu The right of Gönül Bozoğlu to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​14153-​0  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​03060-​4  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of figures  Acknowledgements  1 Introduction 

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2 The museums and their histories: the politics of Ottoman and republican pasts 

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3 Memory, emotion, politics: understanding visitor encounters with history in the museums 

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4 Politics of display at the Panorama 1453 Museum 

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5 Visitor experience at the Panorama 1453 Museum 

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6 Politics of display at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum 

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7 Visitor experience at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum 

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8 Time machines and the politics of affective practice 

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Appendix: Visitors surveyed at the Panorama 1453 Museum using a questionnaire  References  Index 

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Figures

1.1 A group of visitors viewing the panoramic image of Greek fire flying towards the Ottoman soldiers, Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul 1.2 A detail from the Çanakkale (Gallipoli campaign) panorama, Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara: Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) the military commander surveys the battle from a trench. In the front are 3D elements representing his belongings 2.1 Panorama painting from 1912, with replica dead horses in the foreground, Waterloo Mémorial 1815, Belgium 2.2 Anıtkabir in winter, Ankara 2.3 An arched vault display in the third section of Atatürk and War of Independence Museum 2.4 The Topkapı ramparts near Panorama 1453 Museum 2.5 Panorama 1453 Museum, exterior 3.1 Atatürk’s famous Kocatepe pose –​deep in strategic thought on the battlefield 3.2 Kocatepe in public space: the Izmir Municipality building 4.1 Mosaic of Mehmet II during the Conquest in Ulubatlı metro station, Istanbul 4.2 One of many P1453 exhibits made up of facsimiles of historic documents, photographs and interpretive texts 4.3 Ottoman soldiers wearing the controversial battlewear, made from the pelts of Anatolian snow leopards; in front are replica cannons 4.4 Predetermined visitor route at P1453 in the rooms with text panels 4.5 The viewing platform showing the glass barrier; also, visitors on organized tours from Muslim countries outside of Turkey photograph key scenes of the panorama 4.6 Sultan Mehmet II on his white stallion with his retinue

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3 21 27 30 37 38 48 49 67 73 76 78 81 84

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List of figures vii 4.7 The breaching of one of the bastions: Ulubatlı Hasan (Hasan of Ulubat) is first to hoist the Ottoman flag on the wall, notwithstanding his arrow wounds 6.1 Visitors are told by the guard that they are in the ‘closest’ place to Atatürk in the world. The visitors try to watch the video feed of Atatürk’s tomb 6.2 Section 4 of Atatürk and War of Independence Museum: Atatürk in his study 6.3 Historic photograph of Atatürk at Çanakkale 6.4 The Kocatepe pose in the Great Attack panorama in the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum 6.5 A detail from the Çanakkale panorama: Corporal Seyit. This photograph also shows the low ceiling of the panorama 6.6 The famous photograph of Corporal Seyit, in which he appears to replicate his feat of strength 6.7 Geographical and chronological key to the Çanakkale panorama, reproduced courtesy of the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum, Ankara 6.8 Map of Çanakkale peninsula showing the location and dates of the episodes pictured in the panorama, and their pictorial position therein 6.9 A detail from the Çanakkale panorama: hand-​to-​hand fighting. A Turkish soldier, or ‘Mehmetçik’ aids a wounded Anzac soldier replicating an iconic image 7.1 Visitors in front of the Çanakkale panorama, looking at the image of Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) 8.1 A mannequin of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-​Tiki Museum, Oslo, Norway 8.2 The Danish flag descends from the sky in the Danes’ hour of need, during the Battle of Lyndanisse in the Livonian Crusade in 1219, Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, Denmark 8.3 ‘Morning at Napoléon’s headquarters’, 1815 Memorial, Waterloo, Belgium

85 129 131 134 135 137 138 141 142 144 163 196 197 198

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Acknowledgements

This book began life as a PhD thesis, which was the first to be completed at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at Humboldt University in Berlin. I  am deeply grateful to my principal supervisor, Sharon Macdonald, for her mentorship, support, encouragement, and advice over many years and two different institutions, and for helping me to combine a mixed-​up background in archaeology, art history and museology with anthropological thinking and approaches. I thank my secondary supervisor, Wendy Shaw of Freie Universität Berlin, for her advice, feedback, and interest in my work. At Humboldt, Christoph Bareither asked me challenging questions about emotion in museums and generously opened up new ways of thinking, and many of my contemporaries at CARMAH –​notably Siriporn Srisinurai, Katarzyna Puzoh, Christine Gerbich, and Margereta von Oswald  –​helped with friendship, moral support, or kindnesses. Geoffrey Cubitt and Laurie Hanquinet were also important influences and their advice and support shaped my thinking in the early stages of research. I am indebted to Karen Ross –​another key mentor –​and a range of other friends and colleagues who helped me along the way, especially Çağdaş Adıyeke, Bernt Brendemoen, Brita Brenna, Şenay Çimen, Eleanor Curry, Burçin Demirbilek, Susannah Eckersley, Hikmet Vedat Karaduman, Alejandra Jaramillo-​Vázquez, Dawei Lu, Dan Merriman, Claire Marsland, Rhiannon Mason, Andrew Newman, Erling Sverdrup Sandmo, Serdar Uğurlu, Mustafa Ünal, and Einar Wigen. I owe a debt of thanks to my research participants, including many people who freely gave up their time to help me, as well as Istanbul Kültür A.Ș., and the staff of Anıtkabir Komutanlığı, the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum and the Panorama 1453 Museum, including the warding staff who befriended me during my research. I  am grateful to Heidi Lowther and Marc Stratton at Routledge, and to the three expert reviewers who gave insightful feedback on my book proposal. I also need to acknowledge the two large research projects on which I have worked over the last three years at Newcastle University –​Critical Heritages of Europe: Performing & Representing Identities in Europe (funded by the European Commission1) and Plural Heritages of Istanbul: the Case of the Land Walls (Newton Fund2).

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Acknowledgements ix Both of these have provided opportunities for professional and intellectual development, for gaining new perspectives, and learning new methods and approaches. They have also led me to meet a long list of new people who have become good friends and important reference points, and here I single out Mads Daugbjerg, Chiara de Cesari, Cem Hakverdi, Ayhan Kaya, Troels Myrup Kristensen, Vinnie Norskøv, Tom Schofield, Dan Foster-​Smith, and Ayşe Tecmen for inspiring and enriching my thinking. I am also grateful to the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University for helping to fund a final fieldwork trip. Last but not least, thanks of a different order go to my sister, Başak Bozoğlu, who hosted and looked after me during fieldwork, and my husband, colleague, and sometime collaborator, Christopher Whitehead, for his continuous support, encouragement, and endless curiosity about the past and the present.

Notes www.research.ncl.ac.uk/​cohere; grant agreement ID: 693289. 1 2 www.pluralheritages.ncl.ac.uk/​#/​about; grant number AH/​P005810/​1.

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1  Introduction

I am watching visitors in the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul, which tells the story of how the Ottomans conquered Byzantine Constantinople (Figure  1.1). The panorama itself shows this in dramatic and illusionistic fashion:  in front of the painting are replica fifteenth-​century cannons and other weapons strewn about, and in the painting the assault on the Land Walls is ongoing:  Greek fire seems to rain down over the visitors’ heads; Sultan Mehmet II ‘the Conqueror’ can be seen on his white horse, arm raised to give an order. There is some spectacular fighting to be seen in the foreground, and the noise of Ottoman military music can be heard over the din of the crowd. The walls are being breached, and the battle is hard. Visitors exclaim loudly, pointing at areas of the painting and identifying the figures they see. They know the stories. Some people appear to react emotionally, crying and gesturing. Two middle-​aged women are talking loudly to each other: one exclaims ‘This is our history!’ The other responds, ‘They took our ancestors away from us!’ At the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara I observe an older woman, visiting on her own. She begins to weep quietly in front of a display case. This contains some clothes once worn by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic. It is one of many showcasing his everyday possessions, reverentially arranged and spotlit. Alongside these are photographs of him and a life-​sized, highly realistic mannequin of him as he was in the 1930s, wearing white-​tie eveningwear and looking presidential. I move onto the panorama rooms. One of these shows the fighting at Gallipoli in 1915, and in the centre of the painting –​also life-​size –​we see a younger Atatürk, as a military commander, surveying the battle from a trench (Figure 1.2). Groups of visitors look on raptly. Some point and talk in hushed tones about the different scenes. People pay special attention to the figure of Atatürk. One smartly dressed, middle-​aged man is quiet, but obviously moved. He puts his hand on his heart and stands in contemplation for some time, before collecting himself and moving on to the next scene.

Both of these passages from field notes are about visitors’ encounters with history in two state museums in Turkey:  the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul (P1453) and the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara (AWIM).1 In both excerpts, people respond with visible high emotion to the displays. They seem to take very personally the pasts that

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Figure 1.1 A group of visitors viewing the panoramic image of Greek fire flying towards the Ottoman soldiers, Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul

they encounter there. This book explores why this is so. It is about what kinds of museums these are, and what the emotional charge of the histories they present is. It is also about the visitors, and what place the museums have in their lives and experiences, at personal and social levels. These questions must then be related to wider matters of the political roles of historical memory cultures in Turkey. By this I mean the sometimes long-​standing and layered practices whereby certain pasts –​in this case the Ottoman Age and the exploits of Atatürk  –​are brought into the present and imbued with meanings and affects. These are capable of pervading people’s lifeworlds, public space, media representation, and discourse; they are part of, and configure, political and social tensions and identity contests; and they relate at the highest scale to geopolitical concerns about the positioning of Turkey in the world. What we see in the field notes above are complex, intertextual encounters between visitors and history in the museums, in which the politics of memory, emotion, and identity intersect. To understand these encounters, this book involves a suitably relational study. Informed by interests and approaches from memory studies, uses of the past, anthropology, museum studies, and cultural studies of emotion, among others, it sets the development and displays of the museums, their appeal to audiences, and the behaviour of visitors into the wider context of historical memory culture and its social and political meanings. I also intend this book to have general use, beyond its Turkish setting, as an example of how it is possible to study the interrelations between museums, memory cultures, identities, audiences, emotionality, governmentality, and politics.

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Introduction 3

Figure 1.2 A detail from the Çanakkale (Gallipoli campaign) panorama, Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara:  Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) the military commander surveys the battle from a trench. In the front are 3D elements representing his belongings

AWIM and P1453 opened eight years apart, the former in 2002 and the latter in 2009, both at critical junctures in Turkish history, involving the ascendancy of conservative Islamism that signalled profound changes to politics and society. Why these museums? The pasts represented in each have

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4 Introduction symbolic value for different groups. The Conquest of Constantinople has become a key symbol of Ottoman achievement for conservative Islamists represented by the ruling administration. By contrast, the victories and civil reforms of Atatürk are emblems of a secular, westernized (or at least apparently westernized) Turkish identity dear to his followers, and traditionally including the military. Indeed, official representations often pit the histories of the Ottomans and Atatürk’s early Republic against one another competitively (Navaro-​Yashin 2013; Tharoor 2017). As later chapters will clarify, when the woman in P1453 exclaims ‘They took our ancestors away from us!’ she is referring generally to the Republican overthrow of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1923 and the subsequent dominance of a secular elite that many conservative Islamists still see as a threat to their way of life and values. She feels deprived by this group notwithstanding the Islamization of Turkey in recent decades (Kaya 2015) under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, henceforth AKP). Elsewhere, the sadness expressed by some of the visitors I talked to at AWIM was about the erosion of Atatürk’s civil and political legacy, the denial of freedoms, and the invasion of the state by religion. As this shows, what makes these two museums such compelling sites of study today is their critical position at the intersection of memory cultures and social divisions in Turkey, including within the state and the self. This takes place in a long moment of seemingly intractable contrasts between groups who identify strongly with different pasts. These pasts co-​exist in tension in public memory culture, and although we will see some complexity, intertextuality, and give-​and-​take in their relationship, they are also foundational to political and civil visions that are generally antagonistic to one another. This is more significant than just internal wrangling over what should be the national past and the national identity. The museums to be studied here also reveal different conceptions about the meaning of Turkey and Turkishness vis-​à-​vis the wider world. Turkey is –​and some argue has long been –​a site of complex negotiations of identity because of its location on the edges of Europe and Asia and its history of in-​betweenness and oscillation between heritages and cultures (Fisher-​Onar et  al. 2018). This has informed rich literatures in history, political science and, indeed, fiction (such as the novels of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, among others), which explores the cultural interplay and tensions relating to Turkey’s situation in the world (see, for example, İnalcık 2006; Keyman 2006; Kirisci 2017). At best, these explorations transcend the commonplace notion of Turkey as a simple connector or ‘bridge’ between East and West –​a figure easy to associate rhetorically with the bridges that link Asia and Europe in Istanbul –​ in favour of more relational, complex, and nuanced understandings of the reciprocities and relationalities through which geopolitical and geocultural realities come to be. Of course, while most of Turkey is in Asia, a small area of Turkey is in Europe (remembering that these entities are more geopolitical than

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Introduction 5 geological). But more than that, Turkey’s very position on the margins of the historical constructs of Europe and Asia makes it a site of contestation and transactions of identity in which European heritage and culture figure, either as an ‘other’ against which Turkey should define itself, or as a source of emulation (or, more often than not, a paradoxical mixture of both). Turkey is, at the time of writing (early 2019), both a European Union (EU) candidate country –​albeit a remarkably longstanding, and possibly disenchanted one  –​and a Middle-​ Eastern power player. A  secular, modernized state translated by Atatürk and later republican regimes from twentieth-​century European modernity, Turkey is now in the grip of Islamic cultural norms and the desires of dominant conservative-​Islamist politicians  –​most notably president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan  –​to remake it in an image of the Ottoman Age that is sometimes used as a rallying point against Europe, against westernized identities in Turkey, and sometimes against the ‘West’ more generally. This does not go unnoticed. In April 2018 the French President, Emmanuel Macron, pointed out the Islamist bearing and ‘anti-​ European’ sentiment of the Turkish administration, seeming to lament that ‘Erdoğan’s Turkey is not that of President Kemal [Atatürk]’ (Yinanç 2018). The two history museums discussed here are contrasting representations of the national past and competing propositions for its future. They are two responses to perennial questions: what (and where) is Turkey? What is it to be Turkish? What is its foundational past, and hence its future? In case study chapters I work through these questions with consideration of geopolitical interrelationships and contrasts to be found in memory practices, opening up windows into European space in particular, where contrasting and comparable museum politics can be found. A second, connected, reason for studying these museums is because of their role as sites of powerful emotional encounters and behaviours. In each museum, certain kinds of emotional behaviour are prompted by well-​ established tropes, symbols, and stories that are hitched to contemporary social and party politics. As my field notes show, the spectacular museum displays are highly emotive, but they are not self-​contained:  many of the visitors know the stories and their protagonists; they respond to the iconography with practised familiarity and identifiable emotional routines. Each museum has its own kind of affective atmosphere  –​a term I  adapt from one strand of the recent ‘turn to affect’, even though I  will use it against its grain by mixing it with attention to affective practice (Wetherell 2012, Smith et  al. 2018). Such atmospheres, I  suggest, are made jointly by the emotive nature and prompts of the museums and their displays, and the ways in which encultured visitors use them to negotiate and articulate their positions, feelings, and enmities through reference to the past and to prevailing emotional regimes. That is not to say that the emotive provocations of the museums automatically compel all visitors to behave emotionally in a corresponding way. Notwithstanding the emotional behaviour they promote, through physical and intertextual means, the museums

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6 Introduction do not universally override all other responses, such as those that might be considered more ‘cognitive’ or ‘cerebral’ (if indeed any such distinction can be made  –​a question of long-​standing and considerable debate in neuroscience (Pessoa 2009; Watson 2015, 283). As a case in point, part of my research involved visiting the museums with people who would never normally do so because of opposing political beliefs and historical attachments. Many of these people resisted both the pull of the affective atmosphere and the creep of ideology that they perceived within it. We will see that the encounters with the past that are staged in the museums are more complex, and that people’s inclinations, beliefs, and prior engagements with memory culture affect their emotional responses, and indeed their willingness and desire to engage emotionally at all. This much might seem general, and hardly specific to Turkey. No doubt the phenomena addressed in this book may strike a chord with readers who are familiar with certain other museum, heritage, and memory cultures, particularly in countries with highly explicit political–​ideological bearings in governmental uses of culture. This means that what follows should have value for scholarship more generally. However, there are also tighter, local histories and circumstances that inform the practice of museums and visitors that I explore. For example, I consider whether one of the reasons for the pitch and extent of emotional practice of historical memory –​both by the museums and their visitors –​is precisely because of the history of oscillation and tension between geocultural and geopolitical positions discussed above. What are the links between such positions and the intensity and charge of the emotional practice of the past in Turkey? In neither of the museums analysed is emotion ‘under the surface’, nor is it difficult to see in visitors’ behaviour; the emotional provocations are not subtly encoded or ‘banal’, to appropriate Michael Billig’s term for subtle, invisible, and everyday nationalist appeals (1995). The museums appear to be sites of and for emotion, unlike, for example, the art and archaeology museums that one can visit in Turkey. The latter are not to be understood as somehow emotionless, but what we see at P1453 and AWIM –​both on the part of the museums and their visitors –​are emotional displays of a different order. P1453 and AWIM are the first examples of panoramic museums in Turkey. One of the key representational forms they deploy is large-​scale panoramas. These are analogue and inspired by old-​fashioned exhibitionary forms of illusionistic painting. In essence they are spectacular, immersive panoramic mural paintings and dioramas with dramatic audio tracks and some 3D elements, including replicas of objects, and, at AWIM, real ones too. They take visitors back –​as it were –​to particular moments in the past, especially to the heat of battle. The panoramas at P1453 and AWIM do not stage objects so much as scenarios. They offer a possibility for visitors to suspend disbelief in a curious way: to ‘look on’ the past but to be in it and inhabit it as well –​or at least to feel almost as if one could. At the same time, the museums are social environments. Visitors interact, not just with

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Introduction 7 the displays but with each other, and there is a sense of appropriate behaviour, even if each has its own repertoire: noisy and exclamatory in P1453, and mostly hushed and reverent at AWIM. In both museums emotion is very evident, not just in visitors’ displays of emotion but in the emotional provocations and references of the displays.

Emotion in the museums I did not particularly set out to write about emotion in museums: in some ways it took me by surprise. I began this as a study of the politics of history in Turkey: the ways in which the past is bent to contemporary political purposes, and the selections and exclusions this involved. I was interested in how government administration politicians with conservative and Islamist tendencies used Ottoman history to support their own political and economic agendas; or how the figure of Atatürk, who died in 1938, continued to feature so heavily in public space. I wanted to see these phenomena relationally with museum representations, and to study the interplays between cultural, memory and party politics, so I  identified museums strongly associated with each of these histories and with explicit, publicized links to party-​political positions and actors. But upon visiting the museums, and seeing their displays and visitors, affect and emotion emerged as key forces, and not something that could be ignored. After this, my sense of surprise diminished, and I  began to become sensitized to the deeper-​seated cultural and emotional practices to which the museums and many of their visitors relate. For example, I thought of my own childhood and schooling in Turkey, when I was encouraged to display emotion over the memory of Atatürk. I  looked anew, and critically, at things that were ‘internalized as second nature’ (Bourdieu 1990, 56)  –​ an exercise that has become de rigueur in ethnographies of the familiar, where researchers’ come to realize how their own lifeworlds are tied to the ‘objects’ of study. Alongside this, I became attentive to the emotional ‘set-​ up’ of public memory culture, even in its everyday, naturalized and unquestioned forms. This led me to a different kind investigation, which is into the relationships between memory practices inside and outside of the museum; how the museum might derive emotional power from long-​standing social practices, value-​laden symbols and people’s learned responses to particular pasts. This is not just some kind of Pavlovian response (as perhaps, to a degree, mine was as a child, because my ‘good’ behaviour was rewarded) but about how institutions and people might use and adapt established, recurring emotional practices to make new meanings and renegotiate identities and social positions. In my research, emotive uses of historical memory by the museums were tied to governmental projects. Meanwhile, the museums’ visitors often behaved in ways that seemed premeditated and important for their sense of themselves, and the act of situating themselves in relation to a symbolic past was a key part of this that could best be achieved in the

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8 Introduction museum, because of the authority and historical accuracy that they believed the museum had. Divya Tolia-​Kelly et al. talk of the ‘groundswell of research that attends to the value, power and politics of affect and emotion, and shapes heritage landscapes as experienced, as curated, as foundational to our relationship with the past’ (Tolia-​Kelly et  al. 2017, 1), and this book can be seen as part of that groundswell. Indeed, it was researched and written during a time of intense interest in the importance of affect and emotion in heritage studies. Smith et  al. (2018) draw out a narrative here, in which heritage scholars after the millennium began to move beyond David Lowenthal’s view –​in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country –​of heritage itself ‘as a particular form of engagement with the past, that was nostalgic, sentimental and nationalistic, which was antithetical to the more measured, systematic and evidential approach of history’ and therefore had dangerous political liabilities (Smith et  al. 2018, 7). (Next to this we might consider also the influence of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition of 1983 in cautioning against sham histories loaded with people’s desires to remake the past.) Smith et  al. (2018, 8)  argue that such suspicion of emotional engagements with the past informed attempts by professionals to ‘neutralize’ political uses of heritage through a ‘flat affect of expert interpretation’ that obscured the affective qualities of heritage. Rather, the current waves of research into heritage and emotion take emotion seriously, not as an undesirable element, whether in the production or experience of heritage, but as an inevitable and foundational one. I share this approach and give a fuller account of how I have studied emotion in the museums in Chapter 3. Although many affective phenomena may be invisible or interiorized, my interest in this book is primarily in observable affect and empirically accessible expressions of emotion  –​rather than, for example, attention to pre-​ cognitive and extra-​ discursive nature of affect inspired by Non-​ Representational Theory (NRT), or to psychoanalytic approaches. I  focus on affective practice that can be identified through methods of ‘being there’ as a researcher, involving my presence and relying on observation, through contextual and intertextual understandings of my own, and through people’s body behaviours and talk. Engaging with affective practice means looking less at how visitors ‘have’ emotions (a verb that suggests ownership of emotion, or affliction by them), and more at how they do them, through articulation and expression (see also Ahmed 2004, 4, 9; Scheer 2012, 194; Reckwitz 2012). This potentially has wider generative effects within people’s own lives and beyond, and although emotion may seem momentary, insubstantial or fleeting, it can contribute to, or constitute, long-​standing social realities, such as the enmity expressed by the middle-​aged women visiting P1453. Affective practice is not unchangeable, but is made of enculturation, repetition and exercise in which emotional behaviours can become stylized, naturalized and routinized in relation to cultural contexts and prompts (Middleton 1989).

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Introduction 9 To understand affective practice, we need to understand where it comes from, and what are the sedimented social structures that configure emotion and memory culture. My aim here is not to discredit universalist and evolutionary-​biological understandings, such as those that characterize research into ‘basic’ and ‘prime’ emotions or that seek to understand emotion as hardwired for human survival (Ekman 2003; Plutchik 2002; Panksepp and Biven 2012), although such research is often challenged by social constructionist, historical, and anthropological views that argue that emotion is culturally relative across times and places (Middleton 1989; Reddy 2001; Plamper 2012a; Boddice 2018). Rather, I am concerned with understanding the meaning of emotion in relation to its historical and cultural situation. Anger may or may not be anger, whoever and wherever we are. That is not a debate for this book. But the particular configuration of what we feel as anger in relation to circumstances, pasts, social others, sets of discourses or anxieties is inevitably locally and temporally specific, and so is how the feeling subject feels about her anger. This means not only that there are specific cultural ways of doing emotion, but also that they are defining features of cultures that ‘may be described in part by [their] characteristic organization of emotions’ (Middleton 1989). This leads to the need for a relational understanding of affective practice: an overemphasis on visitor behaviour runs the risk of removing from view the affective practices of the museums, which are embedded in representational media such as displays (among other things, such as the museum architecture, publicity materials, audioguides and so on). I  have already argued that affective practice is a co-​production between the museum and its visitors. The former uses culturally familiar prompts to elicit affective and emotional responses in the visitors, many of whom ‘know how to respond’, through recourse to learned emotional repertoires and affective practices. I use the idea of ‘affective atmospheres’ here to indicate the result of a kind of ongoing emotional contract between museums and their visitors to make a space where certain affective practices are possible. This is not the idea of the much-​critiqued ‘extra-​discursive excess’ that transcends bodies and mysteriously imbues spaces and places, which then automatically affect, or contaminate, those who pass through (Smith et  al. 2018, 4). Rather, it is based on a constructionist notion that affective atmospheres are built of convention and a sufficient degree of tacit complicity between parties. These conventions and complicity are historically situated and explainable as such, rather than being autonomous, instantaneous and accidental. Although there is no doubt that unpredicted, impromptu individual and collective behaviour does happen in public space, in the museums studied here it would be relatively hard to achieve because of the tight structuring of behaviour and experience. Just one example to illustrate this, to which I  return in Chapter  6:  the paving stones of the ‘Lion Walk’, which is one of the main routes to AWIM, are set deliberately far apart, forcing visitors to walk slowly (it is easy to trip) and encouraging careful and respectful

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10 Introduction demeanour required in this site of the memory of Atatürk as military and civil hero of the Turkish nation. Because of this attention to environmental factors, another distinction in my use of the term ‘affective atmosphere’ lies in its potential to describe what goes on in a literal physical space  –​that of the museum building and its component galleries and areas. This again runs against the grain of much literature that employs the term to think through more abstract entities and phenomena, even if they often have a physical and spatial dimension too, such as with Angharad Closs Stephen’s work (2015) on the affective atmosphere of nationalism. The making of the ‘atmosphere’ in the physical site of museums forces us to engage with the technological and technical details of representation through which displays become emotive:  the careful placement of objects, sounds and images for effect, lighting, the design of visitor spaces and routes, viewpoints and visual fields, colour relations, and so on. We need, in short, to analyse displays, and as Chapter  3 will show, there are rich methods for this from museology and visual culture. Then we can consider representations and visitor behaviour as interrelated, because in the former emotions can be ‘encoded’, to use Stuart Hall’s term (Hall [1973] 1993; Lidchi 1997, 166–​167), and anticipated and prompted; and in the latter, they are ‘exercised’. It is not that the museums’ representations are ‘unemotional’ and visitors are ‘emotional’; rather, they are both part of particular memory cultures in which the practice of emotion is important. Indeed, further questions to ask here are why emotionally arousing forms of display were produced, why people respond to them as they do, and how both of these phenomena relate to wider cultures of memory and emotion in Turkey. The production and experience of emotion in the museum are not fully separable from other cultural sites, technologies, representations and practices. These include, for example, the school, TV and cinema, visual culture, memorial and commemorative practice, political and media discourse, souvenirs, urban and architectural developments, the naming of public spaces, and so on. Christoph Bareither’s work on emotional practice in online multiplayer video-​gaming (2017) offers a resonant comparison here, if at first sight an unlikely one. Exploring gamers’ gratuitous violence towards other players in the ‘virtual’ space of the game, he argues that ‘the existence of an ontological gap between gaming spaces and ‘real life’ is a false presumption’ (2017, 116). Even if the game seems to have its own ‘feeling rules’ as an ‘enclosed space’ it is not totally separable from other everyday life-​spaces, and there are transfers between such spaces. The museums may be seen as a comparably porous or interactional space, with their own feeling rules or affective regimes and atmospheres, but also with relational transfers going in and out. One of the key positions of this book is the need for a relational view of the production of emotional and memory culture that is attentive to an expanded field of heritage

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Introduction 11 and politics in which identities are produced and contested. This field is characterized by multiple, interacting affective regimes, shared signs and sign systems, encultured audiences, and opportunities to exercise, repeat, perform and practice identities through affective practices that also constitute social relations. If the museum is just one of many cultural sites in an array, or ecology, of public memory, nevertheless it has specific significance. The stories told in the museums are deeply familiar and pervasive, and visitors have prior knowledge of them and yet still choose to visit. There are a number of interconnecting reasons for this that will emerge over the course of this book. One of these relates to the appeal of the immersive experience of the past, seeming to offer an opportunity for a kind of time travel (Holtorf 2017) through which visitors can reimagine themselves in history. Secondly, the museums are resorts for people who, share emotional and political attachments to a certain past and feel inclined to express themselves, and to feel as one with a crowd that shares their feelings. Thirdly, the museums’ associations of authority and appeal to truth are important to people as a validation of their affective practice and identity work, which in turn revalidates for them the truth stories of the museums. One key argument in this book is that people go to the museums to identify, perform and ‘work on’ the self. Tony Bennett, in his influential work on museums and governmentality, talks of museums as encouraging particular ‘evolutionary exercises of the self’ (1995, 10). Margaret Wetherell’s conceptualization of ‘affective practice’, introduced above (itself a development of a long-​standing body of ‘practice theory’), can be seen as a comparable kind of developmental ‘work on the self’, often in relation to external programmes such as cycles of religious observance (2012, 12). In Rick Altman’s theory of narrative, he proposes a concept of ‘narrative drive’, which describes people’s desire to repeatedly see through to its conclusion a celebrated, pre-​known narrative. The narrative drive to engage recurrently with the stories of the Conquest of Constantinople or the battles of the War of Independence, in my configuration of these theoretical frameworks, can be seen as part and parcel of an affective practice that is at once an exercise of the self. I engage with these ideas as a way of thinking through the role of the museum visit in the context of people’s lives and sense of self in relation to past. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell suggest that museums have a psychological function for people in relation to emotion, that ‘museums and heritage sites are places where people go to feel, and indeed they are arenas where people go to “manage” their emotions’. For Smith and Campbell, museums and heritage sites are sites of emotion not just because people feel able to express feeling there, but because they also help people ‘to work out or explore how those emotions may reinforce, provide insight or otherwise engage with aspects of the past and its meaning for the

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12 Introduction present’ (Smith and Campbell 2015, 455; see also Hochschild’s 1979 conception of ‘emotion management’). At the same time, there is something particular about the affective practice that these history museums make possible, and they have a specificity as ‘emotional spaces’ (Chytry 2012) such that they become sites which people seek out, sometimes –​but by no means always –​in ways that resemble a kind of pilgrimage. They deal in historically and politically charged questions that implicitly or explicitly interpellate visitors to tell them where they ‘come from’, to whom they should be thankful (Atatürk or Fatih, Republicans or Ottomans), what has been lost, what changes should be embraced and which ones resisted, and how to situate the self in time and place. All of this makes for an ‘affective atmosphere’ that can be studied historically as a configuration of objects, subjects, stories and affects.

Approaches The blend of studies in this book –​of the museums as cultural productions and representations and of visitors’ responses  –​was undertaken to try to understand not just ‘top-​down’ uses of the past in official representations such as in museums but also how people in various social and political positions relate to the historical past. This means understanding the institutional politics of the museums and how they relate to the representations of the past found in displays and other public-​facing resources, and the motivations, views and work of their staff. It also means understanding the importance of the past for people, and how it informs their senses of identity and political, religious and moral beliefs. In this way, my intention is not to understand visitors’ behaviour as a simple response to the museum, but to take a more holistic view of their visits within the context of their personal and social lives and histories. The museum visits that interest me here are not isolated, ‘one-​off’ or hermetic events, but more often part of an array of habits, life choices and experiences through which people practice the self and build a sense of identity. Over the course of my fieldwork I spent considerable time with visitors, observing them, interviewing them, and visiting the museums with them. I tried to build a sense of their lives, inclinations, social relations, their senses of themselves and their feelings about the past. In each museum, I undertook between ten and 12 in-​depth three-​stage interviews. The first stage took place before the museum visit and explored the lives, interests, beliefs and everyday practices of participants. The second stage was an accompanied visit to the museum in question, followed by a third, post-​visit interview to reflect on their responses to the visit. In each stage I was keen to understand people’s interests and reflections on the past (or pasts) and their political viewpoints. As mentioned, I made an effort to study the responses not just of those people who visited of their own accord, or who would have been members of the museums’ normal audiences, but also other people who sometimes took

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Introduction 13 oppositional positions on the museums and resisted the historical accounts presented there, often seeing them as political mythologies perpetrated by interested parties. In practice, this meant recruiting participants from social and political groups perceived to be antagonistic to the historical stories, political affiliations and governmental claims of each museum. How do people with oppositional views ‘read’ these stories? What is their emotional engagement with, and in, the museums? Can this tell us something about different responses to the emotional prompts in the museums, including how and why they fail? It helps to reveal how historical memory, emotion and social formations operate not just constructively, within visitor groups amenable to one or other of the museums, but also negatively and divisively, creating or reproducing senses of opposition and difference. In addition to these in-​depth interviews, I interviewed visitors at P1453 using a short questionnaire will be introduced in an overview of methods in Chapter 3. (At AWIM I was forbidden from administering a questionnaire in the museum, in fact by the General Chief of Military Staff himself.) Through this questionnaire I  tried to understand more about the politics of positioning that takes place in the museums, why people chose to visit, what it means to visitors to allow themselves to be positioned in relation to the past and what the emotional, political, social, and cultural dimensions of this are in relation to identity. A  final ‘method’ that I adopted was a serendipitous one, which is to say that whenever I had a chance encounter with someone that involved discussions of memory culture –​from colleagues to strangers –​I sought to make use of these. These were chatty interactions rather than structured exercises in collecting data, but from these I also developed my understandings of people’s beliefs and viewpoints. These were coincidental occurrences and not planned as part of ‘fieldwork’, and they need to be understood as such, in other words, as providing ‘data’ that does not come from a rigorously framed qualitative methodology and needs to be contextualized within a story of the encounter in question (for a comparable approach see Macdonald’s (2009) work on the Nuremberg Rally Grounds). They must be taken as representing people’s individual positions in the context of a chat, rather than as structured data or generalizations that characterize groups. These stories will be figure in the following chapters.

Summary and outline of the book This chapter has introduced the main themes and sites of this research. The research is about what it means for museums to charge the past with particular political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations; how this concerns social contests over past, present and future that pervade both the spaces of people’s lives and high-​level party-​political and geopolitical questions; and how and why people visit the museums, make sense of what they find there and respond emotionally. Returning to the excerpts at the

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14 Introduction beginning of this chapter, why are the women looking at the panorama of the Conquest of Constantinople so angry, and how do their responses flow from admiration of the valiant Ottoman forces to resentment towards an unnamed enemy that took away ‘their’ history? Why, in AWIM, does the middle-​aged man behave as he does in front of the Gallipoli panorama, hand on heart and quietly seeking to contain his emotions? What interaction or complicity exist between the museums, their visitors and everyday memory cultures and emotional practices, and what part does this play in the articulation of social identities? Smith and Campbell capture this range of interests as follows: If we accept that heritage is political, that it is a political resource used in conflicts over the understanding of the past and its relevance for the present, then understanding how the interplay of emotions, imagination and the process of remembering and commemoration are informed by people’s culturally and socially diverse affective responses must become a growing area of focus for the field. (2015, 455) The remainder of this book follows these relations through, understanding the heritage presented in the museums as political, and ‘affect and emotion as essential constitutive elements’ of this ‘heritage-​ making’ (Smith and Campbell 2015). This book comes out of anthropological and museological research that aims for in-​depth concentration on key cases. These cases tell us much about the local cultures of which they are part and have more general value in illuminating the particular problematics discussed above, particularly in relation to emotion. Nevertheless, the focus on Turkish cases brings up the challenge of explaining their relevance to other museum and memory cultures. Sharon Macdonald discusses this difficulty, where the benefit of an ethnographic focus on ‘the importance of context and the local, and insistence on recognising complexity’ helps to avoid inappropriate generalization, but also means that sometimes researchers ‘do not realise some of the broader implications of their work or what it shares with that of others’ (Macdonald 2013, 2). So, apart from people who are interested in museums, emotion and memory culture in Turkey, who else can benefit from this? This is book that should serve readers interested in the governmental understandings of museums, in the politics and analysis of display, in emotion, in how historical stories are told through complex images and texts and in contests over memory that play out in museums and in people’s lives. Turkey is my setting and I  advocate ‘going deep’ into this (or any) locale with thorough analyses of the encounters between museums and visitors that hinge on established memory cultures as well as contemporary political conditions. Sometimes, the choice of a single word in a visitor’s exclamation, or her body language, will be an object of sustained analysis, sometimes the emphases and silences of the museums or an intertextual

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Introduction 15 feature of a panoramic painting. Where we have politics, museums, memory, audiences, and emotionality, how do we make sense of their messy interaction? Through weaving together these analyses, I offer up an outlook and a kind of toolkit of qualitative methods for deployment anywhere, in particular in the many settings where identity contests are linked to historical memory and configure tense or divided political and social relations. In addition to this, an in-​depth local focus of the kind presented in this book needs to recognize the exogenous as well as the endogenous making of memory cultures. This is about understanding the ways in which geopolitical concerns and transnational relations filter into memory cultures and museum displays: for example, what relays, intertextual relations or clashes between Turkish and non-​Turkish memory and affective practices  –​particularly European ones, but also Australian, for ­example  –​condition the making of meaning in museums. The result of this wider geopolitical sensitivity means that this is more than a book about Turkish museums. In the next chapter, I present a historical account and preliminary overview of the museums to be studied, before discussing ways of understanding the museums and their visitors in Chapter 3, outlining in greater detail the methods used and the theoretical concepts and assumptions underpinning them. The core of the book is articulated over four chapters, two for each museum. In Chapter 4 I analyse P1453 in order to understand the politics of its representation of the past, looking closely at the displays and incorporating findings from staff interviews. In Chapter  5 I  shift my attention to the museum’s visitors, and their responses to and behaviour within the museums, to understand as fully as possible the dynamics of the encounter with the presented past. Chapters  6 and 7 follow the same pattern, but at AWIM. Towards the end of these chapters I  also explore the ways in which affective practice in the museums might be conditioned by particular geocultural and geopolitical imperatives relating to Turkey’s identity and position in the world, particularly vis-​à-​vis Europe. It is here that we need to think about emotionality and the geographies of memory. Turkey has been called an ‘edge place’ (Whitehead et al. 2019) that is defined not just through internal structuring but also by its dynamic relations and vicinity to others such as Europe, and I  will show that this means something for affective practice, museums and public memory culture. In this analysis, however, it is important not to mischaracterize Turkey as Europe’s ‘irrational other’; in fact, in the museums of Europe and elsewhere we find both comparable affective practices, albeit rooted in other memory cultures. These brief windows into other settings open up views that complicate the relationships between memory, place and geopolitics across Europe and Turkey; each one picks up a key problematic from the case study discussions and shuttles between different spaces of memory. In these concluding sections, I examine the politics of national stories relating to war and conquest, militarism, modernity and the meanings of citizenship across and between geocultural

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16 Introduction space. Finally, Chapter 8 provides an overall discussion of the themes that emerge throughout, together with extended arguments about affective practice in the museums, their intertextuality and contemporary governmental uses of the past.

Note 1 All translations from interviews are mine.

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2  The museums and their histories The politics of Ottoman and republican pasts

In Turkey, the presence of the past in public media  –​from billboards to massive commemorations of historic events –​is highly visible. This is one of the ways in which the past is often explicitly coded with exemplary values for the present, for people to emulate and adopt. In this context, AWIM and P1453 –​and other, related, public sites and moments of historical memory –​ can be seen as part of governmental arrays, building on the classic museological studies on the modelling of citizenship and subjectivities in museums (Bennett 1995) and ‘civilizing rituals’ (Duncan 1995). Notably, these studies found governmentality in museal sites where its appearance was effaced or ‘relatively covert’, such as in art museums that ostensibly are ‘about’ something else (art), and yet turn out to be laden with forces for constituting publics and ordering social and political relations. In the museums studied in this book, there is no such subtlety, and the museums’ exhortations to citizens are, so to speak, in the open, not just as dry maxims to follow but as emotionalized appeals. This chapter introduces the two museums and explores the historical and political significance of the pasts that they present, incorporating reflections on the links between their governmental roles and emotive character.

The museums and their visitors The story of how ‘Fatih’ Sultan Mehmet II (‘the Conqueror’) breached the walls of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and conquered the city in 1453 is  –​as noted in Chapter  1  –​celebrated by conservative Islamists. In the Turkish context, ‘conservative Islamism’ can be understood as the mobilization of Islam within ostensibly secular state politics, and this characterizes the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, henceforth ‘AKP’), which has governed since 2002 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first as Prime Minister and currently, at the time of writing, as president with newly acquired powers (after the referendum on presidential powers of 2017). Although the AKP describe their agenda as ‘conservative democratic’, the party bases much of its discourse and actions explicitly on values that it associates with Islam. The AKP and its

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18  The museums and their histories followers celebrate Ottoman history and use the Ottoman age as a source of inspiration for contemporary politics and identity claims and an object around which to fashion subjectivities and a national ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983). On the other hand, the museum in Ankara tells the story of how Mustafa Kemal (later to be named ‘Atatürk’, the first president of the Turkish Republic between 1923 and 1938), defeated the Allies at Gallipoli and the Greeks at Sakarya and Kocatepe, leading to Turkish independence and a modernizing, secular state. This is a history celebrated by secular republicans, often termed ‘Kemalists’ or ‘Atatürkists’ after their support for Atatürk (1881–​1938) and his political and civil vision for Turkey. This vision is normally articulated across six principles:  republicanism, statism (in economic policy), populism (in the sense of a politics in which the every citizen is concerned with the common destiny of the people), laicism, nationalism, and reformism. Atatürk was a prime mover in bringing about the end of the Ottoman age (1299–​1922) and the abolition of the sultanate. These two groups are not strictly internally homogeneous, in that there is more than one ‘type’ of Kemalist/​Atatürkist, if ever the labels can be distinguished or defined completely (Mardin [1983] 1990, 187),1 and multiple versions and intensities of conservative Islamism (Kara 2012, Aktay et  al. 2014) in Turkey. Nevertheless, they represent a primary division within Turkish society, that links once again to geopolitical and geocultural concerns about what and where Turkey is. Anthropologist Yael Navaro-​ Yashin, for example, describes debates in 1990s where conflicts over Turkish culture and nativity between secularists and Islamists ‘argued over Turkey’s proper “region” ’ and ‘disagreed on Turkey’s positionality vis-​à-​vis Europe’ (Navaro-​Yashin 2002, 7). For secularists, Turkey should stay away from and disidentify with the Middle East and the Arabs, and even position itself as a ‘Mediterranean’ country to configure it relationally with Europe. On the other hand, Islamists argued that Westernization suppressed Turkey’s local culture and real identity (ibid.). This is a debate that has long roots, for criticism of Westernization in Turkey goes back at least until the 18th century (Mardin 1991; Berkes [1975] 2018; Berkes 1998; Karpat 2017). There are many histories other than those of 1453 or the early Republic that have less visibility, but still have profound symbolic importance for other social groups, such as those relating to minority ethnic or religious groups, or to 20th-​century leftist and Marxist activism. These histories have begun to be presented in some independent museums, but histories of minorities in Turkey are rarely presented in Turkish museums (Shaw 2011, 942). The political use of museums also varies according to type. Some, such as those that focus on archaeology and art, while certainly not apolitical (Shaw 2003; Savino 2011), are less overtly ideological in their representations, at least in relation to party-​political agendas. Nevertheless, my focus is less on the complexity of the museum landscape in Turkey than on state museums that present those historical stories that are most visible in public, that have

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The museums and their histories 19 high contemporary political value for powerful actors within the state, and strong appeal to different social groups. The museums are also highly visited. Anıtkabir and AWIM are together the most visited attraction in Turkey. For example, according to figures on the Anıtkabir website, 5,630,353 people visited the site in 2014; although the numbers are not disaggregated between the mausoleum and the museums, it can be estimated that many visit both. Of the overall visitors, only a minority is foreign:  in 2016 fewer than 200,000 foreign tourists visited Anıtkabir, and more than 96% of visitors were Turkish. Relative to other Turkish destinations, Ankara is not a very popular destination for foreign tourists. Next on the list are Ayasofya and the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, both with 3–​4 million visitors annually and far greater mass appeal to foreign tourists. To compare this with an international visitor attraction, in fact the second-​most visited in Europe, the British Museum in London receives around 7 million visitors per year. Given its relatively small physical size, P1453 also receives high visitor numbers –​of over half a million per year (the website reports that on some days up to 6900 visitors attend). In its first year of opening the museum received nearly one million visitors, including large numbers of school groups (T24, December 1, 2010). There is no data collected on the numbers of foreign visitors, but according to staff observations and my own, the vast majority were Turkish at the time of this study, although, increasingly, foreign visitors from countries with Muslim majorities often take package tours that include the museum. To provide a contrast for the P1453 visitor numbers, the Istanbul Archaeology Museum –​one of the major museums in the city and within the vicinity of Topkapı Palace, currently attracts around 400,000 visitors annually. These brief statistical notes show that the case study museums are, comparatively speaking, major attractions, even though only a small minority of their visitors are from outside Turkey. Despite their differences, these museums have something in common other than relatively high visitor numbers, which is the spectacular panoramic displays they use to represent the past.

Panoramas in Turkey Panoramic museums lost much of their popularity in Europe from the early 20th century; panoramas were important elements of state propaganda in Russia both before and after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. However, it is only relatively recently that panoramas have become popular in Turkey for the first time, beginning with the AWIM in Ankara in 2002 and followed by P1453 in 2009. Indeed, more panoramic museums are in process of development in Turkey at the time of writing.2 These are being built following the example of P1453  –​by the same team of designers and also with funding and support from the current administration, the AKP. Why has this

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20  The museums and their histories ‘old-​fashioned’ exhibitionary form become so popular in Turkish museums? Why has it been used by state actors for presenting official history? It is easy to imagine different museum treatments of these histories, using conventional displays of historic objects in display cases, or indeed using readily available digital technologies and moving images. When I  spoke with the producers of the museums, it became evident that panoramas were certainly not a cheaper or easier option: the time, organizational co-​ordination, personnel and expense involved were considerable in both cases. Panoramas have a specific place within exhibitionary history. Historian Bernard Comment (2000) points back to the etymology of the name (from the Greek ‘see all’) and looks at its late 18th-​century, predominantly Western-​European genesis. He notes that the panorama was usually a ‘continuous circular representation hung on the walls of a rotunda specifically constructed to accommodate it’, and that they had to be ‘so true to life that they could be confused with reality’ (2000, 7). He discusses the predominance of topographical images, either of the city in which a given panorama was located, such as London, or of far-​off exotic places, frequently including  –​in Western-​European panoramas  –​Istanbul (Hyde 1988, 36, 73). Comment links this representational form with anxiety about securing control of rapidly-​changing landscapes and cities, as though through the accurate surveying, charting and fixing in time of a place one could mitigate against chaotic reality (2000, 7). Another key genre was the military panorama, where painters often combined patriotic fervour in representing heroes and momentous events with a declared attempt to be as historically accurate as possible, even when the battles had sometimes taken place only months previously (ibid., 8). To develop Comment’s argument further, one could say that the topographical and military panoramas were informed by a common project of securing one version of events as truth. Yet panoramas have ambiguous status. In their early history they were often commercial ventures and spectacular attractions, distinct from the high cultural domain of museums. Many historic panoramas have now become museums as heritage objects in themselves, such as Louis Dumoulin’s 1912 panorama of the Battle of Waterloo, recently restored, at ‘Mémorial 1815’ near Brussels (Figure 2.1). The panoramas on which I focus have not been subject to such heritagizing processes, and do not appeal to visitors as artefacts that represent historic attitudes to the past. At Memorial 1815, people pay to look at the Battle of Waterloo through an early twentieth-​century lens, which allows detachment from an insistence on truth and accuracy. Rather, the panoramas at AWIM and P1453 are presented as timeless artefacts that are forever true. Nevertheless, my interview data suggest that there is still tension about whether the panoramas belong in museums as a legitimate and authoritative way of representing history, or whether they are just impressive spectacles for uncultured people, or worse, propagandist glorifications of military victories with nationalist framings. Chapter  1 recounts that the potential emotion

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The museums and their histories 21

Figure 2.1 Panorama painting from 1912, with replica dead horses in the foreground, Waterloo Mémorial 1815, Belgium

in the museum became suspect in the wake of the studies of scholars such as David Lowenthal in the 1980s, to the degree that heritage actors sought to suppress it by way of imposing a ‘flat affect’ on interpretation (Smith et  al. 2018, 8). Sheila Watson notes that ‘few history museums appear to have grasped the notion of emotion as a tool that is as important as text, lighting, or narrative’ (2015, 286), and this may be a consequence of the suspicion of emotion that Smith et al. identify. In this view, where there is emotive practice, there is the possibility of sham, inflation and romantic, ideological presentations of the past, and the flat affect of interpretation counteracts this. However, this ‘flat affect’ is not a good characterization of AWIM or P1453, although each makes claim to rigorous procedures of historical accuracy associated with disciplinary scholarship. Rather, spectacularly emotive displays and rhetorics of reliable history are brought into problematic relation. The panoramas turn out to be full of paradoxes. They seem to represent one moment in time, and yet as I will show in Chapters 4 and 6, they fuse many asynchronous events into single images. They are spectacular but also aim to be realistic, overcoming any doubts about veracity. On one hand, to represent a scene through painting is necessarily an act of mediation in

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22  The museums and their histories which there is the well-​known potential to introduce fantasy and to ‘change reality’. But in another way, the use of painting is harnessed to an opposite idea, for at both museums there is an official discourse of historical accuracy and truthfulness. This is consistently insisted upon throughout the rhetoric of display, as well as in interpretation and publicity materials. Visitors are told that what they are seeing is not an interpretation; rather, it is the real past, in relation to a range of evidentiary claims including historical primary sources. There are no actors pretending to be historical figures, as there would be in a film, and there is no digital trickery: just (the museums claim) artists faithfully and rigorously copying reality according to strict criteria. The result is to provide, at least for willing visitors, a sense that the panoramas are not mediations, or representations, but actual records. This constitutes a particularly literal version of what Christopher Whitehead calls the ‘surrogate witnessing’ made possible by museum representations, which help some visitors to salve ‘anxieties about truth and reality (what ‘actually happened’)’ and reinforce accounts of the past that help visitors to ‘situate [their] lives and positions in history both in temporal and moral dimensions’. Witnessing, he argues, is a ‘cultural mode of perception associated with proof; it feels like it affords us the ability to cut through the ambiguities and uncertainties of representation to actual truths’ (2016, 6). This is particularly important in relation to the Conquest of Constantinople, where multiple ‘versions’ of the past are available, both from historic sources and from opponents of the museum keen to expose it as a purveyor of inaccuracy (see also Bozoğlu and Whitehead 2018). There have been comparable attempts to undermine the classic hero-​story of Atatürk –​for example in allusions by conservative Islamists to his alcohol consumption (Cumhuriyet, October 10, 2018) –​although this is rendered difficult because of the law against insulting his memory. Nevertheless, the common impulse here is to burst the veracity of one historical story in order to accord primacy to another past and another narrative as true. The very name and status of the museums as museums already connotes authority and truth, and this is compounded by way of the provision of historical scenes for ‘surrogate witnessing’. Moreover, along with this authority and truth status comes high drama –​the fighting, the heroism, and momentous events. Even more, as a visitor you can feel as if you are in the thick of the action. Or, as some of my ‘oppositional’ visitors did, you can ‘resist’ this immersion into the past and dismiss it as fantasy and nonsense. In Cornelius Holtorf’s study of the ‘archaeology of time travel’ he discusses the perception of ‘pastness’ that can be induced by a heavily mediated environment in which a past is reproduced, including digital virtual reality environments. He notes that for some visitors, such environments feel unmediated and therefore both true and  –​necessarily  –​accurate. It is just like ‘time travel’ insofar as:  the past reality is presented coherently; the audience is familiar with the medium, feels involved and is willing to suspend disbelief; their senses are ‘persuaded’ through rich and vivid impressions

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The museums and their histories 23 and immersion; and that their prior understandings and expectations are matched (Holtorf 2017, 12). The slippage between real and unreal, original and copy, true and untrue is galvanized when such conditions are met, as Wulf Kansteiner argues: ‘memories of virtual worlds and virtual interactions will become our most cherished memories and therefore our most real and powerful memories’ (in ibid.), and this aligns with my engagements with visitors, in which I  saw just how profoundly they were affected by their experiences of the museum representations. There is one massive, domed panorama in P1453, and it is the main exhibit. There are no ‘normal’ museum objects here, although there are other displays including photographs of objects, models, films, and lots of text panels. AWIM is a larger and more varied museum, with conventional objects (such as Atatürk’s belongings), thousands of photographic and documentary objects, portraits and mannequins of Atatürk. But here too some of the most spectacular exhibits are the three large panoramas. All of the panoramas  –​in both museums  –​take the visitors back to particular moments in the past, specifically to the heat of battle, whether it is the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople or the Dardanelles. The panoramas are illusionistic: figures in the foreground are life-​sized, as are the 3D objects and replicas in front of them. As a visitor, you can, with little effort and crowds permitting, position yourself so that your whole field of vision is occupied with the action, eliminating from view the museal surroundings. With a certain complicity on the part of visitors –​perhaps a willingness to suspend disbelief, to allow oneself to be transported back to the past, and to be affected by what one finds there –​a strongly emotional experience is crafted. How then might this relate to governmental and political agendas? The remainder of this chapter responds to this question with a historical overview of Republican and Ottoman historical memory in both museums and the public sphere more generally.

Museums and republican memory Many authors have commented on the power of museums ‘to shape collective values and social understandings in a decisively important fashion (Luke 2002, xiii), particularly as a form of governmentality. Museum studies and memory studies are often practised separately, but museums too can be seen as sites of memory and in this context Olick et al. discuss the role of ‘powerful institutions’ such as museums, arguing that: powerful institutions clearly support some histories more than others, provide narrative patterns and exemplars of how individuals can and should remember and stimulate public memory in ways and for reasons that have little to do with the individual or aggregate neurological records. (2011, 20)

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24  The museums and their histories In The Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett develops a perspective on museums as means of achieving multiple governmental objectives. These include both the communication of particular values, such as notions of civilization and progress, and the control of citizens’ behaviour. In this sense the museum is a ‘cultural technology’. It achieves its effectiveness ‘through the articulated combination of representations, routines and regulations’ of which it is comprised (1995, 10). Bennett grounds some of his focus in early museums of the 19th century, which for him functioned as Foucault’s ‘instruments of government’ that operate not through law but through ‘multiform tactics’ including high culture such as fine art (1995, 22). The aim of museums was to change the conduct of visitors, and this depended ‘on a close relationship between the government of the state and the government of the self’. Culture ‘was increasingly thought of as a resource to be used in programmes which aimed at bringing about changes in acceptable norms and forms of behaviour’. These norms were consolidated ‘as self-​ acting imperatives by inscribing them within broadly disseminated regimes of self-​management’ (ibid.). In this way museums would exercise a transformative power over their visitors and, by extension, over society, resulting in the absorption of authorized values and people’s ‘regulation of the self’ through interiorising subjection to authority that effectively created a kind of model citizen. The contexts of Bennett’s analysis are specific, even if they are varied (from the early 19th-​century museum to Beamish Open-​Air Museum in North-​East England). Consequently, we might question how this view of the museum as a governmental technology can be directly appropriated for an apparently very different setting such as Turkey. Savino (2012) and Shaw (2003) have both argued that Turkish museums originally developed in reference to western museum models and involved complex instrumental functions in relation to state politics. The first museums in Turkey date back to the 19th-​century Ottoman Empire and continued to develop after the establishment of the new state. In the 19th century, such early museums developed, focusing on the preservation of archaeology and military exhibitions (Shaw 2003, Savino 2012). In the early years of the Republic the new idea of the nation state, which was based on a modernized concept of ‘Turkishness’, was reflected in the new museums in an attempt to distinguish and distance Turkey from the multi-​ethnic Ottoman Empire. A new, state-​sponsored historical narrative of the Republic of Turkey was published as a consequence: the multi-​authored four-​volume book Outlines of Turkish History (Türk Tarihinin Ana Hatları) (1931). The book was written by a commission of historians, the key member of whom was Afet İnan, known as one of Atatürk’s adopted daughters; she credited Atatürk as its instigator, and it is known that he was involved in making corrections and additions (Kolektif 2014). Used for decades in school education, Outlines focuses on the migration of Turkic peoples from Central Asia to Anatolia, to which (the story goes) they brought civilization. This links to an idea that Turkey

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The museums and their histories 25 has a particular, historical cultural affiliation or kinship with Europe that is somehow more natural than its association with Islam and the Islamic world as a geographical (eastern) construction. Indeed, we see this borne out in the texts in AWIM, where many tenets of Kemalist historiography are replayed. For example, it is stated that Turkish women were freer, and equal to men, in central Asian culture before the arrival of Islam, which erased many cultural values that were akin to European ones (see also Navaro-​Yashin 2002, 50). This returns us to the question of where (or what) Turkey is, and the historical articulation of this for contemporary identities. Outlines of Turkish History goes on to narrate how the Ottomans formed a proud and powerful regime that threatened the borders of Europe, subsequently declining because of the weakness and selfishness of the later sultans, from whom Atatürk rescued Turkey. New museums were established to emphasize different aspects of Turkish identity, such as the Ankara Ethnography Museum (1925) and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The Ethnography Museum, for example, focused on Turkish regional cultures, moving away from ethnic and religious differences to propose a common cultural identity over different groups (Kezer 2000; Shaw 2011, 940), while the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations emphasized the pre-​ Ottoman origins of the Turkish people (e.g. the Hittites) (Gür 2001 and 2007; Shaw 2008). This latter museum reproduced ‘Turkish nationalist archaeological discourses [that] reinterpreted the chain of historical continuity constructed among European, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian civilizations by inserting Turkish culture’ as Aslı Gür argues. She continues:  ‘this provided a rich discursive repertoire for [Republican secular] nationalist elites eager to construct a national identity that could claim historical connections with Europe’ (2007, 48; Bartu 1997). A critical point here is that Atatürk himself was closely involved in the design and commissioning of these historical narratives, whether they took form in written historiography or the spatial historiography of museums. A  historical connection with Europe helped to naturalize ‘the universal validity of Western modernity as the way of building modern Turkey’ (Keyman 2006, 208, original emphasis), even though the new nation-​state story of Turkey was founded on the defeat of Western imperialist powers in the War of Independence. Atatürk is still a strong presence in these museums today, appearing in photographs, flags, videos and sculptures. This is not just another of the many iterations of his iconography in public space. The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations has recently been redeveloped, and the display now begins with a video that explains that it was Atatürk himself who called for the archaeological excavations from which many of the museum’s holdings derive. A large flag of Atatürk (his ubiquitous monochrome portrait as an elder statesman) is hung next to the Ay Yıldız Turkish flag from the rafters of over the main display space, framing the museum visit and making prominent visual connections between the deep past (e.g. of Hittite civilization),

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26  The museums and their histories Atatürk, and the Turkish nation (this is analysed in depth in Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2015). Meanwhile, Topkapı Palace (the historical home of the Ottoman Sultan and his court) was converted into a museum in 1924, becoming the first museum of the Republic of Turkey. The Ottomans were thus transformed into museum matter, ostensibly neutralizing the empire’s political and religious importance. With the newly established republic, Atatürk’s cult of personality developed and his image and slogans became new symbol of the unification of the nation. After his death in 1938 this intensified. Statues of him were erected in the major towns from 1926 onwards (Zürcher 2004, 182; Gur 2013; Tekiner 2014).3 After the 1960 military coup, statues of Atatürk were sent to the cities that did not have one and following the 1980 military coup, in the Atatürk Year (Atatürk yılı) in 1981, which celebrated the Atatürk’s 100th birthday, so-​called ‘sculpture madness’ occurred, with the state-​funded factory production of Atatürk statues for placement in towns and villages (Saymaz 2016). Additionally, since Atatürk’s death, his name has been given to airports, bridges, stadiums, schools, hospitals and other public institutions. His portraits can be seen in practically all public buildings. In 1934, after his introduction of the surname to Turkey, at Parliament’s suggestion he took the surname ‘Atatürk’, literally ‘Father Turk’ that presented him as nation’s father (previously he was known as ‘Mustafa Kemal’, or ‘Mustafa Kemal Pasha’). His titles also included ‘head teacher’ (Başöğretmen), ‘eternal chief’ (ebedi şef), and ‘great leader’ (ulu önder) of the nation. Numerous museums and memorials were dedicated to his memory and achievements, which also reflected his paternalistic persona. His memorial tomb, Anıtkabir, was completed in 1953 (Figure  2.2) and his body was transferred there from its temporary resting place in Ankara Ethnography Museum in the same year on the 15th anniversary of his death on 10 November. The very first text panel in Anıtkabir states that it is ‘sited in the heart of Ankara’, which Atatürk made into the national capital. Architecturally, it reflects the new national narrative of the new state –​mainly reflecting the pre-​Ottoman architectural elements from earlier eras of Seljuq, Hittite and Hellenistic cultures, as well as traditional Turkic Nomadic tents and folk motifs such as Turkish carpet motifs (Wilson 2013). The Anıtkabir official website suggests that the memorial represents the ‘immortal’ Atatürk. As Christopher S. Wilson notes, the ‘function of Anıtkabir was to fix or freeze the idea of Atatürk and his revolutions in a physical three-​dimensional construction’ (ibid., 132). The dissemination of Atatürk’s cult increased after military coups that toppled particular administrations. The direct military coups of 1960, 1971 and 1980 were undertaken in the name of ‘Atatürkism’ and underpinned by a range of motivations from quashing the autocratic behaviour of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes (subsequently tried and executed), to purging communists in the Cold War period, issues of ethnic identity and the Islam-​ state relationship (Heper 2012,139; Kanra 2012, 84). As Time Magazine stated in relation to the 1960 coup:

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The museums and their histories 27

Figure 2.2 Anıtkabir in winter, Ankara

the Turkish army has long scrupulously observed the admonition of the late great Kemal Ataturk [sic] that the army should stay out of partisan politics. But it also remembered that Ataturk charged it with guarding the constitution. (in Rothman 2016, n.p.) In 1997, the desire to quash Political Islamist tendencies through military intervention led to the so-​called ‘Postmodern Coup’, in which the military, with the implicit support of some public and private institutions and civil society groups, forced the Islamist civilian government to resign and closed down affiliated parties on the basis that they used religion for political purposes contrary to Atatürkism (Heper 2012, 139–​140). Museum developments were important in the aftermath of coups. Following the 1960 coup, museums focusing on Atatürk and early Republic history were opened, helping to reinforce Kemalist ideology (Shaw 2011, 934). The ‘Atatürk Museum’ opened in Anıtkabir in 1960, displaying only Atatürk’s belongings from clothing, medals, and gifts to him. The museum presented Atatürk as a figure to be revered, often presenting ‘relics’ of his existence (e.g. his clothes and possessions). The museum was redesigned and augmented with the War of Independence sections, taking on the name of

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28  The museums and their histories the ‘Atatürk and War of Independence Museum’ and reopening in 2002. In 1961, the first Turkish Grand National Assembly Building in Ankara opened to the public. Following the 1980 coup this building reopened as a ‘War of Independence Museum’ as part of celebration of the 100th anniversary of Atatürk’s birth in 1981. This was part of a wave of post-​1980 activity to subdue opposition by groups on the left and right by reinforcing the political principles of the Atatürk and the early Republic. Further museums were opened in order to reestablish Atatürk as an icon for the state (ibid., 935). The Republican Museum, showcasing more of Atatürk’s belongings as well as those of later Republican presidents (İsmet İnönü and Celâl Bayar), was opened in the Second Parliamentary Assembly building in 1981. At much the same time many houses that Atatürk visited during his lifetime were opened as museums across Turkey (including big cities like Istanbul and Ankara but also many small cities and towns as well). These were named Atatürk Houses or Atatürk Museums and were presented as ‘frozen in time at the moment of his visit or stay’ (Wilson 2013, 108). In a similar way, his bedroom in Dolmabahçe Palace, Istanbul, where he died in 10 November 1938, opened in 1982. The Palace was previously the final residence of the Ottoman sultans, and a small number of its rooms are dedicated to Atatürk, showing his medical cabinet and his bedroom, including his deathbed and the clock, stopped at 9.05, the moment of his death. In these practices, the focus is more on the everyday personhood of Atatürk (Shaw 2011, 936), rather than the view represented in Anıtkabir of the immortal memory of him (Wilson 2013, 108), although in the museum both of these versions of Atatürk appear.

The Atatürk and Wars of Independence Museum (AWIM) When AWIM opened in 2002, after years of development by its military staff, Kemalism and militarist nationalism were at a high pitch, although subject to imminent threats: the AKP was shortly to take power and political Islam had been gradually gaining importance. Meanwhile, the EU was suspicious of the idea of Turkey as a ‘military nation’ –​a concept which is clearly promoted in the museum as fundamental to Turkishness past and present. My visitor studies were undertaken in 2015, with AKP dominance firmly established and the military considerably weakened as a force in state politics as a consequence of the ‘Ergenekon’ Trials (2008–​2016), which led to the conviction in 2013 of a number of high-​ranking military officers.4 Nevertheless, in 2015, the position of the military in Turkish national politics and in global relations was still fundamental in many ways –​it was (and is) the second largest military force in NATO, surrounded by regional trouble-​ spots such as Syria and Iran. It still had relative political autonomy:  for example, the Chief of the General Staff does not answer to the Minister of Defence. But in 2015 its position was beleaguered because of tensions

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The museums and their histories 29 with the AKP that were often presented as a ‘secularism-​vs-​Islamism’ clash, connected also to the military’s history of intervention in domestic politics, whenever its view of the Republic was threatened. As the Economist reported in 2013, this was not just a matter of staging coups: In 2007 the army tried unsuccessfully to stop Abdullah Gül, a former foreign minister, from becoming Turkey’s president because his wife wears the Islamic headscarf. In 2008 the generals egged on the constitutional court to ban [the] AK[P]‌on flimsily documented charges that it was seeking to impose sharia law. In the event the case was dismissed by a single vote. (The Economist, February 2, 2013) Now, at the time of writing, the weakened position of the military is even more complex because of the failed coup of 15 July 2016, believed by the government administration to have been driven by the exiled cleric Fetullah Gülen. But before this time, the key political identity associated with the military was as ‘custodians of Atatürk’s secular legacy’ (ibid.), or as Andrew Mango put it, ‘guardians of Kemalism’ (1999, 532). As we will see, this legacy is still profoundly important for some visitors, and the memory of Atatürk can seem indelible both in public space and in political discourse, notwithstanding the ambiguous positions taken by politicians such as Melih Gökçek, the AKP Mayor of Ankara between 1994 and 2017, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself. This is the complex political and temporal context in which my visitor studies were undertaken at AWIM. AWIM was opened by the tenth president of Turkey, Ahmet Necdet Sezer and General Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu, the 23rd Commander of the Turkish Armed forces in 2002. Ahmet Necdet Sezer was and is known for his strong secularist beliefs, and both the military and secularism were dominant political forces in Turkey at the time. When the AKP won the elections in 2002 they faced strong opposition from Sezer. He also often vetoed several laws introduced by the AKP. Later, Erdoğan said he had ‘suffered a lot because of Sezer’ (‘Sezer’den çok çektim’) as Sezer also vetoed the removal of the ban of Erdoğan’s participation in politics after his conviction for ‘inciting hatred based on religious differences’ (Bilgin 2014).5 During his presidency, Sezer caused tensions by refusing to admit women wearing the headscarf to receptions in the presidential palace, meaning that same MPs’ wives were not invited to presidential events. This also included then-​Prime Minister Abdullah Gül’s wife, Hayrünnisa Gül, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s wife, Emine Erdoğan (Radikal, November 9, 2005). Sezer played an active role in the establishment of AWIM and attended the opening (Çakmak 2002; Öncü and Öztürk 2002). The museum personnel I interviewed mentioned Sezer’s extensive support for this museum, and also discussed how ‘militarism’ was at its zenith when the museum opened. (‘Militarism’ is also often used to

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30  The museums and their histories characterize the secularist movement because of the strong military role in Secularism.) The museum is located on a 3,000-​square-​metre columned area below the ‘Hall of Honor’ in Anıtkabir and consists of four sections, including the older Atatürk Museum as the first. The visitor route is straightforward –​there are no changes of level or particular reasons to deviate from a straight path. In the first rooms Atatürk’s personal belongings are on display, including his clothes, uniforms, medals, and gifts presented to him by foreign statesmen. Atatürk’s adopted children gave some of these to the museum.6 In the second section the 1915 Çanakkale Battle (also known as the Gallipoli Battle, or Dardanelles Campaign) and War of Independence that led to establishment of the Turkish Republic are illustrated by the panoramas, as well as by a large number of conventional history paintings and portraits that were produced specially for the museum prior to its 2002 opening. In the third section the ‘national struggle’ and the period of reforms are narrated in 18 arched vaults (Figure 2.3), covering the period between 1919 and 1938, primarily displaying some two thousand archival photographs, sculptural reliefs, portrait busts, models and documents, with numerous text panels. This section includes 18 ‘topics’ covering everything from Turkish Commanders in the War of Independence to women’s rights, language,

Figure 2.3 An arched vault display in the third section of Atatürk and War of Independence Museum

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The museums and their histories 31 agriculture and transportation, giving a comprehensive sense of the influence of Atatürk on Turkish life.7 There are many thousands of words of text in copious panels and historical documents, providing detailed accounts of many aspects of Atatürk’s rule. There is more text than could possibly be read and retained by anyone over the course of a visit, and in later chapters I will explore why, and how this surfeit of information relates to the more spectacular displays in the museum. Finally, in the last section, the museum represents Atatürk as ‘intellectual and thinker’ through a display of his personal library of 3,123 books in a reconstructed interior. This includes a second life-​size wax statute of Atatürk (modelled on his real physical dimensions) shown deep in thought, momentarily looking up from his reading, at his desk in Çankaya Mansion, with his favourite dog (now stuffed) beside him. The reconstructed library provides a kind of key to his civic achievements:  his erudition and hard work, for visitors to admire.

Museums and Ottoman memory Notwithstanding the importance of public memory of Atatürk and the early Republic, nostalgic attitudes to the Ottomans and political uses of the Ottoman past also started to be visible in the second half of the 20th century, and the Ottoman era was a source of inspiration for Islamist movements in Turkey. The ‘Turkish–​Islamic synthesis’, an ideology developed to create a new national narrative, dates back to 1950s (Bora 1999). During the ascendancy of the Democrat Party (1950–​1960), the state relaxed towards Islam somewhat (Siviloglu 2013,160). Museums devoted to the Ottomans opened in this period, such as Dolmabahçe Palace Museum in 1952 (although as mentioned this also contains the rooms dedicated to Atatürk) and the Tanzimat Museum, focusing on the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms between 1839 and 1887, (1952) (Shaw 2011, 933). The first official celebration of the Conquest of Constantinople, which Eric Zurcher argues ‘marked the beginning of the shift’ and the ‘break with republican tradition’ (2016, n.p.), took place on 29 May 1953 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Conquest, followed by the restoration and opening in 1958 of Sultan Mehmet’s castle (Hısarı), which was built by him as a part of the conquest plan on the Bosphorus. The ‘Islamization’ of Turkish history and the nationalization of Islam continued through the 1970s and 1980s (Scalbert-​Yücel 2005, 227). In 1994 local elections an Islamist party –​the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) –​ won a decisive victory and conservative-​Islamist mayors were installed in many municipalities, including Istanbul and Ankara; then, in the 1995 general elections the party won the majority of the vote. With the rise of the Welfare Party, the prominence of Islam in the public domain increased (Göle 1997; Navaro-​Yashin 2002) and Ottoman history became yet more visible (White 2014,  8–​9).

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32  The museums and their histories The change also occurred in celebration and commemorations of national historical moments. The key events identified by Ottoman historiography were not celebrated during the early Republican era (Çınar 2001, 365). Rather, during that time new national days were ‘invented’ in the sense articulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger ([1983] 1992)  to commemorate Atatürk and the reforms of the early Republic. These include 29 October (the foundation of Turkey in 1923), 23 April (the First Assembly was established in Ankara in 1922; Atatürk devoted this date to children) and 19 May (the date that Atatürk started the War of Liberation; he ‘devoted’ this date to Turkish youth). Large-​scale military and school celebrations take place in public spaces, and the cities, towns, public buildings and houses are hung with Turkish flags and Atatürk’s picture. Notably, AWIM was opened on the 80th anniversary of the ‘Great Attack’ (also known as the ‘Great Victory’) led by Atatürk in 1922. Nevertheless, in recent years the AKP has cancelled big public celebrations associated with the Republic (Hürriyet Daily News, May 7, 2012) and officially adopted a week-​long celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, called the ‘Holy Birth Week’ (White 2014, 9). Instead of the celebration of the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, historical events like the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 have become more central in the public and official sphere, through celebrations and festivities (ibid.; Çınar 2001). After the first celebrations of the Conquest of Constantinople in 1953, the event lost its importance until the Islamist Welfare Party won the municipality of Istanbul in 1994, when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan assumed the powerful position of overall Mayor of the city, and since than they have taken place and gained more stridently Islamist character (Zurcher 2016). In these celebrations, men wear Ottoman military costume and fake mustaches, play Mehter (the Ottoman military music), and drag the boats on the banks like Sultan Mehmet’s soldiers are said to have done, to bypass the boom chain that once protected the Golden Horn. In this way they ‘perform the conquest again’ (Çınar 2001; Hürriyet Daily News, May 29, 2016). There is also a re-​enactor who plays the role of Sultan Mehmet on his white horse, ‘re-​entering’ the city. On the 563rd anniversary of the Conquest in 2016, attended by (now) President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, the Conquest was ‘revived’ with the ‘world’s largest’ 3D stage onto which spectacular animations of the Conquest were projected in a massive open-​ air spectacle, transmitted live on the AKP-​supported TV channel A Haber, before a firework display and a show by the Turkish Air Force’s ‘Turkish Stars’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 29 May 2016). The meanings of these re-​ enactment practices can be seen to connect to official practice in museums, and also to political discourse and to media representations. In one sense the panorama museums are themselves forms of re-​enactment. They are not ‘live’ in the way that re-​enactments in commemoration events are (although there are costumed warding staff at Panorama 1453), but there are points of congruence that will emerge from analysis of the museum representations.

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The museums and their histories 33 Ottoman historical memory also appears in Erdoğan’s speeches and the AKP’s political agenda. It has been mobilized in foreign policy discourse for foreign political-​class audiences, as in the speeches, articles and the book Strategic Depth by Ahmet Davutoğlu (foreign policy advisor 2003–​2009, Foreign Minister 2009–​2014, Prime Minister 2014–​2016) and indeed by Erdoğan in numerous speeches at AKP rallies (Davutoğlu 2001; Murinson 2006; The Economist, 21 October 2010; Kıvanç 2015). For example, after the AKP’s 2011 general election victory Erdoğan made express reference to former Ottoman lands in a victory speech, discursively reconstructing the Ottoman Empire while claiming a position as regional leader in the Middle East and Balkans: Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir. (BBC News, June 13, 2011) The AKP’s project to rewrite national history with an emphasis on the Ottoman past has been subject to significant and extensive attention and critique (Girard 2014, 3). Additionally, it is claimed that this shift is supported by many in Turkey partly because the AKP’s promise that ‘our relationship with the past would finally be mended’, possibly an implicit reference to Atatürk’s disestablishment of the Ottoman sultanate (Temelkuran 2015, 11), and institution of a secular state, both of which were subsequently upheld by the ‘Kemalist elite’ as necessary to compete with the European nation-​ state system (Keyman 2006, 210). This also emerged in my interviews. Many visitors stated that the AKP was bringing back the ‘forgotten’ and ‘real’ past, and this was bound up with their reasons for supporting the party, as I will discuss in Chapter 4. Most recently, Erdoğan has featured in a billboard advertisement all over Turkey for August 2017 celebrations of the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt) in 1071. He was shown smiling, holding the Asian recurve bow used by Seljuk and Ottoman archers. The AKP’s use of the Ottoman age in contemporary politics is often characterized as ‘Neo-​ Ottomanism’8 and the idea suggests that Turkey will be ‘magnificent’ again as in Ottomans times (Yavuz 1998, 23), and that Erdoğan is positioning himself as a kind of new sultan (this is often used against him in caricatures).9 Alongside political discourse about the Ottoman past, cultural representation of Ottoman history has become increasingly important in the public domain, and this too emerged in the cultural references made by visitors to whom I spoke. Two major televisual initiatives have been the film Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453), and Diriliş (The revival –​based on the life of Ertuğrul, father of Osman I  who established the Ottomans and the namesake of the empire). This increasing cultural representation of the Ottomans also brings with it a contest for the legitimacy to make historical representations. Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century), is a highly successful soap opera

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34  The museums and their histories made in Turkey, but also popular in many Balkan and Middle Eastern countries. The controversies around its dramatization of Suleiman the Magnificent’s life, harem and court, is a good example of this. Many Islamist-​ nationalist groups have protested against this TV show. Erdoğan himself has criticized the version of Suleiman and has attacked the historical accuracy of the show.10 One possible reason is that it provides an account of Ottoman history that threatens the AKP’s version of Ottoman past. The TV show focuses significantly on Suleiman’s personal relations, for example with his wife Hürrem who has a strong character and an important role as a political protagonist, which may be seen as contrary to Erdoğan’s controversial views about women being ‘equivalent’, but not ‘equal’, to men, unsuited to some kinds of work and best suited to motherhood (BBC News, 4 March 2015). Also, some aspects of Ottoman court life cannot really be considered pious according to contemporary conservative Islam, such as the sexual slavery of the harem system. Notably, Erdoğan openly criticized Hürrem’s costumes on the show, complaining that they were too revealing (Temelkuran 2015, 11–​12). Criticisms of Muhteşem Yüzyıl in relation to ‘true’ versus ‘wrong’ accounts of history and its perceived ‘denigration’ of the Ottoman past also emerged in my fieldwork at P1453, brought up autonomously by visitors unprompted, as my questionnaire and interview schedules did not include a question related to this. Many were very critical of the Muhteşem Yüzyıl although at the time of writing it was already finished. They called it ‘Muhteşem Rezalet’ (‘Magnificent Disgrace’), and preferred Diriliş, a TV series supported by Erdoğan and broadcast by state channel TRT, which in turn supports the AKP. Erdoğan himself made a point of visiting and being photographed on the set of Diriliş together with his wife, Emine Erdoğan, explicitly endorsing the programme. In contrast to the visibility of Islam in public domain following the rise of Islamist parties since 1990s, symbols of Kemalism have appeared in privately funded contexts (Özyürek 2006; Shaw 2011, 937), reflecting contest over visions of state. Fine art museums, such as the Istanbul Modern (2004) and Pera Museum (2005) both owned by wealthy families (Eczacıbaşı and the Kıraç branch of the Koç family respectively) and Santral Istanbul (2007) privately owned by Bilgi University, were established during the 2000s, promoting a form of national identity that aligns with a secular Republican position ‘both through their contents and through their appeal to an elite, urban, and urbane clientele following European cultural norms’ (Shaw 2011, 937). While this is possible in private-​sector museums, newly established public museums emphasize Ottoman and Islamic heritage. The Islamic Technology Museum, opened in 2008 located in Gülhane Park, once the outer garden of Topkapı Palace, represents ‘Islamic scientific achievements’. Replicas of ‘scientific and technical’ findings from 9th–​ 17th-​ century manuscripts are displayed. This museum can be linked with the pan-​Islamist aims to unite whole Islamic world (Kılıçkaya 2010; Shaw 2011, 938)  that form part of the AKP’s agendas, in particular Davutoğlu’s (Özkan 2014). Meanwhile,

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The museums and their histories 35 ‘Miniatürk’ –​a state-​funded ‘miniature park of Turkey’ as the official website calls it –​opened in 2003 and is run by the Istanbul Municipality. This covers 60,000 square metres and presents architectural models of historic buildings from the territory of Turkey. The park also includes structures from Ottoman territorial gains such as Jerusalem and Bosnia. In a more recent move, there have been state attempts to ‘Ottomanize’ the War of Independence, usually seen in Kemalist historiography as the moment of Atatürk’s military glory and the birth of the nation and new Republic. The development of the Gallipoli Epic Centre in 2015 represents this memory contest very well, in which Atatürk’s role in the conflict is downgraded and those of other Ottoman commanders and pious foot soldiers made more prominent. This museum post-​dated the formulation of this research and my choice of research sites, but in many ways represents one of the key fronts of the memory wars that I am interested in. It is also spectacular, like the panoramas analysed here, but this time the technologies of representation are different: 3D immersive environments, film re-​enactments, and even moving floors. I will return to it in Chapter 8 to show how some of the governmental and museal agendas, memory cultures and conflicts illustrated in this book are developing. As Ankara is a key centre for republican history, Istanbul can be seen as a centre of Ottoman history. It was the city of the Sultanate and the Caliphate, meaning that for many Kemalists its significance has been as the ‘city of the past’ (Gül [2009] 2012, 85). The significance of Istanbul declined in the new Republic, although the city remained as the biggest and the main cultural, economic and industrial centre of Turkey (ibid., 90). At the same time, it continued to be important for Islamist groups, involving a discourse of a ‘lost city’, ruined by the Westernization/​Modernization practices of the secular regime (Bora 1995; Büyüksaraç 2004, 1). Within the terms of this discourse, the city needed to be liberated and ‘re-​conquered’ all over again (Bora 1995). For Islamists, the city of Istanbul has another significance because of the Prophet Mohammed’s ‘hadith’ (prophecy) that Constantinople would be conquered by a commander –​the ‘greatest one with the greatest army’. The important role of Prophet’s hadith and of Islamic faith during the Conquest is clearly evident in the P1453 text panels and emerged in my visitor studies. Since the rise to power of Islamist political parties in the Municipality of Istanbul and AKP’s victories since 2002, there have been attempts to ‘bring back’ the Islamic/​Ottoman identity of the city through celebrations of key historical events as mentioned earlier, such the Conquest, and through planning urban redesign projects for Istanbul’s cultural heritage sites. These include the construction of ‘Ottoman-​style’ housing in neighbourhoods such as Sulukule and Eyüp and the controversial AKP project (ongoing at the time of writing) to reconstruct the 1806 Ottoman Halil Pasha Artillery Barracks in Taksim. The reconstruction of the Barracks is a pet project of Erdoğan’s; it involves razing Gezi Park, a European-​style urban green space that is a product of 1930s Republican town planning, and although the 2013 ‘Gezi’ Protests were about more than this, memory contests were a critical part

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36  The museums and their histories of the civil disorder clash between protestors and the government (Girard 2014; Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2016). These initiatives are related to ideas about the suppression of Republican history, memory contests as they play out over public space and in public institutions, and forms of nostalgia.

The Panorama 1453 Museum (P1453) P1453 (Figure 2.5) was opened in 2009 in Istanbul by the Municipality of Istanbul, with participation of Erdoğan, then Prime Minister of Turkey, the then-​President Abdullah Gül and their wives, and (then) Mayor of Istanbul Kadir Topbaş.11 All of these figures are members of the AKP. This, together with the glorifying tendencies of the museum associated with AKP neo-​ Ottomanism, positions the museum politically in a fairly overt manner. It could be suggested that these were the figures who happened to be in power at the time, but the level of impetus, support and involvement of AKP politicians in the development of P1453 is evident from promotional materials and emerged in my interviews with staff. The museum website has a ‘Significant Visits’ page documenting the attendance of key AKP politicians and supporters. The museum is also used by politicians: as Mayor, Topbaş was known to take amenable journalists on tours of the museum (Akyol 2012). P1453 uses the same technique of immersive paintings and audio-​tracks as AWIM, but here the diorama is actually a 360-​degree, semi-​spherical panoramic representation, partly in an attempt to go one better, as my research revealed. Covering 2,350 square meters, the panorama forms the centrepiece of the museum and represents the moment that the Ottomans breached the Byzantine Walls. The fall of the city is displayed with also 3D elements (e.g. replica cannons) and a dramatic audiotrack of battle sounds and traditional Ottoman ‘Mehter’ military music. Some ten thousand figures are represented within the painting to present this story, as is made clear in promotional and interpretation materials. (All of them are men, and while this is a battle scene, the masculinized representation is in many ways congruent with the gendering of Neo-​Ottoman public memory cultures.) Before ascending to the panorama area, visitors pass through a permanent display about Istanbul, failed conquest attempts before Sultan Mehmet II and his preparations for the conquest of the city. After visiting the panorama itself, visitors go down again to the permanent display area passing through the text panels about new practices in Istanbul by the Ottomans after the conquest, the Sultan’s characteristics (e.g. military prowess, wisdom, benevolence etc.), and his tolerance towards the peoples of the city and their faiths. The main forms of representation here are blown-​up photographic reproductions of miniature paintings, maps, and twenty-​one extensive text panels comprising about 15,000 words of text. As with the surfeit of text at AWIM, this represents a contrast with the experiential, emotive, non-​ didactic approach taken in the panorama itself, and the meanings of and reasons for this will be explored in Chapter 8.

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The museums and their histories 37

Figure 2.4 The Topkapı ramparts near Panorama 1453 Museum

The museum is located across from the spot on the Topkapı-​Edirnekapı ramparts (Figure  2.4) from which the points where the Ottoman soldiers first entered the city can be seen (on the left Edirnekapı, on the right Silivri and opposite Topkapı walls). The staff interviews I conducted also clarified that the intention is to capture one particular moment –​a decisive one, when Constantinople is just about to fall. The focus is on the breaching of the city walls. Notably, other moments and sites could have been chosen in this complex and lengthy conflict (the siege itself lasted 53 days), such as the naval breach of the Haliç or Golden Horn, although this story is told elsewhere in the museum (a specially made relief sculpture on one of the staircases). The museum is itself in the immediate proximity of the remains of the walls (part of the ‘Historic Areas of Istanbul’ UNESCO World Heritage Site), but there is little encouragement to visit these nor are the walls currently set up for visits because of lack of heritage tourism infrastructure, and there has been significant critique of the authorities’ failure to valorize the Walls as a heritage site, to conserve them, capitalize on their potential for tourism or build community engagement with them (Shoup and Zan 2013). Nevertheless, the Walls are clearly visible in the immediate proximity of the museum, and promotional information states that the museum ‘awaits its visitors on the spot where the war took place’, appealing to geographical siting to authenticate its representations. But few visitors were interested in the ‘real’ site of

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38  The museums and their histories

Figure 2.5 Panorama 1453 Museum, exterior

the Walls, returning us to the importance of the spectacular and theatrical representation of the past available at the museum.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced the main sites of this research and has given a historical account and preliminary overview of the museums to be studied. This is, in a sense, a double history, for we are concerned at once with the pasts that the museums present –​respectively of the War of Independence and exploits of Atatürk at AWIM and the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople at P1453 –​ and how they came to be revived, versioned and inflected with meanings at particular historical moments. The development and foundation of the museums, in 2002 and 2009 respectively, were surely informed by and implicated in political contingencies and tensions around Turkish identity, and which past should be the historical referent and guide for it. This is in effect the search for an ‘underlying’ Turkish culture and identity, which has been critiqued as a form of nativism and essentialism. One such articulation of this view is in Kevin Robins’ criticism of westernization and westernism in Turkey, which, he suggests, negated and repressed identities and experiences (1996, 68). Arguing against this, Yael Navaro-​Yashin suggests that the very

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The museums and their histories 39 notions of ‘negation’ and ‘repression’ of identities and experiences, as well as their ‘recovery’, effectively constitute an illusory essence. ‘There is’, she contends, ‘no such essential “Turkishness” to be found, no Westernizing curtain to be pulled back and reveal a hidden cultural reservoir’ (2002, 13). If we relate this to memory culture, we may problematize the link between identities and any purportedly ‘foundational’ story. Battles over the past (or over which past is paramount) in this sense, are chimerical struggles, even if their contemporary, social effects are real. The past as such is only ever performed –​essentially the heritage process whereby, as Sharon Macdonald characterizes, ‘the past’ is turned into The Past’ (2013, 18). As Judith Butler notes, to say that entities such as gender, ‘the economy’ or ‘the state’ are ‘performatively constituted’ necessarily calls into question the existence of these as pre-​given entities (Butler 2010, 147), and the same can be said of the past. This is not to suggest that ‘the past’ did not ‘happen’, but rather, that its fullness is inaccessible in the present. It is unknowable without semiotic translation and performance, whether in museums or in visitors’ displays of emotion, or other communicative forms (Bozoğlu and Whitehead 2018). Museums representations are part of a range or repetitions and iterations that make truth and build affective relations, alongside other productions such as the public memorials and anniversaries the dot the landscape and the calendar in Turkey. However, Butler also points out, in a Derridean argument, that performance is a risk, and may not have the desired truth-​making effects; its fallibility is inherent (2010, 152). The potential for one of the ‘Pasts’ explored in this book to ‘fail’ as the account of identity is evident in the existence and social appeal of the other. This is the competitive situation that the museums act within. Before we begin to describe and track these struggles in their articulations in the museums in other sites of memory and in the behaviour and perspectives of people, the next chapter will present ways of understanding those museums and their visitors, outlining in greater detail the methods and the theoretical concepts and assumptions that have guided this research.

Notes 1 These definitions both made reference to thoughts and views of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and today they are often conflated. However, some scholars argue that they have different meanings. For example, Heper 2012 explains that: the admirers of Atatürkism consider it to consist of formulae appropriate for all times and places. Consequently, in their view, there should at no time be a diversion from the policies adopted and pursued in the Atatürk era… For them, Atatürkism is a source of legitimacy for their views and actions. The detractors of Kemalism, on the other hand, regard it as an elitist and authoritarian system of thought, leading to tutelary democracy from which Turkey still, in their opinions, suffers (139)

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40  The museums and their histories (See also Aköz 2009.) In this research I tend to use ‘Kemalism’ for ease, recognizing nevertheless that this covers a wide spectrum of different attachments to the memory and legacy of Atatürk. 2 The Bursa 1326 Panorama Museum (1326 was the year when the Ottomans captured Bursa from the Byzantines), Çanakkale 1915 (Gallipoli Campaign) in Çannakale, Great Attack in Afyon and the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt) (a war between Seljuq Turks and Byzantine Empire in 1071 in which the Seljuqs were victorious and the ‘Turkification’ of Anatolia started) in Muş. 3 After the single-​party period (1923–​1945), in which the Republican People’s Party (CHP) was the only political party, attacks towards Atatürk statues by Islamists took place: between 1938 and 1950 there were four, and between 1950 and 1951, nine Atatürk portrait busts and statues were destroyed. After CHP criticism of these actions, Adnan Menderes’s Democrat Party (DP) issued a ‘Law on Crimes against Atatürk’ (Saymaz 2016). In December 2016, the Municipality of Rize removed an Atatürk sculpture from the main square of the city, which created controversy and upset many Kemalists. The sculpture was subsequently erected in a new site in Rize (ibid.). 4 Ergenekon is a suspected clandestine secularist organization accused of conspiring against the Turkish Government. It has never been proven to exist. Two hundred and seventy-​ five suspects, mainly comprising military officers, journalists, academics and opposition politicians, were put on trial. The verdicts were overturned in 2016, but not before many of those convicted had served considerable time in pre-​trial detention and some of them had committed suicide. Some reports and comments suggested that the government used the trials as a means to undertake a purge and to place AKP loyalists in the positions vacated by those convicted (The Economist, 2 February 2013). 5 The ban resulted from a speech Erdoğan made at a political rally in Siirt, during which he read a poem by nationalist ideologist Ziya Gökalp: Our minarets are our bayonets, Our domes are our helmets, Our mosques are our barracks. We will put a final end to ethnic segregation. No one can ever intimidate us. If the skies and the ground were to open against us. If floods and volcanoes were to burst, We will not turn from our mission. My reference is Islam. If I am not able to speak of this, What is the use of living? He served four months in prison before founding the AKP, which later pushed through legal reforms revoking the ban. 6 Zehra Aylin, Sabiha (Gökçen), Rukiye (Erkin), Afet (İnan), Nebile (Bayyurt), Fikriye, Ülkü (Doğançay, later Adatepe), and Mustafa. 7 Turkish Commanders in the War of Independence; Occupation of the Country (Mondros); The National Forces; The Congresses; Inauguration of the Turkish Grand National Assembly; Uprisings; National Struggle in Çukurova, Antep, Maraş, Urfa and Trakya; First Victories at the Eastern and Western Fronts; Grand Victory, Mudanya Armistice and the Lausanne Treaty; Political Revolutions; Reforms in Education, Language and History; Reforms in Law, Women’s Rights, and Family Names; Reforms in Social Life; Fine Arts, Press, and Community Centers; National Security; Agriculture, Forestry, Industry and Commerce; Finance, Health, Sports and Tourism; Public Works and Transportation; Domestic and Foreign Political Events (1923–​1938)

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The museums and their histories 41 8 The term ‘Neo-​Ottomanism’ was coined to describe policies introduced by Prime Minister Turgut Ozal (1983–​ 1989, president from 1989–​ 1993) to describe the uses of the Ottoman past under his administration. However, the practice of referring to the Ottomans in relation to party-​political matters has vastly increased in discourse, media and critique during the AKP administration, and my use of the term relates to this. For an extended review of the history of the term, see Çolak 2006; Furlanetto 2015: 160–​162). 9 For a western example, see the cover of The Economist, 8 June 2013, where Erdoğan’s face is photoshopped onto a historic image of a sultan, as is the gas mask he holds in one hand (a reference to the deployment of tear gas in the 2013 Gezi Protests); the strapline reads ‘Democrat or Sultan?’. 10 ‘That’s not the Sultan Suleiman we know, that’s not the Lawgiver we know; thirty years of his life was spent on horseback, not in a palace like you see in TV shows’ (Radikal, November 25, 2012). 11 Topbaş was mayor for the duration of this research. He resigned in September 2017.

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3  Memory, emotion, politics Understanding visitor encounters with history in the museums

The almighty leader, supreme commander Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who is the architect of the great Turkish nation’s biggest struggle for existence, enabled the emergence of a brave military nation from the ruins of an empire… Through this achievement, he buried those who tried to harm the history of hundreds of years of Turkish existence in Anatolia and established a modern [(‘çağdaş’)] state. This struggle, which was a turning point in Turkish history, was a stupendous achievement, and wrote the force and bravery of Turkish nation with golden letters… It is a very important duty for everyone to tell future generations and the whole world about the Turkish Nation’s War of Independence and its great leader’s peerless struggle. (General Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu, at the opening of the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum, 2002) …the new generation –​and us included –​have been forced to focus on the Republic [history and ideology] and they have been trying to make us forget about our origin and real past. This museum was established to stop this. In a similar way, making films and TV serials has the same reason: to prevent us from forgetting our self [‘öz’]. (21-​year-​old male visitor to Panorama 1453, 2015)

In the first quotation, the then-​highest officer of the Turkish military replays some stock Kemalist historiography:  how Atatürk forged a Turkey that looked back to the deep Anatolian past but also forwards to a ‘modern’ (and military) national future, overriding the ruinations of the Ottomans and the threats of foreign powers. This, for the General, is the pivotal moment in Turkish history, and one that people need to be reminded of. The year is 2002, and the Conservative-​Islamist AKP is shortly to win the general election, representing a perceived threat to the political power of the military and to the ideals of Atatürk’s secular republic. These tensions were characterized by Erdoğan’s ban from political office, following his famous 1998 speech, in which he recited, ‘the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers’. Kıvrıkoğlu’s 2002 speech loads the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum (AWIM) with governmental responsibility, and sits within a context of political contest in which identities, pasts, and visions of the future are implicated.

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Memory, emotion, politics 43 In the second quotation, the Panorama 1453 Museum (P1453) visitor has specific views about the role of the museum and its imbrication within a socio-​political arena. In his view, the museum acts as a counter to a long-​standing state project to erase the Ottoman past in favour of a national story dominated by the Republic. He brings bitter prejudices about indoctrination and governmentality to the museum (perhaps the kind of indoctrination represented by Kıvrıkoğlu’s speech), as well as references to other cultural forms such as film and TV. He finds that P1453 strongly represents his identity, which he presents as a collectivized one, bound up with a singular ‘origin’. The visit represents to him a particular kind of preventive, or maybe counter-​offensive, memory work. In his words, and in his emotionally heightened speech and body language, I discerned a sense of embattlement, of opposition and resistance to others:  those (Kemalist republicans) responsible for severing people from their history and imposing a false one in its place. His response to the museum display of the Conquest of Constantinople was an amalgam of pride at the Ottoman achievement, anger and resentment towards those who would downplay or erase it, and a kind of gratitude for the existence of the museum as a cultural space in which he could exercise a heartfelt affirmation of identity connected to the Ottoman past. I will return to both of these statements in later chapters within the context of accounts of the museums to which they relate, but for now they point to some key questions. How should we understand the connections and intertextual references of these statements? What relationships do they have to what is on display at the museums, and how it is displayed? How are encounters with the past made in the museums, not just through the production of displays but also through people’s responses to and uses of them? In what ways are such encounters ‘of’ the present, referencing contemporary social, cultural, and political realities, forms of media and competing ideas? A core aim of this research is to understand encounters with history in the museum as interrelational. This means trying to understand the cultural politics behind and within the production of representations of the past in museums, what visitors to the museums bring with them from their cultural lives, how and why they respond to what they find in the museum, and what role the visit has for them. It means a governmental view of the museums as imbricated in social, cultural, and party politics, rather than being ‘neutral’ or somehow ‘above’ politics, and a view of visitors not as empty vessels or blank slates, but as people with stocks of knowledge, social lives, personal dispositions, expectations and motivations, and often, attachments to particular pasts, groups, political agendas, and ways of life. In this sense, the encounters with history are also interactional, as museum producers may assume and rely upon visitors’ understandings of the past and responses to displays. Together, the museums and their visitors contribute to wider cultures of historical memory. In her review of the field of visitor studies, Eilean Hooper-​Greenhill talks of a move away from traditional and simplistic exercises of ‘measuring, counting, and mapping’:

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44  Memory, emotion, politics Demographic studies only provide certain sorts of information. A map of the pattern of use of museums, whether on a small or a large scale, does not provide an understanding of the value of that experience to visitors, and structured questionnaires are of limited use in developing an in-​depth knowledge of attitudes, values and feelings. (2006, 371) In place of this she posits a ‘turn to understanding’ attentive to the ‘complexity, contingency, and provisional character of communication as mediated cultural transactions between individuals and groups, with their own social experience, prior knowledge, and biographical/​historical position’ (2006, 371–​372). This research understands such ‘transactions’ as occurring not just between social groups but also between the museums and their visitors; so this chapter maps out some of the approaches and methods used to capture such complexities and relations. As suggested in Chapter  1, P1453 and AWIM are unusual museums whose visitors behave in unusual ways, and part of this is about the rhetorical power and appeal of the panoramas. This choice to focus most closely on these is also a result of their differences and similarities: as the quotations above show, they are associated with different pasts and, at least for some people, political orientations; but at the same time, they use many of the same representational techniques and tropes. As noted, the two museums both have extensive displays in addition to the panoramas (although at P1453 the panorama is clearly set up as the main event) and interpretive text material totalling many thousands of words. There is not space in this book to analyse all of this in the same depth, but I  engage with them in order to understand intertextual links and narrative continuities –​how, in other words, the panoramas fit within the museums and articulate with other displays. Alongside this, the reliance of the panoramas on ubiquitous imagery in the public sphere, and on widely known stories, requires a contextual analysis that goes beyond the walls of the museum. This contextual understanding extends to the visitor studies, where I tried to understand which displays visitors engaged with within the museums generally (i.e. not just the panorama sections), and how this related to their interests, dispositions and senses of identity.

Studying the museum displays Museological approaches to display analysis perceive and present display as a highly complex multi-​modal and multi-​media form of representation and communication. Such approaches see display as a combination of several exhibitionary technologies, from the physical placement of objects in space, to the furniture, graphics, and interior décor, the text panels, sound, video, and the ways in which the organization of space determines visitor routes,

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Memory, emotion, politics 45 fields of vision, stopping points, and circulation patterns. This is a heterogeneous body of literature (eg. Macdonald 1996; Bal 2001; Mason 2006; Whitehead 2009, 2012, 2016; Tzortzi 2015). My research is in the spirit of these critical analyses of displays that seek to uncover the positions and politics embedded in display. It is also appropriate to think about the museum displays as forms of narrative, because in each case they aim explicitly to ‘tell stories’  –​actually very well-​known ones. However, as stated earlier, the forms of display that are my primary focus are unusual ones in museums. Analytical techniques designed to capture meanings of the spatial organization of conventional museum objects are not particularly helpful when engaging with panoramas. Something more fit for purpose is needed here to help to understand the blend of illusionistic painting, diorama, and audio as an overall composition. One model for this kind of study can be found in the work of scholars concerned with the study of paintings that involve complex narratives, such as Rick Altman’s study of Breughel paintings (Altman 2008). I will draw on this to understand the ways in which the compositional organization of the paintings prompts both narrative understandings and affective responses, an approach complicated by the fact that the panorama painting is not ‘framed’ in the same way as a conventional painting and, in the case of P1453, spans 360 degrees. Comment’s work on panoramas (2000) is mostly a historical overview, and there is very little critical literature providing analytical frameworks to help understand panoramas specifically. Nevertheless, visual theorist Gillian Rose’s review ([2001] 2012, 56–​74) of methodologies for compositional analysis of images provides a helpful framework. This draws on interdisciplinary approaches but is strongly informed by art historical methods of looking, and as I  will show, can be related to Altman’s focus on narrative and the key question of the way in which the visitor/​viewer is positioned in relation to the scene. Rose organizes analytical categories that involve lines of enquiry. For content, she asks:  what is pictured in the image and why? How does it relate intertextually with other images? The next category is colour, involving questions about hue (actual colour), saturation (colour purity), value (colour lightness or darkness), and their effects. After this she attends to spatial organization, not in the space of the museum but in pictorial space:  what are the most important volumes? What is the nature of the lines (e.g. curved, jagged, straight, etc.)? Can particular rhythms be identified? What is the complexity of the pictorial space, e.g. its relative busyness or sparseness, the intervals or spaces between pictorial objects? Rose also considers sound, drawing on Monaco’s 2009 classifications of sound as ‘environmental’, ‘speech’, and ‘music’, where the source of the sound is (‘in or out of the frame’), whether the sound is ‘actual, synchronous with, and related to the image’, or contrapuntal (‘commentative, asynchronous, and

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46  Memory, emotion, politics opposes the image’) (Rose [2001] 2012, 73). She asks what the ‘logic of figuration’ is, i.e. how the viewer is positioned by way of their angle of viewing and closeness/​distance to the scene. This proved to be a key question in relation to the immersive panoramas at the museums that seem to place visitors in the thick of battle. After this, the analysis moves to light, to consider the effects of highlights and lowlights on meaning, and how this, together with the other elements described above, produces expressive content: the ‘atmosphere, emotional force and mood of the image’, which is of special interest to me in thinking through how the museums construct an affective programme and co-​constitute an affective atmosphere. This helps to think through how the elements of an image taken singly or in combination are likely to be intended to provoke certain emotional responses. However, Rose does not dwell on how ‘emotional force’ is produced. Later chapters will provide some answers and exemplifications. One avenue here is to think about sensory stimuli that provoke physiological responses, such as how the dramatic spotlighting of Atatürk’s clothes at AWIM affects the eye, and other such somatic effects. But this quickly takes us into a semiotic realm of cultural meaning, for Atatürk’s clothes are picked out from the dark, and gleam in an otherworldly way. Immediately, we identify their specialness, and maybe some magical thinking goes on too, for we know, or learn, that he wore these very garments. Indeed, the emotional prompts of the museums are entanglements of sensory and semiotic matter and depend on knowing subjects who are susceptible and amenable to the affective coding. Over the following chapters, a number of what we may call ‘meta-​ techniques’ of emotional elicitation will be seen at the museums, typically including:  familiar and iconic narrative scenes from the past (as with the panoramas); objects as auratic ‘connectors’ to the past, like Atatürk’s clothes or handwritten notebooks; the invitation to imagine the presence of past heroes, presenting visitors with exemplary behaviour that is a standard to live up to and a potential test of one’s own virtue; the suggestion to project a dialogue with those past heroes, for example through mannequins; the sense of time travel to events that are presented as foundational for contemporary identity and pride; and rhetoric in verbal interpretation, such as adjectival glorification of historical protagonists, and interpellation of the visitor. Rose’s framework, which I use selectively in relation to the primary ways in which the panoramas communicate, can be supplemented through reference to Altman’s work, which seeks to understand the visual construction of narrative in static images. Narrative in images does not work in the same way as narrative in museums. The latter is based not just upon stories told in texts and other interpretive supports, such as videos, but also upon the control of a visitor route through space where people encounter exhibition elements in order, enabling information to be added consecutively (Bal 2001; Whitehead 2016). In fixed images like the panoramas there is no such capacity to co-​ordinate the visitor route with the consecutive delivery of information. It is not so much about walking through the museum, as it is

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Memory, emotion, politics 47 about standing and looking, scanning the different parts of the image with the eye and following its visual prompts from one place to another. This lack of clear sequential structure is compounded at P1453 by the fact that the image is spherical and cannot easily be ‘read’ from left to right, as it has no beginning and end. At AWIM the panoramas are rectangular and can more or less be read left to right, but as I will show in Chapter 6, their visual effects make most sense when they are viewed from a central position. Altman provides a number of tools that are useful for thinking through narrative images. Such images are, of course, nothing new:  throughout the history of art artists have found ways to embed narrative in static representations. For example, many medieval and early Renaissance Bible paintings represent the same protagonist several times within a single image in order to represent different stages of a story. Contrasting with this, Altman’s example of Breughel’s paintings helps to articulate a method in which narrative is produced through more sophisticated means of compositional organization, particularly through the device of ‘relays’ that draw the eye from one area of a composition to another and create temporal arcs. Although in a static image everything is there at once, equally available to sight, it takes time for the eye to travel over different elements of a composition, and this temporal engagement can be organized or determined by elements within the image. Moreover, the temporality of the viewer’s gaze can be indexical with her perception of a temporal narrative order within a static image. Altman also discusses what he calls the ‘celebrity’ of a narrative, through which a picture will be ‘read’ in a specific way because of the fact that the story is so well known. The assumption is that producers of images build audience awareness into images, much as renaissance painters did with bible stories. The panoramas contain discernible narratives, and they reflect key moments that are well-​known parts of a narrative. General awareness among Turkish people of the stories represented is very high, as they are prominent parts of national narratives, taught at school, reproduced in televisual and cinematic form, and even in the landscape, through use of iconic representations from the stories. An example of this is the iconic figure of Atatürk deep in thought as he strategizes for battle, taken from a historic photograph (Figure 3.1). This scene, often known as ‘Kocatepe’ after the location of the battle, can be seen in the War of Independence Museum panorama, but also on billboards, restaurant signs, statues in the landscape and in many other forms (Figure 3.2). Celebrity requires engagement with the intertextual references in the panoramas and their relation to a large cultural repertoire of visual imagery and iconography. Viewers do not come to the panorama images ‘cold’ because in everyday life they navigate a visual world in which these images are commonplace and have known (albeit sometimes contested) meanings. This might mean that visitors quickly recognize certain scenes and tropes, as indeed turned out to be the case, and that when encountering

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and engaging with a museum panorama the museum they draw upon a stock of familiarity with images and meanings to understand the image in front of them. Altman suggests that celebrity produces a ‘narrative drive’. Even if viewers know the narrative well, and know how it ends, they are compelled to follow it through to its completion. This is about how visitors look, scan

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Memory, emotion, politics 49

Figure 3.2 Kocatepe in public space: the Izmir Municipality building

the scenes, the order in which they take things in, how they respond to the particular treatment of a familiar story, and the satisfaction of closure that is achieved at the end of a narrative even if there was no real chance of surprise. In Chapter  8 I  will ask whether there can be, in the completion of narrative drive, a ritualistic engagement, as with religious cycles of contemplation and prayer. There, I will link this to Margaret Wetherell’s idea of ‘affective practice’ that people undertake in reference to an apparatus of stimulation (such as cycles of religious observation), and to Tony Bennett’s idea of the ‘evolutionary exercises of the self’ encouraged by museums that serve governmental purposes. Alongside the analytic methods proposed by Rose and Altman, Historian Mark Salber Phillips’ idea of proximity and distance in museum displays (2006, 2013) can also be related to the ‘logic of figuration’ and their emphasis on the positioning of viewer, both through pictorial means and museum furniture like security barriers. This is not just about where the visitor is positioned physically in relation to the panoramas, but also how they are ‘placed’ in a metaphorical sense in relation to the past. For Phillips, a primary concern is the way in which historical representations ‘take on the task of positioning their audience in relation to a past’ (2006, 89). Three-​ dimensional elements are also important for this. In P1453, replica cannons

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50  Memory, emotion, politics and weapons strewn around seem to suggest that you as visitor are ‘in’ the battle, almost as if you could pick up a bow and arrow. Visitors are in fact prevented from doing so by the organization of the space and discreet barriers. Nevertheless, the panoramas position visitors in the imaginary position of possible protagonist rather than a passive viewer, even if this requires some ‘willing suspension’, not of disbelief, but of distance between then and now (see also Holtorf 2017). Their representational power and appeal is derived in part from their potential to place the visitor as both ‘looking on’ to the past and ‘being in’ it, and the visitor studies I undertook show that for some people a kind of imaginative confusion between then and now was important, but it was also a source of tension, in recognition that one cannot truly go back, or bring to the present things that are gone. Both this confusion of past and present and the tension between them involve strong emotions that will be highlighted in chapters about visitors to each museum and discussed again in Chapter 8.

Researching the museum representations as productions In connection with the display analysis I  also conducted semi-​structured interviews with museum staff, seeking to understand the processes of cultural production that led to the development of the displays. As Stephanie Moser states, ‘in determining how displays contribute to the creation of knowledge, it is necessary to carry out research on who was responsible for designing the exhibit(s) in question’ (2010, 23). I also attempted to understand the political context of these productions through the interviews and through research relating to the histories of the institutions. Participants were recruited according to their professional positions and willingness to be interviewed. In all cases these were either museum staff such as curators or figures in some way responsible for cultural and/​or museum policy (e.g. the military personnel responsible for AWIM). They were identified through desk research and contact with key individuals at the museums. Through these interviews I attempted to understand the roles and responsibilities of interviewees, and their understanding of the political, economic, and social context of the museum and its displays, including why they were developed and who the main stakeholders and influential actors were (funders, politicians, Military etc.). I tried to understand the museums’ involvement in events or special occasions (e.g. national days, commemorations etc.), in order to understand better their linkage with other forms of official memory. I endeavoured to find out why it was (and still is) considered important to represent a particular past in the museums, whether there were key aims for and intended messages within the displays, and how and why specific display techniques were adopted. This provided important information about the rationale for using panoramas, and, in each museum, there were complex stories about where the idea came from that suggested not just a contest over history but over technical innovation and museal supremacy too.

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Memory, emotion, politics 51 Finally, I enquired about target audiences and how they are perceived and addressed. During these discussions, interviewees often talked about visitor behaviour and emotional responses to the museums, based on their own perceptions and on comments from visitors that they had obtained or seen.

Visitor studies This area of the research is multi-​ layered, and involves three different methods, each with different quantitative reach and qualitative depth, in order to overcome the problem of simplification discussed by Hooper-​Greenhill (2006, 371–​372) mentioned earlier in this chapter. Firstly, I observed visitor behaviour in the museums. Secondly, at P1453 I administered a facilitated questionnaire to a random sample with a combination of standardized, fixed-​ choice questions and open-​ended ones. I asked questions from the questionnaire directly to visitors and recorded their responses, so that it resembled a short, structured interview. Unfortunately, I  was forbidden from doing this at AWIM as my formal request to the Military was denied. Thirdly, I selected a limited number of individuals (around ten per research site) for in-​depth semi-​structured interviews in connection with accompanied visits. These data-​sets were organized through coding using dedicated software. As with any project, the research design involves various limitations. Some of these relate to the limited selection of research sites, the motivation for which was discussed in Chapter  1, and to my inability to administer questionnaires at AWIM. Above all, the qualitative data collected through visitor studies is not intended to be representative or generalizable, but rather to present a multimodal picture of some people’s beliefs, responses to displays and political and cultural dispositions. The different levels of quantitative reach and qualitative depth in the visitor studies are intended to provide different perspectives and complementary datasets. Although unable to administer a questionnaire in AWIM, I  was able to analyse some visitor comments that the museum had published. These, of course, need to be considered as selections made by museum staff, and to be contextualized historically –​in fact they date from shortly after the museum’s opening in 2002. P1453 has no visitor book, but it did, until recently, publish the comments from ‘significant visits’ on its website. These were usually politicians, including high-​ranking (or formerly high-​ranking) individuals such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Kadir Topbaş and the mayors of other major cities, or other prominent public figures such as business tycoon (and vocal AKP supporter) Zeynel Abidin Erdem. These published comments –​both at AWIM and P1453 –​need to be analysed carefully; though they may seem to fall under the purview of visitor studies, they are also part of how the museums seek to represent and promote themselves through these visitors’ laudatory responses. As Macdonald notes, visitor comments ‘are inscriptions of visitor interpretations and thus provide access to aspects of visitor meaning-​construction’. But that does not mean that responses in

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52  Memory, emotion, politics visitor books are ‘somehow more ‘authentic’, ‘unmediated’ or ‘valid’ than other sources’, and they require careful thinking with regard to ‘the context of production’, including when they were written (Macdonald 2005, 122). This is certainly the case at AWIM, where visitor comments were selected and used for museum marketing and institutional representation. At P1453 the comments of high-​profile AKP politicians can be seen as purposeful public endorsements of the museum. At AWIM, specific visitor comments were published after the opening of the museum in 2002. While extremely laudatory, these were in line with many visitor responses that I  observed myself, without the interference of museum personnel, over a decade later. I also learned from AWIM staff that they sometimes found negative, even insulting, comments in the visitor book, but I was unable to see these. ‘Visitor studies’ is a heterogeneous field with no common systematic approach, as museologist Ceri Jones has lamented (2015, 539), echoing Hooper-​Greenhill’s characterization of it as ‘fragmented’, ‘uneven’ in its methods and take-​up across the world, and arising from different intellectual traditions, professional practices, and policy imperatives (2006, 363). It encompasses studies of how museums can better meet visitors’ needs that relate to institutional audience development agendas (e.g. Bitgood 2013). It also includes socio-​psychological studies of people’s motivations for visiting museums, meaning-​making processes (Hooper-​Greenhill et  al. 2001) and their experiences, and recollections of visits (e.g. Falk 2009; Falk and Dierking 2013). Both of these literatures are largely characterized by an instrumental drive to inform and improve museum practice on the basis of better understanding of visitors. Museologist and learning theorist John Falk, for example, suggests a typology of visitor motivations over five categories. ‘Explorers’ need to ‘satisfy personal curiosity and interest in an intellectually challenging environment’. ‘Facilitators’ wish to engage in meaningful social experience with people about whom they care in an ‘educationally supportive environment’. ‘Experience seekers’ aspire to be ‘exposed to things and ideas that exemplify what is best and intellectually most important within a culture or community’. ‘Professionals/​hobbyists’ want to further specific intellectual needs in a setting with a specific subject matter focus’. Finally, ‘rechargers’ yearn to ‘physically, emotionally, and intellectually recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment’ (2009, 63–​64). Falk later added two more motivational identities pertaining specifically to ‘special types of museums such as ethnic or national museums and museums and comparable settings that are designed as memorials to specific historical events’. The first of these is ‘Affinity Seekers’, who ‘come to the museum because it speaks to their sense heritage and/​or personhood. The second, ‘Respectful Pilgrims’ visit because they ‘possess a sense of duty or obligation’ and ‘see their visit as a way to honour the memory of those represented by the institution/​memorial’. Falk considers these categories to be ‘uncommon at most museums’ and notes that ‘good strategies for identifying these have yet to be developed’ (Falk 2013), and yet these perhaps

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Memory, emotion, politics 53 best characterize visitors at P1453 and AWIM to different degrees and in different combinations, and I  suggest that the methodological deficit Falk identifies is tackled in this book through linking different forms of ethnography to understand visitors’ superficial behaviour and deep-​seated personal dispositions. I ask the practical question of what people actually do during visits to the museums of interest here, and why. Conversely, what does the visit do for them? Tony Bennett considers this in the context of self-​regulation, where museum representations can become ‘props’ for visitors to use in personal self-​development –​what he calls ‘evolutionary exercises of the self’ (Bennett 1995, 10–​11). In my research, visitors’ purposeful engagement with a particular historical story can be a basis for such exercises. Bennett is not concerned only with the encounter between visitor and ‘props’. In an essay of 2006 he advances a concept of ‘civic seeing’, developing his ideas of governmentality in the museum, in which culture is adopted instrumentally to teach visitors to discipline themselves. In the museum, they learn what counts as civilized conduct and what counts as valuable culture. At the same time, they observe and regulate themselves and one another in order, ultimately absorbing behaviours as habits (Bennett 2006). Jay Rounds’ notion of ‘identity work’ (2006) offers a comparable perspective here. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’ view that identity ‘needs to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual’ (1991, 52)  and Erving Goffman’s ideas of performative identity (1959), Rounds sees the museum visit as a way of building identity, bolstering ethical and moral positions (about the proper way to live), maintaining ontological security by seeking out representations that make ordered and fixed sense of things and confirming group belongings. Such belongings are articulated through performances of behaviour on the part of visitors who are aware of each other and of what is expected of them. Giving the example of art museum behaviour, Rounds discusses the choreographed ‘attitude’ that a notional visitor ‘dances’: She moves with careful formality, strikes a contemplative pose (stylized, perhaps a bit more rapt than is strictly necessary to focus one’s attention fully on the painting  –​but not so much as to appear to be posing). Other patrons respond in kind, moving as if in response to an invisible choreographer, avoiding intrusions between patron and painting, signaling respect for the aesthetic experience in progress. Their dance is not merely a courtesy; it is a mutual conspiracy, in which each validates the authenticity of the identities being enacted by the others. I construct and maintain my own identity through such performances, and can believe in it because the other visitors act in ways that convey their approval of my performance, their acceptance of my authenticity, my status as a member of the club. I do the same for them. (2006, 142–​143)

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54  Memory, emotion, politics I view the visitors whom I  study in this research through this lens of choreographed enactment, asking what they enact through their behaviour in the museum, and how this produces and expresses particular affective and ethical relations to the past. Another key point from Rounds is that not everyone plays to the rules, thus ‘threatening the mutual reinforcement central to the enactment of identity’. In my research, this too is helpful in considering whether visitors behaved in congruent ways. As discussed, I took some people to the museums who actively disliked the meanings and values they perceived within the displays, to see what they enacted and what meanings they made. The idea of choreography is helpful, with its associations of the scripting of bodily behaviour (like ‘dancing’) ‘in chorus’ or unison, while its focus on bodies recalls Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, to be discussed again below. In the same way, choreography is a way of thinking of people’s responses that are ‘out of step’ or resistant to the pull of the group ‘dance’, with its patterns and ritual aspect. The expression of emotion, both in embodied and vocal form, is one of the key components of visitor behaviour in P1453 and AWIM, although in each one the emotional displays of visitors are different. Showing emotion is, in this sense, part of the metaphorical ‘dance’ described by Rounds. In part, this is ‘choreographed’ by the museum through a number of means. These include the spectacular and emotive forms of representation, appeals, and exhortations embedded within textual materials, the ways in which visitors are positioned as looking on/​ being in history, and reference to symbols and tropes that already bear emotional meanings for specific communities that are commonplace in everyday life beyond the museum. In this way, the museums operate as assemblages of affective prompts to be fulfilled by visitors, inviting them to respond emotionally as an ‘exercise of the self’. I link this to theorist of affect and emotion Margaret Wetherell’s conceptualization of ‘affective practice’, which is a kind of ‘work’ through which to exercise an identity position and self-​transformation (or ‘evolution’ to use Bennett’s term): An affective practice can be made up of cycles of recurrence of affective activities over days, weeks and months, like the Christian year, or the cycle of ‘work on the self’ as good intentions lead to determined resolutions, to failures, to guilt, to berating of the self, to giving up, to self-​indulgence, to good intentions, etc’. (2012, 12) The following qualitative methods are attempts to understand people’s engagements with displays in relation to their dispositions. They range from superficial to in-​depth methods, and the level of depth is in inverse proportion to the quantitative dimension. Together, they are intended to provide a complementary set of understandings.

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Memory, emotion, politics 55

Visitor observations Many early visitor studies on observation of visitor behaviour in museums in the first half of the twentieth century suggested that observation is more ‘objective and reliable’ than visitors’ interviews and their behaviour can reveal the ‘educational effectiveness of exhibitions and displays’ (Hooper-​ Greenhill 2006, 363). However, this technique is less useful for deeper understandings of visitors in their social and cultural context (ibid., 366), making it apparently the most superficial of my methods. However, visitors in both museums manifest ‘surface’ behaviour strongly, and this is manifest in bodily dispositions, gestures and shows of emotion that are prominent and, as discussed in Chapter  1, are not necessarily consecutive or of less significance than ‘interior’ affective states, from which they cannot easily or helpfully be detached as mere ‘exteriorizations’. I recall here the suggestion from Smith et  al. that ‘initial registering and the generative processes of affect/​ emotion are always already embodied and semiotic’ (2018, 1). Because of the prevalence of this surface behaviour and its possible significance for group identities (Ahmed 2004, 53–​54), visitor observation is an important source of information, even if limited, and I use it in combination with other methods so as to ‘allow for fuller and more nuanced access to visitor understandings and experiences’ (Macdonald 2005, 120). For the observations, I was stationed in one gallery at a time for a fixed time period (in the case of the 1453 Panorama Museum there are only two main galleries, so the time period was adjusted accordingly, also in relation to the high volume of visitors in the space). I  spent seven days observing visitors in the P1453, including a weekend. The museum and the Anıtkabir complex of which it is a part are both very large. I spent four days, including one Saturday and Sunday, observing the visitors. I made structured notes on behaviour on the part of visitors for example exclamations, body language, embodied expressions, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ spots (Hooper-​Greenhill 2006, 365). The aim of this method was not to provide highly rigorous or representative data but to give some sense of actual visitor behaviours in the museums in question, even if this is based on my impressions and cannot be generalized. The research involved observing large numbers of people, but not to produce numerical analyses such as percentages of visitors who exhibit a given behaviour. Rather, it sought to characterize some of the visitor behaviour in order to give a sense of the different ways in which people engage with the displays.

Visitor questionnaires The questionnaire was intended to understand people’s motivations for visiting, their background knowledge of the museum and the past it represents and what that past means to them. I  tried to understand the

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56  Memory, emotion, politics importance of people’s sense of personal involvement in or distance from the past, the emotional dimensions of their responses to displays (e.g. pride, belonging, etc.) and how this might relate to people’s personal politics, for example in relation to political persuasion, religion, patriotism and so on. A  key point here, to which I  will return, is that the ‘emotion words’ that people used were not supplied by me but emerged in their talk, avoiding as much as possible an a-​priori imposition of ways of thinking and talking about emotion. As discussed in Chapter  1, emotion was emergent in my study, so in fact the research instruments I used, such as questionnaires and semi-​structured interview questions, did not refer explicitly to emotion at all, minimizing any leading effects in this regard. The administration of the questionnaire took place over different days (i.e. including working and non-​working days), targeting every third group or individual in order to generate a random sample; it took between ten and 30 minutes per respondent and was administered at the end of the visitor circuit so that respondents had completed their visits. I introduced myself as a researcher and clarified that I did not work for the museum. I then explained the project, before administering the questionnaire, asking questions of the respondent and making the annotations while also recording the conversation. I completed 104 questionnaires at P1453. I tried to interview people as individuals rather than as spokespeople for the groups in which they were visiting, although this was not always easy, particularly as adult men often tried to speak for the women and children in their parties. Adults were the target respondents, although it was very common for them to be visiting with their children in order to educate them, and this may have informed their responses to questions. The primary mode of analysis of the questionnaire data was qualitative, but some of the standard, fixed-​choice questions produced quantitative data (e.g., age ranges). The questionnaires covered; demographic information; the purpose of the visit; people’s experience of and responses to the visit; particular features of the display of interest or personal significance (if any); the importance of history for respondents, generally and in relation to the museum displays; cultural consumption (museum visiting, TV etc.); and political viewpoints, if respondents were willing to disclose them.

In-​depth visitor research In order to achieve a greater understanding of the relationships between engagement with museum displays and people’s wider cultural existence and political dispositions I selected around ten participants per research site for in-​depth research. These were people who were unknown to me but who could be reached and recruited through personal contacts, and then through snowball sampling. I tried to gain a sense of these people’s lives and their habitus through an initial interview. I also tried to gain an understanding of how they perceived themselvesd and their identity, including the importance of

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Memory, emotion, politics 57 the past for this, and their political views and party allegiances, if any. For each research site, I aimed to recruit people who constitute the museum’s target audience, as well as others who did not, and may take ‘oppositional’ positions. Although conflict between Kemalists and Islamists is very visible, there are others who are not from these groups, and there are many who are within one of the two groups but who have different attitudes to the political agendas associated with each. I tried to choose people with different political viewpoints. Broadly, I  chose people in three groups:  Political Islam, Kemalists, and those critical of both sides; one participant did not fit into these groups and felt affiliations as a Muslim and a Republican, with complex and heartfelt views on both Ottoman and Republican history. Additionally, some clearly defined their political positions but gave more complex responses. Subsequent to the initial interview, I accompanied the participants on a visit to the museum, asking them to visit as ‘naturally’ as possible, but to ‘think aloud’ using the methodology developed by Hooper-​Greenhill and Moussouri in their 2001 Making Meaning in Art Museums reports. Here, visitors were asked to ‘report what they saw, thought and felt about the artworks and the exhibitions as a whole’, while the ‘researcher’s role was limited to prompting visitors to expand on any points when needed’. After the visit, an extensive exit interview was conducted in order to gain an in-​ depth sense of any responses to and reflections upon the visit not expressed in the galleries, and linking back where appropriate and relevant to the initial interview.

‘Encoding’ and ‘decoding’: a framework for understanding the responses In my in-​depth research I aimed to survey the kinds of visitors who would have been likely visitors to one museum or the other of, as well as people who opposed what they perceived to be the ideological grounds of the museum and the belief systems of its typical visitors. In a sense, these are people with contrasting habituses, and as a practical way of understanding what this means for people’s responses to the museums I  refer to Stuart Hall’s framework of hegemonic, negotiated and oppositional readings (1993). Hall’s notion that representational systems are a means of producing and exchanging ‘shared meanings’ is qualified by his framework of ‘encoding and decoding’. In this sense, we can talk of how a museum display is ‘encoded’ with particular meanings (such as political values) and how this is ‘decoded’ by a visitor, perhaps as was intended, but perhaps not. Visitors may take the dominant or ‘hegemonic’ position, accepting the meanings encoded as true and valuable; or in an oppositional position they may understand the code but reject it. Otherwise, visitors may take a negotiated position, understanding the code and sharing some of the values that it conveys but not completely accepting others. Hall clarifies that the

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58  Memory, emotion, politics imposition of dominant meanings is not a straightforward one-​sided process ‘which governs how all events will be signified’ Instead, ‘it consists of the “work” required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding of the event within the limit of dominant definitions in which it has been connotatively signified’ (1993, 514). In the case of my research sites, the ‘work’ that Hall talks about can be the use of the discourse of history as authoritative truth, but it can also be the use of dramatic, emotive and immersive displays that seek to prompt particular emotional responses.

Identifying emotion in visitor experiences As mentioned, none of the visitor studies methods I employed was adapted specially to bring affective behaviours and responses into view; for example, I did not ask direct questions about emotion, or how people ‘feel’ and so on. Nevertheless, the prominence of emotional responses was impressive, and led me to pay attention to them. In the observations, I  saw people’s bodily behaviours, including pointing, gestures, mimicking what they saw in the displays (for example mimicking the poses of figures within the panoramas), putting hand on heart, crying, and so on. In questionnaires and in-​depth interviews, people identified their emotional responses quite readily and explicitly, using ‘emotion words’ to describe what they felt, such as ‘ashamed’, ‘proud’, ‘angry’, ‘sadness’, and so on. At the same time, they also engaged in bodily and vocal behaviours that suggested emotional content: facial expressions, speaking with emphasis, with raised or quiet voice, and sometimes shaking or crying with emotion. Here, I omitted use of precedents and methods from important anthropological studies for interpreting facial expressions (Ekman 2003) because they require subscription to a general ‘neurocultural’ approach, adhering to a classification of universal emotions that fits poorly with the focus of this book and would detract from the more global view of the multiple sites and manifestations of affective practice. A further body of literature on ‘emotion words’ –​words ‘relating to emotion’ –​articulates a view of emotional speech as more than a mere ‘expressive vehicle’ (Lutz and Abu-​Lughod 1990, 11). In the museums, visitors’ verbal expressions often seemed to be part of their self-​conscious articulation of who they are, displayed to others as an identity position and/​or serving as an affirmation of the self through identification with a symbolic past. This might suggest some caution about what we are really studying: emotion itself, or performance of identity. In some ways, this is not a helpful distinction, for it suggests a recoverable ‘authentic’ emotion free from social structuring. Indeed, studies of ‘emotion words’ also query distinctions between ‘emotion’ and ‘expression of emotion’ (e.g. Brenneis 1990, 114; Lutz and Abu-​Lughold 1990; Reddy 2001; Bareither 2017). Distinguishing between ‘real’ and displayed emotions also downplays the significance of people’s emotional expressions and performances as serious objects of study that have profound significance both for themselves and for

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Memory, emotion, politics 59 others (Hochschild 1979, 558). ‘Emotion words’ are more than labellings of an internal state, for they are inseparable from the process of bringing about that state, meaning that expressed emotion needs to be considered as personal but also semiotic and social. Emotion words can be ‘statements about the relationship between a person and an event’ (Lutz 1982, 113). So, a visitor’s verbal expression about a historical narrative in a museum could be literally about her relationship to an (historic) event, but it is also about a set of other circumstances, including strictly contemporary events such as contests over memory and relations with other groups (Brenneis 1990, 112). In Catherine A. Lutz’s well-​known study of the Ifaluk, the use and meanings of words is mapped into diagrammatic visualizations that reflect the psycho-​ social structuring of society (1986; see Reddy 2001, 5–​13 for a critique). Although such an approach might produce compelling results for studies of emotion in museums and memory culture, it requires a more singular and systematic approach to lexicons than I can achieve in a study that takes into account multiple other manifestations and practices of emotion, and yet I draw on these interests in the interaction of emotion and the verbal. Another difficulty is the slipperiness of what counts as an ‘emotion word’: of course, we can think of love, hate, anger, and so on, but this research shows that emotion sometimes manifests verbally in other kinds of words, including epithets for historical protagonists (‘Fatih’ for Sultan Mehmet II and ‘Ata’ for ‘Atatürk, as I will explain later), attributes and characteristics (e.g. fedakârlık, meaning abnegation or self-​sacrifice) and concepts (e.g. ancestry, or ecdat). For example, one of my respondents in AWIM said, in front of a panorama representing a battle from the War of Independence, ‘I have goose bumps! What self-​sacrifice [fedakârlık]! what sort of thing is that? I  feel that we have lost this!’ The concept of fedakârlık may not, strictly speaking, describe an emotion, and yet it is entangled both with her self-​reported somatic response, her admiration and marvel for the heroes of the Wars, and then her sense of loss and regret. Fedakârlık, here, may function as what William M. Reddy calls an ‘emotive’ or a verbal expression that is itself an instrument ‘for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions (Reddy 2001, 105; see also Bareither 2017). It takes its emotional value from ‘relational intent’ on the part if the speaker to link and associate. An alternative perspective on these relationships is offered by views of emotions as mobile and operating across sites, words, images and practices, so that we see them relationally and transitively (Ahmed 2004, 4), rather than in discrete domains of expression. Often, in Sara Ahmed’s perspective, emotion ‘sticks’ to signs, sometimes with the effect of fixing and limiting their connotations, as when fedakârlık accretes meanings and certain iconic scenes of historical ‘self-​sacrifice’ repeat across public sites of memory. In later chapters I attempt to track the emotional load of these and other terms. Although I do not take Lutz’s schematic approach (or comparable ones, such as Heider 1989) I  am concerned with the ways in which people’s

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60  Memory, emotion, politics individual emotional responses are grouped and articulated together, how emotions (and emotives) seem to lead on from one another, or call each other up. Sometimes, this process resembles what Wetherell calls ‘affective-​ discursive loops’, in which specific emotions, rhetorics and narratives intensify one another cyclically (Wetherell 2012, 7, 53), such as a narrative of group infringement and the anger linked to this. The ‘fedakârlık’ speech above is an example of this, in its ‘looping’ between marvel and regret (and perhaps anger at those responsible for the perceived loss). Another is seen in one of the quotations at the beginning of this chapter, when the P1453 visitor ‘loops’ between pride at the Ottoman victory, and anger and resentment towards those champions of Republican memory culture who would try ‘to make us forget’. Interpreting all of this is not an exact science, especially when people’s behaviour was more controlled, as at AWIM. In general, my identification of emotion was a subjective, ‘face-​value’ approach (although not in Ekman’s terms!). There are problems to acknowledge: in some cases, visitors showed very little emotional response, but this may only mean that it was not manifestly displayed. This also connects to a problem about the representative nature of my impressions in the observations, which mostly focus on visitors who did manifestly respond emotionally, rather than on those who did not. Meanwhile, the emotional behaviours in each museum were regulated in different ways. At AWIM, the presence of armed soldiers –​mostly unsmiling, serious, and disciplined-​looking young men  –​working as front-​of-​house staff might have closed down the possibility of some emotional responses. It would be difficult to imagine visitors openly inveighing against the memory of Atatürk in the museum, for example (although it turns out that some people do so in the Visitors Book!), because this behaviour would surely be policed, and the visitors most likely ejected from the museum. Nevertheless, emotional displays were commonplace and normal in each museum, although the repertoires and regulation of these were different. In response to this, I characterize the ‘affective atmosphere’ of each museum, as something composed both of the museum setting and displays in which there are embedded emotional prompts, and the behaviour of visitors that fulfils the atmosphere. The atmosphere, in other words, is understood as made up of both the ‘choreography’ and the ‘dance’, to use Rounds terms, while remembering the cultural relations that these have outside the museum to specific political, social, and memory cultures. Repertoires of affective practice are closely linked to context (Wetherell 2012, 118), and it is here that we might view P1453 and AWIM as sites of emotion, where specific affective practices are legitimated and encouraged over different memory communities. At the beginning of Chapter  1, the fieldnotes I  presented showed different affective atmospheres between P1453 and AWIM. The former was made of the loud noise of the crowd and the military music, bodily and vocal exclamations, wonderment, and anger.

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Memory, emotion, politics 61 The latter was more sombre, and people were serious and, if they were emotional, they displayed it in a way that was contained. The idea of affective atmospheres is currently the subject of extensive theoretical debate that attempts to account for the origins and nature of the ‘moody force fields’ that have a role in the ‘making and shaping of collective publics’ (Closs Stephens 2015, 182). The term is often used in a semi-​ metaphorical sense, drawing on the meteorological connotations of ‘atmosphere’ to describe human situations, in which ‘a quality of environmental immersion…registers in and through sensing bodies whilst also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’ (McCormack, 2008, 413). Cultural Geographer Ben Anderson states that in everyday speech ‘the word atmosphere is used interchangeably with mood, feeling, ambience, tone, and other ways of naming collective affects’, and the referent for the term is multiple, ‘epochs, societies, rooms, landscapes, couples, artworks, and much more are all said to possess atmospheres (or be possessed by them)’ (2009, 78). For him the peculiar value of the term is in breaking out of a dichotomy between affect (bodily feelings of being) and emotions (feelings that are qualified and named), so that atmospheres are not just spontaneous occurrences but also containers of signification. For me this means that historical memory culture may play a part in affective atmospheres, and they are not the result of a thoughtless outpouring of emotion. They are also diffuse and personal all at once: Atmospheres do not fit neatly into either an analytical or pragmatic distinction between affect and emotion. They are indeterminate with regard to the distinction between the subjective and objective. They mix together narrative and signifying elements and non-​narrative and asignifying elements. And they are impersonal in that they belong to collective situations and yet can be felt as intensely personal. (Anderson 2009, 80) Wetherell addresses the idea of the ‘communal affective atmosphere’ as a way of accounting for how people are ‘swept up’ in the same emotional behaviour at certain times and places, how ‘groups of people are said to manifest affective aura, physically palpable to the outsider entering the room’ (2012, 140–​141). When ‘in’ the atmosphere, each ‘wave of communal affect exerts a physical grab, as our bodies begin to enact anger, or compassion, or shake with laughter, and as we become positioned in relation to the available figures, narratives and affective possibilities’ (2012, 141). The idea of the atmosphere is not limited to physical places, as Anderson’s comment suggests, but it is a way of understanding that can be applied to the physical space of the museum. In this context, theoretical discussions often focus on what it is that determines an affective atmosphere, as Christoph Michels has articulated:

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62  Memory, emotion, politics Do we approach atmospheres by investigating the spatial and material qualities of a room and how they are modulated (as spaces seem to have an inherent atmosphere), or do we focus on how these spaces are experienced by their inhabitants (as atmospheres seem to depend on their subjective perception)? (2015, 255) An example of this dilemma is the way in which the architecture of a sports stadium helps to determine crowd behaviour, as Closs Stephens has discussed in her analysis of the affective atmosphere of the London Olympics. The shape means that focus is on the athletes. But the arrangement of the crowd is also important –​always in sight of itself, allowing for spectacles be performed and seen (flag-​waving, Mexican waves, etc.) and sounds to resonate (chants and songs, drummers, horn players, cheers, boos), encouraging a kind of multimodal crowd dialogue and exercise of collective action and reaction between the sides of the stadium, and over the heads of the athletes. But when the stadium is empty the atmosphere is gone, leading to the idea that affective atmospheres are co-​constituted, that they emerge ‘in between their various human and non-​human components’ (ibid.). Wetherell states that atmospheres also require work –​the affective practice discussed earlier –​to sustain them (2012, 142): the crowd needs to put in the effort, waving the flags and singing the songs, or the atmosphere will be leaden. At the same time, as with the example of the London Olympics, there is a complex interplay of internal and external forces that produces the atmosphere. It is not just about the architecture and the crowd but also the cultural references, practices, and expectations that are built into the events when they come together. As stated in Chapter 1, affective atmospheres are sometimes critiqued as being undefinable, metaphysical, and mysterious ‘extra-​ discursive’ excesses in which ‘complex, feeling social actors become simple affect automatons’ without interpretive agency (Smith et al. 2018, 4). The ‘contractual’ perspective I propose here can open up research into the co-​ production and complicities of cultural spaces and sites that rescues at least the physical affective atmosphere from this pigeonhole. This way of thinking can provide insights into the museums, but it involves methodological challenges. There is a limit to the extent to which the atmospheres in the museums can be anatomized or ‘broken down’ into separable constituent elements that can be seen as simple cases of cause and effect, or stimulus and response, where emotional prompts (like elements of high drama in panorama paintings, e.g. Figure  1.1) directly determine visitors’ emotional behaviour. That seems to go against the diffuse, co-​ produced idea of an atmosphere. There are such prompts in the museums, and they are often explicit; for example, visitors are openly prompted or exhorted to feel certain things, to be amazed by victories, to be reverential towards heroes, and so on; this appears in clearly stated verbal instructions in resources such as text panels and audioguides, as well as in visual and

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Memory, emotion, politics 63 iconic form. In Chapters 4 and 6 I will discuss these at length in relation to both museums. But as I have explained, these prompts are not entirely novel, even if they take on special force in the museum because of its cultural authority and representational techniques. They draw on and reproduce pre-​existing memory cultures –​established practices of and references for emotion, and it may be that they would not otherwise ‘work’ on people. Indeed, some of the people who go to the museums may be already disposed to respond in emotional ways because of enculturation (as I  will discuss next). My approach was to understand this complexity at focal points in the museum where emotion seemed to be at a height. I did not have a pre-​set vocabulary, classification or scale to use. Rather, characterizing the affective atmospheres of the museums was a subjective, impressionistic exercise of looking (in the literal visual sense) relationally at memory cultures, museums, and visitors, observing moments of encounter between visitors and displays, what happens next, and how collective behaviour gives rise to a prevailing mood (insofar as I  could identify it). This was also about listening: how much noise did visitors make, how loudly they spoke, how intense the exclamations, the silences, or the cacophony. These phenomena also relate to ideas about the ways in which our bodies and behaviour convey our identities. This is prominent in Turkish contexts, where cultural markers in clothing, body language, and verbal expressions are common, carefully differentiated across social, political, and religious groups and across men and women, and are easily understood by insiders, to the degree that ‘accumulated knowledge suggests that, especially after the 1980s, bodily consumption has become a highly contested domain in Turkey’ (Karademir-​Hazır 2014, 8). Bourdieu’s articulation of habitus helps to understand the ways in which people may have acquired particular values, tastes, and political dispositions (1990). This relates to social groupings including families and peers, as well as more general milieus, and the way in which dispositions are transmitted, shared, and normalized through people’s social interaction over time, including inter-​generationally. Bourdieu calls this ‘the conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence’. They produce habitus, as in his well-​known description: systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (Bourdieu 1990b, 53) For my research, a disposition could be the unquestioned veneration of a historical figure like Mehmet ‘the Conquerer’, strict ideas about the legitimacy of particular political ideologies, or moral beliefs that people think

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64  Memory, emotion, politics should be commonly imposed and held, or dispositions towards nostalgic perspectives. Even the names people give to phenomena can be dispositions of habitus, as well as expressions of value. For example, the practice of calling Mehmet ‘the Conquerer’ (‘Fatih’), or avoiding use of the name ‘Atatürk’, are both frequent among some Islamist conservative people. The epithet ‘the Conqueror’ can be seen as a relational ‘emotive’; it has different affects and resonances across different groups: for example, it is an index of pride for some, but of subjugation for others, such as the historic Greek population of Istanbul. These semantic politics are pervasive: the entire peninsula of what was Constantinople is now called ‘Fatih’. Meanwhile, instead of ‘Atatürk’, conservative Islamists often prefer ‘Mustafa Kemal’, which was his name during the Ottoman period, well before the surname reform, and is free of the ideological connotation of his surname –​‘Father of Turks’. For Bourdieu, habitus is ‘society written into the body, into the biological individual’ (1990a, 63) but also ‘embodied history’, and is internalized ‘as a second nature and so forgotten as history’. It is ‘the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (Bourdieu 1990b, 56). This sense of the ‘history’ and the ‘past’ accounts for the development of dispositions; it is the set of past conditions and social interactions, not the ‘past’ in the sense of an authorized history such as the history of the Ottomans or the early Republic. But the sense of the ‘past’ in Bourdieu’s concept can incorporate the historical stories that are valued and told, the historical symbols that are prized, and how these inform the production and reproduction of particular dispositions. In this way, the concept of habitus can be seen as connected to ideas about individual and social memory. Margaret Wetherell has attempted to relate the concept of habitus closely to affective practice. The latter is a component of habitus, or, in Wetherell’s reading of Bourdieu, a ‘kind of sediment of dispositions, preferences, tastes, natural attitudes, skills, and standpoints’ that are produced through the social formations in which we live and are enculturated, and guide future conduct (2012, 105; see also Scheer 2012 and Ikegami 2012). Some of the dispositions of habitus are embodied, ‘evident in posture, familiar gestures and mannerisms, ways of inhabiting space’ (2012, 106) and in the experience and manifestation of emotion. Both of these are dispositions of relevance to understanding visitors at P1453 and AWIM. The way visitors dress, exclaim, put their hands on their hearts and so on can also be connected to the sedimented dispositions of habitus. Crying too, is an affective memory practice that is a disposition of habitus. As mentioned, I  experienced this myself, as someone who grew up in a Kemalist environment. At home and school, we learned to cry over Atatürk. For many years  –​even as a young adult –​this disposition stayed with me and the right kind of emotive representation of Atatürk could move me to tears, quite unreflexively. Meanwhile, my visitor studies turned up a range of references to dress and appearance. ‘Oppositional’ visitors sometimes made derogatory comments about, or derided, the appearance (and on one occasion the smell) of the

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Memory, emotion, politics 65 regular visitors. Sometimes, visitors made comments about my dress and appearance, making assumptions about my lifestyle, beliefs, and personal politics on this. The ‘headscarf’ issue was frequently referenced by visitors, both secular and Islamist. At AWIM, Atatürk’s clothing is on display, and was a major point of interest for participants. These ‘superficial’ issues sometimes related to deeper concerns, not least because the regulation of dress and appearance has been an important political issue both in the past and the present; Atatürk and the AKP have both been seen to intervene in and politicise this, in different ways and with contrasting social and moral visions. People’s ‘embodiment of history’ (to go back to Bourdieu’s term) is complex, involving relations between body language, gesture, dress, physical deportment and their keen awareness of how these map different social identities.

Summary This chapter has introduced the methodological frameworks to be adopted in this research, with particular reference to analytical approaches relating to museum display as a form of representation, and the understanding of individuals’ dispositions and how these relate to engagement with museum displays. In these cases, my aim has not been to develop new theorizations but to harness existing approaches and understandings for the purposes of my investigation. However, as this book progresses I will show how some of these approaches and understandings can be enriched in order to better account for the complex encounters between the museums of interest here and their visitors. In the next chapter, I  start by analysing the Panorama 1453 Museum and its representation of the Conquest of Constantinople, before going on to investigate the responses to this museum in the following chapter.

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4  Politics of display at the Panorama 1453 Museum

We are grandchildren of Sultan Mehmet; our grandfather drove the ships on the ground [i.e. on the banks of the Golden Horn to avoid the boom chain defence] and we drove the metro under the sea. (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Radikal, May, 2015)

Is Constantinople always being conquered? In a symbolic sense, it can seem so now, with the prevalence of official representations, from anniversaries to re-​enactments and the Panorama 1453 Museum (P1453) itself. The historical-​material ‘witnesses’ of 1453 are still with us: the Land Walls that were breached figure conspicuously in the inner-​city environment, even if people might pass through them unthinkingly on their daily commute. They are part of a key UNESCO World Heritage Site, giving them an international status that the Turkish state has been assiduous in pursuing (Shoup and Zan 2013). The Haliç (Golden Horn), circumnavigated during the Conquest, is still a central feature, geographical divide and waterway thoroughfare in Istanbul. And the massive boom chain defence that the Ottomans bypassed to get to the Land Walls and begin the siege is on display in the Harbiye Military Museum. On 29 May 2016 (the 563rd anniversary of the breaching of the Walls) the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality staged a spectacular, and no-​ doubt very costly, live-​broadcast light show of the Conquest, projected onto reproductions of the Walls in the Yenikapı area, which is one of Erdoğan’s favourite places to hold political rallies. Erdoğan himself has participated in commemorations and given speeches on the day. The Conquest is discursively connected to contemporary state actions in other ways. The date of the 29th May has been used under the AKP administration to break ground for major new infrastructure such as the third bridge over the Bosporous, and to open important buildings such as new mosques, symbolically connecting the achievements of the Ottomans to those of the current administration. For example, the story of the breaching of the Haliç by stealth at night is very often used to represent Turkish ingenuity both historically and now, as in Erdoğan’s speech linking the Conquest with the development of a new metro tunnel, quoted at the head of this chapter. There is an Istanbul 29 Mayıs [i.e. ‘29th of May’] University, which the

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Politics of display at P1453 67

Figure 4.1 Mosaic of Mehmet II during the Conquest in Ulubatlı metro station, Istanbul

AKP administration plans to transform into an Islamic School to rival Al-​ Azhar in Egypt (WorldWatch 2014). Every year in May billboards appear all over Istanbul showing Sultan Mehmet (now often just called ‘Fatih’, or ‘Conqueror’) in battle on his white horse. Some representations are more permanent, as in metro station mosaics (Figure 4.1). The event has different meanings: in Greek communities it is sometimes called the ‘Fall of Constantinople’, and 29th May is a day of commemoration, but quite a sad one. For many Greeks, Tuesday is considered an unlucky day, as that is the weekday on which Constantinople fell. For some, Constantine XI (1404–​1453, the last Emperor of Byzantium1), who fought and died with other soldiers and the people of Constantinople serves ‘as an inspiration for all people who desire their independence, their freedom, and above all, their faith’ (Karakostas 2009, n.p.). The last spectacular celebration of the conquest in 2016 was reportedly perceived as an ‘insulting celebration of Greek Bloodshed on 29 May’ by some Greeks (Harris 2016). However, for many non-​Greeks in Turkey, the Conquest is ‘great victory’ to be proud of (Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2015); for others, it was just an ‘invasion’ or ‘seizure’ (Hür 2014, n.p.). It has been reported that Greek communities in Turkey take offence at celebrations of the conquest, but they are rarely vocal in public about how they feel about it (Akgönül 2007). Not

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68  Politics of display at P1453 far from the Land Walls the neighbourhood of Fener is home to the Greek Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Here and in other areas such as Yedikule, there is a diminishing Greek community subject to numerous acts of marginalization over centuries. So, immediately there is a context for discrepancies. ‘Constitution moments’ emerge when ‘historicized identities are constituted in museum representations in relation to “moments” of greater or lesser duration selected as being somehow pivotal for and emblematic of those identities’ (Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2015). The choice of such moments often reveals state or collective desires about which pasts are useful for identity construction as objects of pride, and how they should qualify and inform the present and future, for example through techniques of emulation, paralleling and revival. The state’s (particularly the AKP’s) choice of the Conquest as constitution moment is telling, for it is made to speak of an array of identity components: Turkish military might, religiosity, claim to place, technological advancement, the subjugation but fair treatment of others. A  further, crucial component is global power and influence, for a key discourse around the Conquest is that it changed the world: after the epochal shift of 1453, nothing was ever the same, and it was Turkey that made this difference. So, what happened in 1453? The Conquest was a long and complex event, and the subject of vast historiographical literatures focusing on the capture by an invading Ottoman force of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The 21-​year-​old Sultan Mehmet defeated the defending army, comprising Greek and minor supporting forces from Genoa, Venice and the Papal States and commanded by Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, breaching the two main defensive structures: the boom chain in the Haliç (i.e. the Golden Horn) and the newly repaired and reinforced ancient Theodosian Land Walls. Constantinople became the new Ottoman capital (previously this was Edirne). In much historiography, the conquest of the city is seen to have far-​reaching global consequences, bringing to an end the Roman Empire, closing the Middle Ages and posing a longstanding threat to Christendom because it opened the Ottoman territorial advance into Europe (Ekinci 2015). Judith Herrin, a scholar of Late Antiquity and Byzantine history, notes that there are different versions of 1453:  ‘Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Turks and Russians all composed their own versions; they cannot possibly be reconciled’ (2003, n.p.). The text panels of P1453 give us detailed information about one version of this historical event, presenting it as a great victory. I will outline some oppositional understandings of the event by other scholars when I discuss the content of the text panels later. The existence of different versions of the Conquest (or ‘Fall’) of Constantinople show that scholarship is divided and contests take place within the context of historiography. Notwithstanding this, as will be explored, the ‘scientific’ validity of scholarship is one of the P1453’s primary appeals to authority.

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Politics of display at P1453 69

Official voices at P1453 The museum is located Topkapı Cultural Park in Zeytinburnu district. The building is of simple and functional design. The park area was used as a busy coach station for decades. From 1999, the area was reorganized by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the park opened in 2009. The park includes an open-​air theatre, stylized sculptures of cannons and cannonballs, three historical mosques and a ‘Culture of the Turkic World Neighbourhood’ (Türk Dünyası Kültür Mahallesi) that represents cultural and traditional objects of different ‘Turkic’ countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Uzbekistan, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Balkans) in individual houses. There is an official website of this complex in English and Turkish. It describes Topkapı as ‘one of the historical venues of Istanbul’, that ‘unites and competently blends the culture of the Turkish World that has a common background’ (Topkapı Türk Dünyası 2016)2. It continues:  ‘With the diplomatic support of these Turkic countries language courses are offered and “Sabantoy”, Nawruz and national independence days specific to the Turkish World are celebrated with a ceremony at Topkapı Culture Park Culture Houses every year’ (ibid.). P1453 is part of Topkapı Cultural Park, putting the Conquest into discursive relation with ‘Turkic’ cultures more broadly in a Pan-​Turkic sense.3 A brief account of the museum’s development and its mission and orientation is given on the P1453 website.4 It starts with the description of Topkapı Cultural Park, where the museum is situated, alluding immediately to the epochal discourse, which is bound together with conquest and religious predestination: Topkapı Cultural Park, a place where an era was closed and new era was opened, where the epic of the Conquest was written, where Mehmet the second was named as ‘Conqueror’, a place where Byzantium, Istanbul and hearts were conquered. The Culture Park is the place of the Ottoman family who flourished in the shadow of the mountains covering the horizon in Söğüt,5 who opened the breach in the walls of the City and turned into a mighty oak6 which sprouted many branches. (P1453 Website, 2015) It states that (then-​) Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan supported the establishment of this Cultural Park, that ‘immortalises the morning of 29 May 1453’, as did the Mayor of Istanbul, Kadir Topbaş. Photographs of them at the museum are shown on the website. Kültür A. Ş., the corporation that runs the cultural and tourism operations for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and which funds the museum, states that the intention is to ‘freeze’ the historical moment of the Conquest and give it ‘as a gift to the future from the Panorama 1453 Museum, which is in a

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70  Politics of display at P1453 place whose soul enlightens our present as well as our future’. It continues, ‘We hope that you will always keep enthusiasm for the conquest alive and that it will inspire future conquerors’. The museum publicity rests strongly on a heritage discourse of the ‘legacy’ of the Conquest as a ‘historical good’ for the present and the future, and an implicit constitution moment. Erdoğan spoke at the opening, recalling the Ottoman Empire’s memory and its lands: Istanbul is the heritage of the great world empire; as much as it represents Bursa, Van, Diyarbakır, Trabzon, Sivas, Konya, Edirne and Sakarya [the cities in Turkey located in different parts of Turkey], it also represents Sarajevo, Kmotini, Skopje and Pristina [Old cities of the Ottoman Empire]…Our children [yavru] who will visit the museum will say, ‘wow, who was I [how glorious I once was]!’ We do not want our youth to be raised with an inferiority complex… (Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Website, 2009)7 The Conquest has emerged (or been mobilized) in recent years to occupy a primary position in cultural memory as an authorized story of Turkish achievement. As discussed in Chapter  2, in the context of competitive memory there has been much discussion about how 29th May has replaced 19th May as the dominant day of commemoration. The 19th of May 1919 was the date on which Atatürk landed at on the SS Bandırma at Samsun in contravention of his military orders; this was presented by Atatürk himself as pivotal in relation to the subsequent War of Independence, Atatürk’s rise to power, the disestablishment of the Ottoman regime, and the founding of the Republic. The 19th of May is an important public holiday that Atatürk ‘gave’ as a gift to the Turkish youth and which he appropriated as his birthday (his real birthday is unknown). But the day has recently been downplayed, with public celebrations subject to cancellation. Erdoğan has been vocal in arguing that ‘our history did not begin in 1919’ (Sözcü, 29 April 2016). Instead, 1453 has become a keystone of Ottoman nostalgia that connects not only to Islamist and conservative identities but also to the administration’s understandings of the historic reach of the Turks and the political rhetoric about reviving this. Some of the statements quoted above relate clearly to constructs of a Turkish ‘sense of self’ –​as once great, as by no means inferior, and even as ‘future conquerors’! 1453 exists in an array of representations that have different characteristics and functions, from yearly commemorations, spectacles and billboards to the permanent museum. Within this array, the museum fulfils an important cultural role. It consolidates the legitimate version of events and, because of its ‘accurate history’ discourse, bestows upon it the museal stamp of veracity. But this is no dry and dusty museum: because of the means of representation it achieves the discursive trick of lodging within a paradigm of facticity and truth the

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Politics of display at P1453 71 spectacular and emotive experience of reliving the Conquest. In this sense, the museum functions as a cultural device (Cubitt 2007) that legitimizes and reinforces other official representations of 1453 and produces special possibilities for practising identity, as the visitor studies to be presented in the next chapter will show. How does this relate to the form of the museum, and the choice of the panoramic technique? P1453 is classed and named by its producers as a museum, and yet in many ways it little resembles this institutional form other than through its pedagogical communication. It has no collection of ‘original’ objects  –​everything on show is a facsimile, replica or a contemporary painting. An entirely different museum about 1453 might be envisaged, based on traditional displays of objects and texts. Some barriers to this are practical: the material traces of the Conquest and its protagonists are dispersed in numerous other museums  –​Sultan Mehmet’s clothes and swords are in Topkapı Palace, along with many of the manuscripts reproduced in facsimile at the Panorama, and the monumental boom chain is in the Harbiye Military along with weapons from the period of the Conquest; the Rumeli Hisarı fortification museum in Istanbul contains the cannon used in the Conquest, reproduced in 3D replica at P1453. Other objects reproduced in the museum are in foreign museums and archives, for example in Italy and the UK. The administrative, bureaucratic and financial cost of assembling a conventional object-​centred display is likely to be prohibitive, especially considering that even in-​country transfers of objects are difficult because the museums are funded and run by different parts of the state (for example, Harbiye is run by the Military, Topkapı and Rumeli Hisarı are run by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and P1453 is run by a Municipality). But a conventional museum may never have been the aim, and certainly P1453 has significant appeal through its spectacular and immersive representation alone. When panoramas and dioramas emerged, they functioned by making visitors ‘feel there’. Museologist Deniz Ünsal (2013, 2014), who, alongside Şeyda Barlas Bozkuş (2014), is one of few scholars to have written about P1453, considers panoramas as precursors of the moving image and the cinema. Panoramas were places of entertainment for the public in big cities at the beginning of the 19th century. However, they lost their popularity after the emergence of newspapers with engravings and the invention of the photograph, which changed the idea of reporting ‘reality’ (Ünsal 2013, 85). Now, when there is the option of using new digital or cinematic techniques, why is this seemingly obsolete technology used at P1453? I asked this question in my interviews with the staff who were responsible for the design of the museum. I was able to interview two individuals. One of them was the owner of the company Elif Sanat (www.elifsanat.com.tr), which was employed by the Istanbul Municipality to design, develop and produce the P1453. The other individual was the Director of the Elif Sanat

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72  Politics of display at P1453 Art Group responsible for the panorama painting itself and for the form of the panorama interior.8 The owner of the company noted that the idea of a panoramic museum had come directly from Erdoğan. He stated that when Erdoğan was Mayor of Istanbul (1994–​1998), he visited some panoramic museums around the world, for example the Waterloo Panorama outside Brussels introduced in Chapter  2 (Figure  2.1). He had the idea that ‘there must be one for the Conquest of Istanbul and even for the Gallipoli Campaign (1915) and Manzikert (1071)’. The artistic director said that ‘there are another five to six people’ at the Municipality of Istanbul who claim that the idea was theirs. When they had seen some other panoramas in Europe they thought ‘we should have one too’, pointing out that ‘there were also some in Egypt, Iraq and Syria but we have none’. The artistic director said that panoramic painting is a century-​old ‘art communication’ technique before the advent of cinema, and that P1453 was a ‘late attempt’ in Turkey. The artistic director said he himself had had the idea for the domed, 360-​ degree format (‘which is unique in the world’) only once the general idea for a panorama had gone around. However, it took him some time to convince Mayor Kadir Topbaş, a former architect, who thought it would not be possible. This is what results from my interview at P1453. In my fieldwork activity at AWIM, staff there claimed something different: that P1453 producers first saw the technique at AWIM and copied it. AWIM staff stated that ‘We were the first ones who brought this technique to Turkey’, bespeaking not just the contest over histories, but also over the representational techniques involved in their museumization, in the ‘who-​got-​there-​first?’ sense. However, the P1453 and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality ignore AWIM and claim that P1453 is ‘the first panoramic museum in Turkey’ (Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Website 2009). Recently, an application has been made to the Guinness Book of Records for official recognition that the Panorama is the largest in the world (Daily Sabah, January 17, 2015). This too reflects the symbolic investment of the producers and their supporters in claiming primacy for their museum. So, the answer to the question ‘why a panorama?’ is not immediately clear. There are precedents elsewhere in the world, and it may be that Turkish state or municipal actors simply wanted to produce their own (perhaps bigger and better), while drawing on the authority of historic examples elsewhere. But it could also be that the key actors just happened to visit and become interested in panoramas rather than some other exhibitionary type, such as immersive 3D audiovisual projections, or interactive exhibits. In other words, the rationale for the choice of a panorama may involve an element of accident or of rivalry. But it nevertheless fulfils a number of important functions. Panoramas have the benefit of being a stable and robust representational technology that are not subject to technical failures as electronic audiovisuals are. The painting admits of creative choices allowing for

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Politics of display at P1453 73 the manipulation of historical stories, but the pictorial idiom is illusionistic realism, making it literally ‘seem real’ (although as we will see in the next chapter, it does not seem real to everyone). It is still ultimately static as a representation, and perhaps therefore more likely to fit with the conventional idea of the museum, as opposed, say, to the cinema. Above all, the panorama inspires awe as a meticulous and monumental artistic production as well as achieving spectacular results itself. These elements give the panorama a form of rhetorical power that forms both a truth claim comparable to that of the object-​centred museum, and an invitation to visitors to feel dramatic awe, involvement and, as we will see, other emotions connecting them affectively to the Conquest. In institutional presentations at P1453 much is made of the process of consulting professional historians during the production of the museum. In the first galleries of the museum long text panels are supported by documentary evidence in the form of enlarged facsimile graphics of historical miniature paintings, maps and European paintings (Figure 4.2). Obviously, the museum producers made choices about which sources to use, which versions of the history to follow and which historians to consult,9 and then, how to make use of the results. For example, such choices involved deciding which moment (or moments) to encapsulate in the panorama, by making it dramatic and spectacular, by choosing which perspective to take (i.e. Ottoman or Byzantine) and, linking to this, how to position visitors in relation to the story. We also see the compression of key stories into one representation. Visitors can recognize a lot of well-​known characters and events in painting,

Figure 4.2 One of many P1453 exhibits made up of facsimiles of historic documents, photographs and interpretive texts

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74  Politics of display at P1453 as if a number of highly significant things happened all at once. There is no historical evidence to suggest that these characters and actions were all synchronically present together, so it clear that in the management of temporality there is also an element of creative choice. There are more possible choices:  how graphic the violence might be, how recognizable the protagonists, how heroic, and so on. Epitomising this element of choice, the panorama painting includes the image of Sultan Mehmet’s face in the sky, as if formed by clouds (the visage is based on the famous portrait by Gentile Bellini to be discussed later), suggesting the supernatural theme of the fulfilment of prophecy and predestination, which some might see as inimical to rigorous historiography. In my interview, the artistic director referred to a previous conversation he had had where it was pointed out to him that ‘some of our European friends might get upset’ about the panorama. He had thought about this but his conclusion was that this could not be helped as the Conquest incontrovertibly ‘happened’  –​it was a simple ‘fact’. In this rhetoric, the panorama was no longer seen as a version of history, notwithstanding the choices made in treatment, perspective, emphasis and so on, but rather the true history. Both interviewees felt that the Conquest of Constantinople was a crucial moment that needed to be memorialized. The owner of Elif Sanat noted that the conquest ‘closed an era and opened a new one, and it took place in Istanbul so we wanted to do it here’. The artistic director talked extensively about how the event signalled the first fortification to be destroyed by technology, i.e. artillery canons; as he put it, ‘Castles are out, technology is in’, and this was a way of showcasing Ottoman advances in artillery technology and the epoch-​changing nature of this, not just in Constantinople but in Western Europe as well (as indicated in an audioguide reference to Leonardo da Vinci, who was supposedly inspired by the Conquest to design weapons and machines). We also discussed the particular choice of the moment selected for representation. For them, the key feature of the Conquest was the breaching of the walls, more than the waterborne assault, such as the breaching of the boom chain in the Haliç. Again, this was partly connected to a desire to showcase technological advances. Another reason for the choice of the breaching of the walls was to contradict a less glorious version of the Conquest: Many say that the walls were not really breached and that one night they [the gates] were left open, forgotten [by the defenders], and that’s how the Ottomans got through, because the Byzantine Walls were so strong, how could they be breached? Many people claim this. However, we looked at the documents. We know from a [historic] report requested for Hızır Bey, who was the first Ottoman mayor, that after the Conquest they numbered the sections of walls that had collapsed during the siege. They opened three big breaches. On the first day, not even a little bird

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Politics of display at P1453 75 could get through, and on the last day our horses could go in. The reason for that was the cannons. (Elif Sanat personnel pers. comm.) This was typical of a number of references to accuracy and historical evidence that were used to support a more glorious version of events (and again, the use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ is significant in indicating the interviewee’s identification with the Ottomans). Another example related to the Byzantine defenders: We decided ‘let’s be accurate’. We asked ourselves what would really have happened and we tried to be accurate and not exaggerate. We did not show Byzantine people as if they were scared and running away, because they fought for many years, and how many times was the city besieged and the attackers repelled? They defended even if they died. (Elif Sanat personnel pers. comm.) A key point here is the appeal to objectivity, accuracy, and source materials that nevertheless manages to align with a glorious representation of the Ottomans. As will be seen in the next chapter, many visitors were positively impressed by the idea that Constantinople had been hard-​won, and within the museum’s promotional rhetoric and interpretation it is frequently noted that Sultan Mehmet did not have an easy task, nor easy armies to defeat. However, some accuracy is in evidence: Sultan Mehmet is not shown engaging in hand-​to-​hand fighting, gloriously killing an enemy, but in the more likely position of relative safety surrounded by a retinue. In addition to this, when deciding upon which scene to represent from the Conquest the artistic director recounted how he and his team had had the idea that it should be like a ‘journey into the past’ –​a notion referenced in the promotional material discussed at the beginning of this chapter, which presents the museum as a way of ‘freezing this historical moment’. One era is closing. Why? Where can we show the cannons? Let’s make the 3D cannons, and have a journey back into that time so that we can show the last moment, when the defences broke down and when the Ottoman soldiers start to go into the city. (Elif Sanat personnel pers. comm.) On target audiences, the owner suggested that the museum was an objective representation of a crucial moment in history, and so it was by default ‘for everyone’, with no underlying attempt to appeal to a particular group. (He did, however, note that they had taken pains to make sure that the violence represented in the painting was not too graphic, so as to cater for

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76  Politics of display at P1453 family groups.) According to the producers, there were no target audiences, and only a desire to be accurate. But the interviews showed very well the problems involved in presenting a ‘true’ version of the past, while negotiating the possibility that others may think differently about it: Whether it’s a conservative [muhafazakâr] group that comes, or other groups, who might not like it, we did not worry about it. Well, Istanbul was conquered, somehow! But of course, this is about our idea. Maybe we understand it like this. Could somebody else understand it in a different way? Well, we show it how it was. We discussed it, and everyone gave their opinions and step by step it proceeded. (Elif Sanat personnel pers. comm.) This quotation is also of interest in relation to the controversy after the museum’s opening about the accuracy of the buildings and other details such as the costumes worn by some of the soldiers (Figure 4.3), made from the fur of Anatolian snow leopards, as explained in the audioguide), which was then defended by the staff in a published report through reference to historical sources (Hürriyet, March 12, 2009). Sultan Mehmet II’s portrait was another example of using a historical document. In 1480 Gentile Bellini painted Sultan Mehmet’s portrait at the Sultan’s Court. The Sultan was twenty-​seven years younger when he conquered Constantinople, so although the artistic group used Bellini’s ‘real’ portrait, they had to ‘adapt’ it to show his younger age. While it is known that Bellini went to Sultan Mehmet’s court and produced this painting, today it is accepted that the

Figure 4.3 Ottoman soldiers wearing the controversial battlewear, made from the pelts of Anatolian snow leopards; in front are replica cannons

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Politics of display at P1453 77 painting was repainted often and elements such as inscriptions were added, so its originality and accuracy are considered as compromised.10 Notwithstanding the ideal of objective or ‘neutral’ historical representation, the Artistic Director was proud that visitors experienced emotional responses to the panorama: Well, people get very emotional and say they have goose bumps, because there are a lot of reasons, and we worked hard on it, and there are so many details, and that gets an appreciative response. We were neutral here and we just showed how Istanbul was conquered…There are queues on the weekend, and we hear people cry, and we hear people pray, so we are happy with what we achieved. (Elif Sanat personnel pers. comm.) These responses show a particular politics of history that involves a denial of propagandist or even celebratory intent (‘we were neutral’) while simultaneously making a truth claim about the Conquest and inviting highly emotional responses. The painting arguably represents the Conquest as a glorious victory, but for the staff responsible for the displays and for many visitors, this is just unquestionably what it was, and so the painting operates literally like a journey back in time or window onto the past. These represent some of the producers’ perspectives on P1453. How do these translate into the physical and representational space of the museum itself?

The visitor route and its effects The museum visit is organized over multiple floors (see plan below). The route is relatively controlled, and as many of my interviewees stated, the movement between floors and interiors is rather confusing and disorientating. This means that it is hard to maintain a clear sense of where one is in the building, and in relation to ground level, not least because there are no windows. Visitors enter at the ground floor, where the museum shop is to be found. They are then obliged to go underground via a spiral staircase. Some way down is a relatively small mezzanine room containing text and graphic panels, and entrances to the toilets. Visitors are not obliged to engage with the interpretive panels here, although they do have to enter the room in order to get to the next flight of stairs and descend further. When visitors do so they reach a larger interior, organized in undulating corridor-​ like spaces in which the route is pre-​determined by the interior architecture (Figure 4.4). It is not possible to range around and not easy to backtrack, because of the crowds and the rope barriers that delineate the route. The corridor spaces are lined with textual and graphic panels, alongside some videos, about the life and characteristics of Sultan Mehmet II, his conquest of Constantinople and his subsequent good governance. At around the halfway point in the series of texts, visitors ascend via a staircase to the

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Figure 4.4 Predetermined visitor route at P1453 in the rooms with text panels

panorama itself. A number of my interviewees reported that in this part of the visitor route they felt as though they were ‘going outside’, and this feeling could be seen to correspond with the illusionistic representation of exterior space and sky within the panorama painting itself. This feeling was actively and overtly encouraged in the museum design. In the circular space of the panorama room, visitors are free to roam around. After viewing the panorama painting, visitors descend to the basement once more, but by a different staircase, and return to the text panels and other interpretation resources. At the end of this route, visitors return to the ground-​floor exit and shop area. The organization of the space contributes to a sense of travel or confusion between different realms of experience  –​between the outside contemporary world exterior to the museum building, the historical account embodied in the interpretive resources and the immersive experience in the battle of 1453 itself. In the various environments of the museum the visitor is positioned differently: firstly, as someone learning about history by engaging with ‘past-​tense’ resources –​i.e. literally, where text panels use the past tense to describe historical action –​and then as a participant in or witness to a real historical event as if in ‘present tense’. The visitor route means that the immersive experience of the panorama painting is effectively prefaced by engagement with interpretive panels. This pattern provokes an articulated experience of moving from an experience of the Conquest as ‘past’ to one the same event as ‘present’ through the dramatic and immersive panorama. As the website suggests, ‘at the end of a short and dark corridor, suddenly visitors find themselves in the morning of 29th May 1453, and it is as if they witness the moment in which the city was entered [by the Ottomans]’.11

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Politics of display at P1453 79 Shop

Schematic plan of ‘timezones’ in 1453 Panorama Museum

Ground floor Entrance

(contemporary present)

Arrows indicate staircases Mezzanine Past tense: • Pre-siege history • Hadith • Conquest

Top floor

Basement Past tense: • Conquest • Fatih's rule

Panorama 1453 as present

This is in some ways an accidental or serendipitous articulation of experience. My interviews with the artistic director revealed that the spaces now filled with interpretive panels were originally empty corridors until the Mayor of Istanbul, Kadir Topbaş, instructed the museum staff to put something there, delaying the opening of the museum by six months. The panels were made separately from the team who made the panorama. While this shows that we cannot read too much intentionality into the way in which the spaces are set up, it is still true –​whether by serendipity or not –​that a sense of ‘transitioning’ between kinds of experience is created by the need to progress from past-​tense history of the text panel spaces to the present tense of the panorama. Indeed, museum staff talked about the museum as a ‘time machine’ moving people between present and past. There are other ‘transitionary’ spaces and devices as well. The shop is an opportunity to purchase a souvenir (facsimiles of the panorama, jigsaws, figurines of Sultan Mehmet, reproduction Ottoman weapons and jewellery) as it were ‘of the past’ and to transport it into the context of one’s contemporary, personal existence. A  number of textual references within the interpretation panels also stress the continuities and interpenetrations between history and the present. Since 2016 there has been a life-​sized mannequin of Sultan Mehmet at the entrance to the exhibition, modelled on the Bellini portrait, which is shown behind him in a blown-​up photograph. Mehmet is protected by a rope barrier and the main purpose of the mannequin seems to be to present him as an icon and orientation key to what will follow, fostering a cult of personality around him. He is now effectively the first exhibit that visitors encounter in the museum, almost like a gatekeeper to the experience, and schoolteachers point him out straight away to their groups.

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Textual constructions of the Conquest As stated, there are some 15,000 words of Turkish text in this museum, accompanied by enlarged reproductions of visual images such as historic paintings, maps and manuscripts. Some way through my research, small summary texts in (sometimes unintelligible) English of about 70 words each were placed underneath the Turkish text panels, of about 600 words each. This is extensive text according to western standards (where fewer and shorter texts have become normal over recent decades), and even for Turkey, where museum displays often involve lots of text. The Turkish text panels require some prior knowledge of the historical themes and events that they describe. They are not in especially difficult academic language, but there is frequent use of relatively archaic, sometimes Ottoman, words, that are not common today –​e.g ‘gülzâr’, meaning ‘rose garden’ instead of the modern ‘gül bahçesi’. (This poses a question about whether the Ottoman nostalgia represented by the museum extends to the language used in text panels!) The English panels provide summaries of the Turkish text panels. They all start by referencing the image on the latter, even where it does not seem to be directly linked to the topic. For example, a portrait of the young Sultan Mehmet is presented as illustrating ‘the challenges of the Conquest of Istanbul’, even though the painting –​a courtly image and not a martial one –​does not visibly do this. While the Turkish text panels are well written, the English ones are not. Although the second language of the museum is English, the majority of the museum’s foreign visitors are from Arabic countries and the Far East (Daily Sabah, January 17, 2015) (Figure 4.5) The panels are about the characteristics of Mehmet II and his achievements, the preparation for the conquest of Constantinople, the siege and the Ottomans’ tolerance for the people of Constantinople after they captured the city. Mehmet II and the Ottomans are glorified in the panels. The first panel recounts the history of Istanbul from 7000 BC to the Ottoman period including pre-​Roman and Roman periods, the ‘glorious’ time of the Eastern Roman (Byzantium) times and Istanbul’s decline towards the end of this period. Even within this historical frame of pre-​Ottoman Constantinople, the city is presented as ‘waiting for Sultan Mehmet for a new resurrection’. There is also a kind of set-​up to the theme of Ottoman achievement: the city of Constantinople was in decline, but the Walls were strong and ‘impassable’ and the difficulty of invading is emphasized (another long text is entitled ‘Motto of the conquest:  achieving the impossible’). Also, the city had the support of the Venetians, Genoese and some other Europeans. However, after many unsuccessful sieges through history, the Ottomans managed to conquer the city because of their faith (Islam) and the military technology developed by Mehmet II. The important role of Prophet’s hadith and faith of Islam during the Conquest is pointed out several times in the panels. A video in the mezzanine floor also starts with Prophet’s hadith.

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Figure 4.5 The viewing platform showing the glass barrier; also, visitors on organized tours from Muslim countries outside of Turkey photograph key scenes of the panorama

The development of artillery cannon and its role during the conquest are explained in the ‘the Cannonballs of the Conquest’ panel; this was also mentioned in the staff interview, in some videos in the museum, in the DVD, in the audio guide and by some respondents in my questionnaire sample. As a result of the use of technology in the Conquest, the texts state that an era was ‘closed’ and the new one was ‘opened’, just as staff suggested to me. The key trope –​again connecting to the idea of the historical good and paragon of greatness –​is Sultan Mehmet’s intelligence and ingenuity, which is a common one in popular histories of the Ottomans, as discussed in relation to the breaching of the Haliç by stealth at night. This is not included in the panorama painting, but is present in the form of a bespoke sculptural relief on staircase walls, and in bespoke videos. The other main aspect of the panels is Sultan Mehmet II’s character:  Mehmet II was ‘clever, stubborn, sharp, active and liked physical sports’, understood literature and science, and ‘grew up dreaming of the Conquest’. It is stated that his ‘sword was never sheathed; his boots never left his feet’. This is an important way of framing Ottoman history through the military exploits of the sultans. This aspect was brought up by some of the questionnaire respondents who criticized the way the TV serial Magnificent

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82  Politics of display at P1453 Century presented the ‘wrong image’ of the Ottomans, connecting to the notion of authoritative history and truth to which the museum appeals through reference to ‘scientific’ treatment. Another common theme in the panels is the ‘tolerance’ of Sultan Mehmet and the Ottomans. Many panels indicate that when the Ottomans conquered the city, Sultan Mehmet gave permissions to the different religious groups such as Christians and Jews to practise their faiths. Furthermore, it was not just after the conquest that this ‘tolerance’ was known; even before the Conquest, the museum text recounts that the people of Constantinople said: ‘we prefer to see the Turkish turban rather than the Latin hat’. Another panel also emphasizes the ‘tolerance’ and the ‘justice’ of the Ottomans: By way of their gaza politics [a name given to a holy war waged in order to protect or spread Islam], justice, tolerance and social, cultural and religious practices, the Ottomans firstly conquered people’s hearts and then their castles. The idea of the Ottomans as tolerant of different groups (e.g. religious and ethnic groups) has been an important mode of nostalgia and another form of glorification, because it allows a view of the Ottoman state and its millet system of managing minority groups as a precursor to the kind of progressive multiculturalism associated with late modern liberal politics in the West. The underlying idea in this context is that the Turks, as it were, ‘got there first’ (just as with new artillery technology), and perhaps even invented multiculturalism. As discussed, this way of remembering Ottoman history is fraught with problems because, as many historians argue (e.g. Eldem 2013), the tolerance of Ottoman rulers was economic in motivation and still involved unequal restrictions on others (e.g. Jewish, Greek, Armenian, etc.). While the museum presents the Conquest as unequivocally positive, histories of the same event that compromise this are not explored in the museum. One school of thought maintains that the Byzantine city was already weakened and did not have enough defenders; and that the Byzantines had already been decimated by the fourth Crusade in 1204 and had not recovered by the time of the Conquest. They asked Europeans for help but received little (Mansel 1995, 3–​4; Herrin 2003; Hür 2014). The Byzantines needed warriors and new technology for defence. They employed the Hungarian engineer Urban (sometimes ‘Orban’) but the emperor Constantine XI could not afford to pay him adequately. Then Urban offered his skills to Sultan Mehmet II and was employed by him. Urban produced the largest canons ever. Some think that this changed the future of city: ‘it was undoubtedly Byzantine inability to invest in this technology of warfare that sealed the fate of the city’ (Herrin 2003, n.p.). There are other points of factual disagreement about: how the Ottomans managed to drive about seventy ships on the ground in only two hours, in order to bypass the boom chain defence in the Haliç; and whether the Ottoman soldier Ulubatlı Hasan (whom I will introduce shortly) and his

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Politics of display at P1453 83 thirty companions breached the walls due to damage done by the Ottomans alone, or whether some Byzantine soldiers treacherously collaborated with the Ottomans to let them in (Hür 2014, n.p.). Many scholars also talk about the time when the Ottoman troops first entered the city. They use historical documents written by the people who experienced the Conquest first-​hand in 1453 such as Venetian surgeon Nicolò Barbaro and the Ottoman official Tursun Beg. According to some readings of such sources, the Ottomans looted churches, monasteries, libraries, palaces, homes and either killed the civilians or enslaved them (Mansel 1995, 1; Omouggos 2016). Tursun Beg wrote that the troops ‘took silver and gold vessels, precious stones, and all sorts of valuable goods and fabrics from the imperial palace and the houses of rich… Every tent was filled with handsome boys and beautiful girls’ (Mansel 1995, 1; Feldman 2008, 100–​ 101). A Romanian fresco shows the killing of worshippers by Ottoman soldiers at Hagia Sophia, which had been the central cathedral of Greek Orthodoxy for nearly a thousand years before its conversion to a Mosque after the Conquest (Feldman 2008, 100). Similarly, Barbaro’s very detailed account of the final day of the siege suggests that the Ottoman troops were organized in three waves (‘schiere’, in Barbaro’s diary) who attacked consecutively. The first were enslaved ‘Christians’ who had to climb the ladders, and who were mostly decimated and expendable, the second were ‘vilani’ or non-​elite fighters of low condition, and the third were elite janissaries in white turbans. This is not in the texts, or in the Panorama painting, where it is hard to perceive any such differentiation between groups. Other key stories, for example relating to the moment of the breach, do not match with Barbaro’s account. While these primary sources also need to be understood as contestable accounts, they detract from the status of the panorama as an unequivocal version of events.

The Panorama room As stated in Chapter 1, the painting is a vast, 360-​degree image that has no ‘upper frame’, in that the painting also occupies the domed ceiling of the room in a representation of the sky. Additionally, the presence of a ‘lower frame’, i.e. a lower border where the painting stops, is purposefully obscured by the mise-​en-​scène of a three-​dimensional section of about three metres in width that extends into the room at the circumference of the painting. Here sculptural elements (e.g. reconstructed weaponry) are strewn around as if in the midst of battle. In the following discussion, I work through the categories of pictorial analysis introduced in Chapter 3: content, colour spatial organization, light, expressive content and narrative.

Content The panorama shows the battle for Constantinople in progress. It contains numerous interconnecting scenes. As a semi-​spherical panorama, the image

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Figure 4.6 Sultan Mehmet II on his white stallion with his retinue

has no beginning and no end, but visitors emerge from the staircase to face an immense image of a tree, possibly a reference to the ‘Dream of Osman I’, in which Osman’s vision of a tree prefigures the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans (see Note 6 ). Significantly positioned to the right of the tree is Sultan Mehmet II himself (Figure 4.6), surrounded by his company and dressed in conspicuous red (the colour of the Ottoman sultans, but also helpfully drawing the eye to him and signalling his importance). Sultan Mehmet is on horseback, looking imperious, with one arm raised to give an order. Elsewhere we see:  corps of soldiers rushing into battle; ‘sappers’ digging tunnels under the walls for explosives; defensive ‘Greek fire’ (large ceramic pots of flaming oil and rags) raining down from above as if on the visitors themselves (Figure 1.1), and scenes of high drama where it lands; Ottoman fusiliers loading and shooting grenade launchers; and the walls themselves being breached in various places, including the scene where the soldier Ulubatlı Hasan (Hasan of Ulubat) first hoists the Ottoman flag on the walls (Figure  4.7). This (the story goes) he defended heroically until he was relieved, whereupon he collapsed and died from multiple arrow injuries, but not before inspiring the Ottomans and disheartening the defenders. Hasan is the subject of some debate; he is widely celebrated in ubiquitous imagery and public statuary in Turkey –​and an Istanbul metro station is named after him near the site of his supposed feat of heroism –​ but his real existence has been doubted (Hür 2014). Nevertheless, he is one of a number of actual, or presumed-​to-​be-​actual, historical individuals represented; for example, in Sultan Mehmet’s retinue we see one of his teachers, Akşemseddin, and other known figures from his Court. Some of

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Figure 4.7 The breaching of one of the bastions: Ulubatlı Hasan (Hasan of Ulubat) is first to hoist the Ottoman flag on the wall, notwithstanding his arrow wounds

these historical figures were mentioned by visitors, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Meanwhile, in the foreground, visitors see hand-​ to-​ hand combat, Ottoman troops dying in the Greek fire and the wounded being attended to. On the ‘three-​dimensional platform’ there are reproductions of cannons, weapons and water barrels (Figures  1.1 and 4.3). Each of these is significant. The cannons refer to the innovations in firepower that contributed to the downfall of Constantinople: one of the cannons seems to have ruptured or exploded, as is suggested in the Museum’s account of the battery and in the presence of a replica of a larger, cracked cannon. This narrates that Urban’s cannon was too large, taking hours to reload and overheating, and was intended by Sultan Mehmet primarily to intimidate the enemy, while actually the smaller Ottoman cannons were responsible for the breach. In this case what could have been interpreted as a failure of Ottoman military technology is cast as a purposeful and ingenious military strategy of intimidation of Sultan Mehmet’s. The barrels refer to those used by the defenders, who tracked the building of enemy tunnels by observing ripples in the water, before building and detonating counter-​tunnels to kill the Czech ‘sappers’

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86  Politics of display at P1453 (actually silver miners) hired by Sultan Mehmet. These are far from obscure references:  they were noticed by various respondents during my visitor studies and this is unsurprising given their prominence in popular culture, e.g. in the 2012 film Fetih 1453 about the Conquest, in which characters such as Urban and Hasan of Ulubat appear. In the sky projectiles fly overhead, and the sun breaks cloud cover. An image of Sultan Mehmet’s face is discernible in the cloud formations, if one knows to look for it.

Colour and light The colours of the walls and the action are vivid against a relatively drab earth, and the sky is rendered in harsh but vivid colours over light and cloud effects. This is meteorologically accurate:  the precise time of day is represented by the position of the sun, and even today (when outside) the bright sunlight and gentle haze often mean that it is possible to pick out small details of the walls from afar, and their characteristic colours of cream stone and deep-​pink brickwork against the blue sky are well captured in the panorama painting. Areas of highest value are the city walls and the sky, and the bright red colour of Sultan Mehmet’s clothes (Figure 4.6) and the Ottoman flags (of which there are many) is highly prominent, as is the Greek fire shooting overhead. The effect is to emphasize some key elements. The sky contributes to the immersive effect of the scene, but also casts light on the Land Walls, possibly suggesting divine intervention. The Greek fire contributes to immersive feel while putting the visitor under simulated attack and positioning her or him as though part of the Ottoman forces. In one area we see the Greek fire landing dramatically and causing havoc and death in an explosion. This contributes to the sense of danger and difficulty, suggesting that this was no easy rout (this idea also emerged in staff and visitor interviews). The red colour that repeats across Ottoman flags and outfits forms a kind of anchor to identify the action with the Ottoman forces and to function as a potential symbol of attachment. Notably, the modern Turkish national flag is also bright red. In particular, Sultan Mehmet wears a long red robe, and sits astride a white horse (a particular Turkic breed of horse –​ rahvan –​has often been associated with sultans) vividly picking him out in the crowd. In another area a cannon has just been fired, dramatically sending up into the air plumes of black smoke and reminding viewers of the centrality of Ottoman artillery technology in the battle. The highlights are the sky as the clouds open to the sun, and the towers of the wall (the object of the conquest) that are struck by the sun’s rays, a sign perhaps of divine intervention, as mentioned, and of the conquest as the moment in which Constantinople is brought into the light (a common pictorial trope in western history paintings of battles, for a classic example Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe of 1770 can be cited). As the bringer of light, Sultan Mehmet’s face is in the light while the faces of members of his retinue are in the shadow.

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Spatial organization The most important volumes are the tree and the walls, although the projectiles of Greek fire and their smoke trails are also prominent. The pictorial space is exceptionally complicated and varied, and very busy; there is some empty space in the battlefield, but it contributes to the effect of large expanses of ground rather than sparseness. The hundreds of figures in the painting, each individually characterized and no one repeating, means that the scene seems full and massed. There is a balance between a chaotic and rhythmic feel because of the repetition of red, emphasising both difficulty and danger and order. The logic of figuration is very significant. Because of the overhead representation and the diorama section at floor level, the content of the painting extends into the space of the viewer, putting her or him into the thick of the action and physically situating visitors within the likely position of Ottoman troops. Illusionistic details in the painting such as projectiles appearing to come towards visitors add to this immersive experience, as does the audio track of military music and battle sounds, that are given a visual source in the painting in the encampment of soldiers beating drums and playing instruments. It is worth comparing this what historian Mark Salber Philips (2013) sees as the more ‘distancing’ strategy of conventional museum displays, where exhibition furniture, security barriers and even the non-​interpellative language used in interpretation panels function to separate visitors from, and to position them as outside of, the past. In fact, visitors are subtly distanced from the representation in a physical sense, as there is a circular viewing platform that is the only available space in which visitors can move. The sculptural elements and the painting cannot be touched. There is a glass barrier around the viewing platform (Figure 4.5), but its position and height mean that many visitors use it as something to grip onto while surveying the action. The viewer is thus in the action and out of it simultaneously: the action is going on overhead, but the viewing platform itself is a safe space without any traces of the past as in the surrounding diorama, although sometimes the warding staff wear Ottoman costumes. The glass barrier is also transparent, meaning that the view of the action is relatively uninterrupted. The floor of the viewing platform is wooden, while in the diorama section it is a simulation of earth. There are no mannequins in the diorama to detract from visitors’ own bodily presence on the scene, and this in a country where mannequins are routinely used in museums. The resulting feel is that one has magically (but safely) travelled back in time to the scene of the battle, and all that stops one from picking up a weapon and firing it at the ‘enemy’ oneself is a transparent glass screen and the knowledge that the battle is already won. Another important element of the spatial organization is the dome. Barlas Bozkuş, drawing partially on Foucauldian ideas, argues that the dome has particular meaning as ‘a monumental ideological space that covers the

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88  Politics of display at P1453 empire, the city as well as the Turkish nation’ and is the heart of a ‘neo-​ conservative ideological spatial regime’ (2014, 11). This idea suggests that the dome is a kind of metaphorical cover, or container, for bringing together certain collected ideas (empire, city, nation) in relation to a governmental project of identity-​building. Such ambitions did not come out explicitly from my interviews with the panorama’s makers, who were more interested in going one better than any other panorama, and in creating an immersive experience by maximising the illusionism of the space, such that there is no upper frame to interrupt visitors’ imaginative acts of looking at the scenes represented.

Expressive content The atmosphere is one of danger and action. There is some horror in the image, notably in scenes of violence, and strong expressions of emotion (belligerence, suffering, victory, etc.) in the faces and gestures of combatants (Figure 4.3). But this co-​exists with a sense of the resolution of that action as the walls are breached and the sun emerges strongly from the clouds, creating, lower down in the sky, the hazy, blue-​sky atmosphere of a calm day. Also, while fierce combat and dramatic emotions are on view in some areas, Sultan Mehmet appears calm and in control (Figure 4.6). There is, at first, a sense of not knowing where to look that suggests the fullness of drama and the chaos of action. This is slowly resolved as one notices objects that draw the eye and allow for the iterative interpretation of the scene. The panorama balances a range of affects across its expanse. Alongside this is the audio track of battle sounds and military music, or mehter, which is ‘parallel’ or congruous with the scene and is ‘in the frame’. The sound volume is not exceptionally high, so it feels more distanced than the events of the immersive painting. Mehter is a common vehicle of national pride, used to represent Turkish military prowess (it is played by musicians in historical dress at official parades and at performances at the Harbiye Military Museum in Istanbul), and arguably here, at much reduced volume, it constitutes a prompt for pride, which mixes with the dramatic fighting but also the sense of glorious victory. The musicians depicted in the painting are likely to be a familiar sight to Turkish visitors, as the presence of costumed mehter bands (with the men usually all donning fake Ottoman moustaches) is not unusual in public festivities. All of this, together with episodes such as Hasan’s self-​sacrifice, make a potent affective atmosphere.

Narrative The panorama representation is predominantly synchronic, and the staff interviews I  conducted clarified that the intention is to capture one particular moment –​a decisive one, when Constantinople is about to fall. The focus is on the breaching of the city walls. Notably, other moments and sites

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Politics of display at P1453 89 could have been chosen in this complex and lengthy conflict (as discussed, for the historical record the siege itself lasted 53 days, although the precise duration is debated –​see Herrin 2003). The naval breach of the Haliç or Golden Horn is one of the other emblematic stories, although this is told elsewhere in the museum in subsidiary displays. Although a particular synchronic moment is represented in the panorama, a number of narrative components are prominent within the space that would be familiar to many visitors. The representation is synchronic but invokes key elements of the narrative relating to Sultan Mehmet’s command, the ingeniousness of technological innovation and the effect of the battery, the hostile resistance (e.g. Greek Fire), Ottoman heroism and suffering and eventual conquest. These are the key themes that are both narrated and ‘mapped’ in the panorama display. As noted by narrative theorist Rick Altman in his study of Breughel paintings, ‘besides representing a single moment in time, narrative images often extend backward and forward by reference to a previously constituted story and tradition’ (2008, 212). As Osman’s dream of the tree prefigures Sultan Mehmet’s conquest, so Sultan Mehmet’s good governance that is discussed in text panels downstairs is perhaps indicated by his commanding attitude, at a remove from hand-​to-​hand fighting. The painting relies on what Altman calls ‘celebrity’ (ibid.), or viewers’ prior knowledge of protagonists and action in a given story, and viewers’ ‘narrative drive’ (ibid., 19)  to see a well-​known story played out or fulfilled. One curious point in this regard is the fact that the figure of Hasan of Ulubat atop the tower (Figure 4.7) is very small (because of the perspectival diminution of scale), and yet still he was recognizable by visitors, some of whom even looked for him. There is no obvious consecutive narrative as there would be in the temporal ordering of scenes that we might find in a comic strip or a film, even if it could be argued that both of these forms have influenced the panorama’s construction. But there are visual pointers or ‘relays’ (ibid., 212) between one area and another that arguably designate connections, sometimes causes and effects, which compel the viewer to look this way and that or back and forth. Examples of these include the firearms being pointed and fired, Greek fire shooting out overhead, leaving trails of smoke in the sky, explosions caused, Sultan Mehmet’s gesture of command, pointing to the walls (and in a sense to the future home of the Ottoman regime), and the distribution of buildings and trees. Such relays are important elements within the creation of visitor experience. They create a sense of temporal narrative within a synchronic representation that plays upon visitors’ ‘narrative drive’ to see the story unfold both before and after the moment represented, while also creating a sense of the chaos and immediacy of battle. In this way, the visitor is positioned both in the middle and at the ending of the story, providing opportunities to feel excited by the action (the Ottomans’ endeavour) and proud of the result (the Ottomans’ achievement). In other words, both immersion in and reflection

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90  Politics of display at P1453 on the past are possible –​visitors get the excitement of the battle but they know, and can see, how the story ends, ensuring a kind of narrative safety. The audioguide and DVD also provide a precise key to what is going on and what visitors should notice. The former makes repeated reference to the strength of the walls and the historical accuracy of the painting, appealing to the authority of named academic historians who were consulted in the museum development, and the historical documents such as miniature paintings, 15th-​ century documents and weapons that were used in the reconstruction. Particular individuals and corps shown in the painting are identified, and the accuracy of the costumes and the breaches to the walls are emphasized. Key points of significance are noted. For example, visitors learn about the hairstyle worn by Ottoman troops, who, in line with their Bektaşi beliefs, did not want their faces touched if beheaded by the enemy and grew ponytails by which their severed heads could be picked up. The audioguide also makes reference to the fact that the ‘Eastern Romans’ killed over half of ‘our sappers’. This use of first-​person plural possessive adjective forms another interpellation and a positioning of visitors within the history represented, as personally connected to the past and part of the group represented in the painting. Points of pride also emerge: visitors hear that Leonardo da Vinci (born just a year before in 1452)  was inspired by the Conquest to design weapons and machines; that the Conquest ‘sparked the reform and renaissance movements’, effectively appropriating at least some merit for the European Renaissance; that the successful use of battery meant that defensive walls and castles became outmoded everywhere, leading to an entirely new era. Alongside this are clear invitations to visitors about how to respond: the moment observers step onto the platform they experience a shock of ten seconds. Although they have entered an indoor area, they get the feeling that they are outdoors again. (DVD) Likewise, the audioguide prompts the visitor to notice how the inclusion of the sky in the dome and the ‘infinite’ rendering of the image mean that ‘realistic effect and feeling captivates the observer’. Visitors are positioned in such a way as to identify with and as the Ottomans, and the combined effect of image and sound is emotive and epic (and as noted, ‘epic’ is a word used in museum publicity to characterize the Conquest). In the next chapter I will show how some visitors expressed feelings of admiration, pride and gratitude in relation to the Ottomans after having visited the museum.

Emotional prompts in the museum The elements discussed in this chapter taken in combination provide a number of prompts for visitors to engage in emotional practice. The ‘time

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Politics of display at P1453 91 machine’ suggestion made by the contorted visitor route has the effect of disorienting visitors. They do not know where they are in the building and it feels like they suddenly emerge into outdoor space when they enter the panorama room, where they are intended to feel momentary shock, as the audioguide commands. In the panorama room itself, emotional prompts are coded into the representation:  the life-​sized faces of soldiers in the foreground are shown with ferocious, belligerent or horrified (but not fearful) expressions, depending on whether they are skirmishing, advancing or about to die in a blaze of Greek fire. These facial expressions and the bodily poses that go with them are –​if one is amenable –​‘catching’ in such a way as to encourage visitors to identify and feel the emotions they suggest. The military music is a prompt for pride, and the battle sounds let us know that we should indeed imagine ourselves as if we were there at the battle. That makes the Greek fire flying overhead feel more real, and positions us as heroic invaders, co-​opting us in the fight that ‘closed an era and opened a new one’. Meanwhile, Mehmet II calmly surveys and orders, a key to the narrative drive that the battle will be a success, so none of this violence and death is in vain. The narrative is apparently synchronic but it allows visitors to amalgamate a range of emotions attached to different moments in the story: the feeling of high risk and danger, righteous belligerence (because the prophecy justifies the conquest), the bravery and self-​sacrifice of the soldiers (epitomized by Hasan of Ulubat), but also the calm reconciliation of victory and security in the strategic powers of Mehmet. This crafted mix of emotion connects intertextually to other sections in the museum which celebrate his wise rule and magnanimity, which provides further moral justification for the invasion. These prompts are constructed relationally with cultural devices outside of the museum walls. These include the staging of massive public shows celebrating the Conquest in unequivocally positive terms, the representation in city space of Mehmet II as hero and emblem of pride and Neo-​Ottoman values, the emotive speeches of AKP politicians referring to Ottoman successes and, indeed, the sense of wrongs being righted  –​that after years of suppression and competitive erasure of history by secularist republicans, this, for conservative Islamists who identify with the Ottoman past, is finally ‘our time’ and ‘our place’, when the city can be re-​conquered. The museum is a site for the staging of these emotional blends, from the vicarious danger of battle, righteousness and nostalgia for Ottoman rule to an outlet for vindication after the frustrations suffered under secularist republican ascendancy. In the next chapter, we will see whether and how this affective prompt is met by the emotional practice of visitors.

Final thoughts: greatness, will, winning From the analysis of this chapter, which focuses on representation and display, it is easy to imagine the museum relatively empty, and occasionally, for a short while, the visitors do thin out drastically as if pushed in and out

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92  Politics of display at P1453 of the room by some wavelike flow, jointly made by the building and the crowds. But often, the panorama room is packed. It is hard to move around, and some people express wonderment and awe at what they see in the panorama room. This brings us back to the idea of the panorama itself as an eminently scopic invitation to fuse looking with virtual experience. Comment links the panorama with the need to ‘regain control’ in the face of a loss of identity, and in the context of a divided society with memory conflicts, this sheds interesting light on P1453 as a ‘cultural device’ for rebuilding memory erased by Republicanism in a time when a Conservative-​Islamist identity was (and still is, at the time of writing) in the ascendant (see also Barlas Bozkuş 2014). For many, this collective experience of looking must be representative of a kind of confirmation of common social memory based on a notional truth, around a story that reconciles itself into the fulfilment of destiny. This kind of collective looking suggests a kind of ‘reverse-​panopticon’, to adapt Michel Foucault’s idea ([1975] 1991): visitors are looking on history, but we will see that this looking is a declarative and communal activity in which people’s emotional responses are also on show, and identities and group bonds are made through the maintenance of an affective atmosphere. It is also about looking in other ways that are reflexive both at the level of the individual visitor and the population of visitors present at any time in the space, who are conscious of one another. Many visitors look at history in relation to their own lives, and they also look at each other, looking. It is part of a social memory practice involving Bennett’s ‘civic seeing’ (Bennett 2006). Astrid Erll suggests that there are different modes of remembering single historical ‘events’, giving the example of the range of ways in which the First World War can be remembered (Erll 2008, 7). One could plot a similar range of modes of remembering relating to the ‘Conquest’ on the basis of its museum presentation alone. It can be remembered as a mythic event (‘the war as fulfilment of divinely pre-​ordained Turkish destiny’), as part of political history (the war as ‘the great turning point when everything changed’, as a traumatic experience (‘the horror of the Greek Fire, the danger, death, intensity of fighting’, etc.), as part of family history through appropriation (‘the war my ancestors won’, as we will see in the next chapter), and, implicitly, as a focus for bitter contestation (‘the war our ancestors won, whose memory has since been erased’). As Olick et al. state, powerful institutions ‘provide narrative patterns and exemplars of how individuals can and should remember’ (2011, 20), and P1453 arguably provides a blueprint for collective memory made powerful because of its truth claim. In some ways it is telling to contrast the affects of the Turkish constitution moment of 1453 with those from elsewhere. This is particularly so in relation to European memory, because of the implication of Europe in different aspects of the construction of P1453. The Byzantines stand, in some ways, as proxy for Europe; but they were (in the museum’s narrative) justly conquered by the Ottomans, not least because of divine predestination. P1453 interconnects with another side of Neo-​Ottomanism in the

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Politics of display at P1453 93 political domain, which is the uncompromising assertion of the international and global position of Turkey; what hangs in the air is the European extent of the Ottoman Empire at its height, and the need to reclaim an analogue greatness. P1453 is a reminder, and it is not free from future-​making dimensions, including the aspiration to inspire ‘future conquerors’; perhaps we should not take this too seriously, but nevertheless the museum is about greatness, will and winning. Comparably, the museum insists on a kind of representational and historical primacy –​it is the ‘largest’, the ‘only’ panorama of its kind, the one with the most figures, that took the most effort, and so on; the Conquest (in the museum) was epoch-​making, changing everything, catalysing the European Renaissance, inspiring Leonardo, and so on; it was even the birth of multicultural, tolerant society. In this sense there is both a sense of competition with Europe and a discursive bid for key icons of European achievement. The Conquest is, in this view, hardly a matter of ‘invasion’, subjugation or colonial appropriation; instead, the memory paradigm is a mixture of old and new. It combines the glorious and heroic victory, modelled on out-​ dated, historic ways of seeing and feeling the past as in Dumoulin’s Waterloo panorama with the righteousness of the liberating army. Europe, in different ways, runs through the museum representations. The similarity to Dumoulin’s Waterloo panorama, which was painted in 1912, might suggest that P1453 is a more or less unconscious return to old ways of making history. That is, a return to a singular, glorious, one-​ sided and selective narrative that fixes in place a specific view of the past and calls it true. It would be easy to stereotype this as a retrograde, propagandist project of the kind that heritage scholarship in the age of Lowenthal (1985) or Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) sought to problematize. Indeed, more multi-​perspectival approaches that question what happened, that open up different viewpoints and entertain doubts are indeed gaining ground in comparable museums overseas; for example, in the National Trust for Scotland’s high-​tech Battle of Bannockburn Visitor Centre, a spectacular and immersive digital show puts visitors right in the centre of the Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English in 1314, just as with P1453 except with 360º 3D projections instead of painting. Nearby, visitors can listen to the stories of different (fictional) characters from opposing parties and play a wargame where it is possible for the outcome of the battle to go differently. Of course, we know how the battle really went, and notwithstanding the innovations, the Visitor Centre is not entirely free from celebratory and banal (Scottish) nationalism, in which England’s Edward II was ‘faced down’ by the ‘stubborn resistance’ of the Scots and that the victory led to the Declaration of Arbroath and Scottish Independence (National Trust for Scotland 2017). As with the Conquest of 1453, Bannockburn is irredeemably mediatized in public memory culture through popular film, re-​enactments, commemorations and monuments. In other ways it is also comparable, such as in contemporary nation-​building: it can be read against recent political

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94  Politics of display at P1453 developments such as the incipient question of Scottish independence today. The battle ‘continues to conjure up ideas of freedom, independence and patriotism; of heroism, perseverance and triumph against overwhelming odds’. The ‘modern, state-​of-​the-​art interpretation…will ensure that Bannockburn continues to be commemorated, and that it retains its pride of place in the national consciousness’ (ibid.). Indeed, P1453 shares with many European and other museums and exhibitions a desire to chart a mythic story of the national self through immersive means, even though different memory cultures and affects are in play; we see this, for example, in the popular panoramas of Yadegar Asisi, or in the theatrical dioramas of the ruins of wartime Warsaw into which visitors are pitched in the Warsaw Rising Museum and in the Royal Castle in Poland. Here too, unambiguous and singular stories are made of the past, and emotionality is a key part of the exhibitionary logics in order to enable visitors to frame their subjectivity through recourse to the past. This chapter’s study of P1453 has something to offer to these cases as well; together with the ‘European’ dimensions of P1453’s account of the Conquest, they serve as a caution that the geopolitical organization of memory is not always clear-​cut. P1453 presents a story of closure within the literal circle of its own narrative and provides a form of episodic fulfilment. Constantinople is always being conquered, and people go to watch this, engaging in nostalgic experiences that I will explore in the next chapter. But, if Constantinople is always being conquered, we may ask: for whom, and why? As discussed, the producers avoid any discussion of target audiences with their stated aim of serving truth. They disavow any intent of appealing to one group or another, and yet it is clear that the museum attracts large numbers of Conservative Islamic visitors (something that my interviewees acknowledged at various points) and repels others. This poses some additional questions for the next chapter and subsequent discussions:  what is the museum’s influence and reach, and what does this mean for the formation of memory communities and group belongings and exclusions? What are the emotional effects of the constant conquest of Constantinople on the museum’s visitors? What does the museum do for them, and what do they do in the museum?

Notes 1 The Roman Empire was divided between the east and the west in early 4th century AD, Constantine I (272–​337 AD) made a new capital for the Eastern Romans in 324: Constantinople. The term ‘Byzantine’ is used by the modern historians to refer to the ‘Eastern Roman Empire’. The Byzantines established Orthodox Christianity and reestablished the Greek language, ruled North Africa, southern Italy, the Holy Land, Asia Minor, all of today’s Greece and much of the Balkans. However, they lost their lands gradually, and from 1261 to 1453 (the Empire ended with the Conquest of Constantinople), the emperors ruled only a city-​state comprising what was left inside the walls of Constantinople.

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Politics of display at P1453 95 2 http://​topkapiturkdunyasi.com/​homepage/​turkish-​world-​culture-​quarter/​turkish​world-​culture-​quarter.aspx accessed 29.11.2017. 3 ‘Pan-​Turkism’ is a political movement that aimed the cultural and political unification of all Turkic people. It is first started in the late 19th and early 20th century in the Ottoman Empire. Since then, the movement has continued to develop in state discourse, both in Republican and AKP contexts (Landau 1995). 4 http://​panoramikmuze.com/​panorama-​1453/​hakk%C4%B1nda.aspx#  –​ accessed 29.11.2017. 5 Söğüt is a town and district of Bilecik Province where the first Ottoman settlement was created in 1299. 6 The oak tree is an important symbol of the Ottoman Empire. It relates to the ‘Dream of Osman I’, recounted in the 13th-​century Turkish-​Anatolian epic poem, in which Osman’s vision of a tree prefigures the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. 7 ‘Türkiye’nin ilk panoramik müzesi “İstanbul’un Fethi’ni” yeniden yaşatacak…’ http://www.ibb.gov.tr/tr-TR/Lists/Haber/DispForm.aspx?ID=17004 accessed 13.10. 2016. 8 There are no other ‘curator’ figures employed by the Municipality to develop the Museum, and the Museum Manager (who I was not able to interview) is responsible for day-​to-​day running rather than conceptual or creative programming. This arrangement of contracting a private company to develop the museum is common in Turkey. The company is not the only one of its kind; different companies produced the dramatic paintings in other museums such as the War of Independence Museum in Ankara and the Harbiye Military Museum in Istanbul. The difference in the case of the P1453 is that the painting (and 3D elements) is really the only exhibit, unless we count the text panels, videos and relief sculpture of the Haliç. The company is currently involved in the development of other panoramic museums. 9 Associate Professor Dr.  Erhan Afyoncu and Assistant Professor Dr. Coşkun Yılmaz are named as consultants for the texts. 10 Since 1916 the painting has been at the National Gallery in London; the website says ‘the sitter is reasonably identified as Mehmet II’ (https://​ www.nationalgallery.org.uk/​ p aintings/​ g entile-​bellini-​the-​s ultan-​Mehmed-​ii accessed 30.11.2017). 11 ‘Kısa ve karanlık bir koridorun bitiminde ise ziyaretçiler kendilerini birden 29 Mayıs 1453 gününün şafak vaktinde hissetmekte ve adeta şehre giriş anına şahitlik etmektedirler’. (http://​panoramikmuze.com/​panorama-​1453/​fiziki-​ mekân.aspx accessed March 2016).

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5  Visitor experience at the Panorama 1453 Museum

I have come to see how and in which conditions our ancestors [‘ecdat’] won these lands and how they fought for us. I  have also come to see the real Turkishness and the Ottomans. I look at today’s young generation and I see a big difference! Is not it true? I have come from Antalya [to Istanbul] … just to see our sacred objects:  Fatih Sultan Mehmet Han’s shrine and this museum. What I mean is I have come here with love for my country, to see the real children of this country. Thanks be to Allah that I achieved this! (Male, 29, butcher)1

This visitor, who responded to my questionnaire, came to the museum with ideas in mind about what he wanted to see, and within that, how he wanted to feel about it. He did not come with a vague desire to find out about the past –​as it were to learn ‘what happened’, because he already had a well-​ established understanding of this. He came with a particular sense of the past that he wanted to find reflected in the museum, along with the meanings that it bears for him, including religious and nationalistic ones. In the quotation, he makes explicit connections with the past by calling the Ottoman invaders ‘our ancestors’, relying on a memory culture of identification of descendance. For him, the Ottomans represent the ‘real’ Turkishness, as if other groups and their histories somehow cannot really be considered similarly ‘real’ as representations of proper Turkish identity. Indeed, he went on to suggest that there is a ‘big difference’ between the Ottomans and the current (westernized) youth, whom he later said were too far removed from Ottoman values. This sense of a decline was expressed with a mixed sense of regret and indignation. As he went on, he said he too wanted to be on horseback playing a part in the battle for Constantinople, as if wishing himself into the historic scene represented in the museum. He said that the youth of today should ‘at least’ be taught to use swords, regaining the lost skills and fortitude of the Ottomans. His words are laced with emotional past-​present connections that configure an ‘affective-​discursive loop’ (Wetherell 2012, 7) proud descendance, regret, loss, and the possibility for continuity and restoration. The man’s comments are not untypical of the responses I encountered at the museum and help to introduce the emotional repertoire of some of its

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Visitor experience at P1453 97 visitors. In some cases, people make their visits with premeditated agendas and strong opinions, and attachments to the past, which are consolidated at the museum. This recalls Smith and Campbell’s statement that museums and heritage sites are places where people go to feel (2015, 445), and that this is about reinforcing the meaning of the past for the present through emotional practice. Proper reverence for the Ottomans could be, for example, a way to potentially reverse a perceived moral decline in the present. Or it could help people to complain about the ‘youth’. (It can be noted that the respondent was hardly old himself, so we may ponder who he means by the ‘youth’ and how he positions himself in relation to them.) Smith and Campbell also point out that people desire to have emotional responses; they seek them out and look to museums and heritage sites to mediate them; they become skilled at recognizing and ‘working with’ their emotional responses in such settings (2016, 445). Linking this to practice theories, we can view this as ‘work on the self’ through the exercise of emotions (Wetherell 2012, 12). Wetherell gives the example of how some people use cycles of religious observance for this work on the self; the routines, structures, and prompts of observance are set frameworks enabling people to exercise a specific emotional repertoire. My argument is that P1453 offers a comparable reference and resort for deliberate affective practice. Excluding those whom I invited, all of the visitors that I observed and interviewed in the Panorama 1453 Museum powerfully expressed emotional responses related to feelings of connection with the Ottomans. Below I  explore the emotional nature of their encounters with the past, and the kinds of ‘work on the self’ that these encounters helped visitors to do. First, I  explore how this strong connection with the past is made and what it means to visitors. Then, how do they feel, and what part does the sense of connection to the past play in this? It also appears that there are threats towards visitors’ connections with the past, whether it is change or unnamed others. What are these threats and what part do they play in visitors’ responses? For many visitors there was a sense of something that needed to be done to rectify matters, as if to say ‘what should we do about it?’ My belief, as I will discuss, is that that ‘we’ referred to a strongly demarcated social group, with its own values and perceived opponents. Below I present an account of my visitor studies, amalgamating insights from observations, questionnaires, and in-​ depth interviews and accompanied visits. I  did not ask blunt or loaded questions, like ‘who are you/​ what is your identity?’ and so on. Rather, the key issues as I present them are grouped around the prominent statements and themes in people’s talk. After this, we will see that visitors’ sense of connection to the past, and an unquestioning belief that the story told by the museum is ‘truth’, was not universal. The ‘oppositional’ participants, who came on my invitation, had very different views and responses. Sometimes these too were very emotional ones, but with a very different repertoire from that of the ‘regular’ visitors who visited of their own accord. Additionally, there were others

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98  Visitor experience at P1453 who showed more negotiated and complex positions, whose responses complicate an entirely binary or dichotic view of warring memory cultures, and their voices will bring this chapter to a close.

Who we are I was touched and I cried. All those soldiers are our grandfathers, fathers, and uncles  –​whatever you would call them  –​they are our ancestors [ecdat]. (R18, female, 61, housewife) The majority of the visitors clearly connected to the Ottomans through the idea of ancestry or ‘ecdat’ and identified who these ancestors were. The connections with the ancestors were expressed with strong shows of emotion, including crying for them. The term ecdat, which comes from the Arabic word ecdâd (‫)دادجا‬, is particularly associated with Ottoman culture (as is commonly known in Turkey), and has a quasi-​sacred value that bestows status both on the ancestors referred to, and on the speaker (Şengül 2012). In Kemalist culture the alternative Turkish term ‘ata’ is preferred, referring to mainly Atatürk. From many possible examples, here are a few examples. One visitor ‘came to see what the Ottomans/​their ancestors did for them’ (R1, 28, female, housewife). Another, a woman aged over 60 and wearing a headscarf, reprimanded a group of schoolchildren who were talking about the ‘soldiers’ in the painting, telling them ‘don’t say just ‘soldiers’  –​they were our grandfathers!’ As can be seen, all of these expressions rely on the notion of ‘ancestry’ (ecdat) and the ‘our grandfathers’ trope (dedelerimiz) to invoke a collective personal connection to the Ottoman past. People used ecdat to refer to ‘Fatih’ (Mehmet II), to the warriors of the Conquest ‘who died for us’ and other Ottoman Sultans or key historical figures related to the Conquest. In the Panorama section, visitors were showing one another the painting and discussing it with great interest, often pointing out key figures such as Hasan of Ulubat to each other with excitement. Some visitors also mentioned that they were happy that the museum had not ‘forgotten’ about Hasan or Akşemseddin. My three Islamist in-​depth interviewees talked at length about ecdat and noted pointedly that there had been 2500 years of Turkish history –​that it did not start in 1923 (the date of the foundation of the Republic). For them, ‘our ancestries’ (Ecdatlarımız) also included the so-​called ‘sixteen empires’ of the Turkic peoples as well. But the most important ancestors were the Seljuks (the 10th–​14th-​century Turkish Muslim dynasty) and the Ottomans, particularly as they were active in spreading Islam. One participant, (68, shopkeeper), stated that ‘we had sixteen empires in the past, but in the 1920s this was ruined by a weak state that was not serious’. Notably, just before the interviews Erdoğan had recently made reference

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Visitor experience at P1453 99 to the idea of the Turks’ ‘sixteen empires’ of Turkey, by having actors at his new Palace in Ankara dress up in costume to represent guards the different empires, from Hun Turks to Ottomans. He has done this on a number of occasions, most famously for the visit of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in January 2015 (which met with some ridicule from the national and international press). The ‘sixteen empires’ idea (‘16 Büyük Türk Devleti’) is a revival of a Pan-​Turkist-​nationalist concept popular after the 1980 Coup, when a number of official representations were produced, such as postage stamps, in support of a national identity based on the Turkish-​Islamic Synthesis. While aligning loosely with the historical-​territorial claims made by AKP-​supported initiatives, as in the Turkic Neighbourhood near the museum, the ‘sixteen empires’ also aligns with Erdoğan’s aggressive opposition to the idea that Turkey’s history begins with Atatürk or with the Republic. There is a striking congruence between his comments and those of this group of participants. I  asked about this, enquiring whether they had seen the photographs of Erdoğan’s ‘sixteen empires’ mise en scene. Indeed, they had, but they said that their ideas about a long history of Turkey had already been in place, and that Erdoğan was simply reflecting them, to his credit. Additionally, the use of pronouns and possessives, especially forms of ‘us’, ‘our’ and ‘them’ in referring to ‘ancestors’ was striking. In fact, all 104 respondents, with only one exception (an MHP supporter), used first-​person language (we, us, our) in relating themselves to the ancestors and historical stories as well as representations on display. This suggests at least that visitors imagined themselves to be part of a community. The use of ecdat is a mode of connection between the past and contemporary identities. But it also constitutes a group (descendants) indicated by the prominent use of ‘we’ ‘our’ and ‘us’ in responses (and of course, if there is a ‘we’ then there is also an ‘other’). A teacher in the museum pointing a map and telling the primary school children: ‘Asia was ours! And we conquered Europe!’ Her emphasis was such that it was as if she had herself experienced an event (the conquest) which happened more than five centuries ago, but at the same time she projects a sense of global dominance. In Iwona Irwin-​Zarecka’s conceptualization of the memory community, it is not just people who ‘lived through’ a key event who belong, but also those for whom an event is a ‘key orienting force for their lives and public actions’ (1994, 49) –​in effect, a ‘constitution moment’ (Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2015) that is adopted by a group as central to identity. As much as shared experience, it is the shared meaning attributed to a historical memory that makes the memory community. This can be linked to the idea that people group together, or can be grouped, in ‘emotional communities’, coming from theories of affect (Wetherell 2012). Such communities feel that they know who they are in relation to others, that they have common interests to protect, and have shared affective practices that relate to common stimuli. Ecdat is a powerful device for forging connection between past and present because it implies that the past is literally present within people

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100  Visitor experience at P1453 who use it, who think of themselves as the latest in a line of descendance that stretches back to 1453 and beyond. It enables the construction of an imagined community, a ‘we’, that is not limited to the present but goes back centuries. Indeed, one of Benedict Anderson’s tenets of nationalism is the subjective construction of the nation’s ‘antiquity’, that contradicts properly historical views of the nation’s actual age (1991, 6–​7). Ecdat is a device for constructing that antiquity and an imagined community of spiritual descendance. It is a curious idea in some ways. People do not use it to talk about their actual identifiable ancestors, i.e. people from previous generations of their own families. Indeed, many people in Turkey often know relatively little about their longer family histories, for genealogical research is difficult because of the lack of public records in modern Turkish (many of those that exist are in Ottoman Turkish). Alternatively, it might seem that ecdat can be used as a marker of ethnic descendance, but this too is not straightforward, as the Ottomans were not a homogenous ethnic group, not least because of the practice of devşirme (the levy of male children from Christian households for service in the Ottoman state) and the bondage of women from conquered territories into sexual slavery and motherhood (even concubines such as Hürrem, who was from what is now Ukraine, could be the mother of sultans!). Nevertheless, it might be possible to say that these associations –​of actual ancestry, genetic inheritance, and ethnicity –​are loosely in play in people’s talk, which is to say that ecdat operates like a familial and ethnic connector, although people do not dwell on the substance of this, and that looseness is one of the means for the creation of past-​present bonds. It could also be that expressions of emotion play an important part in the construction of ‘ecdat’, so that the expression of emotion is not just a reflection or consequence of the bond between present and past generations, but one of the very means of forging it. There is, of course, another element to this, which is Islam, and the identification of the Ottomans as an Islamic people enables a sense of religious and spiritual connection for Muslims today (but only Sunni Muslims), and as we have seen this is expressed in the museum in the story of the Hadith. The role of Islam within the concept of ecdat and within the group identity of P1453 visitors will emerge again as we proceed, in the next section but also in Chapter 8. Within ecdat as a line of descendance that flows backwards from the self, there are key individuals who represent the collective values to which the community should aspire  –​figures like Mehmet II and later sultans, such as Suleiman the Magnificent, who achieve great victories. Yet it is not just sultans and the social elite who embody key values. Hasan of Ulubat was (in the story of the Conquest) a common footsoldier, but it is precisely his non-​elite status that makes him iconic and emblematic, as if to say that there could be an Ottoman hero in even the humblest of individuals. The fundamental nature of the Ottomans is constructed as homogenous (even if their ethnicity was not) and fixed, irrespective of social position, suggesting a

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Visitor experience at P1453 101 total collectivity that can be extended to the present and, indeed, to the self, as intimated by many of the visitors to whom I spoke. Another key connection of ecdat is the idea (and problem) of inheritance. This was as if to go to the museum to ask: to whom do we owe our presence? What is it that we have inherited from our ancestors? What is (or should be) ours because of their achievements? This was an inheritance both of territory (Constantinople, and the lands of the Ottoman Empire) and spirit; here visitors often flowed into talk of responsibility, as if to ponder whether ‘we’ are protecting that inheritance, serving the legacy of the Ottomans and living up to their memory. Or, alternatively, a sense of privation could emerge, in assertions that the ‘inheritance’ had been taken away. Below, I will discuss this, and the construction of the enemy responsible for that privation. These characterize particular ‘affective-​discursive loops’ (Wetherell 2012) typical of the emotional community of visitors.

How we are (our nature) Even though boiling oil was poured [and] the blaze was coming, they [i.e. the Ottomans] were still going there [to the Walls]. That interested me very much. That means heroism and sacrifice. Well, our ancestors were like that. (R87, male, 40, refectory worker) Many visitors expressed very strong ideas about the nature of the ancestors, making a point of the fact that they did not accept alternative viewpoints. Discussion about ‘true’ or ‘real’ history elided with statements about the nature of the ancestors. Visitors very often mentioned the self-​sacrifice and bravery of the ancestors who died willingly for the common good. This was, for the respondents, their ancestors’ reason to be in the battlefield, rather than merely fighting. Visitors also talked about the importance of the faith of Islam for the ancestors’ victory and success, and very often this led to a critique of contemporary society. The Islamist participants who came to the museum with me also pointed this out clearly, connecting religious belief to a critique of modern society including: opposition to abortion; the prevalence of crime, adultery, rape, and suicide today because of a loss of ‘Islamic values’, in comparison with their absence in Ottoman times when these things ‘did not happen’; and the ‘rotten values’ of the West transferred to Turkey via films, TV, and the education system. Many visitors connected this image of the Ottomans as a moral and upstanding group, a model of virtue for the present, to contemporary TV and film culture. Their responses were often highly critical of the TV serial Magnificent Century as it showed the ‘ecdat’ wrongly. The ‘real’ ancestors spent most of their time ‘on horseback’ (i.e. in battle), not in the harem like in the TV show. Instead, other TV serials like Diriliş, which is supported by the AKP, and films like Fetih, focus on the achievements of the Ottomans, which

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102  Visitor experience at P1453 are primarily seen to be military victories. These televisual forms operate in broad alignment with P1453 (indeed, in one section of the display is a film, employing lots of CGI, showing the Conquest in the epic style of such shows and films). For the visitors, this was the ‘true’ nature of the ancestors. What was also striking about this is that I asked visitors no questions about TV and film, but since this is an important component of public contest over the past in Turkey with a very high profile, it is unsurprising that visitors might make such common references to this. It also shows the interrelations of people’s engagements with cultural forms, and the ways in which the museum operates in and with a kind of ecology of representations. The presence of cinematic-​style videos in the museum show that it draws upon the popular cultural forms that many of its visitors consume, but crucially, its visitors perceive it to be discriminating in the story that it tells. TV shows can present things inaccurately, as those who criticize the veracity of Magnificent Century believe, but to these visitors’ minds, there was no chance of the museum doing that. Indeed, for them, the museum was like a corrective to wrong history, an utterly reliable zone of truth to which visitors resorted, to connect with the past as it really was. This meant that the glorious presentation of victory, and its key protagonists, was seen unquestionably as accurate, and the characteristics of the Ottomans that this presented were also ‘real’ ones, a word much used by respondents interested in witnessing and rediscovering their own ‘real’ selves in the museum.

Our feelings We loved it [museum] very much and we were ashamed in front of our ancestors. How much blood, sadness and suffering in order to leave us a homeland! They did not even know us. I don’t think we deserve them. We were really touched [speaking also on behalf of his wife]. (R48, male, 49, dentist) For visitors, it was in the heroic nature of the ancestors to be brave, and to fight for the common good and in fulfilment of divine will, to be selfless (even sacrificing themselves when needed, like Hasan of Ulubat), ingenious, commanding, far-​sighted, pious, and morally upstanding. This linked to an emotional repertoire among visitors of pride, gratitude, and admiration. Very often, as R48 stated, visitors felt a strong sense of shame about not living up to the example of the Ottomans, their bravery and self-​sacrifice for ‘us’, and being in debt. These highly emotional responses were so dominant that they often recurred many times within individual respondents’ answers to different questions within the questionnaire, even where such responses were less appropriate to the question asked. As extreme emotional responses, some cried (e.g. R18, female, 61, housewife; R37, female, 40, housewife) and others stated that they wanted to cry but stopped themselves (e.g. R75, male, 29, butcher; R93, male, 58, electrician). Crying was in each case presented as

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Visitor experience at P1453 103 an expression of gratitude for the achievements of Mehmet II and his troops. As discussed, visitors crying also emerged as a topic in the staff interviews. Why do people cry in the museum? This is quite hard to determine precisely, and the scant literature on crying in museums is also equivocal. Nevertheless, James Elkins’ suggestions about why people cry in front of paintings in art museums offer up some ideas for P1453. Crying, Elkins says, can be complex, involving a mixture of emotions that can be hard to disentangle (2001, 20). But he argues that romantic cultural forms (e.g. romantic music, the romantic novels) make people cry, perhaps because of their high drama. People do not cry over James Joyce novels or Buñuel films, according to Elkins, and perhaps the glorious and arresting story of the Conquest in P1453 is the kind of ‘romantic’ narrative that Elkins says moves people to tears. One of my respondents –​R19, male, 55, a driver, wearing a traditional Muslim outfit –​began to cry during an interview, his voice catching as he reflected on just how much Mehmet II had achieved and how heroically, against such adversity. Crying for the hero in this way was a response to the narrative of the museum (from the Hadith to the Conquest and then the good governance of Constantinople and its vanquished people), but also connected to a sense of loss, and the erosion of Mehmet II’s legacy. Elkins suggests that another of the reasons people cry in front of paintings is because paintings express the fact that time passes and things have changed; the contrast between past and present becomes hard to bear. For Elkins, atmosphere is another important condition of crying. He gives the example of the small room in the National Gallery in London dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Burlington House’ cartoon, which has low ambient light and feels separated from the larger, more crowded main galleries, with an intimacy and quiet that feels like a chapel and is more likely to induce moving experience (2001, 117). At P1453, highly emotional responses like crying may be made more likely by the prompts embodied within the structure of the display, such as the loud audio track of battle noise and military music, or the dramatic gestures and facial expressions of the soldiers represented in the panorama. This is part of the construction of an ‘affective atmosphere’ that is ‘completed’ by people’s actual behaviour in the museum. However, none of my ‘oppositional’ visitors were at all moved to tears by these emotional prompts, suggesting the need for some kind of predisposition or readiness on the part of visitors who cry that is part of habitus, and a kind of willingness to ‘give in’ to the emotional structures of the museum and to take part in the affective atmosphere. As we will see in later chapters, crying is also common in the memory culture of Atatürk. In Chapter 8 I will discuss the phenomenon of crying at both P1453 and AWIM to consider the interrelationships between memory cultures, but also between the representational modes and narratives of the museums and people’s predispositions towards emotional behaviour. Indeed, I  do not mean that visitors’ crying was somehow fake, or just for show. In the example of the interview above it seemed both real and spontaneous. Nevertheless, I believe that many visitors

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104  Visitor experience at P1453 came to the museum expecting content that they would find emotional. Moreover, I also believe that they expected to find other visitors responding similarly, meaning both that the museum offered a safe space for affective practice and a ground for the constitution of a group or community. This communal dimension recalls Durkheim’s understandings of the patterning of weeping in mourning practices as a matter of obligations for group membership, rather than an ‘individual’ compulsion (1995, 401). The strong emotions expressed by visitors included deep desire to live in the Ottoman era or wanting ‘to have a more Ottoman “soul” after visiting this museum’ (R51, 45, male, self-​employed). Some visitors actively imagined themselves within (or into) the representation: Basically, it would have been better if we lived in that era (R86, male, 40, insurance company worker) Experiencing that moment [i.e the Conquest of Constantinople] is so different. I wish I was on one of those horses…I really want that. I mean it: to be one of those who were holding a shield. (R75, male, 29, butcher) The immersive nature of the panorama also led to visitors’ longing to be really part of the action as R75 stated above. Nostalgic emotional responses included a regret that the Ottoman age was over, in the sense that they are about lost or compromised pasts that need to be restored. For Smith and Campbell, ‘nostalgia is integral and constitutive of modern life, and an “inevitable emotion in an era of rapid and enforced change” ’ (2015, 12). In psychological accounts (e.g. Sedikides et  al. 2008), nostalgia can be understood both as a positive emotion, or vehicle for travelling back in time to evade humdrum everyday existence and to use the past to provide a sense of orientation in the present and a defence against change. However, it can also involve self-​deception and selective remembering, so that the past comes to seem like a lost utopia when everything was better. But in such understandings the frame of reference is often the life of the individual, and what she or he may remember nostalgically from personal experience. In P1453, visitors engaged in a different kind of nostalgia connected to a moment in time well before their own lives. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym identifies two kinds of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. The former is about longing, recalling the poetic, romantic, and existential associations of the concept. Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, ‘does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather truth and tradition’, and involves historical revivalisms at state level, including, amongst other things, the reconstruction of historical monuments to evoke a national past and future (ibid., xviii, 41, 49). The idea of restorative nostalgia can be used to account for the ways in which an attempt is made to restore to the present some aspects of a particular historical regime,

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Visitor experience at P1453 105 for example the reign of a particular sultan or the early Republic of Atatürk. Such regimes are thus presented as valuable models for creating contemporary social and political orders, and as sources to guide people’s moral and ideological attitudes in the present. Reflective and restorative nostalgias can be distinguished typologically but in practice often call each other up. In my interviews, people’s reflective nostalgic expressions lamenting the demise of the Ottoman regime often prefaced restorative statements about the need to recapture (perceived) Ottoman values and to replicate Ottoman achievements in the present. R75’s response, cited at the beginning of this chapter, shows how reflective nostalgia can slip into restorative nostalgia. To recall, this visitor argued that ‘at least to teach swords and shields to people is our duty!’ as if the Turkish state of today should instruct the citizenry in the use of 15th-​century weapons. However, this seems less fanciful than it might when we consider the use of Ottoman imagery in publicity campaigns or public representations relating to the AKP, including Erdoğan’s ‘Sixteen Empires’ publicity, or the 2017 billboards showing Erdoğan handling a bow for the anniversary of the 1071 Seljuk victory over the Byzantine forces at Manzikert, discussed in Chapter 1. And of course, upon leaving the museum visitors can browse the reproduction Ottoman weapons on sale in the shop. While nostalgic expressions at P1453 suggest that something has been lost, many respondents saw this as the consequence of an overemphasis on Republican memory to the detriment of Ottoman memory. This emerged in talk of erasure and enforced forgetting, as first shown in Chapter 3: In fact, the new generation  –​and us included  –​have been forced to focus on the Republic’s history and ideology, and they have been trying to make us forget about our origin and real past. This museum was established to stop this. In a similar way, making films and TV serials [e.g. Diriliş] has the same purpose:  to prevent us from forgetting our real self [‘öz’]. (R57, male, 21, student) A common trope in such responses was the understanding that this enforced forgetting or erasure was not an accidental circumstance of history, but a hostile act of privation by a specific enemy. Many expressed that the Republicans attempted to make people ‘forget’ about the Ottoman past. Some showed vociferous anger about it. After visiting the Panorama section, a middle-​aged male visitor shouted ‘they [i.e. Republicans, Kemalists etc.] took our ancestors from us for 80 [sic] years!’ For Another (male, 60, retired civil servant) ‘the Republican period erased our society’s memory’; he discussed monarchical states in Western Europe, citing the UK, before asking rhetorically: Where is my monarch? They [i.e. the Republicans] sent him into exile! That is a sorrow for me!

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106  Visitor experience at P1453 It is not unreasonable to point out that the founding of the Republic was inextricably connected to the abolition of the sultanate, and that Mehmet VI (1861–​1926) did indeed go into forced exile (in Malta). However, early Republican historiography such as Outlines of Turkish History, published in the 1930s, does not exclude the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and is not unfavourable to Mehmet II (if anything, in Outlines he is a western-​facing, educated soldier and statesman much like a proto-​Atatürk!). As discussed, the stock Republican historical narrative is rather that the Ottoman regime had degenerated from its glorious eras, and needed to be replaced for Turkey to be great again. This is the story I myself learned at school in the 1990s. The historiography of the Republican period in fact celebrates the Conquest of Constantinople, but in different, more secular terms compared to P1453 (for example Outlines omits mention of the Prophet’s Hadith and asserts that history and life are unaffected by forces ‘external to nature’). At the same time, strongly Kemalist museums such as the Harbiye Military Museum in Istanbul also present glorious representations of the Conquest (indeed, a new panoramic diorama has recently been opened there, albeit on a smaller scale that P1453’s). It is an oversimplification to say that Ottoman memory was supressed or denigrated; some aspects of it were, but others were claimed as part of the glorious history of Turkey. Nevertheless, many of the visitors whom I interviewed expressed a very clear sense of forced and intentional privation. This enabled a position of victimhood and constructed an unambiguous social enemy against whom they could define themselves in relation to another emotion: indignation. In turn, indignation often ‘looped’ into righteous and prescriptive statements: what needs to be done, and what should happen, to make things right.

Restoration, reconnection: ‘what should we do?’ I have come to see what the Ottomans did for us. The people [i.e. politicians] who are fighting for a seat should come and see this place. Also, the ones who begrudge Erdoğan his position should come and see this. I feel very emotional. This is my first visit but I will come back here. You see how Turkey was rescued with such difficulty, how we have come to this situation with such difficulty! With such difficulty, our integrity [‘namus’] and honour were rescued, and now we are here. People should pray and give thanks! Like the Ottomans, our dear president [Erdoğan] is also fighting for these values. People should know the value of our president! (R3, female, 65, housewife) So how do ‘we’ connect to the ‘real’ past again that was ‘lost’? A very clear connection was made between the Ottoman past and present, between Ottoman achievements and contemporary political values, often directly

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Visitor experience at P1453 107 linking to the AKP and sometimes to Erdoğan himself. Similar comments were made in other questions to express that it was the AKP who were bringing back the ‘forgotten’ and ‘real’ past and history. Visitors’ explanations about their reasons for visiting –​that they came to see what the Ottomans (their ‘ancestors’) did for them –​were often made in connection with disparagement of today’s Turks who have almost forgotten about their ‘ancestors’ and are not doing anything for them, ‘not even praying for them’. For many respondents, 1453 Panorama was the place where they came to realize and regret what they did not think about or do in everyday life in relation to their past and who they ‘really are’. When they felt that they wanted to discover some ‘real’ stories, then this museum was, for them, the place to come, suggesting again the idea of an external structure required for affective practice. Wetherell’s example of cycles of religious observance is an interesting point of contrast. A  cycle of observance has its routines and set rituals. The museum is a place, and when talking to visitors it sometimes felt like it was a place of observance, almost a kind of pilgrimage, with comparable importance for people’s emotional lives. Many visitors at the P1453, including one of my in-​depth respondents, Arif, stressed the importance of bringing ‘our young people’ to the museum to develop a proper historical awareness in them. One male visitor (R13, age 43, self-​employed) wanted ‘the whole of Turkey’ to come to the museum and see the real past, as if to be converted, or to return to the ‘true path’, as he said that he hoped I would. When I asked him why, he said that he could see, on the basis of my clothing and appearance, that I was not likely to be amenable to the teachings of the museum, but that there was still time for me to change my ways and views. The visitors I have described seek to know themselves through the past. They know the ancestors from whom they perceived themselves to be descended, what their nature was, how and why this was ‘lost’ or indeed ‘taken’, and how to connect to the Ottomans again, as if to bring them back, or even to become them, as if recapturing a ‘real’ identity. They also know who they are not, and who their enemies are –​these were the very Republicans who have deprived them of their history. These were the people against whom I heard many visitors inveigh. Alongside the notional enemy status accorded to some  –​such as Kemalists  –​there also seemed to be a further construction of otherness, as shown in the comment above about returning to the true path. Many modern-​looking, westernized (çağdaş) people had, for such visitors, forgotten their true selves and history, but could regain these through exposure to the museum. However, the AKP has been in power since 2002 and its government administration has been using the Ottoman past very actively and promoted conservative Islamic values, while supressing Republican memory and culture. In this sense, it is curious that P1453 visitors talk about their past as still ‘lost’ or ‘taken’. The celebrations of the Conquest are now more spectacular than any days related to Atatürk’s memory or early Republican

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108  Visitor experience at P1453 events, and mainstays of the secular state, such as the ban on headscarves in public institutions, have been removed, notwithstanding significant opposition from secularist parties. One visitor to whom I talked touched upon the headscarf issue, addressing me personally in reference to the AKP’s lifting on the ban on wearing headscarves in public institutions (universities, schools etc.). He said, ‘Look at you: you have made the choice not to wear the headscarf! Why should not my daughter be able to make the opposite choice?’ As with people’s references to TV shows, this was not something I broached –​ I  had no questions about headscarves. In this sense it demonstrates the way the visitor’s engagement with historical memory  –​the Conquest of Constantinople –​looped into concerns about contemporary social and religious identities in Turkey, and narratives of victimhood and oppression; it shows the overlaying of time-​frames (1453 and 2015), or the visitor’s rapid movement between them, and the affective-​discursive connection he made between the past glory, on the one hand, and on the other, social politics and group rights in the present.

What does it all mean for ‘others’? When Wetherell talks about ‘communal affective atmospheres’ (2012, 140), she likens them to the feeling of swimming in the sea and passing through warmer and colder areas. However, contrary to the natural-​world metaphor, she is at pains to suggest that this is not actually ‘natural’ or given, and nor is it transmitted by some kind of contagion; rather, it is ‘actively created and needs work to sustain’ (142). In this view the panorama in itself cannot absolutely and universally define emotional response, and as indicated, some of the people whom I  invited to the museum certainly did not take part in the ‘communal affective atmosphere’; some actively resisted it, or even disparaged the people whose emotional responses I have described so far. For some of my invited visitors, all of the historical figures and events that meant so much to regular P1453 visitors were ‘meaningless’ or deemed to be ‘only’ history. Most did not wish to visit this museum in the first place. For example, when I initially made contact with Erol by telephone to arrange the visit to the 1453 Panorama Museum he said the museum name itself ‘sounds terrible’. (Erol classed himself as part Marxist, part anarchist, part ‘radical democracy’.) At a later date I  reminded him of this conversation and he said that his bad feeling about the museum was because he could guess what its rationale and purpose would be, and he had not visited ‘because I could tell what kind of place it was’. In other words, he presumed that the museum had a propagandist agenda. Ottoman history had no positive value for him –​and indeed he noted that the Conquest had meant exile or death for the conquered. This is a version of events that the museum avoids. Instead, there is a video reconstruction of the reading of Mehmet II’s firman that granted freedom of religious practice to the conquered Constantinopolitans. As the firman is read out the people in the crowd

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Visitor experience at P1453 109 (all costumed actors) congratulate one another with expressions of relief and appreciation. Erol was not familiar with alternative accounts, such as those from the historical sources discussed in the previous chapter, but he was inclined towards an understanding of the Conquest as a shameful act of trespass and violence. He was not swayed by the museum’s version of events, nor its moral and religious justification of the invasion. Another ‘alternative’ participant –​Meral, a 56-​year-​old female journalist and photographer  –​also responded oppositionally to the celebratory history of the Conquest in the museum, commenting ‘history in this country is just racist!’ Like Erol, she had no nostalgia for the Ottoman period; indeed, she thought that something had ‘gone wrong’ then. She expressed a general dislike for regimes with excessive political power. In her view both Ottoman and Republican regimes could have created more democratic and free states, but had not. The ‘Kemalist’ female participants Buket (34, independent art historian), Ece (36, assistant manager of an events company) and Nehir (32, teacher) saw the museum as a site of ‘propaganda’ (the term is the same in Turkish) for the AKP, like Erol. Buket was very angry at the museum and loudly criticized almost everything. The participants also described the language in the panels as very ‘exaggerated’ and ‘heroic’ in that it shows the Ottomans as ‘almighty’ and ‘amazing’. They were annoyed about the fact that the museum reflects Turkish history as if it were only about Mehmet II and the Ottomans, ignoring Atatürk. (Indeed, the question ‘where is Atatürk in the museum?’ may seem perverse but it will turn out to be a thought-​ provoking one for later discussion.) Additionally, they all thought that there was too much emphasis on religion and disliked the museum’s suggestion that the Ottomans were victorious because of their strong religious beliefs. For the Kemalist visitors, the Conquest had no particular personal significance and the phrase ‘only history’ recurred, as did their disparagement of the visitors they saw in the museum, for whom the Conquest was clearly much more than that. For my Kemalist visitors, ‘recent history’, starting with Atatürk’s time, was more important because of its greater relevance to their political viewpoints. One of them, Ece, said that ‘for me Republican history is more important as it is closer to my political view’. She clarified, ‘I know that the Ottomans and Fatih were important but this is just history’. It was clear that some of my invited visitors were prejudiced against the museum at the outset, before visiting, one even noting that the museum’s name ‘sounds terrible’, even though there is nothing that is expressly ideological in the name. Simply the idea of dedicating a museum to the events of 1453 was enough to prejudice this participant, who immediately connected this particular choice of history with a social group (Conservative Islamists/​ AKP supporters) that he opposed. This extended to disdain for the group expressed in pejorative terms:  the museum ‘smelled of hacı amca’ (my emphasis) indicating a feeling of revulsion so strong that it was experienced, or at least expressed, as sensory disgust; this was disgust at those people

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110  Visitor experience at P1453 who readily consumed a propagandist history, extended to the physical habitus. With some of the invited visitors it was quite difficult to compel them to come to the museum, such was their reluctance. From this it may be possible to speculate about the extent to which such museum representations operate within relatively discrete groups who self-​select, so the reproduction and dissemination of a particular historical mythology and the values that it carries with it can be powerful but demographically limited. One participant said, ‘an opposition party supporter would not come here!’, suggesting that social divisions are reinforced and reproduced by museum visiting, and also, critically, by elective non-​visiting based on prejudices about the histories chosen for representation and their interest groups and uses. In this perspective, the potential for people to be ‘converted’ to a particular viewpoint or to ‘change their minds’ about history because of a museum seems limited by the self-​limiting of the audience. However, this is not a universal phenomenon; if ‘normal’ P1453 audiences seem to be self-​selecting and with apparently quite homogeneous group belongings and viewpoints, this was not always the case at AWIM, a Kemalist museum that nevertheless attracts some Conservative-​Islamist audiences, as I  will discuss in later chapters. But P1453 elicited highly negative comments about the link between the museum and party politics. When I asked one respondent –​Nehir –​whether the visit had changed her attitudes and opinions, she stated emotionally: I would say yes. Before, I had some suspicion about how this government is trying to make the Ottomans more important and visible. By emphasizing a link between the Ottomans and religion they are trying to make this already conservative public even more religious and Ottomanist. Visiting this place has confirmed my suspicion and I find this very dangerous for Turkey’s future. It has made me feel hopeless about Turkey. I wish I hadn’t seen it… As discussed, none of these visitors would have contemplated visiting had it not been for me, so they were not actively seeking out a situation or opportunity in which to engage in emotional practice, as I have argued that the regular visitors did. However, resistance to the AKP in social, cultural and civil contexts is both visible and widespread (consider the ‘Justice March’ of 2017 from Ankara to Istanbul), and engaging in resistance, whether through public activism or in private beliefs and personal choices, is something that many people are proud of, even if this can seem to be mixed with the ‘hopelessness’ mentioned by Nehir. In this way, the oppositional responses to the museum can be seen to express a different kind of pride from the one practised by regular visitors, and it could be that the museum triggered a set of established emotional responses, for example of proud resistance, that connect to well-​worn grievances over governance and the organization of civil society.

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Visitor experience at P1453 111 So far, this chapter has focused on a range of visitors whom I argue are particularly disposed to certain attitudes towards the past and to certain ways of feeling about it. In turn, this has a connection to people’s choices to visit one museum or another in the first place, and the experiment of bringing unwilling visitors to P1453 has illuminated different historical and emotional attachments, as well as the social dynamics that they connect with. The responses I have discussed also show the interaction of memory culture, emotional practice, and habitus across different communities: how people know who they are, which group they belong to, to which they do not; how to recognize those on the other side, not least from the physical markers of dress and appearance, whether by my western clothing or the Islamic dress worn by many of the visitors. However, as I  have hinted, the situation is rather more complex. The visitors I characterize in this chapter represent, in my view, extremes. Those whom I  encountered in the museum (i.e. not my invitees) were sampled randomly, and even if they represent the majority of P1453 visitors, they were in extreme alignment with the messages of the museum. Meanwhile, for my invited visitors I  deliberately chose a range of people, some of whom I  anticipated would be extremely oppositional. There were people in between, who sometimes negotiated the social and memory divides more acutely, or in some other way complicated a simplistic binary opposition between two communities –​Ottomanist and Kemalist, with different historical, political, social, and moral sensibilities. One of the most reflexive of these was Aynur, a 35-​year-​old Sunni Muslim woman working as a curator and conservator, although not at P1453, and I will focus on her visit at length because it is particularly informative. Aynur was interested in history in general, having read history at university. She was particularly interested in Turkish history but also in the pre-​Turkish Byzantine period and ‘Beylikler’ period of small states between Seljuk and Ottoman empires. Although her historical interests were plural and not fixated on the Ottomans, she felt that the Ottoman period was particularly important as the age preceding the Republic. She also stated that she felt an attachment to the Ottomans because they shared her interests in art and Sufism, ruled in a decentralized fashion (this could be disputed, although as an interviewer I did not do so) and because people were relatively free under the Ottomans. In a sense she viewed the Ottomans as having exercised a kind of liberal government, similar in some ways to the claims made about the Ottoman state as the first ‘multicultural’ one. She also talked about Atatürk, reflecting thoughtfully on her relationship with his memory in a way that illuminates the cultural politics of living with the past: Could we talk freely about Atatürk in the past? Perhaps people can talk a bit more now, but my situation is this: it was perhaps about my environment… in this country they put you in a situation where you have to like Atatürk or dislike him. Because of that –​maybe it was a

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112  Visitor experience at P1453 reaction –​I just did not want to think about him. But I always thought he was a very good soldier. I also thought that he made a lot of mistakes. As a historian I always thought that the Alphabet Reform2 was absolutely wrong. It was a trauma for knowledge. But he had good sides too: I always saw him as a good party leader. I always looked [at him] from a distance. This is a complex position on the significance of Atatürk and on her own enculturation, within which she saw as a dichotic, oppositional, and competitive memory culture. Aynur herself seemed to be working through these ideas as she spoke, rather than explaining an established position of hers. In her own thinking, she managed to parse what she liked and disliked about Atatürk, but this was about transcending what she saw as set, determined positions within society. Notwithstanding her independent thinking, Aynur had not visited museums related to Atatürk; she had visited Anıtkabir, but not the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum (AWIM), because she had not realized that there was a museum there. Perhaps this also reflects the social determination of memory cultures. It seems quite astonishing that an educated woman working in the museum sector in Istanbul would be unaware of the existence in Ankara of one of the most visited museums in Turkey. But perhaps it is not, and AWIM was simply outside the particular habitus, or the ‘cognitive horizons’ (Bennett 1995) associated with her social group at home and possibly at her workplace too, where a religious conservative culture prevailed. When viewing the painting she noted, ‘well, we know the history but it might be useful for people who don’t’. She did not, however, question its accuracy, selectivity or suggest other viewpoints that might have been taken and generally seemed to understand this history as true. But as someone with an identity connected to a sense of being educated and cultured, a visual reminder of history was superfluous. It may be that her ‘distanced’ position, as if she were above the need for spectacular representation of the past, is part of her habitus as a highly educated historian and curator –​ indeed some of her criticisms of the museum, such as those about the size of fonts in labels –​are typical curatorial preoccupations. Nevertheless, such dispositions co-​existed with others relating to her religious and family background, which she seemed to be negotiating with her reflections on memory culture and on the museum representations. Bourdieu’s idea of habitus has been critiqued for its apparent deterministic nature as it can be interpreted as suggesting that all behaviour is a consequence of some kind of social inculcation, against which the subject is powerless to react and forge new dispositions. For example, how is it possible for us to forge new political beliefs independent of those transmitted to us, or to develop a taste for something independently? This is part of a complex debate on the nature of being –​agency and self-​determination –​ and this book has no space for an extensive discussion of this. However, as

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Visitor experience at P1453 113 Hilgers (2009, 728) has argued, this determinism in the concept of habitus is countered because the ‘conditionings’ which produce habitus can produce an infinite number of behaviours and habitus is in a state of permanent mutation. This does not imply an ‘ultimate’ or ‘true’ freedom but does mean that a person can take ‘relatively free action despite the obligations that stem from a given position in the social space has the ‘capacity to adopt a free behaviour that is probably more difficult to foresee for his or her partners’, including struggling against norms (ibid., 748). In her discussion of emotion and habitus, Wetherell cites Andrew Sayer’s argument that habitus is not just a result of a process of conditioning, but ‘also arises through intelligent and reflexive adaptation to new circumstances’. People ‘ponder and suffer angst over the patterns in their lives, make resolutions, and resist the forces that seem to be moving them in what feels like the wrong direction’ (Wetherell 2012, 105–​106). In some ways this seems to characterize Aynur’s reflexivity, perhaps connecting to changes that she found significant for herself, such as her perception of an increase in autocratic behaviour on the part of the AKP, for whom she could no longer bring herself to vote. Eiko Ikegami’s reading of Bourdieu’s habitus stresses the idea that the strategies people adopt to control, and fare well in, situations frequently fail because of the unpredictability of social exchanges, which is to say that habitus never perfectly equips us for every eventuality and mismatches occur in which its patternings no longer help us to navigate life (2012, 338). Aynur talked at length, and sadly, about how she had recently been criticized in her workplace for her westernized clothing (even though she wore very ‘modest’ dress, including a headscarf), and that this had led her to question rigid positions and prejudices within society. This opens up other considerations on habitus. Smith et  al. argue that the Bourdieusian concept of habitus has begun to ‘creak under the strain as the intersectionality, multiplicity, and fragmentation of people’s social positions has become evident in recent years’ (2018, 6). Aynur’s case suggests different responses to this: firstly, that different aspects of the habitus –​different sets of dispositions –​may come to the fore at different times and places, and that these may well involve particular affective practices and respond to certain sets of ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild 1979) specific to situations such as the workplace or the museum visit; secondly, perhaps what we see in the complexities of her visit and statements is precisely the habitus ‘creaking under the strain’ of dealing with a multiplicity of such situations, and a consequent reckoning of their differences. The final participant was also anomalous in his responses, but in a different way. Ali, a 56-​year-​old male estate agent, had also changed his outlook over time, in relation to religious, political, and memory culture. A  non-​practising Sunni Muslim pacifist, Ali had gone from actively supporting Conservative-​ Islamist parties to left-​ wing and Republican parties. He believed in the importance of both Mehmet II and Atatürk, but as a pacifist he regretted both the Ottoman conquests and expansionism as

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114  Visitor experience at P1453 well as the death of so many Turkish and enemy troops in Gallipoli. For him, Atatürk had ‘brought civilization to Turkey’. He had been a viewer of the TV serial Magnificent Century but this series led him to be disappointed in Suleiman the Magnificent, particularly in his treatment of Hürrem. He reported that he stopped watching the serial in disgust, not because he thought it misrepresented the Ottomans (as many conservative Muslims do) but because, in his view, it represented them accurately, as they truly were. Although Ali held complex views, as is clear from this description, he enjoyed the spectacle of the museum quite uncritically. This was his second visit and he reported having been very excited the first time, less so on the second. The visit prompted him to make a number of historical observations, pointing out Hasan of Ulubat and discussing the cannons and other weapons shown in the scene, but he did not express particular admiration for Mehmet II and the Ottomans, and nor did he give any sign of perceiving a political or propagandist intent within the museum. As discussed in Chapter 3, Stuart Hall gives three hypothetical positions from which ‘reading’ might be made:  dominant/​hegemonic, oppositional and negotiated positions (Hall 1993). Almost all respondents in the questionnaire, who were mainly conservative Muslims and the participants Arif, Hamit (58, had been a teacher but was now a self-​employed businessman) and Ahmet from the same group, accepted the encoded meaning unproblematically. The groups that I identified as ‘Kemalists’ and ‘those critical of both sides’ understood the ‘dominant’ meaning and were clearly opposed to this. However, as discussed earlier in this chapter, responses to the museum did not all fall into a binary of complete acceptance or complete opposition and rejection. The many extreme responses do suggest divisions across groups in Turkish society, but other responses complicate this and point to more complex positions and attitudes in political and politicized understandings of history. For example, Aynur was a conservative Muslim woman who clearly ‘negotiated’ the meaning of the display and seemed indeed to be thinking about and modulating her own position in response to the museum. She was not afraid to criticize aspects of the museum (the caricature-​like painting) but enthusiastically accepted some of the museum’s messages, including the notion of the Ottoman state as tolerant and enlightened. To complicate matters we can point to Ali. He seemed to spend much of his life negotiating quite independent positions in relation to social norms (for example, being Muslim but not believing in prayer), but when visiting the museum for the first time enjoyed it, perhaps largely because of its spectacular nature, and on his second visit (with me), seemed to engage only very superficially with the displays. His strongly-held beliefs, for example his pacifism, were not awoken by the visit itself, although they came out in general conversation. So, his position does not correspond easily to the three outlined by Hall, because his engagement with the museum was not of a kind or a depth that provoked any reference to his own attitudes and beliefs. He

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Visitor experience at P1453 115 seemed neither to welcome nor to resist the emotional pull of the museum representation and the affective atmosphere there, but remained seemingly indifferent to what he saw. The benefit to this research of working with responses from Aynur and Ali was to problematize simplistic correlations between museum representations and groups, either because people, like Aynur, negotiate their ways through what appear to be dichotic memory cultures and ways of life, or, like Ali, seem to float over the top of social division, as if unaware of and unresponsive to the rhetorical and governmental appeal of the museum, reminding us that not everyone is susceptible to the influence of museums, governmental agendas or spectacular, emotive displays. These different kinds of response, and the complexities they illuminate, will be discussed again in Chapter 8. There, I will also explore unexpected links between memory communities. While there are clear divides between the emotional responses of ‘dominant’ visitors and the oppositional ones whom I invited, it is also striking that there were refractions or echoes across the divide: types of pride, resentment, feelings of privation and threat, anger, and prejudice.

Final thoughts: pride, difficulty, nostalgia Although the museum’s narrative centres on Constantinople, Europe runs through it. For some of the visitors I interviewed, adopting a ‘Europeanized’ identity and politics was clearly to go down the wrong path in Turkey, and the museum represented a ‘reminder’ (as one respondent put it) of the nation’s true history and self as distinct and different from Europe. Interviewees directed anger at those who took Turkey on this wrong path, and who aped European ways that were part of a ‘rotten’, materialist, impious moral order. This fed into reflections on the dominance of Turkey within Europe and a desire to see Turkey in some way ‘re-​centred’ within the world. While some respondents used the ‘gateway’ trope to describe Turkey’s situation between Europe and Asia, others more bluntly characterized it as the ‘cradle of civilization’ or the ‘centre of the world’ that the Ottomans had taken over with divine predestination. Visitors saw the importance of the Conquest as an Islamic victory that fulfilled the Hadith and situated Islam as a powerful force in Europe. The significance of 1453, said one respondent, ‘is that the Islamic World defeated the Crusaders’. He went on, ‘If it did not, we would have gone backwards. Conquering Vienna was not as important as this, but if we had conquered Vienna,3 now the Balkans would have been ours’. The Islamic dimension was coupled with pride in military might: ‘we have intimidated the world!’ exclaimed one respondent, as if 1453 were not long ago. Indeed, this was often looped into considerations about the present day, as with this reflection on the contemporary renewal of Turkey’s global power, so that it is as it was in Ottoman times, configuring an us-​them dynamic with Europe: ‘now we are powerful again, with the AKP. And now Europe is jealous of us’.

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116  Visitor experience at P1453 Recent research into AKP members’ perceptions of Europe reveals similar sentiments. One respondent commented:  ‘The EU is afraid of us. We are surpassing them. We are becoming stronger. They are afraid of Islam. We are modernizing but we are not European. We have different cultures, religions and beliefs and we cannot overcome that’. In other responses this was linked to ideas of Ottoman military and cultural dominance: that European unity was a result of the Ottoman threat, and that the Ottomans ‘transformed’ Europe culturally through its example.4 Of course, the othering goes both ways, for in some European contexts the defeat of the Ottomans at the 1683 Siege of Vienna or the 1571 Battle of Lepanto are commemorated by some –​ often groups on the far right of the political spectrum –​as the moment when the alien encroachment of Islam into Europe was halted and reversed. This is, however, entangled with the contemporary politics of Islamophobia in Europe and such commemorations occur largely below the official level, where a number of right-​ wing activist and groups and political parties such as the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, (Freedom Party of Vienna, or FPÖ) celebrate the halting of the Ottomans at the Gates of Vienna through organized commemorations, social media groups (e.g. just one of many is Gedenken 1683) and comics (Wodak and Forchtner 20145). Nevertheless, there are curious echoes across the objects and affects of remembrance across Turkey and Europe in relation to Ottoman memory. Celebrating territorial expansion in European heritage is fraught with problems because of the history of the twentieth century, and the Second World War in particular. What Jeffrey Olick (2007) has called the ‘politics of regret’ characterizes the emotional management of such histories in the present, which, after a prevalent focus in official heritage and memory on the Nazi war effort –​including the invasion of Poland and the mass extermination of predominantly Jewish civilians –​has now taken hold of memories of European colonialism, This involves the reconfiguration of old ethnographic museums that were once showcases of the benefits of imperialism. In the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg, Sweden, for example, a display on the exploitation of the Congo communicates a core message that Europe has blood on its hands: ‘people with common languages and cultures were separated by the European desire for power’. Child soldiery, the burning of villages, mass exodus and the interethnic conflicts of the twentieth century are laid at the door of the European nations present at the Berlin Conference of 1884–​1885. Similar affective reckonings can be found in other contexts, such as the German Historical Museum’s 2016 ‘German Colonialism’ exhibition, in which a ‘difficult history’ paradigm was used to process a past ‘that is recognized as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-​ affirming contemporary identity’ (Macdonald 2009, 1). At a basic level, if the Conquest of Constantinople was the taking of territory by force and the subjection of others to the power of a new state, then it could well be tilted to align well with such a politics of regret and seen

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Visitor experience at P1453 117 as an instance of difficult history. Indeed, the ‘oppositional’ visitors whom I interviewed strongly disavowed the pride that was expressed by regular visitors. The Conquest, in their view, was certainly nothing to be proud of, and not material upon which to base contemporary values. Nevertheless, the museum and its visitors evade a politics of regret for the Conquest of Constantinople through a number of discourses:  one is the legitimacy conferred by the Hadith; another is the sense that the city’s vanquished inhabitants were content and grateful; and finally, visitors negotiate their own position of victimhood. Although they position themselves with the victorious Ottomans, the real enemies are not the Byzantines, but the secular powers within Turkey who subsequently deprived them of their past. The visitors to P1453 who expressed a sense of victimhood and privation from an enemy that is both outwith and within, both ‘European(-​ized)’ and Turkish. If this curious blend of affects –​celebration of victory over others simultaneously combined with melancholy for empire and victimhood –​seems odd and unique to Turkey, we may also find analogues elsewhere in Europe. Recent work on imperial nostalgia among visitors to an open-​air museum in the UK reveals a comparable ‘affective-​discursive loop’ in which some people fondly remembered Britain’s global dominance, interrelated with a bitter sense of being deprived of the past by the adherents of cosmopolitanism (Daugbjerg et al. 2019). At Beamish Museum in northern England, which presents a reassembly of historic landscapes and life in the region, visitors whom I  interviewed for that research expressed similar senses of pride, indignation, loss and a desire to return to the old ways, to resume one’s old selfhood. Indeed, there are some similarities between the two contexts: both museums rely on immersive environments (although of different kinds); both the UK and Turkey are on opposite sides of Europe, both were the centres of far-​reaching empires, and both have problematic relations with the EU; in both countries multiple media representations  –​whether it is Downton Abbey or Diriliş –​mythologize or romanticize aspects of the past to make it an object of nostalgia. This research recalls Paul Gilroy’s work on people’s ‘post-​imperial melancholia’ in the UK (2004), which argued that victim status is a precious and exalted position that people compete for. In this view, what is prized is the ability to ‘take umbrage’, express ‘righteous indignation’ and perceive oneself as ‘missing out’ and not having one’s ‘natural’ claims recognized (Wetherell 2012, 7). In Gilroy’s work, this manifests in grievances on the part of white English people towards ‘immigrants’ who fail to ‘integrate’ so that ‘in a bizarre twist, some members of a nation that acted as the colonial oppressor have come to understand themselves as the victims, claiming unfairness, infringement and lamenting in particular the loss of English identity. (Wetherell 2012, 7)’ As Wetherell says, such victim status ‘often depends on practical affective work to establish entitlement and rightful status, a sense of self as good and fair but abused’ (2012, 8).

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118  Visitor experience at P1453 This combines with the specific cultural power of the museum, as a (presumed) vehicle of truth and a means of connecting with the ‘real’, supported by the spectacular illusionism and atmosphere that feels like time travel. As one visitor put it, ‘I knew this history, but feeling that atmosphere is very different! We were part of something!’ (R40, male, 25, soldier). Barlas Bozkuş maintains that P1453 works bluntly to create ‘a new class of citizens with a new relationship to Turkish-​Ottoman identity’ (2014, 1), as if the museum were set up to convert people, who are, as it were, blank slates. But my research suggests a more complex set of relations between the museum and its visitors, which is more about an audience that is in many ways already ‘in-​tune’ with the museum, and seeks both a confirmation and a social and emotional space to exercise identity positions. The museum may indeed work to bring into being and assemble a particular imagined community, and people bring commitments to this, such as emotional reliance on the ecdat trope. However, one problem that this book explores, and that the next two chapters show, is that there is more than one imagined community. Next, we turn to Atatürk, Ankara and the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum, to explore a different, yet interlinked memory culture with an affective atmosphere of its own.

Notes 1 This respondent used the appellation ‘Fatih Sultan Mehmet Han’ for Mehmet II, as did many others. Use of the full appellation is a sign of extreme respect and reverence. The ‘sacred objects’ to which he refers are those relating to the Prophet Mohammed and other Islamic figures in Topkapı Palace. 2 That is, when Atatürk instigated the switch from Arabic script to an adapted Latin alphabet for the Turkish language in 1928. 3 That is, at the Ottoman Siege of Vienna in 1683. 4 Tecmen, A., ‘Populist Political Rhetoric in Turkey’, conference paper at ‘Who is Europe?’, POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, Warsaw, Poland, 23 November 2018. 5 I am grateful to David Farrell-​Banks for information on right-​wing mobilizations of the 1683 Siege of Vienna. His PhD research at Newcastle University focuses on European memory of the Siege in museums, party politics and unofficial heritage practice.

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6  Politics of display at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum

Oh Great Ata [Father]! We are the eternal guardian of Turkish Independence and Republic, which is the most sacred basis of our existence. This decision is the first and last narrative of unchanging will. In the future no force will impede our way. We take all of our speedy progress from you, from our national history, and from the fire of faith in our soul that will never be extinguished. Every step we take on the strong foundation you set up is sound, every breakthrough we make is conscious… (Gençliğin Atatürk’e Cevabı, ‘The Response of the Youth to Atatürk’1)

If, in Chapter 4, we can ask the question ‘is Constantinople always being conquered?’ when we turn to the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum (AWIM) we might ask instead ‘is Atatürk still with us?’ Sometimes it can seem so. At the museum, his exploits are recreated and the scenography of the museum invites visitors to practice particular kinds of imaginative access to his personhood and achievements, and to engage reverentially with him. As mentioned in Chapter 2, images of Atatürk seem to be everywhere. On a visit to Istanbul in 2016, startled by a sudden and unusual silence, I  happened to look out of the window of my sister’s flat  –​in Bostancı, a largely secular neighbourhood on the ‘Asian side’ –​at 9.05am on 10th of November. At other times, there is always a din, even in the early hours, because of the busy urban highway outside. But on that morning, all of the traffic had stopped. Many drivers stepped outside of their vehicles and put their hands to their hearts to remember the moment of Atatürk’s passing, seventy-​eight years earlier in 1938. In Dolmabahçe Palace, where Atatürk died, the clock is perpetually stopped at 9.05. This is one of many symbolic dates associated with Atatürk and the early Republic that are sometimes ranged competitively with the Neo-​Ottomanist attention to the 29th of May 1453, when Constantinople was conquered (or fell). At the official level of the state the memory wars are not clear-​cut. There is an extensive government website about Atatürk2 that glorifies his memory. It is still illegal to insult him. In a recent trial of the manager of anti-​Kemalist channel AKİT TV, who was accused of insulting Atatürk in a transmission, the judge pointedly set the time for a subsequent court appearance at 9.05am!

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120  Politics of display at AWIM (Cumhuriyet, October 7, 2016). From some viewpoints, it can seem that the AKP is in the difficult position of appearing to resent Atatürk’s memory but having to live with it at the same time, as it is precious to so large a proportion of Turks at home and abroad,3 and organs of the state such as the military have often been closely associated with his memory and modernizing political vision. A common suggestion is that the AKP seeks to erase memory of Atatürk through implied insults (e.g. about Atatürk’s alleged alcoholism or dictatorial behaviour), through crackdowns such as the Ergenekon Trials and purges, or by stealth, for example in the case of the demolition of the Atatürk Cultural Centre in Istanbul. And yet Erdoğan frequently appears in public appearances in front of images of Atatürk and has been seen to borrow from his repertoire as leader (Sözcü, July 9, 2014). At the everyday level, many people wear T-​ shirts of Atatürk; some Kemalists bear tattoos of his signature or portrait or emblazon their car windows with Atatürk stickers; his image is in shops and public offices and people still talk with him in oaths, songs, social media posts, memes, and protests (see Ökten 2007 for a discussion of this). People complain to him, beseech him, or evaluate their sense of self-​worth against his example. This is shown in the speech excerpted in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, which children learn and recite by heart in school (as I myself did), often in unison. When recited now, decades after Atatürk’s death, the speech still positions the reader to imagine him as an interlocutor. Sometimes, words are put into his mouth as people imagine what he would say ‘if he were alive’, so that he is made to pronounce on various contemporary situations and circumstances (Ökten 2007, 99). ‘Atatürk did not die, he lives in my heart’, runs one of the lyrics of the school song Atatürk Ölmedi, normally sung on the 10th of November. He still ‘carries the flag of civilization’. After this the singer addresses him directly: The Youth belong to you and you belong to the Youth.

You did not die, you cannot die! You did not die, you cannot die! As if to push this dialogical engagement to an extreme, there have been numerous instances in which newsmedia outlets have run features in which they film city walkabouts by Atatürk impersonators. Typically, impersonators (nearly always in the ‘Elder Statesman’ iteration of Atatürk’s image history, such as the well-​known impersonator Göksel Kaya) shake the hands of clearly emotional people. They are mobbed by adoring crowds, including groups of assembled schoolchildren who seem, unsurprisingly, to confuse the impersonator with the real (long-​dead) man.4 It is not just children who appear to get confused. In one film, a passer-​by in the city of Denizli shakes ‘Atatürk’s’ hand; visibly moved, he starts to weep and says ‘we need you, Paşam!’ ‘Paşam’ means ‘my Pasha’, and it is a term of address used by Atatürk’s familiar contemporaries. As Nazlı Ökten (2007, 102) notes, people

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Politics of display at AWIM 121 use it today as a technique for collapsing temporal distance and suspending the fact of Atatürk’s death, so as to converse with him as if he were here. Atatürk is brought back to life, but this is a melancholic memory act that implies also his ‘endless death’ prompting an ‘eternal mourning’ (2007). On the anniversary of Atatürk’s death on 10th November 2017, the Koç Family released a video (as they do every year).5 It begins with a small boy asking his grandfather if he ever saw Atatürk. The Grandfather replies that he saw him just this morning, as the video shifts to a young female teacher painting the exterior of a rural village school. While melancholy piano music plays lower in the mix, other voices join in to say that they ‘saw him’ in the Steppes, in the posture of a female gymnast, in the features of a female pilot, and in the eyes of a foot soldier. A  fisherman on the Bosporous says that he sees him every morning at the same time, as he looks to the sunrise over the water. As the screen fades to black a text appears: ‘Can you see? We’ve never forgotten you’. The question is addressed to us, the viewers, but the following statement is addressed to Atatürk. The year 1938 appears next to the Koç logo, but the ‘8’ is rendered as horizontal ‘∞’, alluding to the infinite nature of Atatürk’s influence. If this is what we see in these everyday memory acts, representations, then what is the role and place of the museum, as an official site of memory and a means of producing historical representations? This chapter presents research undertaken at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum (henceforth AWIM) in Ankara. Following the model established in Chapter 4, which focused on the 1453 Panorama Museum in Istanbul, the chapter looks briefly at institutional framing and official voices at AWIM, before an analysis of the displays. Because of the size and extent of the museum, I focus on key parts of the displays, in particular one of the panoramic paintings/​dioramas. Interviews with staff members and official publications about the museum development enable me to set this analysis in relation to the processes and politics of the production of the displays. As with Chapter 4, the display analysis makes use of frameworks introduced relating particularly to the study of complex pictorial compositions. At AWIM there is a greater diversity of display types than at the 1453 Panorama Museum and there is a collection of objects in the conventional museum sense. But panoramic representations are still an important part of the museum, and act in some ways as a dramatic centrepiece. This allows me to trace points of contrast and similarity between the two museums over a common representational form. Alongside this I present an analysis of some of written texts in the museum that form a supplement to the panoramas.

Institutional framing and official voices at AWIM AWIM is part of Anıtkabir, and both are run by the Turkish Military. Before I give details of the museum, I will briefly describe Anıtkabir, as the museum is part of this memorial complex. Anıtkabir covers an area of c.750,000

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122  Politics of display at AWIM square meters, or c.185 acres, and is divided into two parts: The Peace Park and the Monument Block. The memorial complex includes numerous monuments, the primary one being the Mausoleum and Hall of Honour, a massive rectangular portico structure, situated on a high platform in one of the highest points of the city (Figure 2.2). Within is a symbolic sarcophagus, underneath which is Atatürk’s tomb. Atatürk’s speech on the tenth anniversary of the republic is on the right wall of the entrance and on the left is his 1927 speech to the Turkish Youth, both inscribed in relief and gilded. The building plays an important part in official diplomacy and ceremony, as official visitors leave wreaths at the sarcophagus and official gatherings take place on the anniversary of Atatürk’s death. A  number of other buildings, each with symbolic meanings, also form part of the complex. For example, there are towers of ‘Liberty’, ‘Independence’, ‘Mehmetçik’ (a name dedicated to the lowest rank of Turkish infantry, as we will see), ‘Victory’, ‘the Defense of Rights’, ‘the Republic, ‘Peace’, ‘April 23’ (the date of the foundation of the Turkish Parliament), ‘the National Pact’, and ‘Revolution’. The museum is physically and conceptually placed within this extensive memorial complex, replete with explicit symbolic meanings. Moreover, the complex itself is a military base. The Secretariat of Turkish Military General Staff runs the museum. My interviewees noted that they see this museum as an important military headquarters and a place for protocol and official ceremonies. This is evident in the environment too. Soldiers are everywhere, sometimes parading or performing a highly stylized and spectacular changing of the guard. Visitors pass through tight military security control and must deposit bags to get into the complex. All of these elements frame the visit and mean that a certain atmosphere of seriousness prevails. This is reinforced by a list of fifteen ‘Rules for Visiting Anıtkabir’ displayed on billboards. The rules forbid, for example, the wearing of hats in the Hall of Honour, behaving in any way ‘contrary to good manners’, making noise or doing anything not ‘in conformity with the dignity of the eternal resting place of great leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’. Although Anıtkabir is, as this regulation suggests, a mausoleum, and therefore invites respectful comportment, this also relates to a common cultural imperative to model one’s behaviour in a way that is worthy of Atatürk’s example and memory. Nazlı Ökten has explored this, drawing on Freudian ideas to suggest that ‘like a superego watching the ego to keep it under control, Atatürk keeps his eyes on the Turkish nation to see if it does well on the way of progress’ (2007, 108), as in Bedri Baykam’s 1997 book Gözleri Hep Üzerimizde (‘His Eyes Are on Us’). This is at the level of the collective but also at that of the individual:  Ökten points to examples that define Atatürk ‘in not only the political but also in the physical habitus’ such as posters on Istanbul commuter boats in the late 1990s that exhorted passengers:  ‘Be a citizen worthy of Atatürk. Do not spit!’ (2007, 100). Notably, one of the most common forms of relief sculptures of

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Politics of display at AWIM 123 Atatürk in official public space (council offices, state buildings, museums) is of his face, as though it were coming through the walls to keep watch on us. In 2016, an initiative to include a children’s playground in the Anıtkabir complex caused controversy on social media, in local communities and in the Ankara Chamber of Architects as it was deemed disrespectful to Atatürk and incongruous with Anıtkabir. Protests against the playground were organized by the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, or CHP); protestors themselves broke up the playground, which was then removed entirely by authorities (Hürriyet Daily News, September 24, 2016). Seen in one way, this is about respect for Atatürk among his followers, but it can also be seen as a contest over the type of affective atmosphere that should prevail at the site, and the emotional framing of the visit. For supporters of Atatürk, this is not supposed to be a place of fun, not even for children. However, children are a target audience: on my visit to see the staff they gave me a copy of their free children’s publication Atatürk and a Child –​ a long, illustrated history of Atatürk’s life and achievements. Although some of it is in cartoon form, it is a serious book, interspersed with Atatürk’s own injunctions: ‘Sizler, yeni Türkiye’nin genç evlatları, yorulsanız dahi beni takip edeceksiniz’. (‘You, young children of new Turkey, even if you are tired you will follow me’.); and ‘Sizlerden çok şeyler bekliyoruz’ (‘We expect a lot from you’.) In public life Atatürk paid a lot of attention to new generations, often addressing them en masse as in his famous 1928 ‘Speech to the Turkish Youth’, with a tone that was paternal and kindly but also exacting and patriotic, conveying a sense of their ownership of Turkey but also their responsibility for it. During Atatürk’s life, schoolchildren produced albums of letters and poems addressing him (today many of these are held in a dedicated archive at AWIM). Children still write letters to him today (in the present tense). This can be seen alongside other practices, such as daily recital of the 1933 Andımız, or Student Oath (banned by the AKP administration in 2013): Oh Great Atatürk on the path that you have paved I  swear to walk incessantly toward the aims that you have set. The effect of these is that many people have learned from a young age to feel indebted to Atatürk, to hold themselves to account using his memory, and to express sorrowful emotion and allegiance to him. To be in dialogue with Atatürk’s memory is to test one’s character and Turkishness according to his standards and values. In her analysis of the development of the AWIM in the early 2000s, Patrizia Kern (2013) points to a context of financial crisis, the threats to the secular project of Islamism and Kurdish separatism, and external demands from the European Union (arising from the conditions for Turkey’s accession), as well as from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (204–​ 205). One area of tension was the status of the military because of the

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124  Politics of display at AWIM EU’s disquiet at the idea of the indivisibility of the Turkish nation and its military. At the same time, she argued, the governing parties threatened by Islamism underwent a legitimacy crisis and reached out for ‘heroic nationalist discourse’ based around Atatürk and the War of Independence (Kern 2013, 205). At this time Erdoğan was leader of the AKP and banned from political life, but the AKP was shortly to win the 2002 elections, signalling a victory for political Islam. These difficult issues may indeed be germane to the museum’s development, and my interviewees at the museums noted that the museum opened at the ‘peak of militarism’ in Turkey. But, there was also a substantial continuity with previous attitudes to history and to reverential museum cultures relating to Atatürk: the countless Atatürk house museums wherever he stayed on visits, and indeed the many other national museums or sites in Ankara that memorialize him and precede the opening of AWIM in 2002 (e.g. the Atatürk Farm); his historical and cultural vision of Turkey (The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations and the Museum of Ethnography); or, the early Republic (e.g. the First and Second Parliament Buildings). The new development of the AWIM dwarfed other museums in the scale, cost, and complexity of the endeavour, involving collaborative working across the Ministries of Culture and Defence, the Turkish Military General Staff, the Headquarters of Fine Arts, and historians from Genelkurmay Askeri Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Daire Başkanlığı (ATASE) (the Department of General Staff’s ‘Military History and Strategic Studies Agency’). A  commission including staff from ATASE and the Ministry of Culture prepared a project that was approved by the Turkish Military General Chief of Staff and other high level of commander, and the prime minister. The idea to include panoramas is reported to have come from General Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu himself, who was then Turkish Military General Chief of Staff (Kern 2013, 206; Baranov 2004, 66). The paintings were developed as pencil drawings and then sent to the Grekov Studio of Military Painting in Moscow. This has been seen as a consequence both of the Turkish military’s preference for a realistic pictorial style, and its interest in forging new international alliances outside of the EU, perceived as unamenable to the Turkish ‘military nation’ idea (Kern 2013, 207–​208, note 19). The choice of the Grekov Studio is also revealing in other ways. The studio was established on November 29th 1934 by USSR Commissar of Defence Klim Voroshilov to provide propagandist paintings glorifying the military exploits of the regime. The studio was inspired by the vision of the war artist Mitrofan Grekov who had died in Crimea just two days earlier. A ‘keynote’ statement from Grekov is often used to characterize the artistic ethos of the group over its history: Not every gifted painter or graphic artist, no matter how talented, can become a military artist. You have to study the art of war very well, know its secrets and smells, and have a clear understanding of

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Politics of display at AWIM 125 the actions of troops and their units, as well as of individual soldiers and officers. You must put yourself in the serviceman’s shoes, smell the powder, gain experience of the rifle, artillery and machine-​guns. Most importantly, you have to come to know better those who fight, and attune yourself to their spiritual side. (Sytov 2015) It is easy to see the appeal of this for the producers of AWIM, concerned with accuracy and vicarious experience. When the Grekov Studio was founded many of its artists were ‘talented Red Army soldiers, who continued to undergo combat and political training while attending art classes in their spare time’ (Sytov 2015). During the ‘Great Patriotic War’ on the Eastern Fronts of World War 2, the studio produced murals ‘urging soldiers to fulfil their duty as true patriots’ and propaganda posters. In a panegyric article about the studio, Alexander Sytov suggests that many of the artists travelled to the front, their ‘immediate participation in military action’ enabling them ‘to truthfully convey in their works the reality of the battlefields and experience in areas behind the lines’ in line with Grekov’s call for vicarious immersion in the war experience (ibid.). In the post-​war period the studio began to experiment with panoramas, finally realizing the monumental (120m x 16m) Debacle of the Nazi Troops near Stalingrad (The Battle of Stalingrad) in 1982 as a centrepiece to the Battle of Stalingrad Museum-​Panorama. After this the studio produced six panoramas of key battles for the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow, opening in 1995. These are the panoramas that were seen by the Turkish Military when it was preparing AWIM. Although they opened to the public in the post-​Soviet period, work began in 1986, and these panoramas can be seen to carry through forms of representation that were sanctioned and encouraged by the Soviet state, and they show continuities with the state-​sponsored propagandist representations for which the studio was known. The panoramas are a site of state reception for foreign dignitaries,6 presenting a highly-​charged official historiography to the outside world. They continue the tradition of linking with patriotic memory, and exhorting visitors to identify and feel emotion, not least because they are placed within a memorial context  –​ there is a Hall of Remembrance and Sorrow, and a Hall of Glory, in which the names of nearly 12,000 Soviet soldiers are recorded (at AWIM there is also a memorial room in which large glass panels record the names of the hundreds of Turkish commanders who fought in the War of Independence). This is the cultural and visual apparatus that AWIM producers appropriated, transposing it from an immediate-​Post-​Soviet context into that of Turkish military and Kemalist historiography. Notwithstanding the different political orientations of the home states, this transposition seems relatively easy, perhaps because of common historiographical tropes:  high drama, difficulty, glorification, and exhortations to relive historical experience,

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126  Politics of display at AWIM all accompanied by a paradoxical insistence on accuracy. The Moscow panoramas strongly resemble the AWIM panoramas (and indeed the later 1453 one) in their combination of 3D diorama and painting, and the dramatic and emotional content. A significant difference is that alongside the ‘people’ in the Moscow panoramas with their mythic single mind and identity, at AWIM as well as ‘mehmetçik’ and celebration of ordinary soldiers, as well as named commanders, there is also a ‘superhero’ right in the midst of battle: Atatürk. The Turkish state subsequently gave the Russian artists official honours for their work. Nevertheless, the artists were subject to restrictions, such as always having to depict Atatürk as 160cm tall, as he was in life, and only in poses seen in historic photographs from the museum; no ‘free interpretation’ on the part of the Russians was allowed (Baranov 2004, 69). As we will see the designs themselves do in fact deviate from the historic photographs, but this was on the initiative of the Turkish artists responsible for the designs. Chapter  2 began with an excerpt from the speech given by General Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu upon the opening of the museum, at a time when Militarism was at a height, but soon to be threatened by the arrival of a Conservative-​ Islamist administration. In the speech, Kıvrıkoğlu called Atatürk ‘the almighty leader’ and ‘architect of the great Turkish nation’s biggest struggle for existence’. This speech provides a useful guide to the impetus behind it and the framing of the museum’s mission, and bestows it with a clear sense of duty to transmit to future generations the memory of the ‘Turkish nation’s struggle for liberty and independence’, and the ‘fire of liberty lit by peerless Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’.7 The points of thematic similarity and contrast with the 1453 Panorama Museum come quickly into view in this and other texts: for example, the idea of the great leader, of struggle, and of the indebtedness of future generations. Indeed, one of my interviewees suggested that AKP representatives had visited AWIM and had ‘built Panorama 1453 in order to compete with it’. These resonances, with their competitive overtones, will be discussed at length in Chapter 8, but for now the resonances between the two museums’ rhetorics will deepen as this chapter and the next proceed. The museum opened on 26th of August –​the anniversary of the ‘Great Attack’ in 1922, attended by high-​ranking soldiers, politicians, and foreign dignitaries. The Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer were in attendance, and it was Sezer who cut the ribbon and officially opened the museum, as well as giving out formal recognitions and honours to those involved in its development. In a 2002 article to mark the opening in the official Anıtkabir Dergisi magazine, general staff members Bora Öncü and Görkem Öztürk discuss the genesis and rationale of the museum representations. The aim of the development was to ‘promote Atatürk, the soul of the War of Independence and the heroes of the War of Independence more effectively’ to Anıtkabir’s six to seven million annual visitors (Öncü and Öztürk 2002, 11). They describe how examples of

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Politics of display at AWIM 127 panoramas around the world were consulted, and how sketches and even material collections were sent to the Russian studio, including the ‘uniforms, the tools and supplies that were used during the War of Independence, and the maps and the photographs of the that time’ (ibid., 13). The 3D elements were completed in the museum itself (not in Moscow), and sound effects and music soundtrack [matching with the originals] were introduced, with the aim of enabling audiences to experience ‘the full atmosphere of war’ (‘tam bir savaş atmosferi’). Öncü and Öztürk provide a key account of the positioning of the viewer (or ‘logic of figuration’, to use Gillian Rose’s term), effectively explaining the forms of visual engagement that they hoped to elicit from visitors. They note that pictorial elements ‘run towards’ viewers irrespective of their viewpoint in front of the image, providing a sense of involvement. Likewise, the people and animals depicted in the paintings –​especially Atatürk and other commanders –​are intended to seem like they meet and follow the eyes of the viewers, as if to engage them personally. The aim is to combine authenticity and vicarious experience (ibid., 20). Indeed, one important feature of the panoramas at AWIM is that it is claimed that some of the objects arranged in the dioramas are not replicas but originals, such as the artillery shells in front of the Gallipoli panorama that were ‘brought from the battlefield’. This presents a difference compared to P1453 in Istanbul, where replicas were used, perhaps because of the difficulty of reassembling real fifteenth-​century objects from the multiple collections in which they are housed, all overseen by different authorities. AWIM, however, could access original early-​ twentieth-​ century material much more easily, as there is a greater volume of it. Another appeal to authenticity is made through reference to academics and intellectuals who were consulted, one of whom was the novelist Turgut Özakman, known for anti-​Western accounts of the War of Independence (Kern 2013, 207), whose specially commissioned ‘script’ for the museum I will discuss shortly. Alongside authenticity, the primary imperative related to memory and glorification, as Öncü and Öztürk’s official article concludes: AWIM is first and foremost dedicated to the great leader Atatürk, and then to the precious memory of the dear people who struggled for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, which is the most momentous thing in the glorious history of Turkey. (2002, 20) There are at least two iterations of this dedication. Another, written for Turkish Airlines Magazine by the Art Co-​ordinator Mehmet Özel, added that the rationale was to ‘transfer the great struggle of the Turkish nation under Atatürk’s leadership from generation to generation’. The museum, he said, ‘has the responsibility of spreading to the whole world the light from the torch of liberation that He [i.e. Atatürk] lit’ (Özel n.d.8).

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The visitor route and its effects The museum is underneath the Hall of Honour complex, in basement apartments adapted for museum purposes, and a text panel at the beginning of the route, bluntly entitled ‘Information Panel of the War of Independence Museum’ reminds visitors that they are right below the sarcophagus. The same panel explains directly that the aim of the museum is to present a chronological view from the War of Independence to 1938 (when Atatürk died) ‘to make visitors feel the hardships endured through the foundation of the Republic of Turkey’. To recall, the museum is in four sections: 1: Atatürk’s belongings; 2:  the War of Independence or the ‘National Struggle’ (Milli Mücadele); 3: political and social reforms (1919–​1938); and 4: Atatürk as intellectual and thinker. These are consecutive, and there is a single visitor route. The first and second sections have no natural light. The display cases of the first section are in black-​box conditions, and Atatürk’s possessions are heavily spot-​lit in the dark environment, reminiscent of the displays of relics and reliquaries in western ecclesiastical museums, such as cathedral treasuries. Visitors are not allowed to photograph in this section. Natural light is allowed back in the third section, but the spaces are vaulted sandstone rooms around a cloister-​like corridor, which still gives the sense of being in a serious and sacred space; it is atmospheric and sepulchral. The combination of these with the dark spaces at the beginning means that we never forget that we are in a mausoleum context. Indeed, originally, the vaulted spaces of the third section were originally intended to be the resting place for the presidents of the Republic after Atatürk (in fact the only other person buried at Anıtkabir is İsmet İnönü). In one area of the third section is a bronze gateway that leads to Atatürk’s tomb (there is a relief of Atatürk’s face over the door); a soldier guards this, and no access is allowed, but there is a TV showing video footage from the interior. There is often a mass of people watching this, although of course nothing ever happens:  it is just footage of a static tomb. A  guard, standing by the TV screen tells visitor groups that ‘we are at the closest point to our Ata in the world’ (Figure 6.1). Meanwhile, in many of the spaces recordings of Republican hymns can be heard. Towards the end of the third section we hear a historic recording of excerpts Atatürk’s 1927 Nutuk (‘Speech’), which spanned six days and told the story of the War of Independence and the Foundation of the Republic in 1923 from Atatürk’s viewpoint. This is one of the key sources for Kemalist historiography and is always in print. As Hülya Adak (2003) states, Nutuk describes ‘the heroic accounts of the Independence Struggle of Turkey against the Allies (1919–​1922), particularly the military leadership of Mustafa Kemal during the Struggle, with much hyperbole. Adak points out that Nutuk is only Atatürk’s version of the War of Independence and the foundation of the Republic, and that it obscured the contributions of others, such as female activist Halide Edib, within the process of nationalist

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Figure 6.1 Visitors are told by the guard that they are in the ‘closest’ place to Atatürk in the world. The visitors try to watch the video feed of Atatürk’s tomb

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130  Politics of display at AWIM struggle. Adak’s argument is that there were many others whose endeavours might be recognized as part of the founding story of the Republic, but that Atatürk’s own manoeuvring, and his manipulation of recent history, has meant that these figures are more or less lost from the historical record, certainly within public museum contexts such as AWIM. As we saw at P1453, important records of the Conquest of Constantinople went unrepresented in favour of a dominant history, and at AWIM too, the historical account is singular and does not allow for other viewpoints from or on the past. The museum is overwhelming, not just because of its size. Especially after the first section there are so many things  –​paintings, objects, photographs, busts, panoramas, reconstructions, maps, memorials  –​and there is so much text that it must be nigh on impossible to engage with everything over the course of a single visit. The texts run to hundreds of thousands of words (I will examine just a few of the text panels later), and in the third section alone over 3000 historic documentary photographs are displayed. While this is a sign of seriousness and thoroughness brought to the arrangement of the museum, it also suggests a lack of interest on the part of producers to those approaches to exhibition design that organize displays for effective consumption. Here, thoroughness in the museum is more important than the accommodation of visitor attention spans, and the result is that the museum feels like a compendium or encyclopedia of Atatürk, as if one could go there and find out everything about him. The effect on the visitor is to provide an overwhelming sense of the quantity, gravity, and significance of Atatürk’s achievements, such that there are literally too many of them to absorb. In one sense engaging with everything in the museum is like a test, just as the encounter with the memory of Atatürk can seem. While the ‘museum as test’ is not an idea espoused by the staff whom I interviewed, the idea of a ‘test of character’ with Atatürk as a paragon is, as mentioned, a common trope in everyday practice. Do ‘we’ (Turks) live up to his example and memory? Are ‘we’ on the right path –​the one he set us on? I will consider later the shades of this in the museum, especially as we come face to face with Atatürk’s effigy in the final section and find his eyes fixed upon us (Figure 6.2). It is from this room –​the reconstruction of Atatürk’s study, where we appear to have interrupted him at work surrounded by his books –​that we exit the museum proper and pass into the shop to buy mementoes of him to take into our everyday lives. In some ways it is reminiscent of a common focus in the study of frescoed medieval chapels in Europe –​ classically, Giotto di Bondone’s Scrovegni or ‘Arena’ Chapel in Padua –​which is to think about the discursive effects of the placement of representations in the interior. Here, the Last Judgment on the entrance wall of the chapel would be the last seen image. First one sees multiple scenes from the life of Christ. The placement of the Last Judgment over the exit served as a reminder, to those leaving the chapel and passing back into worldly space, not to sin, and not to end up among the damned on the Day of Judgment (Jacobus 2008).

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Figure 6.2 Section 4 of Atatürk and War of Independence Museum: Atatürk in his study

This is not to suggest that AWIM staff have absorbed or applied the lessons of late medieval and Renaissance visual culture, but rather that in the weird space of AWIM, secular but with something sacred and something spectral, a comparable ‘exit logic’ can be seen, as if visitors should interiorize Atatürk’s gaze, as a measure of the worth of the self.

Display at AWIM This section, together with the brief description of the museum provided in Chapter 2 is intended to give a sense of the context in which the main focus of my display analysis  –​the monumental panorama paintings/​dioramas representing the Gallipoli Battle and ‘Commander in Chief Battle’ –​can be found. Any one of the sections and their component displays would warrant extensive analysis, and although that is not possible here it is important to consider that the panorama scenes in the second part of the museum are complements and counterpoints to other kinds of displays that invite particular types of engagement. For example, the displays of Atatürk’s possessions invite reverence, almost as sacred relics might, and wonderment at the very idea that these objects were owned, touched, and used by him. As this is the first section it could be argued that it establishes a sense of reverence that carries through to other sections, including the dramatic battle scenes that follow it. The comprehensiveness of the third section aims to convey a sense of just how prolific Atatürk was, and how thoroughly and significantly he reorganized Turkey’s institutions, society, and identity.

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132  Politics of display at AWIM There are also some notable intertextual contacts between the different sections. For example, the figure of Atatürk the elder statesman thinking at his desk recalls the figure of the younger Atatürk deep in thought on the battlefield as he strategizes. The nurses who aid the wounded in the panoramas prefigure Atatürk’s attention to women’s rights and the contribution of women to the Republic in the third section, which my interviewees counted as particularly important and symbolic of the truly unitary nature of society under Atatürk. Perhaps most significantly, the display of documentary photographs in this third section functions as an appendix and objective proof of the historical interpretations made here and in other sections, such as the panorama room. For example, one group of photographs focuses on the cruelty of the Greek forces towards Turkish peasants, showing graphic scenes of violence, wounding, and dead bodies, one beheaded. The texts make open reference to Greek cruelty; one is subtitled: ‘Hit with the butts of rifles and axes, a Turkish peasant being martyred by the Greek occupation forces’. This can relate intertextually to some of the panoramic battle scenes in which Greek enemy forces are subdued, providing a sense of narrative resolution (i.e. of wrongs righted, victory over oppressors etc.) and moral justification. Some resolutions to the narratives in the panorama paintings are provided in further paintings (conventional non-​panoramic ones) situated in the same galleries. While the 1960 Atatürk Museum was incorporated into AWIM as the first section, it was also refurbished, redisplayed, and given state-​of-​the-​art lighting and a blackout environment, and it is evident from official publications that a connective and narrative link between the different sections, concluding with Atatürk in his study, was identified by producers (Öncü and Öztürk 2002). In this way, the displays need to be understood holistically to elaborate the mythic life of Atatürk, from ingenious Ottoman soldier and commander turned visionary leader and then elder statesman, who saves and modernizes Turkey, bringing about civil institutions, democratic, cultural and social reforms, women’s rights, and, above all, creates a unitary Turkish national identity to be proud of. (Except, of course, many do not share this identity, as we have seen in the P1453 visitor studies.)

The Panoramas The Çanakkale Battles, or Gallipoli Campaign, took place during the First World War in 1915 between Ottoman-​German Alliance and the British Empire. The campaign resulted in the Ottoman victory. Atatürk, at that time known as Mustafa Kemal (he only assumed the name ‘Atatürk’ in 1934 when the Surname Law was put into effect) rose to prominence as a successful commander during this war. There are three panoramas: one for the Gallipoli Campaign (1915), one for the Sakarya Pitched Battle (1921) and the third for the Büyük Taarruz (Great Attack) of 1922. Although there are similarities in the techniques, the Panorama 1453 Museum is a 360-​ degree image, whereas here each battle is displayed by mostly flat paintings,

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Politics of display at AWIM 133 each 35–​38m in length and 2m high, with three-​dimensional elements in front. The paintings are vast and long, designed for left-​to-​right engagement, with different iconic scenes represented in the same paintings, not necessarily in chronological order. The visitors in front of the 1453 Panorama painting in Istanbul were situated as if they were part of the Ottoman troops. Here at AWIM, visitors are separated from the paintings by security barriers and it positions them more as observers than participants, although as I  will show in some instances the representation is organized to give a sense that participants might ‘enter the scene’. In front of the paintings, and in some cases merging into them through relief sculptural modelling, are the three-​ dimensional elements, in one case, a stream is shown in the painting that then continues as a real, burbling water feature in the diorama component in front. In the Gallipoli panorama, the dioramas occupy a kind of trench –​ about one metre in depth  –​containing replica weapons and other battle scene paraphernalia, as well as mannequins facing towards the battle, with their backs to visitors. The scenes are taken from photographs that make up a corpus of very well-​known images. These have longstanding cultural associations, to the point that they are ubiquitous in everyday imagery and in the landscape. The museum publicity makes a point of presenting the displays as based on historic photographs, making a claim to accuracy of representation, for example the accurate representation of the landscape of the battle (Öncü and Öztürk 2002, 19). In some cases, the most famous photographs are reproduced in the text panels accompanying the panoramas, so that one can compare them to the paintings (Figure 6.3). Accuracy is also invoked in relation to the landscape or seascape settings of the panoramas. In the Sakarya Pitched Battle Panorama, the museum website states that the spectacular scene is depicted in the ‘original’ place of battle. Atatürk is seen atop a hill with binoculars observing the fighting. This is also taken from a well-​ known photograph of him from this battle. But the ‘montage’ nature of the panoramas is also conspicuous. For example, in the ‘Great Attack’ (Büyük Taarruz) panorama Atatürk is seen at the very centre of the painting and this is also from an original iconic photograph that shows him as thinking –​ the so-​called ‘Kocatepe’ photograph. This is possibly the most famous and most reproduced and remediated wartime image of Atatürk; it is ubiquitous in everyday life in public sculpture, logos (for example Afyon Kocatepe University takes its name and corporate visual identity from the image), as well as being part of the stock for popular car stickers, tattoos, T-​shirts and so on. This ubiquity helps us to think about intertextual and iconographic resonances outside of the museum setting, and the way meanings are made from its visual organization. An early study by Denny (1982) discusses the different manipulations of the image from the ‘darkroom magic’ of the original print to the use of the Kocatepe pose in the 2-​and-​a-​half lira coin minted in the 1960s. A key issue in this iconographic study is the extent to

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Figure 6.3 Historic photograph of Atatürk at Çanakkale

which different portrayals of Atatürk in the same pose show him as isolated from other figures, or climbing uphill (suggesting respectively the singularity of his achievement, and his effort). In the museum panorama (Figure 6.4) we see him standing atop a hill (unlikely given that there is a pitched gunbattle going on and the Turkish troops behind him are taking cover and firing from prone positions). To Atatürk’s right are known figures, such as İsmet İnönü (then known as İsmet Paşa, and later as ‘Second Man’, succeeding Atatürk as President from 1938 to 1950), who were not in the original photograph. This illustrates the way in which the panorama paintings reassemble imagery, using documented historic scenes in new configurations that orchestrate in one scene an iconographic repertoire. This centrality of ‘accuracy’ and authenticity, however malleable in reality, is reminiscent of discourse at the P1453. Comparable controversies surround the stock iconography of Atatürk, who some claim posed artificially for the photographs in order to engineer and control a preferred

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Figure 6.4 The Kocatepe pose in the Great Attack panorama in the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum

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136  Politics of display at AWIM public and mythic image for himself (Denny 1982). It was usual for early 20th-​century military, cultural, and political figures to curate their own public images through staged photography, but the museum understanding of all of the photographs that they either display or use is, nevertheless, as self-​evident proofs. This is notwithstanding the possibility that they might look wooden and stilted to contemporary eyes, and exposure times and the general set-​up of photographic shoots in 1915 might have rendered difficult the kind of momentary images that we see. In some senses, the panoramas act as montages of some of these iconic photographs, as will be seen in the in-​depth analysis of one of the panoramas –​the Gallipoli Battles Panorama, through which I can illustrate a number of key representational techniques. As discussed in Chapter 3, here I adapt methods of visual analysis suggested by Rose ([2001] 2012). Within this, it makes sense also to refer to the extensive interpretation panel underneath, which is intended as a key to the panorama. The interpretation panels combine text (in Turkish and English, some of it emphasized in red font, all uppercase), tables with key facts (e.g. who the warring parties were, broken up into enemies and allies, number of dead on each side), some historic photographs that provided source material for the panorama, and contemporary photographs of the landscapes represented there as they are today; for example in the panel for the Gallipoli panorama there is a photograph of one of the trenches that has been reconstructed in situ on the peninsula. The interpretation panels provided a programme for looking: there is a photograph of the panorama itself in which important scenes are numbered and described. As will be seen, the text has an explanatory tone, but its inclusions and exclusions, emphases, and narratives frame the account of the conflict as glorious.

Close analysis of the Gallipoli Battles Panorama Content Looked at vertically, there are different zones in the panorama. The diorama section that extends into the gallery space includes artillery cannon and shells, maps that seem to have been consulted just a minute ago, weapons, bullets, and the stuff of trench warfare  –​wooden supporting walls, ammunition boxes, embers burning (actually made of red glass) –​all strewn among sandstone rocks and dull-​coloured vegetation. The space is designed to resemble a trench, and there are mannequins of soldiers with their backs to the viewer, looking out towards the action. In the very centre, the three-​dimensional trench takes a turn into the two-​dimensional picture plane, leading to the (painted, two-​dimensional) figure of Atatürk himself, surveying the battle in one of the poses made famous in the war photography (Figure 1.2). This is the central horizontal band of the image, showing a promontory jutting into the sea, where allied ships burn, spewing black smoke into the sky against a mountainous backdrop. The ceiling of the panorama space is quite low, and

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Figure 6.5 A detail from the Çanakkale panorama: Corporal Seyit. This photograph also shows the low ceiling of the panorama

the rendition of the sky carries over into this, to create a box-​like space of illusion (Figure 6.5). On the left, the first action we see is around an artillery cannon. The Turkish soldier operating the cannon falls, having just been shot. Between the cannon and us we see a soldier in a white shirt carrying a large, heavy shell. This is Corporal Seyit, one of the recognizable heroes in the image. He is known for this feat of strength –​for each shell was reputed to weigh 276 kilograms –​and also for using the cannon to sink HMS Ocean. He is shown in a pose adapted from a historic photograph for which, the story goes, Seyit was asked to replicate his feat, but could not. He reportedly said that only if war were to break out would he be able to do so again. The photograph was then taken of Seyit carrying a wooden shell instead, looking directly at the camera (Figure 6.6). This very photograph is included in the interpretation panel, although there is no mention that this time the shell was wooden. To the right, a number of groups of soldiers shoot out to sea at the ships, some of which list and burn (‘The so-​called undefeatable British fleet experienced her first defeat in Çanakkale’). In front of them on the promontory there is fierce fighting at close quarters as Anzacs attempt to storm the headland, some soldiers waving the Blue Ensign (rather than the more common Red Ensign or Union flags).9 This is linked numerically to the interpretation panel, which explains that this fierce fighting is the outcome of Atatürk’s famous order, given in the text panel in red font for emphasis: ‘I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die!’, which became famous in the

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Figure 6.6 The famous photograph of Corporal Seyit, in which he appears to replicate his feat of strength

Turkish official historiography, emphasizing core values of courage, abnegation and self-​sacrifice. In the centre is the trench that links the three-​dimensional and two-​ dimensional areas of the representation: a map of the peninsula is weighted

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Politics of display at AWIM 139 down with a metal plate, cups, and a ‘yatağan’ sword; dusty battlefield telephone apparatus is stacked up alongside rifles leaning against the trench wall; and a blasted shell doubles as an ashtray, on which a cigarette is perched. Atatürk, binoculars around his neck, leans out, in the pose taken from the famous photograph (Figure 6.3). The other soldiers who can be seen in the photograph can also be recognizably seen in the painting, although their position relative to Atatürk has been changed. Another change is the lower height of the trench wall in the panorama compared to the photograph, as if putting Atatürk in greater danger. To the right of this central group is another scene taken from a photograph showing the commander (and, at the time, Atatürk’s military superior) Mehmet Esat Bülkat (known as Esat Pasha), seated and studying a map, surrounded by his officers, all of whom are recognizably the same individuals, and in the same poses, as in the photograph. Scanning to the right again is a makeshift hospital where female nurses in white gowns tend to the wounded, as food cooks on a pot in the fire. The presence of the nurses is significant, as much was made of the contribution of women in official discourse and commemoration relating to the War of Independence and the development of the Republic: the idea of the Cumhuriyet Kadını (or ‘woman of the Republic’) is the subject of numerous memorial sculptures, as in the group at the base of the Zafer Anıtı, or the Ankara Victory Monument. At the museum, there is a separate area on the ‘Selfless Contribution Made by Turkish Women in the National Struggle’, and this is a key theme tracking through the rest of the museum, not least because a discursive connection is made between women’s contribution and Atatürk’s promotion of women’s rights, which in turn are used as a symbol of his modern and progressive civil government. We can contrast this with the all-​male cast of the P1453 panorama, although AWIM’s gendering is no less powerful, for Atatürk is the male hero who becomes both liberator and father figure for the modern state. His promotion of women’s value, social position, and rights are part of the symbolism of a progressive national modernity to which we will see female visitors respond in the next chapter. Next in the panorama is more fighting between Turks and Anzacs, some hand-​to-​hand. But in the foreground one Turkish soldier carries a wounded Anzac on his back towards the makeshift hospital. These humane acts are noticed in the final section of the interpretive panel. This also forms part of the stock iconography of the conflict –​the ‘Mehmetçik’ who carries his wounded enemy –​that appears in numerous public sculptures (such as the 1997 Respect to Mehmetçik monument at Gallipoli) and miniatures, which can be bought in many museum shops (alongside miniatures of Corporal Seyit and a bust of Atatürk). The theme connects intertextually to Atatürk’s tributes to the Anzac soldiers, and most famously his ‘Johnnies and Mehmets’ message of condolence to the mothers of Anzac dead, quoted in the adjacent museum texts: Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is

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140  Politics of display at AWIM no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well. This message is highly significant in the memory cultures of Gallipoli for both Turkish and Australian/​New Zealand groups, and is heavily invoked in bilateral rituals of commemoration, monuments, and in official relations (for example, there is a page dedicated to the speech on the website of the Turkish Embassy in Canberra). The museum texts also reproduce the response to Atatürk made by an Anzac soldier’s mother, writing on behalf of others and asking whether he would accept them calling him ‘father’. Atatürk’s sentiment has recently been submitted to scrutiny (Daley 201510) that casts doubt on its authorship, wording, and on when and how it came about. Nevertheless, the emotive intervisual and intertextual representation emphasizes the key theme of the humane attitude of the Turkish victors, forming a counterpoint to their heroic bravery and ingenuity. Overall, the painting involves multiple scenes taken from different geographical areas and moments within the campaign (Figures 6.7 and 6.8). For example, on the left we see the sea battle and the Allied fleet failing to enter the Bosporus, ostensibly partly because of Corporal Seyit’s feat of strength. This sea battle took place on 18 March 1915. The central image of Atatürk is from a photograph of the later battle of Chunuk Bair (Conkbayırı), which the museum dates as 10 August 1915, about a mile inland, far to the north-​ east of the sea battle that Atatürk appears to survey. To the right the panorama shows the Landing at Suvla Bay and the repulsion of the Anzacs, dated as 9 August 1915 by the museum. Three different battles are represented in one apparently synchronic image. Furthermore, the audioguide and museum texts state that the figures of Turkish soldiers helping wounded or dehydrated Anzacs represent ‘the Solidarity of the Soldiers After the War’, even though, if one were to understand the painting as synchronic, they are seen in the midst of battle. So there are a number of temporalities and geographies involved in the painting, and time and space are compressed. Broadly, left to right is also south to north, although this is not straightforward as the sea assault shown on the left was actually on the opposite (eastern) side of the Peninsula. The promontory in the centre of the painting is geographically misleading, for Atatürk’s vantage point at Chunuk Bair is at a far higher altitude. This presents a different perspective on the museum’s appeal to historical accuracy. From a chronological view, the aim seems not to be to present a single moment but rather to assemble key moments and themes into a kind of compendium, anchored by classic images that are likely to be pre-​known to visitors and have longstanding associations with key themes

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Figure 6.7 Geographical and chronological key to the Çanakkale panorama, reproduced courtesy of the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum, Ankara

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Figure 6.8 Map of Çanakkale peninsula showing the location and dates of the episodes pictured in the panorama, and their pictorial position therein

(bravery, ingenuity, the contribution of women, the mercy of the victors, etc.). This also helps to make sense of what was, after all, an extremely complex series of events of which perhaps most visitors  –​even ardent Kemalists  –​do not have really thorough knowledge. If the image is an assemblage of different times and places, and also different borrowings from the iconography, then there are choices and omissions to consider. Firstly, none of the panorama paintings includes any of the battles that went badly for Atatürk and the Turks, such as his failure to capture Russell’s Top on 30 June 1915 (Carlyon 2001, 461; see Carlyon also for a different view of Atatürk’s strategic ability in battle –​as sometimes reckless rather than ingenious). Secondly, in no part of the panorama painting do we see German commanders, downplaying this alliance (although Germany is given as an ally in the table of combatants in the interpretation panel). In the final sentence of the interpretation panel, the outcome of the conflict is framed, between reference to the humane attitude of the Turkish forces, and the achievement of Atatürk:

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Politics of display at AWIM 143 Çanakkale Wars ended with the victory of the Turkish forces and the allied forces had to withdraw from Çanakkale. Due to his great success in Çanakkale Wars, Mustafa Kemal was well known by all of the world.

Spatial organization The composition is tripartite, both vertically (as discussed above in relation to colour and light) and horizontally. In the latter perspective, the land promontory forms the middle component of the image, and the figure of Atatürk is at the very centre of this, forming the key focal point and pivot of the entire ensemble. Visually, he is also the linking mechanism between the foreground diorama of the trench, the land of the middle-​ground, and the backdrop of the sky darkened by the smoke clouds. There is a certain refraction of key figures posed similarly –​Corporal Seyit (Figure 6.5 and the Mehmetçik figure at either side (Figure  6.9), both carrying their burdens, and the leaning figure of Atatürk at the centre, and making for a kind of thematic triad of indomitable spirit, ingenuity, and mercy. The logic of figuration or positioning of the viewer in relation to the scene creates a situation in which we look on to the scene, rather than being in it. At first this seems unlike the positioning of the viewer at Panorama 1453, as if in the thick of the action. At AWIM there is in some respects a greater sense of division between visitor space and representational space, and the shape of the room lends a cinematic feel, as the painting is set into a recess, just as a screen might be. It feels less immersive. But there are components that complicate this, such as the mannequins of soldiers in front of us, the audio track of battle noise. Our own standpoint is, as it were, with (or rather, behind) the Turks in the Turkish trenches. It is not too great a leap of imagination and suspension of disbelief to pretend that we might be actors in the scene as well, could we just step in. Moreover, if we stand centrally in front of the panorama, the trench route to Atatürk seems to be open to us, as if by chance we have happened upon the great man himself, precisely in the famous moment in which he peers out of the trench. Perhaps the burning cigarette perched on the blasted shell is Atatürk’s own! (He was often photographed smoking). Perhaps one could go and speak to him. This can also act as a reminder of previous modes of ‘access’ to the great man, in the first section of the museum where Atatürk’s belongings are on show as if they were relics. This suggests that the logic of figuration invites the visitor to engage in a kind of imaginative work  –​to imagine her or himself into the image, and into contact with Atatürk. This can be linked to contemporary cultural practice discussed at the beginning of this chapter of addressing or conversing with Atatürk, in rhetorical dialogues such as those that exhort him to ‘wake up’ because he is needed. This common rhetorical, nostalgic, and imaginative form of communion or contact with Atatürk is materialized and visualized in the museum here in the trench at Çanakkale, and in the form of

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Figure 6.9 A detail from the Çanakkale panorama: hand-​to-​hand fighting. A Turkish soldier, or ‘Mehmetçik’ aids a wounded Anzac soldier replicating an iconic image

his possessions –​things he touched, used, and wore –​in the first section. It is always there in his own appearance as elder statesman and thinker, in the form of a life-​sized mannequin, in his library. In the same room is the very dog –​named ‘Foks’ –​that he owned, taxidermied. While the museum takes visitors back in time to the moment of the battles, and, later, to see the great statesman at work, it also relates to this melancholy practice of making Atatürk ever-​present, even though he is long dead.

Expressive content and narrative The atmosphere is mostly dramatic, as fighting on land and sea is fierce and the scene is busy with urgent action and effort. There are a few set pieces that detract from this, including the saz-​playing soldier and the scene of Esat Pasha and his companions. These seem incongruous with the violent and deadly action, and the oscillation in mood reflects the composite nature of the scene, drawn from different places, times, events, and sources. Esat Pasha’s companions are particularly incongruous and unnatural in appearance as they look out at us, just as they do in the photograph, mid-​way between the historic conventions of group portraiture (the figures are ranged almost like a Dutch Golden Age guild portrait) and the newer visual form of war photography. Meanwhile, Atatürk is calm as he surveys the battle, while soldiers fight and die around him. He seems impervious to the danger he would be in (although once again we must recall that this scene has been incorporated –​the original

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Politics of display at AWIM 145 photograph included only the figure of Atatürk and his attendants, with no sign of battle around him). His calm appearance and central position is a reminder to the visitor that notwithstanding the destruction and violence that is all around, victory will prevail, because Atatürk can see what to do. In this sense Atatürk’s act of looking, and our looking at him as he looks, is key to a narrative that is at once ongoing and ended. Atatürk is the anchor of visitors’ trust in the positive ending and the resolution of the story, and his gaze can be followed as it were into the future, to victory and greatness. As discussed, there is no clear chronological correspondence between a left-​to-​right reading of the panorama. Visitors enter from the left, but the logical vantage point is from the centre, honing in first on Atatürk before looking elsewhere, perhaps first following his gaze left towards Corporal Seyit, before tracking back to the right to encounter other known scenes such as Esat Pasha at his desk and the merciful Mehmetçik (Figure  6.9). These form some of the cardinal visual ‘relays’ that Altman discusses as connectors of narrative, and means of ordering and sequencing the visitor’s gaze. Indeed, it is not easy to make historical narrative links between the three different battles represented, and there is no textual information to differentiate them, much less to link them in any kind of causal relation. Rather, this visual analysis of the panorama has revealed a different kind of narrative, which is both affective and associative in nature. It suggests that the central pivot of Atatürk, master strategist and intellectual soldier, brings about victory. He does this by marshalling the bravery, indomitable spirit, strength of resolve, and the humane and merciful behaviour of the Turkish forces. The narrative is constructed through the assembly of known figures and vignettes, and is predicated on visitors’ prior knowledge and intertextual awareness. Another intertextual sense of ‘what-​ happens-​ next?’ also plays into this narrative, as visitors know that this is the preface to Independence and to the new Republic. Atatürk’s act of looking tells us that victory is coming, for he has seen and understood what to do. But what else does he see? Perhaps the creation of a great nation…!

Interpretive panels and other resources As noted, the amount of text in the museum is quite overwhelming and creates a kind of encyclopaedic narrative that no-​one could feasibly read comprehensively in one visit. Within the above visual analysis, I  have incorporated an analysis of the interpretation panels for the panoramas, with their inclusion of graphics, historical visual source materials, facts and figures, and their subtly glorifying explanatory narratives. As an example of such narratives we can consider how Corporal Seyit sank the ‘famous’ HMS Ocean and how the ‘so-​called undefeatable British fleet’ was defeated, as if it were only Turkish forces that could achieve this. In section one, the labels simply state what the objects are, but Atatürk’s possession of these is made clear in each case, as in ‘Atatürk’s gloves’, and

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146  Politics of display at AWIM so on. Section four is similar: the label describing Atatürk in his study does little more than this, but it tells us that the assemblage consists mostly of Atatürk’s real possessions (except the bookcase and the clothes), and that the effigy has been made ‘according to his original body size’. Audioguide and web text tell us that there are no less than 3,123 books, mostly in French and Turkish but also in English, Romanian, Greek, and Latin. Section three is the most text-​heavy section of the museum not just because of the extensive panels (some of which are over 1000 words in length) and labels, but also because many of the objects on display are also texts, such as letters and official communications, or legal reforms. There is no direct address to visitors and relatively little use of first-​person-​plural forms (we, us, our), but it is not absent. One panel, on dress reform in the early Republic, notes that ‘Our women also adopted western clothing styles on [i.e. of] their free will’. As mentioned, the topic of women is a key component and there are copious images and texts about women voting for the first time, the first elected women, the first female medical doctors, and so on. As the section on ‘Reform of Women’s Rights’ shows, this is also linked symbolically both to the discourse of secular modernization and to the pre-​Islamic history of Turkey favoured by Atatürk and promoted in his regime by Outlines of Turkish History. This has a prominent place in public discourse as well, as in the case of the Koç advertisement commemorating Atatürk from 2017, described earlier, where a number of the protagonists in whose work or achievements Atatürk could be ‘seen’ were empowered, determined young women. The following label also shows the precise and encyclopaedic presentation of the interpretation, referencing specific reforms and laws by number, and supported by documentary photographs as proof: The women and men in ancient Turks [sic; i.e. Turkish culture] had equal rights. Women lost their rights after conversion to Islam. The Turkish women defended the motherland side by side with the men during the War of Independence. The founder of our Republic and the creator of Turkish society, Ghazi Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] was determined that men and women should have equal rights. For this purpose he ensured the presentation of relevant acts to the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Equality of men and women was largely ensured with the Turkish Civil Code number 743 ratified by the Turkish Grand National Assembly on February 17, 1926. The women acquired the right of inheritance and they became equal with men before the laws… The panel goes on to detail women’s acquisition of marital and political rights, their right to be elected to public office and the development of women’s education and equal professional status with men. A  number of

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Politics of display at AWIM 147 points can be drawn from this, such as: the implicit disparagement of Islam as inimical to women’s rights; the discursive connections made to women’s efforts in the War of Independence; the identification of Atatürk as the far-​ sighted instigator of these developments; and the comprehensive provision of identifiable legal outcomes that are in place today. As discussed, the provision of women’s rights takes on symbolic importance within the museum, and is articulated across different sections. One of its meanings is the turn to a modern, progressive, westernized nation state that Atatürk brought about. This is part of the discourse of being ‘çağdaş’, which translates as contemporary or modern. As has been seen, it is a word used today to describe westernized Turkish people –​their clothing, dispositions, and practices (or ‘habitus’). People identify with and against the term. There is, for example, an association called (Çağdaş Yașamı Destekleme Derneği ‘Association for the Support of Contemporary Living’ who ‘support the modernization reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’ and fight in particular against gender discrimination.11 The idea of the modern is also crucial in other texts, for example about military reforms, language reforms (i.e. the adoption of the Latin alphabet, and the unification of the Turkish language), number reforms, weights and measures, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, of ‘alafranga’ (western) rather than ‘alaturca’ (Ottoman) time measurement, and so on. In each case the reform is presented as being instigated by Atatürk: The western civilization was followed in the reforms made to elevate the nation ‘above the level of contemporary civilization’. Accordingly, integration into the civilized nations would be ensured by adopting one after the other the calendar, time, numeral and alphabetical systems and measurements used by the western civilization. For example, in ‘Linguistic Reform’ we learn that there was ‘no linguistic unity’ in the Ottoman state, which was thus bound to decline because language ‘is one of the fundamental ties that constitutes a nation’. To rectify this national problem, ‘the founder of our Republic, Great Leader Atatürk wished to transform Turkish into a language of culture and science by enriching it within its authenticity’. This text attempts a kind of equilibrium between ‘çağdaş’ reforms and the ancient that is common to many of the panels. The theocratic nature of Ottoman society is also presented as an anachronistic backdrop against which reforms are achieved: religious basis of Ottoman jurisprudence and day-​to-​day life is contrasted with the ‘secular and civilized judicial system’ that replaced it straight after the foundation of the Republic in 1924. If the Ottoman past is something to turn away from, the idea of western civilization is a contrasting reference point of modernity and aspiration, although it is clear that Atatürk saw this not as a slavish copying of the west

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148  Politics of display at AWIM but a means of bringing Turkey ‘up to speed’ with western civilization and being in a position to surpass it. This could only happen, however, through the kinds of cultural shifts outlined above, for Kemalism ‘understood modernization not just as a question of acquiring technology, but as something that could not be absorbed without a dense network of cultural practices’ (Sayyid 1997, 269, in Keyman 2006, 209) At the museum, Atatürk provides the literal example for modernization. Whatever it is, he is photographed doing it, as he well knew the didactic power of images of himself to change public attitudes. He is shown modelling western clothing in connection with the dress reforms; or teaching the Latin alphabet to children, men and indeed the general public in the streets, and especially encouraging education among women and girls; he is shown driving a tractor (agricultural modernization), and on a train (transport infrastructure). We learn that Atatürk himself contributed to the new Turkish lexicon, and was the first Turk to take a surname, and his identity cards from before and after the reforms are on display to show this. Many of the text panels make clear that he was the first to adopt, introduce or instigate a new practice, a set of values, standards, and infrastructure or technology. A sense of his phenomenal energy results from all of this, overlaid on our recollection of the dramatic and heroic exploits of the panorama section. One last wall panel for attention here presents an account of military reforms in the Republic. This is the kind of detailed explanation of progressive incremental development familiar from the rest of the museum texts and follows the same basic pattern to suggest that after 1923 everything got better. But it is framed by a vision of the fundamental significance for Turkey of the military. This even harks back to the steppes of Central Asia (prior to the 11th-​century Seljuk invasion of Anatolia), eliding the nation state with a deeper idea of ethnic identity: The Turkish Army has a past which is as historic as that of the Turkish nation. The depth of history of the Turkish Army stems from nation-​ army interfusion. In the Turkish communities of Central Asia, especially in times of peace, there was no difference between civilians and the military. The army lived in the public order, and the people lived in the military order. This is the idea of the ‘military nation’, based on a historical vision. Although it reads like a manifesto, it is presented within the museum’s overarching insistence on truth and of the progressive transformation of Turkey as a nation state, itself brought about by military victory, and of Turkishness as an identity that is both modern and ancient. As noted, at the time of the museum development the idea of a ‘military nation’ joining the EU was problematic in membership talks with Turkey. But in the AWIM discourse, the military nation is what should be, and gains force from its association with the emblematic achievements of Atatürk in war and peace.

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Final thoughts: militarism, pedagogy, emotion People’s visits to AWIM are strongly framed in institutional, architectural, and discursive ways. Upon approaching Anıtkabir it is very clear that you are entering a serious place. It is a military base and your bags are searched and retained by uniformed soldiers. Inside the complex, everything is well kept. The lawns are clipped and there are information panels everywhere with strict rules of behaviour. On one visit I went to the café for a break and glass of tea. The café was manned by a young soldier, who had laid out the chocolate bars and drinks in precisely matching, equally-​spaced straight lines on the counter. Everything is ordered and a strong sense of decorum and what is proper prevails. As mentioned in Chapter 1, in Anıtkabir itself the very distance between paving stones is calculated to make you walk slowly and carefully lest you trip, to take your time, and to cultivate due behaviour and respect. There can be no running around, and there is a feeling that even if you tried you would soon be apprehended by one of the hundreds of soldiers patrolling on site, parading or standing guard. Regulation is everywhere. The focal point of this is the mausoleum itself: a severe block of a building, which is a kind of military simplification of a classical temple. The atmosphere is sombre; inside the mausoleum it is dark and cavernous, and people pay their respects in front of Ataturk’s sarcophagus. Only then do you go into the museum to encounter the great man and his exploits as directly as it seems possible to do. Walking and feeling, then. Here we might consider how Andrea Witcomb adapts Tony Bennett’s conception of a ‘pedagogy of walking’ (1995, 1998), in which the historical museum viewer absorbed the linear and serial teleologics of evolutionary development as he moved in the museum, all the while adopting a citizen status as ‘the white male visitor as the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder’. The ethnographic other upon whom this visitor gazes is the ‘antithesis of the citizen of the modern nation state’ (Witcomb 2015, 324). As a development of this, she proposes the development of a ‘pedagogy of feeling’ in contemporary exhibition practices which ‘stage affective encounters between viewer and viewed through the ways in which they use a range of devices to promote sensorial experiences that encourage introspective reflection on the part of visitors’ (2015, 322). In her analysis, this has the very different affective and political frame of exhibitions that propose care for others –​‘an ethics that promotes empathy rather than simply tolerance toward difference and which is, as a consequence, interested in promoting both dialogue and political responsibility’ (2015, 327). I see this as hitched to a particular civil and socio-​political mission that characterizes museum practice in Anglophone and Western-​European contexts. What we see in AWIM is not this. It is a pedagogy of feeling of a different kind, binding together pride, honour, loss, and committing to a harsh reckoning of one’s worth within a national historical frame. It is an emotional pedagogy of the self as national subject and an ethics of care for Atatürk’s vision of the national project.

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150  Politics of display at AWIM It will be recalled that Bernard Comment discusses the role of the panorama, particularly the military one, as a ‘propaganda machine’ aimed at ‘depicting heroic deeds’ and keeping them alive as sources for patriotism in the context of the development of nation states (2000, 8). In Chapter 2 I also drew on his suggestions in discussing the significance of the panorama form as a means of exerting control at times of threat to identity. In his study, this concerned the transformation of cities and the ‘sprawling’ of collective space that resulted from the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modernity, particularly in Europe. At AWIM, opened in 2002, a different set of threats to identity and to the status quo have been identified, in particular by Patrizia Kern (2013): in this view, the demands and concerns of the EU, the rise of Islamism and Kurdish separatism fostered a need for reinforcement to the national narrative to bind together the War of Independence and the foundation and development of the Republic. This bind is achieved through the story of Atatürk as military, and then civic and national, leader. The copious textuality of the museum mentioned earlier –​its compendiousness and its tens of thousands of words about Atatürk’s achievements –​look in this sense like a kind of defensive overkill to protect against any tendency to question the dominance of this national story. The EU’s disquiet about the possibility of accommodating a ‘military nation’ brings into view a clash between different conceptions of the nation in a post-​war international order. The World Wars of the twentieth century loom large here in the EU foreboding about the very idea of a national identity being so closely connected with military character. And yet Turkey’s neutrality in World War II in some ways means that the military felt itself to be free from this web of anxieties and could pursue a different memory culture. In recent research into Turkish people’s attitudes to Europe, Ayhan Kaya, and Ayşe Tecmen found that respondents differentiated Turkish and European memory in relation to a fear of conflict deriving from the World Wars.12 The use of war as an origin story has different complexities in different places and both European and non-​European referents are important here. One possible assertion at the outset is that Turkey has never accepted a politics of regret –​in particular the notion of ‘coming to terms with the past’ (vergangenheitsbewältigung) that has characterized German and, to a lesser degree, EU understandings of war memory, including Turkey’s infamous opposition to any suggestion of the very notion of an ‘Armenian Genocide’ of 1915. This starting position enables an unequivocally celebratory and singular story of the making of the nation through conflict. Indeed, by dint of its focus, AWIM evades the wider history of World War I  in favour of the overriding focus on the ‘Wars of Independence’, which places the narrative within a singularly national defensive paradigm in which Atatürk delivers freedom to the homeland. The international, political, and global dimensions of the conflict are largely unseen in the museum (with one important exception, as we will see). Military stories and battles are very often represented in national stories that appear in museums, alongside other mass media including popular films, TV series, and documentaries.

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Politics of display at AWIM 151 The emphases are mainly on victory over, or resistance to, an enemy threatening the national existence (Winter 2013, 23). In some ways, the AWIM narrative of the heroic defence of homeland and national virtues somewhat resembles the British memory culture of Churchillian resolve. At Churchill’s War Rooms in London one can find the great man’s half-​smoked cigar on display, much as in AWIM where we see Atatürk’s cigarette perched on an ashtray as he surveys the Battle. But AWIM’s narrative lacks the global dimension of the British war memory as the moral battle for world, and not just national, freedom. This contrasting memory culture is no less selective. Britain’s role in World War II enables a kind of ‘saviour’ positioning that emerges in the discourse of the ‘liberators’ (Daugbjerg et al. 2019), but this tends to obscure other military histories less amenable to moral positioning in the present, such as those in colonial settings. Meanwhile, in British World War I  memory culture there is a predominant emphasis on the Western rather than the Eastern theatres of war, and Gallipoli is a relatively little-​known past that has received far less popular attention. When it does receive attention in UK contexts it is largely framed as a deep contrast with Churchill’s later heroism: Gallipoli was Churchill’s folly, great mistake, debacle or blunder, leading to senseless loss of life (although many more Turkish than Allied troops died). As L.A. Carlyon (2001, 541) notes, it was World War II that rehabilitated Churchill’s military reputation. It may be that Gallipoli is such a dissonant past in Britain that it can only live in the margins of the national story. AWIM, on the other hand, puts it centre-​stage, but as the battle for the Turkish homeland. Churchill and the other war parties are barely there except as the apparently undefeatable ‘enemy’, vanquished only because of Turkish spirit and Atatürk’s brilliance. (Germany –​Turkey’s ally –​barely figures either.) In some ways, the museum also looks ‘un-​European’, not only because the European war parties are reduced to flat signs, and their agendas and histories go largely unremarked, but also because the panoramas and the mausoleum-​like character of the site can seem reminiscent of a Soviet propaganda exercise, or the morbid attachment to the corpses of great leaders. This is perhaps not least because the museum’s makers reportedly turned away from Europe and towards Russia in search of the right representational idiom, and the right people to make it. (Ironically in some regards, they alighted on the panorama as translated from its European exhibitionary spectacle into a vehicle of Soviet govermentality.) Europe is largely out of the frame at AWIM, and, arguably, in Turkish memory of Gallipoli generally, but transnational memory connections are much clearer with the ‘Anzac’ past. This is emblematized in the panorama in the form of the Turkish soldier carrying (and thus saving) a wounded Australian. This is a motif that can be found in public sculptures around the Gallipoli peninsula and is a key part of the appeal of Gallipoli to the large and economically important Australian memory tourism market. As Lucienne Thys-​Şenocak (2019, 20) notes, this idea of the ‘gentleman’s war’, and of Turkish and Australian soldiers as ‘brothers in arms’ and ‘Johnnies

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152  Politics of display at AWIM and Mehmets’ (drawing on Atatürk’s famous words), has been a key plank in marketing and a 2014 application for World Heritage status. The transnational memory story made and the geopolitical configuration of memory in Turkey faces away from Europe. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in both Australia and Turkey Gallipoli is a key origin story that enables selective remembering. As Jay Winter (2013, 25) has suggested, Gallipoli offers up an Australian national narrative that helps to evade the preceding colonial one. Perhaps this is why Gallipoli is celebrated with such spectacle, including re-​ enactments, dioramas, and military parades that would not look out of place in Turkey and have comparable affects. Even the Australian War Memorial was designed in the form of Hagia Sophia. Moreover, the Australian war memory is in some ways predicated on distinction from Britain, because of its disregard for Australian lives (see Dittmer and Waterton 2017). The geopolitical memory relays between the two nations in some ways are a form of reciprocated distinction from a Eurocentric past. Mads Daugbjerg’s explorations of the 1864 Battle of Dybbøl in Denmark provide a useful European counterpoint. Here, Denmark was defeated by Prussia and lost significant territory to Prussia. National commemorations take place in Dybbøl every year and Danish soldiers participate, wearing period costumes. Although this was a defeat, the battle became a key part of the national story of Denmark and the ‘cradle of the “pure” Danish nation’ (Daugbjerg 2014, 245). In 2011, German soldiers were for the first time invited to the ceremonies. Rather than drawing attention to historic hostilities, the ceremony made a point of common suffering of the soldiers of both sides. What is more, an audio-​visual guide at the heritage centre in Dybbøl also reflected the Prussian perspective in order to create ‘a more balanced’ story (ibid., 257). However, this attempt of being ‘non-​national’ and promoting ‘universal humanitarian ideals’ was never fully realized (2011, 249). For example, a well-​known Danish nationalist military song was played as background of the same audio-​visual guide. Daugbjerg noticed that after visiting the centre, some visitors went away whistling this tune, also used at the time in publicity by an anti-​immigrant party (ibid., 257). To be sure, this is a banal undercurrent of nationalism in the sense articulated by Michael Billig (1995), and at AWIM we see something rather more explicit and overt, and there is little sense of the move towards a ‘balanced’ remembrance  –​ even if that balance is undermined by banal nationalism in the Danish case. Although here we have talked of ‘defeat’ or loss, rather than ‘victory’ in both Australian and Danish memory cultures, these turn conspicuously into victories of the spirit, crucibles of the new nation, and the forging of a new national self (a similar point could be made about the Allied Landing at Dunkirk). These pasts are mined for symbols, affects, icons, and devices for identification and collectivization in the present. They tend to be heavily mediatized in museums, but also in popular culture and film. These wartime constitution moments turn out have much in common with the Turkish treatment of Gallipoli in AWIM. The Turkish account of the conflict

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Politics of display at AWIM 153 differs because it is couched as victory, but this obscures the Turkish losses sustained at Gallipoli and the overall defeat of the Central Powers in World War I (again, the ‘Wars of Independence’ frame evades this) and, of course, the fate of the Armenians who died in 1915, the same year as Gallipoli. After this, Atatürk’s victories in the 1910s move seamlessly into his reconstruction of the nation and political reforms in the rest of the museum, without pausing to account at any length for the shock of the fall and break-​up of the Ottoman Empire and Sultanate. If Europe is tidied out of the wartime galleries, in the post-​war galleries of the museum, Europe as referent is woven through the displays as a positive referent in some ways. It is partly a model for the modernizing state, partly an example to surpass. The insistence on secularization, women’s rights, and bringing Turkey into line with European modernity is central to the museum. But there are key differences. In some ways the governmental character of AWIM is as a museal translation of Atatürk’s ‘populism’. This differs from European liberal democracy in the affective weight of moral obligation placed upon citizens to commit to and work for the national project; everyone is held to account; everyone bears what is sometimes called bayrak (the flag), or the ethico-​political project handed down from the heroes of the nation. It is here that the museum, and Anıtkabir, function as overlapping sites of pedagogy and governmentality. Both Panorama 1453 and AWIM attempt to present singular unitary visions of Turkish identity premised on history:  the sense in each case is that the history in question is the story of and for Turkish identity. But they clearly cannot both have primacy for everyone. They are also in some ways at odds with one another (e.g. with reference to religion). So, immediately there is inevitable contest at the level of representation, and it was evident from some visitor responses at P1453 that this can translate into intergroup conflict and resentment. But must it always? One of my staff interviewees pointed to growing divisions in Turkish society but also reported that over the last five years the ‘other side’ [öbür kesim], by which she meant conservative Muslims, had been visiting in greater numbers, perhaps because of the lifting of the headscarf ban. At first sight this suggests that people might forge attachments to different historical narratives in the public sphere, notwithstanding the fact that they are each presented as singular and having national primacy. The next chapters will attempt to understand these complexities, first at AWIM (Chapter  7) and then across both of the museums explored in this book. Visitor motivations turn out to be plural: as noted, I learned from AWIM staff that some people come to scrawl insults to Atatürk in the visitor book. But they also told me that ‘headscarf women’ come to wave the Turkish flag at Anıtkabir on the National Days, like on 29th October (the establishment of the Republic). I too saw something that made me take caution before simplistically equating social divisions with discrete audiences. One day as I left Anıtkabir

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154  Politics of display at AWIM after conducting fieldwork I passed out through the security barriers at the same time as a woman and her young son, who looked to be around eight years old. The woman wore a headscarf and full-​length clothing typical of conservative Sunni Muslim women in Turkey, and cheerfully said to her son, ‘See? Now we have seen Atatürk! Shall we come again soon?’

Notes 1 My translation. The original reads: ‘Ey Büyük Ata’ Varlığımızın en kutsal temeli olan, Türk İstiklâl ve Cumhuriyetinin sonsuz bekçisiyiz. Bu karar, değişmez irademizin ilk ve son anlatımıdır. Istikbâlde, hiçbir bir kuvvet bizi yolumuzdan döndürmeyecektir. Bizler, bütün hızımızı senden, ulusal tarihimizden ve ruhumuzdaki sönmez inanç ateşinden alıyoruz. Senin kurduğun güçlü temeller üzerinde attığımız her adım sağlam, yaptığımız her atılım bilinçlidir…’ The speech is a belated response to Atatürk’s own speech to the Turkish Youth of 1927. It is recited on the celebration of 19 May, which was dedicated to the Turkish youth by Atatürk. (Notre-​Dame de Sion French High School in Istanbul www.nds.k12.tr/​Gencligin-​Ataturk-​e-​Cevabi accessed 8.11. 2017). The exact author and date of origin of the speech in its current version are unknown, although it was in use during my own school years in the 1980s and 1990s. A number of variations exist, based on an original written by Law Students at Ankara University in 1927. 2 www.atam.gov.tr 3 E.g. the Atatürk Society of America –​www.ataturksociety.org 4 E.g. www.youtube.com/​watch?v=CUtdSwxBlm4 features Kaya impersonating Atatürk. 5 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=hylsV7KwNmM 6 E.g. http://​news.xinhuanet.com/​english/​photo/​2012-​06/​20/​c_​131664964.htm shows how He Guoqiang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Central Committee Political Bureau, and the head of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, visited the Museum of the Great Patriotic War with his entourage in Moscow, Russia, June 19, 2012. 7 The speech is in Turkish; this is my translation. 8 The upper case for ‘He’ is in the original. It is common in references to Atatürk but is not generally used for other historical figures. 9 A lively debate exists in antipodean contexts on whether the Blue Ensign was ever flown at Gallipoli, e.g. www.ausflag.com.au. Its general introduction was much later. 10 www.theguardian.com/ ​n ews/ ​2 015/ ​ a pr/ ​ 2 0/ ​a taturks- ​ johnnies- ​ and- ​ mehmets-​ words-​about-​the-​anzacs-​are-​shrouded-​in-​doubt 11 www.cydd.org.tr 12 Tecmen, A., ‘Populist Political Rhetoric in Turkey’, conference paper at ‘Who is Europe?’, POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, Warsaw, Poland, 23 November 2018.

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7  Visitor experience at the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum

Today I left with unbelievable feelings: a little upset, a little sadness, and most importantly, with pride and tears. Thank you so much, for taking us back to the past and reminding us [of it] in these days when such feelings have been lost. I am a female teacher of six years’ standing. I promised to all of the veterans shown in the museum, to all of the suffering mothers and to our Great Father [Atamıza] to be more willing, enthusiastic and devoted when school starts again.

The quotation is a visitor comment from the official publication Anıtkabir Dergisi (Öncü and Öztürk 2002, 24). The comment suggests that the writer had engaged in a kind of psychic or imaginary dialogue with the protagonists represented in the museum and had made a promise to them relation to her own day-​to-​day attitude. The writer proposes attitudinal ‘exercises of the self’ (Bennett 1995), as if the historical actors whom she admires, including a paternal Atatürk in particular, were the symbols of the moral standards to which she aspires and the means of bettering and testing herself. The comment also demonstrates the profound emotional experience she had undergone at the museum, as well as her feeling of having been taken ‘back to the past’. In some ways, this is reminiscent of P1453 visitors’ responses, as well as the sense of time travel that the museum sometimes induced. Indeed, the museums share certain representational approaches, such as dramatic panorama and diorama scenes, although there are also important differences in the organization and contents of the displays. At AWIM, visitors demonstrated high emotion in many areas of this museum too, but this was a particular kind of emotional response, differing from the behaviour we have seen at P1453 in important ways. This is not least because it mostly (although not exclusively) revolved around the memory of a single man, rather than a group such as the Ottomans. As we will see, many visitors took up the opportunity offered by the museum to come face to face with Atatürk, and perhaps to enter into a kind of imaginary dialogue with him in which emotional practice and the affirmation of values are involved. This chapter asks:  what is the nature of such dialogue and its role in people’s

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156  Visitor experience at AWIM lives? How does this articulate with social formations and with memory culture outside the museum? As explored in the previous chapter, AWIM has a strong political agenda and presents a controlled historical narrative about the Turkish nation and what it is to be Turkish. This focuses on and glorifies specific events (the War of Independence and subsequent reforming Republican government), and above all on the figure of Atatürk, as reference points for common identity. My in-​depth visitor studies involved bringing to the museum a range of people, some of whom identified strongly with the messages of the museum, and some of whom resisted or opposed them, suggesting that the common identity proposed in the museum is an imagined one. This was, of course, also the case at P1453, but here at AWIM the picture might seem to be directly reversed, in a museum whose appeal is strong for Kemalists. In some ways, these Kemalist visitors are people who feel embattled, as we saw when I brought some of them to visit P1453 –​they can feel that their way of life, belief systems and political ideals are threatened by an antagonistic government administration and majority electorate that seems to be against at least some of the six principles of Atatürkism, notably laicism. As with P1453, many visitors to AWIM come with substantial awareness and knowledge of the historical stories, events, and characters that they will encounter at the museum, prompting similar questions about why people visit and what they get out of the visit experience. As seen in the comment above, the visit may be something of profound personal importance. And yet I caution against a black-​and-​white view of the two museums, as if all of the responses that they provoke were extreme ones, of wholehearted and passionate agreement or disagreement with each, according to visitors’ political orientation and social belongings. In this chapter too, I will explore some extreme responses to the museum (although extreme, these can nevertheless be common), before opening the way for nuanced understandings. This chapter proceeds across the key themes that emerged from my visitor studies, which included observations in the museum, in-​ depth interviews with respondents from a range of political positions, and reference to some published visitor comments. The first of these themes –​ about clothes and visual appearance –​might seem surprising at first, given the high-​minded and serious approach of the museum, but in fact links to key issues around habitus, lifestyle, and personal, social, and political outlooks.

How Atatürk looks to us First of all, he is a very charming man, and he has a great taste. It even overlaps with today’s modern taste, and we are in 2015! I think someone’s body and posture reflects their personality. His stance shows his great personality. (Nevin, 50, female, retired civil servant)

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Visitor experience at AWIM 157 The section of AWIM displaying Atatürk’s belongings was very popular and many visitors showed serious interest in the display cases; indeed, at some times of day it was not easy to move because of the crowds clamouring to see. I overheard çağdaş (modern)-​looking women and men telling each other what good taste Atatürk had, and how it is still valid today. Indeed, replicas of his trademark sleeveless sweater can be bought in the shop! One woman stayed on her own for some time after she and her friend had talked about Atatürk’s good taste. She looked again at his clothes and began to weep quietly. Two teenage boys said they would wear these clothes and shoes today, commenting on how universal and modern Atatürk was. This frequent trope about how ‘forward-​looking’ he was (ileri görüşlü) is also represented in the museum in the photographs of him modelling western dress at the time of the dress reforms in 1925. Atatürk’s taste in clothing and his appearance, which Nevin, quoted above, considered to be so ‘charming’ (in the present tense), was a common interest among respondents. Asu (female, 55, retired civil servant) and Nevin were two of my in-​depth respondents, and although I had invited them to the museum, they were amenable to its emphases and messages. Of all contents of the museum they preferred Atatürk’s clothes and belongings. As discussed, Atatürk was quite adept at controlling his image, and cultivated it to maximize his charisma as leader. He went to considerable lengths to dress well, even sending the designer Levon Kordonciyan to Paris to learn from French fashion, so it is unsurprising in some ways that the clothing associated with his image should become significant for people’s memory practices. Secondly, Atatürk’s political reforms also involved the transformation of clothing practices and styles, from Ottoman outfits to the modern, western dress he favoured. As with so many reforms, he tried to lead the way, with immaculately tailored suits, and a characteristic style that was both western and individual. Thirdly, society in Turkey is visibly demarcated through dress and clothing, particularly in the context of conservative Islamic identities and modern, westernized identities, and their very different dress codes, clearly signalling a different physical habitus. We can recall that this was also an important theme in responses at P1453, where my in-​depth visitors often made comments on clothing, including Islamists pointing out their religiosity, oppositional visitors deriding it, and, in one case (Aynur), a Muslim woman reflecting on the fact that she had recently been criticized for wearing western clothing. These differences continue to be critical points in relation to cultural contests and legislation, for example with regard to the headscarf ban and the various attempts made by the AKP to repeal it. Contemporary issues around clothing are the subject of considerable public discussion in news and social media (BBC News, March 4, 2015). The AKP rarely publishes statements about dress and attire but has been seen to influence attitudes and norms, such as in the case of Erdoğan’s antipathy for tattoos as a western form of adornment, or the AKP criticism of ATV television newsreader

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158  Visitor experience at AWIM Gözde Kansu’s attire, leading to her dismissal (Thomas 2013). Female attire and demeanour in particular is considered a site of biopolitics and a social battleground, in particular after Erdoğan’s 2014 speech on the natural inequality of men and women (BBC News, March 4, 2015) and the promotion of modest dress. In May 2016, the first Istanbul Modest Fashion Week was held with AKP support. In 2015, just before my visitor studies, the sexual assault and murder of 19-​year-​old student Özgecan Aslan was in the news and this was connected in some conservative political discourse to the perils of wearing westernized clothing (Links 2015). Clothing, in this sense, is not understood simply as a matter of fashion, tailoring and so on, but as a marker of difference and self-​determination versus conformity, secularism versus piety, and the different ways of life with which these are associated. The physical habitus is not a simple surface matter in Turkey; it is connected to deep social antagonisms and moral conflicts, ranging over gender, sexual, political and religious issues, and we might relate these to Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the interconnections between the making of surfaces and the making of social relations: hate, she argues, ‘creates the surfaces of bodies through the way in which bodies are aligned with and against other bodies’ (2004, 54). The identification of westernized dress as a marker of enlightenment is simultaneously an identification of visibly Conservative-​Islamist dress as retrograde and hateful, not least because it is entangled with gender politics. As if to highlight these areas of crossover, the female Kemalist visitors whom I  interviewed in the museum moved fluidly between praise for Atatürk’s fashion sense and his interests in women’s rights. In Nevin’s case this was set against the negative example of the Ottoman era: I never embraced the Ottomans and I  never will. For me, they have gone. For me, there is only afterwards:  the republican period. [This is] because [the Ottomans] did not have a lifestyle that I could adopt, whereas Atatürk always worked for his people. Then his reforms… Especially what he gave us women was very important. Were there rights for women in the Ottoman period? There were none! A society that does not stand for women’s rights is not valid! Therefore, I refuse the society that thinks we’re nothing. I don’t want it. We women have more rights because of him. We owe him so much! It is in this context that Atatürk’s clothing takes on the values of his reforming political project and its legacy. In a sense, to admire Atatürk’s taste in clothing is to admire and adhere to his vision, and to practise being modern in a way that is both westernized and egalitarian. Asu commented on this in relation to contemporary socio-​political issues, pointing out that Atatürk had ‘given us our freedom’ and that the AKP was now taking this away: How can he [Erdoğan] tell me and my daughters how to live and who we are, and who we can live with? Think about our husbands and sons,

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Visitor experience at AWIM 159 who are taught that we Turkish women are only good [inasmuch as we are] mothers! I think our father [i.e. Atatürk] must be turning in his grave to see this! Once again, this is a reference to Erdoğan’s speech about the ‘equivalence’ but not ‘equality’ of men and women, and his insistence on the value of motherhood. It also concerns the AKP’s critical interventions in the private sphere. In the 2013 co-​ed student housing debates, for example, Erdoğan suggested that as prime minister he had a mandate from parents to ‘distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate living’, in a statement much criticized by oppositional commentators as evidence of the government overstepping its bounds (Kubicek 2016, 136). Asu’s comment illustrates the connections she makes between phenomena –​from Atatürk to gender relations and lifestyle choices. The affective-​discursive loop goes from passionate memory of Atatürk to indignation and resentment towards Erdoğan’s encroachments upon personal freedoms; and then back to Atatürk in an imaginary sense, as if to present the shortcomings of the present to his judgment. It can, of course, be argued that Atatürk was also prescriptive about people’s lifestyle and intended to impose a shared habitus that was no less top-​down, including the regulation of clothing such as the ‘Hat Law’ of 1925, which banned the fez, and the 1934  ‘Prohibited Garments’ Law, which banned religious clothing and promoted western attire. Moreover, both Islamists and non-​religious, non-​conservative westernized people have frequently defended women’s right to wear the headscarf, illustrating the complexity of these issues. Nevertheless, for the Kemalist respondents there was a clear sense that one of the critical threats to Atatürk’s legacy was the loss of personal freedoms and, critically, all that they stand for –​an identity based on individuality but also shared socio-​political ideals of egalitarianism, the virtues of education, and a belief in a paternalist yet progressive secular state. In the museum, this is bound up with a related memory practice, which is based upon knowledge that these were his actual clothes. This means that they also bear significance as relics that connect past and present auratically. They show that he really lived, and that allow some kind of imaginative contact between him and visitors today. Visitors often dwelled for some time in front of his clothes and possessions, sometimes displaying emotion, pointing things out to companions in hushed tones, and, on occasion, reaching out to touch the glass. This issue of contact also emerged in people’s responses to Atatürk’s handwritten notes, which became a proof of his reality and a trace of him. During our visit, when Semra (30, female, teacher) saw Atatürk’s notes on the pages of his books, she said she felt strange upon realizing that ‘his hand touched that page’, and ‘he was just like us –​human!’ Atatürk’s intelligence, erudition, and wisdom were also important characteristics. Semra discussed this and stated that even after the wars he was still given many gifts because ‘he was such a genius and whole

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160  Visitor experience at AWIM world must have loved him’. The amount of books in the last section of Atatürk’s personal library visibly amazed many visitors. In this section, I  often heard visitors discussing how clever he was and marvelling at the idea that Atatürk had read all of the books on display. One of my in-​depth visitors, Esra (female, 25, new graduate), particularly liked sections one and four, displaying respectively Atatürk’s belongings and his reconstructed study. Although she did not communicate extensively, she did say something striking in Section 4, where Atatürk’s study is reconstructed. She spoke not to me, but to Atatürk (i.e. to his effigy), as though he was listening, saying ‘I mean, you did not just read these books, but you really understood them!’ Atatürk’s erudition is yet another of his achievements to stack alongside the others: in battle, in government, in civil and social reform; together these build into a picture of a superhuman individual at whom his followers marvel with amazement and awe. In measuring oneself against such a person, visitors might well find themselves wanting or inadequate, but Atatürk’s benign persona allays this, as if to affirm that of course one cannot be as good as him! However, in this affective-​discursive loop, it does not matter, because he is there for us, always paternal, selfless, and wise. Esra’s expression about Atatürk’s understanding of the books he read shows his value as someone able to absorb and distil knowledge of the wider world for the benefit of the state and its people, upon whom one can rely for leadership and guidance. Atatürk symbolizes security, and the feeling that there is someone looking after ‘us’ with immense ability and vision who knows the ways of the world. The problems with this view are with the pronoun and the tense, for the ‘us’ is no longer unified (as some of the visitors commented, ‘we have lost our unity’), and Atatürk is long-​dead, his memory and legacy under threat. Perhaps what we see in visitor responses to the museum is an emotional repertoire of mourning, not just of Atatürk, but of the unity and security that he has come to symbolize. This may be like a feeling of grief at being adrift and unprotected in a complex and hostile world, with no guide to help negotiate new difficulties or defend against new enemies. This idea of loss of control, certainty, and guidance helps us to understand the frequent rhetorical calls to Atatürk by his followers to ‘wake up’ and to ‘come back’ in situations of perceived duress, where people say to him, ‘we need you now!’ to reverse what they see as the assault on his political and civil legacy by the AKP administration and its supporters.

What have we lost? [Pointing] There he is! This shows how he built our country from the ashes. He said ‘I order you not to fight but to die’ and they did, because he told them and they understood that we are one people, fighting for our country! Now we are fighting each other! (Erdal, in front of Gallipoli panorama)

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Visitor experience at AWIM 161 If he saw what is happening, he would be displeased. We have lost our way. We have not been strong enough and we are disorganized. Where are his principles now? Where is his secular state? Refah [the Welfare Party, a forerunner of the AKP], then the AKP, they pretended to be democratic… they are not democratic, they just used the idea. They copy Atatürk, but take away everything he gave to us. (Erdal, in front of Atatürk portrait) These comments, from a single respondent, demonstrate relays between the paintings on display and reflections on loss, contemporary social disunity and political opposition. The trope of the strong leader who galvanized the Turkish people was frequent, as was the sense of living in disarray because of his absence, even several decades after his death. While in the second quotation above there is a clear sense of anger towards the AKP, in many visitor comments this sense of loss was pervaded by a sense of melancholy, as one middle-​aged male visitor commented: ‘Atatürk did not think about himself at all. He only cared about others’. As mentioned in Chapter 3, one participant, Asu, talked during our visit about what, in her view, the Turkish nation had lost –​‘fedakârlık’. In English, this word can be taken to mean self-​sacrifice, altruistic self-​abnegation, or unselfish devotion or loyalty to a common cause; in front of one of the panoramas she said: I have goose bumps! What self-​sacrifice [fedakârlık]! what sort of thing is that? I feel that we have lost this. Nevin also complained about how the unity of the county was lost; she clarified, ‘I mean we have lost our unity and there’s too much hatred now that was not there when I was young’. Comparably, Semra stated: ‘they [the people who died during the wars] gave their lives. I cannot imagine what would happen if we had such wars now, what we would do’. For her, faith in the country was very important and people sacrificed their lives because of their faith; without it, no country would survive. She was impressed with the National Struggle and felt ‘insufficient’ or ‘inadequate’ [yetersiz] after seeing the displays about it. For her, this feeling of being insufficient also related to Atatürk’s efforts for the nation and intelligence. The themes of selflessness and unity, and talk of their loss, were also apparent in visitor discussion. I  observed three young adult male visitors discussing what would happen if ‘we’ [i.e. Turkey] were to go to war again. This was in front of the last panorama of the Great Attack, which displays how the Turkish civilian common people  –​men and women  –​helped the war effort, for example by transporting supplies and weapons to the front or tending to the wounded. This is part of a mythic narrative about unified effort, how everyone worked together for the common cause. It is also found in other cultural expressions, such as Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca’s 1951 poem Mustafa Kemal’in Kağnısı, often read on national days related

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162  Visitor experience at AWIM to the Republic. Here, a character called Elif takes supplies to battle using her ox cart (notably, there is one of these in the panorama painting) and demonstrates bravery and self-​sacrifice. One of the men in front of the panorama said, ‘We would unite again like our ancestors did’. Another one disagreed and said, bitterly, ‘we have lost that’. This exchange encapsulates well a kind of memory tension. The first speaker posits a sense of collective identity built upon historical narratives: if it came to it, ‘we’ would act in the same way as ‘we’ (the Turkish people in the 1910s) did then, so there is a sense of continuity and sameness. The second speaker expresses instead a sense of loss and regret that perceives a chasm between a kind of golden age for Turkish identity and society, and the lack of unity and solidarity today. Alongside these are appeals about the general importance of the museum’s message for all Turks, proposing the War of Independence in particular as a key ‘constitution moment’ (Whitehead and Bozoğlu 2015) that should be common to all, because of the lives lost to the national cause. Mert (28, male, masters student in social science) thought that everyone in Turkey should visit the museum, ‘to experience the struggle for themselves, as much as possible, as much as we can’, suggesting that the museum formed a vehicle in which people could vicariously experience the trials that Atatürk and his followers faced. Such appeals suggested that the museum could unify what some visitors saw as a divided society in which others –​sometimes named as the AKP and its followers  –​threatened the memory of Atatürk. Asu’s comment on this also shows the importance in her life of the ubiquitous public imagery relating to him: While I was visiting [the museum], I felt very emotional and I enjoyed it so much. I just admire him [Atatürk]! That feeling is so powerful. It makes me very sad that they try to eradicate his memory. They attack statues of him! When I see his portrait busts and big sculptures of him I feel very happy. For example, in Çanakkale and in Izmir…. In this instance Asu mentions the cities of Çanakkale and in Izmir, both traditional strongholds of Kemalist memory, whose urban landscapes and environs are dotted with images of Atatürk. Nevin and Asu also ‘worried’ about the situation and Asu stated: I am very worried about my country. This administration [i.e. the AKP] worries me so much, and they scare me. I want [the state] to be secular again, and to have a real Republic again, like in the old days. I want to live in peace (huzur).

How we behave and how we feel As should be evident, the museum is situated within a complex that is both architectural and affective, preparing visitors for the museum. One

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Visitor experience at AWIM 163 of my respondents talked about how, on each visit, his sense of anticipation developed as he progressed along Lion Walk, passed the statuary and towards the main building. He also described how seeing the guards usually increased his high emotion (‘heyecanlanıyorum’, literally ‘I get excited’). This, he said, culminates when he looks at Atatürk’s clothes and belongings and the panoramas. He said the panorama section was like ‘living history’ and he could ‘almost experience what happened in the National Struggle’. Feeling immersed in the panoramas, hearing all of the sounds (i.e. the audiotrack of battle noise) and ‘feeling it’ was ‘very emotional’ (çok duygulu) for him. The panorama section was very popular and the visitors scrutinized the panorama pictures with close interest and talked about Corporal Seyit in the Gallipoli panorama (Figure 6.5), pointing at him and at the ships being bombarded and sunk in the background. Of course, people constellated in particular around the figure of Atatürk in each panorama (Figure 7.1). The atmosphere and the visitors’ behaviour are different from the P1453. For example, I saw many people who were visibly moved, but clearly making an effort to contain themselves as if to maintain serious and proper decorum. I saw people discreetly wiping away tears. Alongside this there was a lot of silent looking, as if spellbound, with extensive ‘dwell times’, in particular in front of key exhibits such as Atatürk’s belongings, the panoramas, the live video feed of Atatürk’s tomb, and the reconstruction of Atatürk in his study. There were no really loud exclamations of pride, gratitude or regret, nor were there shouted insults or imprecations to other groups who could be perceived as a threat to Atatürk’s memory. Just as the atmosphere is very serious, so too were the visitors, and conversation was often conducted in hushed tones.

Figure 7.1 Visitors in front of the Çanakkale panorama, looking at the image of Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk)

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164  Visitor experience at AWIM This extended to people’s photography. Selfies at Anıtkabir are phenomenally popular. Clearly, this is a popular visitor and tourist pastime in many locations, but it appeared to be particularly important here, as there seemed to be heightened emotion in the way in which people photographed themselves. Their photography did not seem to be casual, light-​hearted or whimsical; rather it was considered and serious. Visitors to Anıtkabir do not seem to have fun, but they do engage seriously and demonstrate emotional commitment to the visit. I was not able to quiz people about this, but perhaps in part people’s photography served as a kind of proof of presence, as might photographs taken by pilgrims (Urry and Larsen 2011, 213). It may also be that the idea of being photographed in proximity to Atatürk was important for people. As the responses show, some had a desire to be close to him, or sought to make a connection with him. In the museum itself, there were a number of locations where people congregated to take pictures of themselves, or of one another. Some of the most popular ones were in front of the panorama paintings (especially near to Atatürk). Between two of the panoramas (Sakarya and Great Attack) there is a large framed equestrian portrait, protected by a rope, of Atatürk in uniform, looking directly at the viewer. Either side of the painting is a Turkish flag. This is another selfie hotspot: people pose quite rigidly and their expressions are usually unsmiling and serious in the presence of the great man. The other key location is the reconstruction of Atatürk’s study: the reconstruction itself is in a large glass case, but visitors can stand and be photographed in front of the whole scene, and many do. Notably, photography in Section 1, where Atatürk’s clothing and belongings are displayed, is prohibited (and enforced by the soldiers who ward the galleries), adding to the sacred feeling of the space. Sound was also important. Semra, for example, was particularly affected by the audio tracks and other ambient soundscapes, and wished that the sound, particularly the Republican anthems and hymns, had continued for the whole visit, partly because they helped her to focus only on the museum displays and it would be ‘such a waste’ to miss anything. Hearing Atatürk’s voice in the recording of the Nutuk in Section 3 made her excited and very emotional: she exclaimed: ‘it’s his real voice!’ People’s wonder at manifestations in the museum of Atatürk’s real physical existence was a common response: his voice, the clothes he wore, the paper he wrote upon, the books he handled and even Foks, the (real) dog he kept as a pet, and his tomb, visible via a TV monitor in the museum, were all objects of marvel. As we have seen, sometimes this led people to comment that Atatürk was a person ‘just like us’, but this was counterbalanced by a view of him as a quasi-​superhuman leader whose achievements could never be paralleled. Meanwhile, the ‘real’ objects co-​existed alongside modern fabrications such as mannequins, and images such as portraits. This seemed to create a kind of ambiguity about what was real –​perhaps epitomized in the diorama sections of the panoramas, where ‘real’ objects from the battles were purportedly used. Indeed, many visitors responded to images and effigies of Atatürk as if

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Visitor experience at AWIM 165 it were really him (sometimes they talked to such images), but the real physical or auditory traces of Atatürk often provoked particularly strong emotional responses. One comment in the visitor book explains that the museum ‘really took me back to the past periods, bringing to life the meaning of the war. And most importantly I almost saw our dear and irreplaceable father [Ata’mızı]’ (Öncü and Öztürk 2002, 24). The phrase ‘almost saw’ captures well the sense of ambiguity about the encounter with Atatürk in the museum, like a fleeting glimpse or an uncanny feeling of presence. At a superficial level, the Kemalist visitors whom I accompanied at AWIM seemed to have a similar emotional repertoire to Conservative-​ Islamist visitors at P1453: feeling proud, gratitude, indebted, sometimes crying, but also sometimes flowing into indignation at threats to the historical, social, and political legacy that they saw as their inheritance. There are indeed emotional refractions between the two groups at the two museums, and yet there were important differences. At AWIM the sense of sacred space and memory produced a reverent atmosphere in which people felt strong emotions but appeared to try to keep them in check. Often, my in-​depth respondents seemed to struggle to contain themselves, and, when emotional, sometimes spoke with broken or trembling voices, albeit low ones. When Erdal talked of the Atatürk’s galvanizing effect upon the nation he was shaking with emotion, and this was not unusual. Meanwhile, the mass of visitors (outside of my invited sample) behaved quite concertedly, with sombre, quiet, and careful attention; emotional displays did not seem taboo, but they had a particular range and character that approximated a kind of dignified control of the self in moments of sorrow. This extended to the physical habitus in people’s smart dress, slow movement, sometimes upright bearing, and in physical expressions such as placing hand on heart or over the mouth. When I met Nevin at the Anıtkabir before the visit, she was dressed smartly and told me that she had made an effort to be smart and not wear her leather jacket, as she thought it would be disrespectful to Atatürk. Wetherell discusses the ways in which body behaviour is what makes a situation affective, and suggests a way of understanding this that presents an idea of the social transmission of affects: All the time…people are orienting their conduct to each other, constructing contexts for mutual action, and developing shared foci and frames which guide what seems like the most appropriate thing to do next. As an affective practice emerges, or as we enter into an ongoing affective practice, we begin to engage with interpersonal and collective ways of figuring situations, with the affective positions offered by conventional relationship duets, and our bodies begin to respond. (2012, 143) This is one way of viewing visitor behaviour in the museum (both P1453 and AWIM, but also in any museum), and helps to connect embodied

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166  Visitor experience at AWIM responses, that are part of a physical habitus of heightened importance here, to wider social constructions and articulations (even if often tacit) of emotion and self, and the relationships between past and present. Another important component of this at AWIM was the sense of opportunity to ‘look to’ Atatürk, in the double sense of how people look to him for guidance and how people felt they might be judged by him, whether they ‘measure up’ to his standards.

How we look to Atatürk I come here to listen to him, and feel both my sadness and his strength. When I am here, I know what he would say to me about things. It helps me to think about myself and what is happening. (Asu) Atatürk wouldn’t forgive us if he saw what the country is like today. I cannot bear to think what he would say. (Erdal) These two quotations typify respectively the two senses of ‘looking to’ outlined above. Asu looks to Atatürk (or to his memory) for guidance and as a kind of compass to understand herself and help negotiate the meanings of change. This motivates her visits to the museum, as a special place where she can encounter him. In some senses this encounter is real, not just because she imagines it so, but because the museum is indeed on the site of his burial place. This is related to a frequent ambiguity and tension about Atatürk’s death: it is as if one could talk to him, and yet the critical problem that such people identify is that although he is ‘here’, he is not actually alive. As we saw with the Koç anniversary advertisement, dialogue with Atatürk is part of public as well as private memory culture. ‘Complaint’ letters to him are a common literary form, sometimes practised by high-​profile public figures (e.g. İlker Başbuğ, 26th Chief of the General staff of Turkey). Frequently, people use phrasing to suggest that Atatürk is ‘resting’ or sleeping, and that one can talk to him much as one might to someone in a coma (and perhaps, if we talk to him enough, he might wake up). Erdal’s comment is typical of many that imagine Atatürk alive today, but this is employed as a device to see the present through his eyes, to imagine his disappointment –​and, perhaps, to feel shame. People’s talk involved a lot of switching between present and past tense, and bitter acknowledgements that what was available was just his memory, and that this too was under threat. In an example of individuals imagining a kind of dialogue with Atatürk, Semra confided that when she read a book, she often thought about whether Atatürk would like that book and would think it a good choice of reading matter. She often tried to imagine him reading the books that she was reading, to think about how he would interpret them and how his interpretation would compare to

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Visitor experience at AWIM 167 hers. Asu also talked about her own emotional practice in this way, saying ‘I ask myself, what will he say to me?’ In The Work of Mourning, Derrida suggests that mourning is a process of incorporating or interiorizing the gaze of the deceased, making us responsible to him or her. This gaze is reciprocal but not symmetrical, for the dead are reduced to images ‘in us’ to form a ghostly part of the self (Derrida 2001, 41; Naas 2008, 170). It is notable in this context that Atatürk’s own gaze is such an important part of his iconography, including in the museum, helping to normalize people’s sense of carrying within themselves the interiorized, testing gaze of the leader. Although direct dialogue with Atatürk is common in Kemalist culture, the museum has a particular power to suggest the possibility of connection and imaginary work, and the kind of ‘speculative’ emotional practice mentioned before. One of my respondents, walking around the museum with me, faced the mannequin of Atatürk in his study at the end of the visit; after a pause, he said: I almost cannot look at his face. You struggled for this country but we… [stops himself]. I want to say something bad, but I will not do that here. I mean, we have ruined this country. (Erdal) His statement reflects a complex interplay of engagements:  he began by addressing me as the researcher accompanying him. It then seemed as though he switched to addressing Atatürk directly. He regulated his behaviour accordingly, and his comment that he would not swear ‘here’ may suggest both the particular code of conduct and propriety that he associated with the museum, and proper decorum in front of Atatürk. His final comment was addressed to me, an explanation in proper language of what he wanted to say, and what lay underneath his expression of emotion, of holding oneself (and society generally) to account by invoking Atatürk as judge. However, while this kind of emotional practice may be a frequent part of many visitors’ responses to the museum, there are others who feel differently.

Other ways of experiencing AWIM In contrast to the view that ‘everyone should come and see this museum’ in order to ‘remember’ the struggle and how whole nation fought together, my invited visitors had more mixed responses. Three participants who associated themselves with Turkish-​Islamic nationalist ideology, Mehmet (38, male, shopkeeper) Mustafa (56, male, self-​employed), and Cemil (58, male, retired from his local municipality in Ankara) were very critical of the memory of Atatürk. For them, coming to the museum was a ‘favour’ to me rather than a choice. When I met Cemil at the site, the first thing he said was there was no way that he would have gone there ordinarily, and that he had only come because he wanted to help me. This episode demonstrates the

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168  Visitor experience at AWIM strength of negative feeling and antipathy towards Anıtkabir on the part of some non-​visitor groups. It is reminiscent of the prejudices of some of the Kemalists and other oppositional participants whom I took to P1453. Mehmet was taken to Anıtkabir when he was small, and Mustafa said he had once been ‘obliged’ to take a guest there. Their previous visits had been before the new museum had opened in 2002, and after the 2015 visit with me they each said they had not been expecting it to be like it was. They all liked the panorama more than other sections and spent most time here and in the previous section with Atatürk’s belongings. Cemil particularly liked his weapons. Mustafa said his belongings were beautiful/​nice (‘güzel’) but he ‘did not accept the way that Kemalists show Atatürk like a prophet’. This is a very common anti-​Kemalist argument (Haber7com, March 8, 2008). For Cemil, Atatürk was, properly speaking, ‘Mustafa Kemal’, a great Ottoman Pasha only, and not ‘father of the Turks’ as his assumed surname purports. This is one of the crucial issues relating to the symbolic values attached to Atatürk, because he was at one point in his life an important Ottoman soldier. Some conservatives who oppose Kemalism often recognize and celebrate this, while resenting his later achievements after the demise of the Ottoman regime that he himself was partly responsible for bringing about. Indeed, Cemil criticized Atatürk for abolishing the caliphate and Ottoman Sultanate. The other two participants made similar comments and said that this was why they had never wanted to come to Anıtkabir. Nevertheless, as stated, the museum had surprised them and made an unexpectedly positive impression on them in some ways, although they had been ready to hate it. As we will see below, Cemil even said that he would bring his children to see the panoramas. When we came to the Gallipoli panorama, he said he was glad that they had not forgotten about Corporal Seyit, and he began to cry. Later, he commented that this part was his favourite. The Gallipoli section was very popular with all of them, and none of them had expected to encounter anything to do with it. However, the mixed feelings about the panoramas are evident in Cemil’s words: I would never come here but I will bring my children to see this [the panoramas section]. Well, I  am against the ideology that was created after this. Do you know why a Çorumlu (a person from Çorum, a city located near Ankara region) calls a donkey ‘father’? This İnönü [Atatürk’s follower and successor as president], collected tax even from a donkey. So, because of that, a man put his donkey into a bed and covered it; he pretended that it was his father! I mean I get angry about these sorts of things. This apocryphal story is often mobilized to represent the Republican administration’s cruelty and indifference to the common people. There is no reference to it in the museum and in this instance, it was ‘called up’ by Cemil as a counter-​narrative to the glorified story of Republican statehood.

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Visitor experience at AWIM 169 The last two participants, Bora and Ozan, were male students in their 20s on the far left of the political spectrum. Although westernized, they represent a group for whom Atatürk and the early Republic have little appeal. Indeed, they were completely opposed to the museum and very critical of the display and of the Turkish historiography it represents. When I met Bora at Anıtkabir, the first thing he said was ‘what a waste of space! They invaded such a big place so needlessly!’ Both had made mandatory visits to Anıtkabir, having been on school trips (which Bora said was ‘unfortunate’). Ozan said that he had to come back several times during his undergraduate degree studies because it was also compulsory for this, and there were strict checks to prove attendance. Bora and Ozan were critical about Turkish historiography, which they understood to be based on an ethnic conception of Turkishness. They linked this to Atatürk and the early Republic but commented that the AKP admiration upheld essentially the same beliefs. They both liked how the Ottomans were ‘multicultural’ and did not emphasize Turkishness, although Bora clarified that he did not know exactly what this meant and ‘what the criteria for this idea were in Ottoman times’. He was critical of the exclusion of minorities such as Armenians and Greeks from the identity category of ‘Turkish’, and argued that it was the Young Turks who introduced this idea: They imported Turkishness from Central Asia. All these storied are made up and they have taken sides in them. The [neo-​Hittite] sculptures here in Anıtkabir and Erdoğan’s soldiers representing the Turkic empires are all nonsense… We are witnessing the lies of a political system that tries to keep alive a bogus tradition.1 Ozan also commented on the keystone of ethnic Turkish identity, saying ‘I don’t believe the story of how we came from Central Asia’. Their suspicion of such master narratives manifested in the sense that official historiography is manipulated, whatever the political leanings of successive government administrations. In the War of Independence, Ozan mentioned that ‘the self-​sacrifice [fedakârlık] of the people of this country cannot be denied’, but commented that ‘the people were just used and they were lied to by the leaders who broke their promises. Mustafa Kemal is the most obvious example. Since then, each government reflects history as it sees it, and the next one another’. Meanwhile, some of the most emotive exhibits for Kemalist visitors left Bora and Ozan cold, and even prompted their derision. Bora commented on use of Mustafa Kemal’s voice in the Nutuk recording, the topic of the wars in the panorama with the sound effects and found all of these ‘ridiculous’. Ozan said he did not understand why Atatürk’s clothes and belongings were on display. This reminded him of the burial of Pharaohs. The museum, he said, presents the same old story that he was bored of: ‘heroism’. To be sure, it is very likely that these unwilling visitors would have been equally critical

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170  Visitor experience at AWIM at P1453, as their general suspicion of official historiography suggests. Museums, said Bora, should be above propaganda and should be about ‘cultural activities’ (as if these could be separated from political issues). He went on, ‘I don’t think the museums established by the [Turkish] state serve that interest, and that’s why I don’t plan to visit any of them’.

Final thoughts: modernity, obligation and competing freedoms For some, as we have seen, Atatürk’s clothes were more than an auratic record of his presence: they were an index of his modernity and commitment to the development of an egalitarian society that was literally fashioned in the image of the West. The adoption of Western clothing was discursively bound up with the repeal of repressive Islam and the advancement of women’s rights. In turn, female visitors whom I interviewed implicitly or explicitly linked such sartorial matters to contemporary gender politics in Turkey and the regulation of women’s appearance as a moral matter. It is notable that shortly after my fieldwork at AWIM, the first Istanbul Modest Fashion Week was held with AKP support in May 2016. This might bring to view the critical politics of Islamic dress in Europe:  just a few months later a woman on a beach in Nice was asked to remove her burqa on the grounds that it was not ‘an outfit respecting good morals and secularism’.2 However, AWIM’s exposure of gender relations does not always feel quite up to date: in one of the displays at AWIM, alongside photographs of the first women doctors, engineers, writers, journalists and national politicians we also find photographs of women performing calisthenics, the first beauty contest, and the first Miss Turkey in 1929. Women’s rights are deployed in this sense as a beacon of enlightened modernity, but sometimes in reference to their bodies and uncovered hair. Atatürk was adept at this too, encouraging photographs of him and his westernized wife and adopted daughters to circulate in public media. Many of these photographs are on display. These sartorial and biopolitical concerns at AWIM are not, as I  have argued, merely superficial. This is because they connote a deeper political and moral programme that was simultaneously about transforming society but also Turkey’s image and place in the world. Atatürk’s clothes have such a powerful charge for visitors because they seem to represent social freedoms modelled on the West that some of my respondents perceive to be at risk in Turkey. Meanwhile, museums in Europe, such as the Museum of London’s ‘What Muslims Wear’ project, or the Vienna Welt Museum’s ‘Veiled, Unveiled!’ exhibition of 2018–​2019 showcase Islamic dress to better represent the diversity and freedoms of the multicultural and multi-​religious societies in which they are situated, and to problematize their associations with the repression of women. There are critical paradoxes here where freedoms are encoded into different signs in different places: in European and other western museums Islamic dress is now frequently presented as a matter of tolerance and cosmopolitan acceptance  –​a positive sign of

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Visitor experience at AWIM 171 diversity rather than the symbol of repression that it is in AWIM. At AWIM, the gaze is in the other direction, and western dress is a symbol of overcoming repression. We deal here with contexts in which the political and religious majorities are quite different, but in each case, it is through women that the museums teach visitors about ideal social relations, and through women, west and east have become one another’s referents. Even if there is, at AWIM, a doctrinal insistence on progressive modernity and the freedoms it connotes, this comes with an obligation not just to curate one’s habitus but also one’s commitment to Atatürk’s memory, politics and example. What was the range of possible engagements with the memory of Atatürk? Consider, as a summary example, the different responses to the display of Atatürk’s clothing. For my ‘critical visitors’ this was as much a nonsense as burying a pharaoh with his possessions; for the Islamists, it wrongly presented him as some kind of prophet; for others, this was proof that he really existed, a real trace of him and his physical body, an index of his far-​sighted reforming attitudes, and something to weep over. But quietly, perhaps because the demonstrative and loud lamentations associated with traditional funerary behaviour are something to be resisted as anachronistic, unwestern and unmodern (Yazar 2014). We must indeed remember that at the heart of the museum and the entire mausoleum complex lies the body of Atatürk, an object of mediated scrutiny and reverence from crowds. They are kept at a distance and we do not see a corpse, as visitors to Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow do, but the signs of him are everywhere. As I have described, this extends far beyond the walls of the museum: he is ‘seen’ in everyday spaces, he is the invisible interlocutor of (some) people’s interior worlds, and he looks back at us too. Whenever I  have spent time with European colleagues and friends on their first visits to Turkey I have always found myself trying to explain to them just why there are so many images of Atatürk in shops, in homes, on billboards, on people’s clothes, bodies, and cars. My interlocutors often do not understand and are sometimes a little disquieted. The idea of a cult of personality centred on Atatürk sits uncomfortably with connotations of totalitarian regimes of one kind or another, marked, for example, by the thousands of images made of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Otherwise, it can remind people of those despots who carefully cultivated and disseminated their own images as part of maligned nationalist and imperialist projects, such as Hitler, Mussolini or Franco. What it means in Turkey is different. On one visit, a colleague of mine suggested, jokingly, that the right way to deal with all of these images of Atatürk might be to copy the example of Hungary or Lithuania, where statues of Lenin and Stalin have been deposed and removed to sculpture parks (Memento Park and Grūtas Park respectively) far from urban centres, where they are assembled into something that is part museum, part cemetery for the images of despots for whom no-​one mourns. This anxiety about the shadow of totalitarianism is in some ways rooted in horror stories from the European past, resulting in suspicion of

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172  Visitor experience at AWIM situations where the ‘personality of the leader becomes the fountainhead of authority for an entire political system’ (Paltiel 1983), or in which it relies significantly on the control of mass media to target the whole population (Plamper 2012b). In short, it seems at odds with European (and other) ideals of liberal and deliberative democracy –​an anachronism that a modern nation state should have overcome. But even my jocular colleague could see that these images of Atatürk were part of the urban, social, and psychological fabric of life. (I sometimes remind my interlocutors that when you remember to look, there are plenty of personalities still to be found dotting or giving their names to urban space in western Europe:  Queen Victoria, Christian IV of Denmark, any number of statues to World-​War-​II resistance fighters in Norway, streets named after the heroes of the Risorgimento in Italy, and so on. These drop out of mind until some controversy illuminates them again, as in #RhodesMustFall movement to topple the statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College Oxford in 2015–​2016.) Sharon Macdonald has suggested that European memory practices and cultures are configured by a kind of complex –​that there are ‘patterns in ways of approaching and experiencing the past that are widely shared across Europe’ which has a certain degree of autonomy. It is an ‘assemblage of practices, affects and physical things, which includes such parts as memorial services, nostalgia and historical artefacts’ (Macdonald 2013, 5–​6). The physical configuration of memory in public (and private) space in many settings within Turkey suggests a literal, on-​the-​surface kind of ‘patterning’. This is made up of icons of Atatürk and, perhaps more, people’s psychic interaction with him, through a locking-​of-​gazes which is available almost anywhere at any time. There is literally always space for conversation with him. European colleagues are bewildered by this too: why would one talk to a dead person? Why is it that so many Turks know exactly when Atatürk died and stop everything for a moment’s silence? How many Britons know when Winston Churchill died, or Germans Willy Brandt? Certainly there may be anniversaries and memorials known to some, but there is little chance of people collectively stopping their cars in the busy traffic to mark the very minute of someone’s passing. Once again, for outsiders there is a kind of Orwellian ‘Big-​Brother’ feel to this that is off-​putting. And yet as we have seen in this chapter, for Kemalist visitors to AWIM, being ‘close’ to Atatürk, mourning him, conjuring up his image (and his very person, by looking at his possessions, admiring his clothes or engaging with effigies of him) are often important practices of the self that refer not to situations of totalitarian control but rather to freedoms. These freedoms, some feel, are under threat from a Conservative-​Islamist regime that would undermine his progressive, westernizing legacy in favour of moralizing biopower inimical to modernity. In this sense it is ironic, but not coincidental, that the AKP proposes a number of intertextual alternatives to Atatürk that involve the same kind of patterning, such as ‘Fatih’ Sultan Mehmet II, Hasan of Ulubat, Abdülhamit II (the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire) and of course Erdoğan himself.

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Visitor experience at AWIM 173 Macdonald’s suggestion that a specific kind of ‘memory complex’ exists in Europe seems, in the context of this book, to beg the question of whether such a complex, whether the same, comparable or contrasting, can be identified in Turkey. Some ‘parts’ of the complex might be analogous, such as the interest in anniversaries, in reconstructions and –​even –​an attachment to historical figures. Perhaps then it becomes a matter of the different depth, intensity of feeling, and ubiquity of such parts, and why this difference exists. Gerard Delanty has recently argued that there is a set of structuring phenomena in the European past that configure Europe as a necessarily unique and discrete cultural formation, because of the local configuration of key events such as World Wars and the Cold War. This opens up the possibility of a singular ‘European heritage’ based on a general state of modernity as a ‘constitutive matrix that gave to Europe a direction and meaning’ (Delanty 2018, 54). But his argument is more complex. Across this singular space there are in fact ‘multiple modernities’ determined by local conditions, interpretations, and combinations of ideas such as freedom, autonomy, equality, justice, and so on (ibid., 55). If, on first sight, Turkey looks less than ‘modern’ to the eyes of outsiders used to the European memory complex, because of its obsession with dates, leaders, and icons, it is notable that these very fundamentals of modernity are attached semiotically to Atatürk’s image, and one reason why it proliferates so much is as a response to political and cultural threat from antagonistic groups who see things, including what counts as freedom, very differently. There are also different, clashing modernities in Turkey too, even if they are attached to and expressed through the past. They are configured by specific, structuring histories of antagonism between groups, ways of life and political ideals, although they may be underpinned by a common memory complex or framework for doing the past, comparably with Europe (Macdonald 2013). The threat to group ideals requires –​on all sides –​the continuous maintenance and proposition of symbols as defence for affective and ideological orders. It could be argued that AWIM functions in a way similar to P1453 as a site for the maintenance of one group’s sense of collective identity, sharing the same attachment to symbols, the same behaviours and emotional repertoires and practices, and, as visitors, ‘doing the same dance’ in Jay Rounds’ terminology. In this argument, one can visit the museum with the certainty of finding there one’s own political kin or tribe, perhaps even as a kind of retreat from the more obvious social divides in the outside world. On one visit to the museum in April 2015 I got talking to an older male visitor. We exchanged pleasantries about the weather and although I said nothing about my political orientation, as we said goodbye to one another he said ‘make sure you vote!’ A  general election was coming in a few months’ time. I  told him I  would indeed be voting, and he approved, adding ‘young people like you should protect the republic and the memory of Atatürk’. The mere fact that I was there, possibly combined with my own physical habitus, made him entirely certain that I was, as it were, ‘one of us’, and subject to corollary obligations.

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174  Visitor experience at AWIM If AWIM is (for a majority) a site of group belonging and affirmation of identity, then for them it was also a place for regret. Bernard Comment (2002) says that panoramas are about responding to threats by taking symbolic control through visual means, and in this light, it can seem at AWIM as though some visitors are, rather, mourning the loss of control. Atatürk’s legacy is no longer effective at maintaining control and his reassuring presence is gone, or merely spectral. The sense of security that he embodies has been compromised and there is no feeling of ‘being in safe hands’. The museum’s representational techniques bring visitors into contact with Atatürk, sometimes face to face. But this too is a reminder that he is only really alive in the mind, making of the museum a kind of wailing wall, as long as one wails discreetly. In the next and final chapter, the different strands of this book are woven together to understand the common cultures of the two museums that this book has explored in relation to the politics of memory, identities and Turkey’s position in the world.

Notes 1 The reference to Erdoğan’s soldiers concerns his ceremonial use of an honour guard of sixteen men dressed to represent the historic sixteen Turkic empires, as discussed in Chapter 5. 2 www.theguardian.com/ ​ w orld/ ​ 2 016/ ​ a ug/ ​ 2 4/ ​ f rench- ​ p olice- ​ m ake- ​ w oman​remove-​burkini-​on-​nice-​beach

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8  Time machines and the politics of affective practice

[It is a] great bliss to keep the sensation of the conquest alive! I felt as if [I were] living in those days (Özleyiş Topbaş, P1453 website 2009). That is where he [Atatürk] really is: in there! (Erdal, AWIM research participant, 2015)

The first of these comments refers to P1453, and is by Özleyiş Topbaş, wife of former AKP Mayor of Istanbul Kadir Topbaş. The second is from Erdal, one of my Kemalist invited visitors at AWIM, who refers to the video feed of Atatürk’s tomb. Both of these quotations point to ambiguities at the two museums about past and present, representation and reality. Özleyiş Topbaş’s comment was written shortly after the opening of P1453 in 2009 and was for some time used by the museum as a testimonial on its ‘Significant Visits’ webpage, in Turkish and English.1 This is made up almost exclusively of comments from high-​profile individuals linked to the AKP. Notwithstanding her special status, Topbaş’s comment is similar to many that I heard during my visitor studies at the museum. She says that the ‘sensation’ of the conquest is ‘kept alive’, helping her to feel imaginatively ‘as if’ she could inhabit the past. Erdal’s comment came after we had seen a considerable part of the displays at AWIM. We had visited the first section, with Atatürk’s clothes and belongings, and the life-​size effigy of him in evening wear in the 1930s. We had spent a lot of time in front of the panorama paintings of the young Atatürk in battle, also life-​sized, followed by seemingly innumerable portraits and photographs of him over his life course. Erdal’s point was that after all of these traces and representations of Atatürk, it was only then, outside the tomb, that we were really near to him. Many people often seem to suspend disbelief that Atatürk is dead, but Erdal dropped this pretence in the presence of the video. Although a photograph would look identical to the video (because nothing ever happens or moves, including the camera, and all we see is a coffin), the whole point is that it is real footage, that Atatürk (or his body), the man from the past, is right there in the present. Nevertheless, previously, Erdal had engaged imaginatively with the panoramas, feeling, he said, almost as if he wanted just to go up to Atatürk in the trench, tap him on the shoulder and talk.

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176  Time machines and affective practice In both of these responses there is an important sense of ‘as if’. The museums stage the scenarios enabling the imaginative work of time travel to take place, but it is always compromised by a contrary reality: it is not really the morning of 29 May 1453, and Atatürk is really in his tomb. The displays invite a kind of subjunctive memory work –​at P1453, as if it were possible to go back  –​offering a temporary immersion in the past that is always going to be incomplete, and at AWIM, as if Atatürk might suddenly awaken. This sense of ‘as if’ is like the move from reality to representation and back again, like a solace that is ultimately frustrated. It echoes in other visitor responses: the man at P1453 who felt acutely frustrated and upset that he could not really mount one of the horses and fight in the conquest, or the visitor who felt she ‘almost saw’ Atatürk at AWIM. These are, as discussed throughout this book, not straightforward encounters between visitors and the past. As well as having this subjunctive, ‘as if’ character, they are also multidimensional and intertextual ones. They involve interplays between state political agendas, public memory culture and iconography, the representations staged by the museums, and the responsive behaviour of visitors. Engagements with one past, such as the Conquest of Constantinople, often involve antagonistic or negotiated engagement with another one, such as the exploits of Atatürk. In this final chapter, I  make sense of these encounters within the interlinked affective practices of the museums and their visitors, who together form affective atmospheres with specific cultural and social politics.

The common cultures of AWIM and P1453 Bernard Comment notes that the nineteenth-​century topographical panorama was a means of reasserting a lost order on the modern city, which had ‘exploded, becoming opaque, no longer visible’ as a consequence of urban transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution: In conditions like these, the panorama had a decisive role to play. Not only did it express the perceptual and representational fantasies that befitted such troubled times; it was also a way of regaining control of sprawling collective space. However it was at the very moment when individuals seemed to want to escape from mass culture and loss of identity that they became party to the primary alienation of the image. They returned to the imaginary situation that reality was preventing them from living. (ibid., 8; original emphasis) Comment’s argument about the implicit roles of 19th-​century panorama in a fast-​changing world may seem far-​removed from these two 21st-​century state museums in Turkey, but his key transposable observations are that panoramas are attempts to impose order and singularity, to fix into place a

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Time machines and affective practice 177 definitive version of reality (whether the subject is a cityscape or a battle); and, related to this, they are a representational means of exerting control, as a kind of defence against the threat of change. Thirdly, they offer an imaginary reality, one that is not really possible anymore outside the panorama walls. In different ways, both museums can be seen to exemplify these anxieties and possibilities. In 2002, when AWIM was opened, both militarism and secularism were under threat from the rise of Political Islam and the imminent AKP general election victory. The memory culture of Atatürk and the early Republic was under threat, and I have discussed some of the ways in which, since then, the AKP administration has been perceived to encroach upon, denigrate or erase this. Indeed, the Wars of Independence have turned out to be important strategic territory in these memory wars, as they pre-​date the Republic and can be reconstructed as Ottoman victories. At the new, spectacular ‘Epic Centre’ in Gallipoli, supported by the AKP, the real star of the story is not Atatürk but Corporal Seyit. In the 3D show he is presented very much the Ottoman, with an exaggerated Ottoman-​style moustache (quite different from Seyit’s own more modest one in the famous photograph), invoking Allah when he loads and fires the cannon that sinks the HMS Ocean. Images and dioramas featuring Seyit recur over the course of the visit, and, outside the museum, the landscape of the peninsula has begun to be dotted with statues of him, as if to rival those of Atatürk. After Ankara and Istanbul, Gallipoli is one of the new fronts of the memory wars. This shows the overlapping stories within Kemalist and Islamist historiography, and their different emphases  –​what Michael Rothberg calls the ‘conflicting claims that constitute the archives of memory and the terrain of politics’ (Rothberg 2009, 29). When seen with this hindsight, upon its opening in 2002, AWIM seems like a bastion of a memory culture soon to be under siege. Here, the star is undoubtedly Atatürk, who, as General Kıvrıkoğlu stressed at the opening, brought about the most important ‘turning point’ in Turkish history. Although the images are synchronic assemblages of different times, places, and battles, their veracity and authority is underwritten by claims to absolute accuracy. These are based on the strict criteria given to the artists and on the presence of the corpus of historic documentary photographs of the War of Independence. The museum presents these as documentary photographs without admitting the possibility that they are also images through which a public iconography was constructed. Other issues with the photographs, such as the fact that in the image of Seyit the shell is wooden (which, to a cynical mind, might cast doubt over the whole story of his heroic feat), are not acknowledged. Instead, the historiography of Atatürk’s Nutuk is reproduced as incontrovertibly real, and its emphases and omissions (for which see Adak 2003) are matched in the museum. P1453 seems like a different story but turns out to be comparable. Opened in 2009, seven years into AKP government, there might seem to be little perceptible threat to the top-​down imposition of a Neo-​Ottoman

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178  Time machines and affective practice memory culture that privileges the majority form of Islam. But the administration was still in the process of subduing the military and its staunchest Kemalist officers, and the threat of instant regime change in Turkey can feel ever-​present, as shown by the historical incidence of military coups, and sometimes large-​scale civil protests and uprisings. Power goes back and forth ‘like a pendulum: it swings from mosque to barracks, and back again’ (Dündar 2016). In this sense, P1453 is both counter-​offensive to the longstanding dominance of Kemalist history, which helped to diminish Ottoman memory, and a way of warding off the threat of a return to a Kemalist government and the way of life it supports. Indeed, at the very moment of this book going to press on 23 June 2019, the opposition coalition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu dealt a severe blow to the AKP by winning the Istanbul mayoral election. I  was there in the streets on that evening after the result was declared. I  heard many in the huge crowds chanting ‘We are soldiers of Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk]!’ Perhaps the pendulum has swung again, although İmamoğlu’s campaign focused on bridging some of the divides that this book has explored. The panorama also has the function of establishing a single, ‘true’ version of the conquest and viewpoint on it, where in fact multiple ones exist, including stories about how Constantinople was not won gloriously. The city hosts diverse political viewpoints, identities, and histories, and the museum functions as a particularly potent means of exercising nostalgia for a glorious Ottoman past, connecting to conservative and Muslim identity today. (Indeed, a new, smaller panorama of the Conquest at Harbiye Military Museum is markedly more secular in orientation, albeit still glorifying.) Lastly, Comment points to urban change as an important catalyst for panoramas, and the megacity of Istanbul has been in a state of continuous transformation into a contemporary metropolis, full of skyscrapers and grand projects. Many of these are promoted by the AKP, such as the Marmaray metro tunnel that Erdoğan compared to the breaching of the Haliç  –​in train and metro stations the tunnel is shown in graphics that imitate the style of an Ottoman miniature. In this context, the P1453 is an important means of connecting past and present, and providing museal authority to a more general neo-​Ottoman memory project. This is also a complex identity claim about being equivalent or more than equal to the western ‘developed world’ through the deployment of technology, the glass and steel surfaces and skylines of cities, and the development of hi-​tech infrastructure; but (the message is) these are no slavish westernizations, for they have their precedents in the achievement of the Ottomans. As with the AWIM panoramas, there are selections involved in the production of the P1453: of particular themes, and of a particular moment, or really an assembly of moments strategically brought together. The breaching of the walls is the constitution moment explicitly identified by producers as one that changed history (instead of Atatürk’s victories as the ‘turning point’), a moment also that encapsulates moral attributes such as valour,

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Time machines and affective practice 179 perseverance, ingenuity, and religious faith that might be seen as exemplary for contemporary society, even as something to recapture or to aspire to. There is a basic ideological choice in the selection of the breaching of the Byzantine Walls over other possible ‘moments’: it enables a focus on military might, ingenuity, technological advancement, sacrifice, danger, and difficulty. It is also presented positively as a predestined Turkish victory, rather than an expansionist invasion of foreign territory and suppression of its inhabitants. There are significant omissions or occlusions in the panorama’s story. This is epitomized by the figure of Hasan of Ulubat. Hasan is not named in the contemporary historical sources discussed previously, which adds to doubts about his real existence. Nicolò Barbaro does, however, mention that a group of Turks cut down the Byzantine and Italian flags and replaced them with their own, and that this demoralized the defenders. But, it would seem from Barbaro’s account that this occurred after the Turkish forces had entered the city en masse. He also presents a very different and quite inglorious narrative of the behaviour of the victorious Ottomans, of which there is no mention in texts or in the panorama:  the former concentrate on Mehmet II’s ‘tolerance’, the latter chooses the moment of the breach, into which are placed mythic representations such as Hasan’s self-​sacrifice, to accentuate the heroic Conquest rather than its possibly inglorious aftermath. A number of commonalities and parallels in content emerge across the two museums. Danger, fighting, death, expressions of emotion, explosions, fire and smoke contrast with the calm demeanour of Mehmet II and Atatürk, each shown as a far-​sighted, strategic genius; in each case we visitors are positioned with the ‘Turkish’ forces. The colour, audio, and compositional effects are comparable, as are the narrative elements and the ‘celebrity’ of the images. Both museums represent seemingly impossible challenges: breaching the impregnable walls of Constantinople; or sinking the undefeatable Allied fleet at Gallipoli. There is a humane element:  the tolerance of Mehmet II towards the vanquished at P1453; and the Mehmetçik aiding the wounded Anzacs at AWIM. In both, there is a positive aftermath: the glorious, multicultural, tolerant Ottoman Age of Istanbul at P1453; and the independent Republic of Turkey at AWIM. In each museum, there is an ordinary hero to complement the superhero –​Hasan of Ulubat at P1453 and Corporal Seyit at AWIM, both of whose stories have been cast in doubt and mythologized. Last but not least, each museum matches its spectacular displays with an extraordinary amount of text. If visitors were to read all of this it would surely be overwhelming, and I believe that few do. One possible reason for this verbal profusion is that the practice of succinct and accessible museum text writing developed in anglophone contexts since the late 1980s has largely failed to have an impact in Turkey. Another possible reason is that the volume of text stands as a measure of the purported importance, centrality, and universality of the national stories told in the museums. The effect may be impressive, as if to show just how much can be written of these stories, how many messages drawn from them and how many aspects

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180  Time machines and affective practice opened up. At the same time, the comprehensiveness of the storytelling may signal a certain anxiety about prevailing against competing national stories. These commonalities are unsurprising in some ways. I  have mentioned the story that P1453 producers visited the AWIM panoramas and sought to surpass them (although P1453 staff never mentioned this), while competing on the same representational playing field, as it were. At each museum, the panoramas represent a compendium or ‘memory bank’ of exemplary behaviour for didactic transmission to the present. The behaviours encompass heroism, bravery, enlightenment, ingenuity, and steadfastness. (Perhaps the most significant difference is the relative absence of Islam at the AWIM panoramas, allowing for an easier lead-​in to the story of the secular Republic.) If both museums present pasts as exemplary models for the present, the putative mode of remembering (Erll 2008) at each museum is ‘accurate history’, produced through professional means and competencies, and in relation to documentary evidence. The museums play to the same rules, and appeal to many of the same themes, reflecting longstanding memory culture and practices in Turkey. Although the two histories  –​of the Conquest and the War of Independence –​seem to occlude one another, in another sense they are intertextual, and partly modelled on one another. Perhaps P1453 relies on stock ways of understanding glorious battles, won by a great hero, that are familiar from Kemalist memory culture. Perhaps Atatürk himself was at war with Ottoman memory –​as a reading of historiography such as the Nutuk and Outlines of Turkish History might suggest –​ and had to surpass and overshadow it with comparable achievements of his own. Geoffrey Cubitt’s understanding of ‘social memory’ can be used to characterize practice at both museums both on the part of producers and visitors. For him, ‘social memory’ sits between individual and collective memory, and involves the operation of various ‘cultural devices’ and of elements of institutional or social structure whose effect is often to ‘loosen the connections that given bodies of data may have to specific contexts of individual recollection’ (2007, 15). At one level, ‘cultural devices’ can include institutions such as immersive museum displays, national days, historical dramas on TV, official heritage, and tourism productions, and even politicians’ uses of the past in speeches. At another level, a cultural device can also be a rhetorical trope or discourse, such as the idea of claiming the Ottomans as one’s ancestors, or of calling Atatürk ‘father’ and asking him to return to solve Turkey’s contemporary problems. In both museums, the theme of sacrifice for later generations, feelings of indebtedness and the need to give thanks emerged, whether to the Ottomans or to Atatürk, establishing forms of personal emotional connection with the past. However, these commonalities represent conflict and contest rather than unity. At each museum, visitors who conformed to the ‘dominant’ or ‘hegemonic’ position (using Stuart Hall’s term) expressed anger and resentment towards others –​a social enemy –​seen to be threatening the memory culture

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Time machines and affective practice 181 and way of life to which they were attached. At AWIM the ‘enemy’ were Islamist politicians seeking to undermine the secular state from within, and at P1453 the targets of people’s anger were Kemalist Republicans who had erased Ottoman history and the sultanate, making people forget their ‘true selves’. What then is the relationship between the museums and their audiences?

Memory communities at AWIM and P1453 In his exploration of the politics of holocaust memory in the US in his 2009 book Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg asks ‘What happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one history erase others from view?’ (Rothberg 2009, 2). He takes issue with an understanding of memory as ‘competitive’, or the assertion that the ‘the interaction of different collective memories within [the public] sphere takes the form of a zero-​sum struggle for pre-​eminence’ (ibid., 3). He goes on to problematize the idea that a ‘direct line’ runs between ‘remembrance of the past and the formation of identity in the present’, so that articulations of the past form part of struggles for recognition ‘in which there can only be winners and losers’ (ibid.). The emblematic case that begins his book is drawn from an essay by Walter Benn Michaels that ‘considers the seemingly incompatible legacies of slavery and genocide in the United States’. Michaels asks why there is a federally-funded US Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington DC, before describing how ‘notorious black racist’ Khalid Muhammad used reference to the museum to make a claim that the ‘black Holocaust was 100 times worse than the so-​called Jew Holocaust’ (Rothberg 2009, 1). This characterizes the ‘zero-​sum struggle’ that suggests that remembering can be a competitive, antagonistic, and destructive act, but also the paradox that the apparent incompatibility of memories often involves comparison and referencing, meaning that they can become discursively connected. Although Rothberg is talking about the specific case of contest between memory of the Holocaust and of slavery in the US, the ‘zero-​sum’ model that he critiques seems at first sight to characterize Turkey very well. The historical representations made in different museums and the competitive staging of commemorations can seem like attempts to ‘block out’ other histories, each presenting a single history as the key past for contemporary attention and reflection, whether it is the Conquest of Constantinople or the exploits of Atatürk. Multidirectional memory focuses attention on how memory cultures and the groups that participate in them co-​constitute one another, even if oppositionally or divisively. As stated, Rothberg is interested in ‘uncovering historical relatedness and working through the partial overlaps and conflicting claims that constitute the archives of memory and the terrain of politics’ (2009, 29). This suggests a different way of seeing the memory cultures of

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182  Time machines and affective practice which P1453 and AWIM are parts. The Conquest of Constantinople and the exploits of Atatürk may be perceived as ‘competing’, but they are also interrelated discursively. Borrowings (acknowledged or unacknowledged), ‘overlaps’, references, dismissals of an opposing history or attempts to erase it, even expressions of privation (‘they took our ancestors away from us!’) –​ all express this multidirectionality of memory and co-​constitute memory communities. Iwona Irwin-​Zarecka suggests that a memory community is made up of those for whom an event is a ‘key orienting force for their lives and public actions’ (1994, 49). In the museums, memory community membership can involve reference to, or even rhetorical reliance on, expressions of opposition to others, making historical memory part of the dialectics of self-​other identification. It is not just one apparently discrete historical memory that ‘orients’ people’s ‘lives and public actions’. Rather, this orientation is also based on reference, implicit or explicit, to other histories too. For the female P1453 visitor quoted at the very beginning of this book to say ‘they took our ancestors away from us!’ is an exact example, for it brings together in one expression the Ottomans and the Republic, as well as an ‘us’. This angry exclamation is a ‘public action’ oriented by different histories, through which the woman expressed group belonging and brought social divisions and enemies into view. In relation to the emotional tone of the exclamation, memory communities are also emotional communities, as they are characterized by specific forms of affective practice, a shared repertoire and common affective-​discursive loops: at P1453, for example, pride, gratitude, and anger at others, victimhood all go ‘round and round’ (Wetherell 2012, 7). Barbie Zelizer suggests that we can belong simultaneously to different memory communities, relating, for example, to ethnicity, age, political orientation, and so on (1998, 4). She draws on Hans Kellner to relate this to key historical stories, motifs or ‘vehicles’. The meanings attributed to a historical memory like the Conquest of Constantinople or Atatürk depend ‘on the social codes that prevail in a group, a time, or place’ and certain vehicles of memory are more helpful than others in allowing given communities to address significant shared agendas. Kellner notes that the very choice of a historical story as a symbolic ‘resource’ for contemporary identity –​something that we ‘resort to’, ‘depends on who we are, and what we need to know, which facts we wish to verify, and which to obscure’ (Kellner 1994; Zelizer 1998, 4), a suggestion that resonates with theories of emotion as a resource for evaluating social situations, negotiating one’s position in relation to them and managing anxieties about control over them (Nussbaum 2003; Ikegami 2012, 350–​351). This suggestion –​that some historical ‘facts’ might be obscured in people’s preferred historical stories –​connects to the idea that some of these stories are promoted by governmental agendas in the form of museum representations and with the aim of influencing visitors. In this view, certain stories are chosen by state actors as resources to inspire

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Time machines and affective practice 183 citizens to adopt the values associated with them, in order, as Timothy Luke says in his account of museum politics, ‘to shape collective values and social understandings in a decisively important fashion’ (Luke 2002, xiii). Relating this to ideas about memory and society, it might be said that a governmental use of the past in museums invites or strengthens membership of a dominant memory community. However, as we have seen, identity positions are also complex. At P1453 this was exemplified most thoroughly by Aynur, and her thoughtful reflection on history and identity, through which a complex negotiation of habitus was played out. Aynur felt as though Turkish society positions people either for or against Atatürk, and that it was very hard to get out of either group position, or to take middle ground. As novelist Elif Shafak notes, ‘It is almost impossible to speak about the positive things and the negative things in Atatürk’s legacy: you must either defend or attack him’ (Shafak 2013). And yet Aynur was able to resist the conditionings of a Conservative-​Islamist habitus to attempt a more balanced view of Atatürk. She also thought the panorama was cartoon-​like and unrealistic, and was unmoved by its emotional pull or illusionistic appeal. It did not make her feel (or want to feel) ‘as if’ she were there in the midst of battle, or ‘living in those days’, as the comment from Özleyiş Topbaş suggests. Although Aynur had a positive view of Ottoman history, she did not want to do the subjunctive memory work prompted by the museum, a point to which I will return. Meanwhile, at AWIM some of my participants identified as Muslim, but also as secularists and the Islamist participants who came to visit in order to help me (albeit somewhat unwillingly), were pleasantly surprised to find that they enjoyed some things in the museum, even if, in the case of the panoramas, they resented ‘what came after’. One of these visitors said that he had been ‘ready to hate’ the museum. There were, nevertheless, greater extremes, as exemplified firstly in the AKP supporters who simply refused to come, or even to mention the name ‘Atatürk’. Another extreme position is represented by those critical of both Kemalism and Political Islam: these participants were also predisposed against both museums and would never normally visit, although it did give them the possibility to consolidate a thoroughly oppositional identity. Lastly, an impression gained from my visitor studies is that compared to visitors at AWIM, those at P1453 were both more homogenous in terms of habitus and more extreme in terms of antagonism and anger at perceived attacks upon ‘their’ past. This could be because neo-​Ottomanism represents a relatively new counter-​offensive within memory contest, compared to the longstanding and visually ubiquitous Kemalist memory culture. Perhaps the emotional charge of Ottoman memory it is intensified in order to compete with Kemalism; perhaps there is also an element of vengeance for all of Kemalism’s perceived injuries and insults to the Ottoman past and for the repression of Islam in society. At AWIM I perceived less anger and more sorrow at encroachments, perhaps bound up with the mournful atmosphere and the culture of grieving for

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184  Time machines and affective practice Atatürk. It is also possible that both of these constitute transfers into the museum of more general cultural practices of mourning and lamentation –​ whether religious or secular and whether they concern recently deceased people or long-​dead, historic individuals (although this is an avenue for further research to which I can only point in this book). There was some intertextuality in visitor accounts. As will be recalled, the loss of Atatürk felt even more acute to some AWIM visitors because of Conservative-​ Islamist encroachments upon his memory, while (in Chapter  5) one visitor to P1453 asked ‘Where is my monarch?’, positing the legitimacy of mourning for Mehmet II as others mourn for Atatürk. Both the objects and styles of mourning and weeping –​whether voluble, anguished and angry at P1453 or muted and subdued at AWIM –​may constitute and consolidate a group emotionally in relation to its other, and may confirm the ideological and moral foundations of that group while subverting those of the other (Tambar 2014, 34). For Michael Rothberg, memory is not inert but is ‘a form of work’, a labour, or action, and for Tony Bennett the museum is a site of ‘exercise of the self’. In P1453 and AWIM this work and exercise is emotional. In part, this is facilitated by particular affective atmospheres, built up from the affective prompts of each museum, powered by a range of other memory practices and representations across public and private spheres, the ways of feeling about a particular past that have become conventional (like crying over the memory of Atatürk), and how this is fulfilled by people’s behaviour in response to the exhibits and to one another. The museums in this sense become opportunities or outlets for people to engage in affective ‘work’ connected to historical memory that consolidate the habitus and reinforce its dispositions cyclically. This work both depends upon and co-​produces a certain affective atmosphere, which has a role in the ‘making and shaping of collective publics’ (Closs Stephens 2015, 182). The metaphor of the affective atmosphere has been critiqued because it suggests the assumption that everyone will be affected in the same way, and accounts poorly for discrepancies. Margaret Wetherell resists the idea of affect as a kind of chemical contagion or ‘entrainment’ and rejects the assumption that there is a ‘perfect mirroring relation between affective atmosphere…and emotional states’ (2012, 146). This is important in the context of P1453 and AWIM, where my oppositional visitors might be seen as ‘resistant’ to the affective atmospheres of the museums, neither taking up the emotional prompts built into the structure of the displays nor adopting the behaviour of the crowd. On the other hand, I suggest that although there may be no ‘perfect mirroring’ between affective atmosphere and emotional states, there is, in the museums, some correlation of the two. This is because of the self-​selection of the audiences and the likelihood that a sufficient number of visitors are predisposed towards the affective practice connected to the memory culture on display. Put simply, some visitors go to the museums to exercise emotion and to practise their membership of a memory community;

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Time machines and affective practice 185 they go to experience and sustain the affective atmosphere, and then, to take something from it into their everyday lives, as I will explore next. In their most extreme effects, the museums help to maintain a situation of suspicion, division, and vigilance among different memory communities, but this does not work on, or mean something, to everyone. The breakdown of this process was evidenced when I took people to the museums who would not normally have visited, who resisted their emotional prompts, governmental underpinnings, the behaviour of the crowd, and the types of ‘work’ that I argue is modelled and supported by each museum. In Judith Butler’s theory of performative agency, discussed in Chapter 2, she adapts John Langshaw Austin’s speech-​act theory to understand the conditions under which performances can be effective in achieving desired objectives. In Austin’s illocutionary model, speech acts bring about certain realities, as with court pronouncements or state announcements about interest raises. Perlocutionary performatives, on the other hand, rely on certain conditions  –​an ‘if-​and-​only-​if’ consonance between speaker and situation. ‘A politician’, she exemplifies, ‘may claim that ‘a new day has arrived’’, but that is a gamble, for a ‘new day only has a chance of arriving if people take up the utterance and endeavour to make it happen’ (2010, 147–​148). It could be said that the museums are spaces of perlocutionary safety, where certain performances of the past, of emotion, and of identity are less risky because of a ‘contracted’ affective atmosphere between the museums and visitors and the reciprocal expectations that enable this (the museum producers expect certain kinds of visitors; visitors expect certain pasts, experiences, and certain kinds of fellow visitors). This recalls Jay Rounds’ view of the museum visit as a kind of choreographed enactment that creates norms: here is his exemplification again: I construct and maintain my own identity through such performances, and can believe in it because the other visitors act in ways that convey their approval of my performance, their acceptance of my authenticity, my status as a member of the club. I do the same for them. (2006, 143) This perlocutionary safety mitigates the fear of failure of performativity that Butler sees as inherent. It creates an indulgent retreat from competing perlocutionary performances of the past and from dissident voices –​people who refuse to dance or do so to a different tune –​even if at the same time it refers to them both antagonistically and intertextually. The past that people desire feels like less of a gamble and more like a certainty, alleviating anxieties about truthfulness and accuracy. However, there is a further inherent failure in the performance of the past, for as discussed, the panoramas offer a tantalizing possibility of entry that ultimately forces a frustrating confrontation with the inaccessibility of the past, or the impossibility of return.

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Affective practice, memory work, work on the self Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell suggest that museums have a psychological function for people in relation to emotion, for ‘museums and heritage sites are places where people go to feel, and indeed they are arenas where people go to “manage” their emotions’ (2016, 455). For Smith and Campbell, museums and heritage sites are legitimate sites of emotion, not just because people feel able to express feeling there, but because they also help people ‘to work out or explore how those emotions may reinforce, provide insight or otherwise engage with aspects of the past and its meaning for the present’ (ibid.). Şeyda Barlas Bozkuş (2014) argues that P1453 ‘creates’ citizens and transmits an ideological bearing to visitors, but I  argue that the social role and position of both this museum and AWIM is more complex and relational. They do not merely convert pliable and empty subjects to one way of seeing or another, or to attachment to one past or another, as a superficial understanding of governmentality might suggest. They are components of and spaces within a much wider set of transactions –​to use Hooper-​Greenhill’s term –​that have their own histories, and span across cultural representations, institutions and social groups. Likewise, many visitors have often made their own transactions within memory cultures before they make visits, meaning that complicity with the agenda of the museum and a willingness and desire to play by its rules are, at least for some, important motivations. The overlap between emotional communities, memory communities and museum audiences comes about because for some people, visiting a specific museum that focuses on and celebrates a specific past is a choice that has purpose and meaning for their lives more generally, relating to their dispositions, prior knowledge, and their needs to understand themselves in place and time, and in relation to others: Affective responses do not just happen spontaneously and uncontrollably… but occur through the ability of the visitor to both desire, seek out and mediate that response. It is therefore, a contextual response, depending not only on the site/​exhibition, but the visitors’ relationship to it, their own political and social contexts, and their own skills at recognizing and working with their emotional responses. (Smith and Campbell 2016, 455) In this perspective, some visitors may ‘use’ museums ‘to remember and find affirmation of personal or collective social and political values’ or to ‘seek reinforcement of what they already know, believe, and feel about the past and its relationship with the present’ (ibid., 5). The museum visit sits within an ecology of memory practice as a site of epistemic authority:  a place where things are (ostensibly) true and real, and thus provoke heightened emotion. This motivation for visiting most resembles a blend of John Falk’s

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Time machines and affective practice 187 categorization of ‘Affinity Seekers’ and Respectful Pilgrims’ (Falk 2013, n.p.). I  suggest visits to P1453 and AWIM may contain elements of these motivations; the idea of the pilgrimage captures at once the sense of going to the real, authentic source or presence of things of which one has prior knowledge; and being prepared to be affected and emotional, reinforcing one’s identity and observing one’s dues, in this case, to a past, and the values which can be taken from it for the present. Wetherell articulates her idea of ‘affective practice’ through the example of cycles of devotion and religious observance, and from this I  take the idea of the visit to P1453 or AWIM as a form of emotional pilgrimage, taken once in a while, that strengthens and articulates with engagements with memory culture outside the museum. Pilgrimage is also peculiarly associated with war memory, which is at the heart of each museum: Jay Winter (2013, 26) calls war museums ‘stations’, perhaps in the double sense of ‘stops’ but also sacred sites of observance (as in the Stations of the Cross). Pilgrimages may involve engagement with relics or imaginative reconstructions like visualization. A pilgrimage also involves some work –​both imaginative work and ‘work on the self’. This work is two-​fold: it is manifest in the way that people engage with representations in the museum, and in what they take into the present from their encounters with the past. The museums confuse past and present, seeming to allow visitors to travel through time. Tenses are mixed up, both in museum texts and in visitors’ responses, and there seems to be a chance to help to breach the Walls or to tap Atatürk on the shoulder. There is an atmosphere of confusion. But the sense of ‘as if’ (one could return to the past) inevitably leads into a melancholic sense of ‘if only’ one could. There is an irreconcilable difference between past and present that can only ever be bridged illusionistically. This requires imaginative and emotional work on the part of visitors who willingly suspend disbelief. A tacit contract between the museums and visitors regards this kind of affective practice, involving set responses to representation. In the case of the panoramas at both museums, visitors are required to submit to the pull of the past and to the ‘grab’ (Wetherell 2012) of the spectacular, multisensory effects of display. They have to allow themselves to be immersed in the simulated past, to pretend to travel in time. Aynur’s comment about the cartoon-​like character of the panorama is illuminating here, and helps to answer the question I have posed about why panoramas were chosen as a representational form, in an age of multimedia options (even in 2002, when AWIM opened). While the panorama paintings are indeed illusionistic, to contemporary eyes, used to hyper-​realistic film and TV representations of battles, they can seem unconvincing and, of course, static. I would argue that some visitors willingly overcome this shortcoming to allow themselves to be amazed by and immersed in the panoramas’ simulation of the past. Part of the ‘work’ that the museum requires is for visitors to overlook the shortcomings of representation, and the divide between past and present. This is done by visitors whose own pre-​existing dispositions

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188  Time machines and affective practice fit well with the memory culture and values reproduced by the museums. They are also looking at the work that has been put into the panoramas and marvelling at it. This work is a phenomenal reconstructive effort, of many specialized artists painting thousands of figures and well-​known scenes and stories to ‘accurate’ standards, recapturing the atmosphere of war. It suggests that these pasts are worthy of work, and encourages a related commitment to imagination, remembering and reverence on the part of the visitors. Tony Bennett’s ‘civic seeing’ is part of this, as visitors see one another marvelling at the panoramas and regulate themselves accordingly, dancing, to recall Jay Rounds’ analogy, to the choreography. In this way they fulfil the promise of the affective atmosphere. But just as visitors ‘immerse’ themselves in something  –​in this case a sense of the past –​so they must eventually emerge, either at the end of the visit, or when our willing suspension of disbelief gives way to awareness of the real effects of time and a recognition of the gap between representation and reality. This too is part of the ‘affective practice’ of the museum, and it is where ‘work on the self’ happens, as a kind of project that visitors might frame based upon their visits. Sometimes these are explicitly made, as in the case of the P1453 visitor who wanted, henceforth, to cultivate a ‘more Ottoman soul’, or the schoolteacher who visited AWIM and promised to be more diligent in her future work. Even where visitors frame this less explicitly, I  argue that there is still an implicit sense of work on the self, as in the commitment not to forget a symbolic past (whether 1453 or 1923), to seek to live by the principles it is seen or made to represent –​and, perhaps, to defend that past against others vigilantly, to practice the self through reference to the past as a symbol of identity. The affective practice of the panoramas is to manage and negotiate the confused and ambiguous state of simultaneously looking onto the past and imaginatively being in it too, before coming back to the present having ‘worked through’ emotions in order to reinforce one’s dispositions, sense of self and a sense of social position. It is also to pull through from the past some virtues to aspire to, and, whether it is ‘our ancestors’ or ‘our father’, an example to measure oneself against.

Conclusion: the emotional politics of memory in Turkey In April 2016 Erdoğan condemned the ‘mentality’ that sees the start of Turkish history on 19 May 1919, when Atatürk landed at Samsun, presaging the dissolution of the Ottoman regime and the founding of the Republic four years later. Erdoğan clarified: Whoever leaves out our last 200 years, even 600 years together with its victories and defeats, and jumps directly from old Turkish history to the Republic, is an enemy of our nation and state. (Hussein 2018)

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Time machines and affective practice 189 Erdoğan’s speech was made on the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman Kut-​ül Amare Victory, against British Empire forces in Iraq in 1916. He attempted to mobilize this as a glorification of Ottoman power, claiming that this victory had been ‘ignored’ in the Turkish official historiography because of its western orientation. He could not openly blame Atatürk for this, but newsmedia sympathetic to the AKP did so instead:  the newspaper Sabah suggested that the memory of Kut-​ül Amare had suffered unfairly, seeming unglamorous because Atatürk was not involved in the battle (Ardınç 2016; see also Armağan 2017). That someone can be classed as ‘enemy of the state and nation’ based on their historical viewpoint is an indication of the high stakes involved in the circulation of historical memory in Turkey. It also suggests multiple views of the state and its history, cycles of erasure of memory, and an overriding sense of conflict and hostility –​what I have called memory wars. These are paradoxical:  some people ‘buy into’ the conflictual and antagonistic dimension of this, but others do not, and their encounters with the past are not necessarily charged with senses of division and difference. My impression is that some people do not engage with the past as material for politics, and this may be one reason why some visitors seem, on the surface at least, to be blithe in the museums, as if they do not notice the political and governmental dimensions. Visitors like Ali, who was unmoved but also uncritical at P1453, exemplify this, as might some of the many Sunni Muslim visitors at AWIM. Although I  was not able to interview the latter, from observation many seemed to be visiting positively, as a leisure activity, rather than with a view to insulting Atatürk in the Visitor Book. Perhaps some visitors do not make a connection between the past on display at the museums and their beliefs and lifestyles. Then there is a swathe of people who do not visit anything at all. I recently got talking to a late-​middle-​aged man in a tea garden. Although I  did not interview him formally, or indeed mention my research into P1453 or AWIM, his comments gave me quite a different perspective on my findings. He was a supporter of Erdoğan and the AKP but primarily for economic reasons, having been impressed by all of the big infrastructure projects, which made him hopeful about Turkey’s future and proud of its status as a developed country, like those ‘in Europe’. He was a moderately observant Sunni Muslim, but not always strictly observant: he said he had drunk alcohol on occasion, and had a secular, westernized daughter of whose university education he was proud. But he also said that Turkey would be improved by the general adoption of Sharia Law. When he heard that I was interested in history he said that he had never been interested in the past and did not care ‘whether something was made 2000 years ago or 20 minutes ago’. He couldn’t remember ever visiting a museum since his childhood. He may or may not be unusual. Although I took some habitual non-​visitors to the museum, all of them engaged seriously and consciously with the historical past in their daily lives, in one way or another. My chat at the tea garden cautioned against too much generalization, and a too-​strict

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190  Time machines and affective practice identification of party politics with memory  –​that all AKP supporters are necessarily obsessed with 1453, or that all Kemalists are permanently mournful people who go around having imaginary dialogues with Atatürk. If memory cultures are at war, not everyone cares equally: some are heavily invested in the past as a site of contemporary political conflicts, others less so, or not at all. In her edited book about public memory in Turkey (2001), Esra Özyürek talks about ‘new’ growing interest in memory. She explains how books on this subject had recently became popular, how new Ottoman language courses were opened, how the old furniture –​which was initially thrown away as it were considered ‘alaturka’ and old-​fashioned –​was taken back from antique shops and markets. Özyürek suggests that the memory boom experienced elsewhere in the world might have influenced Turkey as well. However, she suggests that there are also some other, local reasons in this growing interest. According to her, the first generation of the early Republican era were not curious about their past; they were more interested in the future and modernization. For Özyürek, a powerful reason was the language reform, which meant not just the adoption of the Latin alphabet but also that Turkish ‘history’ was rewritten –​as indeed it was in the form of Atatürk’s Nutuk speech, and in Outlines of Turkish History co-​ordinated by Afet Inan. As a result of this, the new generation of the Republic was taken away from their ‘past’ (Özyürek 2001, 7–​8). In an English edition of this book in 2007, Özyürek states that when she told her friends and acquaintances that she was working on a book about public memory in Turkey, she received encouraging responses: ‘It is really important that you are writing a book on this topic. Lack of memory is one of the most important problems we have in this country’ (Özyürek 2007, 3). Indeed, she argues that the Turkish Republic ‘was originally based on forgetting’, about the Ottoman period. This is also a common topic in Turkish popular literature. For example, the desire to be modern and westernized, and the decay of Ottoman memory, are key themes in novelist Orhan Pamuk’s works. Now, however, it is more often Early Republican memory culture and contemporary secular politics that is under attack in the public sphere, threatened by Neo-​Ottomanism either in zero-​sum games or strategic appropriations (as at Gallipoli). Gerard Delanty argues that forgetting is a key feature of the ways in which national memory has been viewed –​that ‘oblivion was the necessary condition to begin anew’, especially after violent ruptures, involving the selective remembering of national history upon which identities could be based. But, he adds, ‘oblivion cannot last forever, for there comes a time when the next generation will want to hold the old one to account’ (2018, 3–​4). What we see in Turkey is not so much about one generation holding an older one to account, but a cycle of competitive erasures, emotive recovery of memory and emotional work to defend memory. AWIM and P1453 are part of this, full of emotional prompts that rely on longstanding cultural practices. Both museums were

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Time machines and affective practice 191 formed in moments where emotion and political imperatives were related, and anxieties about identities and futures came to be expressed through recourse to the past. It could be said that there was an emotional need for each museum, and that this need continues to evolve in relation to shifts in politics and the relative ascendancy of political parties, ideologies, and social groups. The museums purport to create unity through a singular narrative and a shared repertoire. But they also have the capacity to entrench division, because they encourage those visitors already disposed to antagonistic relations with other groups to forge heightened emotional commitments to pasts with different symbolic values. For some, these memory wars are a distraction from the real matter of politics. On occasion, when I told Turkish people what I was researching, unlike Esra Özyürek I sometimes received ambivalent or discouraging responses. Acquaintances, including academic friends and colleagues, sometimes raised eyebrows about the idea of studying P1453 or AWIM and their visitors, or suggested there was not much point because the memory cultures of each are so commonplace, stereotypical, and manufactured as to be uninteresting. One friend, an expert in Turkish politics, said that whenever he came across the kind of manifestations of memory culture that interested me –​citing the 1453 anniversary public spectacles in Istanbul and the Manzikert anniversary events in 2017 –​he simply ‘switched off’, sometimes literally, when he was channel surfing and saw coverage of them on TV. Such things were, he said, ‘just political parties manipulating the past’ as if this were the frivolous and insignificant end of state politics and not worthy of sustained critical attention. Some people with whom I discussed my work looked down upon the visitors too, precisely because of their emotional behaviour, understood as silly, nostalgic, and the ignorant make-​believe of people who prefer to live in a fake Ottoman past or cannot let go of Atatürk. The museums too were talked of as spectacular in a derogatory, populist sense, which is to say as unserious, not high-​minded enough, lacking in historical nuance and objectivity. Or just not very good –​crudely politicizing the past in blatantly partisan ways, and with retrograde museal techniques and sensibilities, reminding us of the western impulse towards a ‘flat affect’ of interpretation in museum treatments of the past, and the imperative of keeping one’s distance lest spectacular and emotionalized representations take hold and inflame political imaginations. In this book, I have tried to argue an alternative view, that these museums and the memory cultures that they draw upon and reproduce are important because they are not external to politics and society (Delanty 2018, 12) and are significant sites in which the past is interpreted and transformed, enabling and encouraging forms of emotional work on the part of visitors that forges both identities and social divisions. By the same token, Sheila Watson argues that ‘few history museums appear to have grasped the notion of emotion as a tool that is as important as text, lighting, or narrative’ (2015, 286). That clearly does not characterize the museums analysed in this book. But there is more to it than this: the emotion

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192  Time machines and affective practice is not separable from the text, lighting, and narrative, along with a range of other technologies and techniques, and not separable from wider memory cultures and practices, or from political contingencies that frame visitors’ desires about the past and future, expectations of the museum and affective practices. To be sure, the museums I have examined and the pasts that they represent are not the only battlegrounds of memory wars in Turkey. As I write, Erdoğan is investing heavily in other pasts to build new narratives of Turkish history. One of these is Gallipoli, transformed into an Ottoman victory, leading to a large influx of Conservative-​Islamist tourism into the normally Kemalist stronghold of Çanakkale and the nearby Gallipoli peninsula. Another is the Seljuk victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 where, Erdoğan says, ‘our ancestors [ecdat again] wrote history’, and ‘we, as their inheritors, will start to commemorate August 26 every year’. Then there is the most recent past: the failed coup of 15th July 2016. In a ‘perlocutionary’ performance of memory and national identity, the AKP has alighted on this as a new constitution moment and has funded an array of representations to repeat it and normalize it as such. Photographs of the ‘martyrs’ who were killed trying to supress the coup are printed onto the walls of metro stations. At the funeral of one of the ‘martyrs’, Erdoğan himself broke down and wept dramatically during a public speech in front of a large crowd, modelling exemplary grief (the microphone, which he never lowered, captured every sob), before comparing the instigators of the coup to hashashins of the Seljuk era. What used to be Boğaziçi Köprüsü (Bosporous Bridge) where much of the action happened has been renamed ‘15 Temmuz Şehitler Köprüsü’ (Bridge of the Martyrs of 15 July). New public monuments have appeared. In 2017, art school students were set the task of representing the coup as an attack on civil liberty, and their artworks were displayed in a free exhibition at the Turkish Islamic Art Museum in Istanbul, one of the city’s flagship attractions. In a specially written introductory text panel, Erdoğan made connections between past and present. Turkey, he said, had been looking for the answer to the question ‘how is Turkey going to be saved?’ for two hundred years. In the cases of Çanakkale and the War of Independence, the answer came: ‘Turkey can only be saved by acting together with the nation’. On 15 July 2016, he said, this same answer came again. Just as in history, across multiple precursor ‘states’, the ‘children of the Turkish nation’ went voluntarily to the frontlines in the name of their beliefs, homeland, and flags, so too ‘the nation filled the streets with the same sentiments on the 15 July’. This represents one of the ways these pasts are bound together discursively, showing the complexity of claims on the past. As discussed, the memory of Atatürk and the early Republic may be impossible to erase entirely, and a more effective strategy could be to transform them. In his speech at the mass celebrations of the Manzikert Anniversary on 26 August 2017 in Muş, in the midst of thousands of costumed Seljuk re-​enactors, Erdoğan gave a roll call

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Time machines and affective practice 193 of Turkish victors, from Sultan Alparslan (the Seljuk victor at Manzikert) to Mehmet II and lastly ‘Gazi Mustafa Kemal’ (this, it will be recalled, is the name for Atatürk preferred by those who celebrate his military victories but not his civil reforms). Whoever they fought against, Erdoğan said, ‘we fought against them [too] on 15th July’ (Yeni Şafak, August 27, 2017). This is an appropriation of heterogeneous pasts and a strategic generalization of the ‘enemy’ across time. It is also a discursive positioning of the 2016 coup as a moment to rival the most dramatic in Turkish history, and the leadership that quashed it as comparably heroic. Meanwhile, pasts (and futures) are interwoven in unexpected patterns. The administration has set targets or ‘horizons’ for major economic and infrastructural improvements in 2023, the centenary of the founding of the Republic, 2053, the 600th anniversary of the Conquest of Constantinople, and 2071, the millenary of Manzikert. The choice of 2023 seems weird in some ways, but realistically, the centenary cannot be ignored without dangerously alienating and offending the tens of millions for whom the memory of Atatürk is fundamental. How the celebrations are managed will be fascinating to watch, whoever is in power. These are caveats about memory wars. They are not binary, they are complex in their dynamics and involve sharings, reciprocities, and appropriations, as well as offensives and erasures, and not everyone invests in one side or another, or even takes them seriously. Nevertheless, for some, historical memory and antipathy towards others are bound up in personal and social politics. In 2017, as part of another research project, I  walked along the length of the Byzantine Land Walls in Istanbul with a professional tour guide, interviewing him about his job. He told me that most of his clients were educated, middle-​class, westernized, and secular inhabitants of Istanbul who had developed curiosity about the history of the city. As we reached P1453, near Topkapı, he said his clients were often contemptuous about the museum as AKP propaganda, and Islamist, neo-​Ottoman revivalist nonsense. This talk of the museum often led them to complain about the encroachments made by the AKP in other areas of life: state regulation of alcohol consumption; the increase in the everyday visibility of Islam; the infringement of women’s rights; and the AKP’s transformation of the cityscape, whether through the uprooting of trees and razing of green spaces to the springing up of new mosques, neo-​Ottoman buildings and skyscrapers. Although the tour guide clarified that he always tried to be scrupulously neutral and apolitical in his tour guiding, I asked him about his own view of P1453. He said that upon its development and opening in 2009 he had been ‘tolerant’ of the museum because he thought it was right that AKP and other Conservative-​Islamist groups had somewhere to go to ‘celebrate the history in their imagination’, and a place to ‘regain what they think they lost’. But more recently he had become less tolerant because he perceived more and more ‘bad faith’ in the governmental use of the past that P1453 represented to him. He also made another point. ‘The Walls’, he said, ‘are right here’. His view was that ‘Nobody who goes to the museum looks at them. All they

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194  Time machines and affective practice want is a show, an easy simulation [of the past]. But all the time the real history has been here! You just have to use your imagination’. The tour guide was correct in one sense: the Walls are right there in front of the museum, but largely unvisited by its audience. They do not do that ‘work’ of looking at a historic monument and reconstructing in the mind the events associated with it. But what they do in the museum, with the support of spectacular scenography, emotive prompts and in company of other people who respond in identical or similar ways, is no less ‘work’, compared to what an educated tour guide can do when looking at the Walls. It is just of a different order: it is the social and imaginative work of the emotional pilgrim, whose visit to the museum is part of a regime of making sense of the self through a staged, social, and somewhat pre-​meditated encounter with history. It is part of a contract in which the visitor contributes to an affective atmosphere, suspends disbelief, overcomes representational shortcomings and accepts spectacle as truth, accepts one version of history as the only one, and takes from this a set of values and dispositions that entrench social and political divisions. The encounters with history discussed in this book are not straightforward. They involve interplays between state political agendas, public memory culture, and iconography, the representations staged by the museums, and the responsive behaviour of visitors. They are multidirectional, for engagements with one history, such as the Conquest of Constantinople, often also involve antagonistic or negotiated engagement with another one, such as the exploits of Atatürk. To a degree, the protagonists of the ‘memory wars’ I have characterized rely on one another to maintain oppositional positions that are important aspects of identity. The aim of my analysis of AWIM and P1453 and their visitors has been to achieve a relational view of cultural, political, and memory practice, comprehending understandings of affective practice and identity, across individual and ‘top-​down’ levels. I have tried to understand memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion relationally, to show how museums, memory culture, and social group positions create encounters with history that can have different intensities, atmospheres, and politics in different times and places. In the context of museum studies, I have sought to link explorations of museum representations and visitor studies together to understand the complexities and contingencies of the production and experience of historical memory. This is something that cannot be understood just as a blunt and hermetic governmental transmission from institution to visitor, but as an intertextual, social co-​production of meanings linking with various cultural forms and memory practices, from banal, everyday iconography to TV, public spectacle, and re-​enactment. Museum representation, memory culture, politics, emotion, and identity appear in this research in contingent and iterating relations rather than in consecutive or strictly causal ones, and meaning-​making is often marked by know-​how, transaction, and complicity between museums and their visitors.

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Time machines and affective practice 195 I have explored this in the Turkish context. Here, visitor studies are scant. State museums and officially sanctioned culture are a matter of increasing interest for Anglophone scholarship seeking to understand a complex country (Ünsal 2014), which appears westernized and familiar in some respects (and seemingly aspires to EU membership), but which can also seem to be liable to autocracy, social division, instability, propagandist productions, censorship, and government encroachment upon civil freedoms. The museums are fascinating and perhaps not a little exotic to outsiders because, as a (Western-​ European) anthropologist and colleague mentioned to me as I took him on visits to P1453 and to the new AKP-​sponsored Epic Centre in Gallipoli, there is nothing ‘banal’ about their representations, in the sense articulated by Michael Billig (1995) of everyday, relatively unnoticed articulations of nationalism. While this view from outside is illuminating, it is necessary to resist a reading of the museums explored here as somehow exotically retrograde and ‘other’ to a more reflective, enlightened western museum practice of history. As my windows into other memory spaces have shown in Chapters 4–​ 7, there is more that could be said about similarities and interconnections between the museums analysed in this book and counterparts elsewhere, and governmentality comes in different forms, hitched to evolving notions of citizenship that are never less political than their predecessors, as Tony Bennett has explored in relation to (western) museums’ current preoccupation with the promotion of tolerance (2015, 10–​ 11). The apparently distinctive Turkish memory cultures analysed in this book are suffused by references to their ‘others’ both within and outwith Turkey. Meanwhile, as a museum visitor I  have often noticed striking technical and rhetorical similarities in western European museums. The centenary exhibition ‘Proclaiming a Republic: the 1916 Rising’ at the National Museum of Ireland’s Decorative Arts and History branch in Dublin contains an impossible mass of text and a depth of narrative detail that any normal visitor would struggle to absorb in a full day, recalling the effect of the extensive storytelling at AWIM and P1453. Perhaps this is a feature of such tightly important and emotionally weighted national stories? There is time travel too. When I visited, a front-​of-​house staff member told me that I  was ‘in 1916 now’, and I  understood him to mean both the exhibition and the year. We also see resonances in the physical aspect of displays. On a recent visit to the Kon-​Tiki Museum in Oslo, after engaging with displays about the heroism and ingenuity of the explorer (and Norwegian national symbol) Thor Heyerdahl, I  found myself, at the end of the visit, face to face with a highly lifelike mannequin of him sitting in a reconstruction of his library (Figure 8.1), very similar to AWIM’s presentation of Atatürk as elder statesman. One could go on with myth-​making and dramatic scenography: the magical appearance in the sky of the Danish flag in displays in the Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus (Figure 8.2); the solid heroism of Winston Churchill in the War Rooms in London, where his sleeping quarters are

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Figure 8.1 A mannequin of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-​Tiki Museum, Oslo, Norway

made up to seem like he just stepped out; the appeals to European collectivism in the House of European History in Brussels –​all set to emotive music and affecting visuals. There is also a renewed interest in panoramas –​ both old and new –​in museum and exhibition practice across countries.2 As discussed in Chapter  4, Louis Dumoulin’s 1912 Waterloo Panorama (Figure  2.1) has been restored and turned into a heritagized object in its own right, transforming its meanings. But the recently developed 1815 Memorial museum alongside it makes powerful use of spectacular dioramas, audiovisuals, and reconstructed scenes such as ‘Morning at Napoléon’s Headquarters’, in which he and his generals plan the battle (Figure 8.3). The museum marketing tells us that it ‘allows you to experience one of the most turbulent times in our History… as if you were there’.3 And yet, if there is much more that is general in this book then might seem, there is also much that is local and specific. I have tried to show this by exploring the strident political bearings of the museums, their thorough entanglement in longstanding emotional and memory cultures, and their significance as sites for the articulation of group identities and relations. Turkey is a critical arena of memory that has enabled a very clear view of these issues. But the picture is moving. A recent, if vague, concept circulated by the AKP elite is the ‘New Turkey’ (Yeni Türkiye), a slogan that seems to pull together a sense of revived global power, trenchant resistance to threats (such as those posed by military coups) and, implicitly, a reprise of glorious ages epitomized by the Ottomans and their Islamic predecessors; as Jenny White puts it, the ‘new Turkish identity’ is ‘that of a pious Muslim

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Figure 8.2 The Danish flag descends from the sky in the Danes’ hour of need, during the Battle of Lyndanisse in the Livonian Crusade in 1219, Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, Denmark

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Figure 8.3 ‘Morning at Napoléon’s headquarters’, 1815 Memorial, Waterloo, Belgium

Turk whose subjectivity and vision for the future is shaped by an imperial Ottoman past overlaid onto a republican state framework, but divorced from the Kemalist state project’ (2013, 9). This has, if anything, intensified since the attempted coup of 15 July 2016. A 2017 Washington Post article on Erdoğan’s new interest in Manzikert commented that while ‘there is no country where the past is not political’, in Turkey ‘the past is even more viscerally prologue’ (Tharoor 2017). İbrahim Karagül, the editor-​ in-​ chief of an Islamist-​ nationalist newspaper that supports Erdoğan and the AKP, recently commented darkly that Turkey was once again at a turning point in which it would defeat its enemies (‘multinational alliances, axes, the West’, among others). ‘We are going to return to the great Seljuks, the Anatolian Seljuk state, to the Ottoman Empire’ (2017). Although Karagül’s position is partisan and his views objectionable to very many people, the time-​travelling, affective-​discursive loops of past and present that he sketches recall entrenched memory cultures, as well as pointing forwards to the changing fronts, techniques, affects, and parties of the memory wars. Time, he said, ‘is going backward, the winds have reversed, and we are returned to history’.

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Notes 1 http://​panoramikmuze.com/​homepage/​panorama-​1453/​significant-​visits.aspx, accessed August 2017. The website was revised subsequent to this research, and currently only shows a comment from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 2 See for example the International Panorama Council at https://​panorama council.org/​ 3 www.waterloo1815.be/​index.php?page=the-​memorial-​1815

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Appendix Visitors surveyed at the Panorama 1453 Museum using a questionnaire

R1, female, 28, housewife R2, female, 62, housewife R3, female, 65, housewife R4, male, 54, retired R5, male, 32, civil servant at a hospital R6, male, 60, civil servant R7, male, 42, construction worker R8, male, 36, warehouse worker in Germany R9, male, 41, musician R10, male, 36, a worker in Germany R11, male, 22, student R12, male, 21, student R13, male, 74, self employed R14, male, 43, metalworker R15, female, 47, housewife R16, female, 50, housewife R17, female, 42, housewife R18, female, 61, housewife R19, male, 55, a driver R20, female, 55, housewife R21, male, 22, student R22, male, 19, works in a pastry shop R23, male, 18, student R24, female, 68, housewife R25, male, 23, a worker in a factory R26, male, 72, farmer R27, female, 65, housewife R28, male, 30, works in tourism R29, female, 34, housewife R30, male, 18, preparing for a university entrance exam R31, male, 27, student R32, female, 32, housewife R33, female, 36, housewife

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Appendix: Visitors surveyed at P1453 201 R34, male, 19, student R35, male, 22, student R36, male, 22, unemployed R37, female, 40, housewife R38, female, 65, housewife R39, male, 58, retired from an insurance company R40, male, 25, soldier R41, female, nurse R42, male, 22, medical technician R43, male, 50, farmer R44, male, 18, student R45, male, 39, a worker in Germany R46, male, 52, driver (retired) R47, male, retired civil servant R48, male, 49, dentist R49, male, 35, primary school teacher R50, female, 50, housewife R51, male, 45, self-​employed R52, male, 42, journalist at Zaman newspaper R53, male, 42, guild (esnaf) worker R54, male, 60, works at an estate agency R55, male, 23, restorer R56, male, 22, student R57, male, 21, student R58, male, 67, farmer R59, male, 18, student R60, male, 51, works in a vegetable market R61, female, 42, housewife R62, male, 44, farmer R63, male, unemployed R64, male, 21, student R65, female, 48, nurse R66, male, 18, student R67, female, 23, textile worker R68, male, 24, worker R69, male, 52, retired from Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality R70, male, 27, unemployed R71, female, 43, housewife R72, male, 25, nurse R73, female, 25, nurse R74, female, unemployed R75, male, 29, butcher R76, male, 40, policeman R77, male, 73, farmer R78, male, 69, guild worker

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202  Appendix: Visitors surveyed at P1453 R79, male, 60, guild worker R80, female, 58, housewife R81, male, 68, guild worker R82, male, 71, retired guild worker R83, female, 41, marketing R84, male, civil servant at İSKİ (Water supply and sanitation for Istanbul Municipality) R85, female, 20, student R86, male, 40, insurance company worker R87, male, 40, refectory worker R88, male, 60, teacher R89, male, 58, farmer R90, male, 75, farmer R91, female, 22, housewife R92, male, 30, furniture merchant R93, male, 58, electrician R94, male, 57, retired gave prior occupation as ‘marine’ R95, male, 28, film and TV extra in Diriliş R96, male, 57, retired civil servant R97, female, 46, housewife, R98, male, 77, retired teacher R99, female, 67, housewife R100, female, 25, student R101, male, 28, unemployed R102, male, 29, works in food market R103, male, 45, guild worker R104, male, 32, plane technician

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and in bold indicate tables on the corresponding pages. Abbas, Mahmoud 99 Adak, Hülya 128 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) 107–​108, 157–​158; Conquest of Constantinople and 67–​68; dominance of 28, 29; political agenda of 33; secularism-​vs-​Islamism clash and 29; values of 17–​18 affective atmospheres 5–​6, 9–​10, 61, 185; communal 61, 108; difficulty of analysis of 62–​63; in sports stadiums 62 affective-​discursive loops 60, 96, 101, 108, 117, 159–​160, 182, 198 affective phenomena 8 affective practice 5, 8–​9, 54, 60–​61; habitus and 64; memory work and work on the self in 186–​188 affinity seeker visitors 52, 187 Ahmed, Sara 59 AKP see Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) Altman, Rick 11, 45–​49, 89 Anderson, Ben 61 Anıtkabir Dergisi 126, 155 Anıtkabir tomb 26, 27 Ankara Ethnography Museum 25, 26 Anzacs, the 139–​140, 151 archaeology of time travel 22–​23 Aslan, Özgecan 158 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 5, 7, 18, 39–​40n1; clothing of 157, 170, 175; complex viewpoints on 111–​112; cult of personality around 26–​28, 119–​121, 171–​172; guidance from, visitors’ feelings of 166–​167;

Kocatepe pose 47, 48, 49, 133–​134, 134, 135; mourning over 121; portrayed in Gallipoli Battles panorama (see Gallipoli Battles panorama); tomb of 26, 27, 129; visitor impressions of legacy of 156–​160; women’s rights and 139, 158–​159 Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara (AWIM) 42, 112, 175–​176; agenda of 17–​18; common cultures of P1453 and 176–​181; design and plan for 124–​126; display at 131–​132; emotion management of visitors to 60; field observations of visitors to 1–​2; financial support for 123–​124; Hall of Honor in 30, 30–​31, 122; institutional framing and official voices at 121–​127; interpretive panels and other resources at 145–​148; Kemalist historiography displayed in 25; location of 121–​122; memory community at 181–​185; militarism, pedagogy, and emotion at 149–​154; modernity, obligation and competing freedoms and 170–​174; as ‘museum as test’ 130; opening of 28, 29, 126–​127; other ways of experiencing 167–​170; panoramas at 132–​136, 134, 135; as panoramic museum 6–​7; reflections of loss and 160–​162; role in historical memory culture of Turkey 3–​4, 17, 155–​156; security at 122; spatial organization of 143–​144, 144; target audience

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216 Index of 123; types and numbers of visitors to 19; visitor behaviour and feelings elicited by 162–​166, 163; visitor impressions of Atatürk and 156–​160; visitor route and its effects in 128–​131, 129, 131; see also Gallipoli Battles panorama; museums Atatürkism 26–​28 Atatürk Year 26 Austin, John Langshaw 185 Australia 152 AWIM see Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara (AWIM) Barbaro, Nicolò 83 Bareither, Christoph 10 Battle of Manzikert 33, 72, 105, 191–​193, 198 Battle of Stalingrad 125 Baykam, Bedri 122 Beg, Tursun 83 Bellini, Gentile 74, 79 Bennett, Tony 11, 24, 53, 92, 149, 188 Billig, Michael 6, 152, 195 Birth of the Museum, The 24 Bourdieu, Pierre 54, 63–​64, 65 Boym, Svetlana 104 Bozkuş, Şeyda Barlas 71, 87–​88, 118, 186 Bülkat, Mehmet Esat 139 Butler, Judith 39, 185 Campbell, Gary 11, 14, 97, 104, 186 Çanakkale Battles see Gallipoli Battles panorama Carlyon, L.A. 151 choreographed enactment 54, 185 Churchill, Winston 151 civic seeing 92, 188 Closs Stephens, Angharad 10, 62 clothing 157–​159, 170, 175 colour of displays 10, 45, 83–​84, 86, 143, 179 Comment, Bernard 20, 45, 150, 174 communal affective atmosphere 61, 108 Conquest of Constantinople 11, 38; celebrations of 31, 66–​67; events of 68; Greek viewpoint of 67–​68; as key symbol of Ottoman achievement 4, 43; multiple ‘versions’ of panoramic representations of 22; textual constructions of 80–​83

Conquest of Constantinople panorama, P1453 23, 66–​68; colour and light of 86; content of 83–​86, 84, 85; decisions regarding representation of Sultan Mehmet in 74–​75; expressive content in 88; greatness, will, and winning portrayed by 91–​94; narrative of 88–​90; official voices on 69–​77, 73, 76; panorama room 83; as positive presentation 82–​83; reasons for constructing 72–​73; target audience for 75–​76; visitor route and its effects 77–​79, 79 content of displays 34, 45–​46, 58, 68, 83–​86, 155; commonalities and parallels in 179; expected 104; expressive 88, 144–​145; Gallipoli Battles Panorama 136–​145 crying by visitors 1, 58, 64, 98, 102–​103, 165, 184 Cubitt, Geoffrey 180 cult of personality, Atatürk and 26–​28, 119–​121, 171–​172 Daugbjerg, Mads 152 da Vinci, Leonardo 90, 103 Death of General Wolfe 86 decoding 57–​58 Delanty, Gerard 190 Denmark 152, 172, 197 Diriliş  101 displays, study of museum 44–​50 Dumoulin, Louis 20, 93 Durkheim, Emile 104 ecdat 59, 98–​101, 118, 192 Ecevit, Bülent 126 Economist, The 29, 33, 41n9 Edib, Halide 128 Elif Sanat Art Group 71–​72, 74–​75 Elkins, James 103 embodiment of history in people 65 emotional politics of memory 188–​198, 196–​198 emotion management 12, 60; behaviour and 162–​166, 163 emotions 7–​12; affective atmospheres and 5–​6, 9–​10; affective-​discursive loops of 60; affective practice of 5, 8–​9; behaviours associated with elicited 5–​6; crying and 102–​103; emotional force production and 46; in militarism and pedagogy 149–​154;

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Index 217 nostalgic and longing 104–​105; over memory of Atatürk 7, ​184; in porous or interactional space of museums 10–​11; prompting of, at P1453 90–​91; research on value, power and politics of 8; visitor expressions of 5–​6, 11–​12, 58–​65 emotion words 59 encoding 57–​58 Erdem, Zeynel Abidin 51 Erdoğan, Emine 29, 34 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 5, 17, 192, 198; as mayor of Istanbul 32, 72; opening of AWIM and 29; opening of P1453 and 36; speeches of 33, 40n5, 66, 188–​189; television shows and 34; Topkapı Cultural Park established by 69; on women’s rights 159 Erll, Astrid 92 Europe 115–​117, 150–​153; memory practices and cultures in 172, 195–​196, 196–​198; panoramic museums in 19–​20, 21, 74, 93–​94 European Union (EU) 5, 123–​124, 150 experience seeker visitors 52 explorer visitors 52 facial expressions 58, 103 facilitator visitors 52 Falk, John 52–​53, 186–​187 ‘Fatih’ see Mehmet ‘the Conqueror’ Fetih 101 Foucault, Michel 92 Future of Nostalgia, The 104 Gallipoli Battles panorama 132–​136, 134, 135; content of 136–​143, 137–​138, 141–​142; expressive content and narrative of 144–​145; spatial organization of 143–​144, 144 Giddens, Anthony 53 Gilroy, Paul 117 Goffman, Erving 53 Gökçek, Melih 29 Gözleri Hep Üzerimizde 122 Greeks and the ‘Fall’ of Constantinople 67–​68 Grekov, Mitrofan 124 Grekov Studio of Military Painting 124–​125 Gül, Abdullah 29, 36

Gül, Hayrünnisa 29 Gülen, Fetullah 29 habitus 54, 63–​64, 113 Hadith 106, 115, 117 Hall, Stuart 57–​58, 180 Hasan, Ulubat 82–​83, 85, 86, 91 Herrin, Judith 68 Heyerdahl, Thor 195, 196 Hilgers, M. 113 historical memory cultures 2, 17, 115–​118, 155–​156; ecdat and 99–​100; emotional politics of memory in 188–​198, 196–​198; Europe and 152–​153; guidance from Atatürk and 166–​167; memory community and 99, 181–​185; memory complex in 173; multidirectional memory in 181–​182; Ottoman 31–​36; Republican 23–​28 Hobsbawm, E. 8, 32, 93 Holtorf, Cornelius 22 Hooper-​Greenhill, Eilean 43–​44, 51, 52, 57 Hussein, M. 188 identity, Turkish 25, 38–​39, 63, 118, 196 identity work 53, 107–​108 Ikegami, Eiko 113 illocutionary model 185 İnan, Afet 24, 190 in-​depth visitor research 56–​57 Invention of Tradition, The 8 Irwin-​Zarecka, Iwona 99, 182 Islamic Technology Museum 34–​35, 35–​36 Islamist movement 4, 17, 31, 57, 92; Istanbul as centre of 35–​36; Western clothing discouraged by 158–​159, 170; see also Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) Istanbul, cultural significance of 35–​36 Istanbul Archaeology Museum 19 Istanbul Modern 34 Jones, Ceri 52 Kansteiner, Wulf 23 Kellner, Hans 182

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218 Index Kemalism 34, 40n1, 57, 162, 165, 167; in popular culture 120; resistant visitors and 109–​110 Kern, Patrizia 123, 150 Kıvrıkoğlu, Hüseyin 29, 42, 126, 177 Kocatepe pose 47, 48, 49, 133–​134, 134, 135 Kordonciyan, Levon 157 logic of figuration of displays 46, 49–​50, 87, 127 looping of emotions 60 Lowenthal, David 8, 21 Lutz, Catherine A. 59 Macdonald, Sharon 13, 14, 51–​52, 172–​173 Macron, Emmanuel 5 Magnificent Century 101, 102 Making Meaning in Art Museums 57 media representations of Ottomans 33–​34, 101–​102 Mehmet ‘the Conqueror’ 36, 63–​64, 67, 68, 71; colour and light used in painting of 86; decisions about panoramic representation of 74–​75; expressiveness displayed by 88; narrative components in display of 89–​90; panorama images of 83–​86, 84, 85; as symbolic hero 91; textual constructions of story of 80–​82; visitor connection to 98 mehter 32, 36, 88 memory: historical memory cultures 2, 17, 23–​28, 31–​36, 99–​100, 115–​118, 152–​153, 155–​156, 166–​167, 173, 181–​185, 188–​198, 196–​198; memory communities 60, 94, 99, 115, 181–​186; memory complex 173; memory wars 35, 119, 177, 189, 191–​194, 198; multidirectional 181; neo-​Ottoman 33, 36, 41n8, 91–​93, 177–​178, 183, 190, 193; Republican 23–​28, 60, 105, 107, 190; social 64, 92, 180 Menderes, Adnan 26, ​40n3 Michaels, Walter Benn 181 Michels, Christoph 61–​62 military coups 26–​29, 178 modernity 5, 15, 147, 170–​173; progressive national 139; Western 25, 150, 153 Moser, Stephanie 50 Muhammad, Khalid 181 Multidirectional Memory 181

Museum of Anatolian Civilizations 25 museums: affective atmospheres of 5–​6, 9–​10, 61–​63, 108, 185; affective practices in 5, 8–​9, 9–​10, 54, 60–​61, 186–​188; archaeology of time travel in 22–​23; ‘as tests’ 130; authority and appeal to truth of 11; behaviour of visitors to 162–​166, 163; as choreographed enactment 54, 185; different aspects of Turkish identity displayed in 25, 38–​39; displays as productions in 50–​51; as emotional spaces 12; emotions in 7–​12; as heritage sites 97; historical memory cultures in 2–​6; immersive experience in 11; Kemalism represented in 34; logic of figuration of displays in 46, 49–​50, 127; Ottoman memory in 31–​36; panoramic 6–​7, 19–​23; as porous or interactional space 10–​11; reconnection with the past through 106–​108; relational study of visitor encounters in 2–​3, 12–​13, 97–​98; representing part of a range of experience 39; Republican memory and 23–​28, 92, 105–​106; spatial organization of 45, 87–​88, 143–​144, 144; studying the displays in 44–​50; visitors to (see visitors, museum); see also Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara (AWIM); Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul (P1453) Mustafa Kemal’in Kağnısı 161–​162 narrative drive 11, 48–​49, 89–​90 narrative of P1453 panorama 88–​90 narrative theory 11, 45–​49 nationalism 25, 93; affective atmosphere of 10; AWIM and 28 Navaro-​Yashin, Yael 18, 38–​39 Neo-​Ottomanism 3, 36, 41n8, 91–​93, 177–​178, 183, 190, 193 Non-​Representational Theory (NRT)  8 nostalgia and longing by visitors 104–​105 Nutuk 128, 190 observations, visitor 55 Ökten, Nazlı 120–​121 Olick, Jeffrey 23, 116 Öncü, Bora 126–​127 Ottoman Empire, the 17–​18; Çanakkale Battles 132–​136,

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Index 219 134, 135; clothing of 157–​158; Conquest of Constantinople as symbol for 4 (see also Conquest of Constantinople); differing viewpoints on 111–​115; Erdoğan speeches about 33; first museums of 24, 40n2; historical memory culture of 2, 115–​118; media representations of 33–​34, 101–​102; museums and memory of 31–​36; nostalgia over 104–​105; portrayed in Conquest of Constantinople panorama (see Conquest of Constantinople panorama, P1453); portrayed in Gallipoli Battles (see Gallipoli Battles panorama); visitor feelings toward 102–​106; visitors desires for restoration and reconnection with 106–​108 Outlines of Turkish History 24–​25, 106, 146, 190 Özal, Turgut 41n8 Özel, Mehmet 127 Öztürk, Görkem 126–​127 Özyürek, Esra 190, 191 P1453 see Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul (P1453) Pamuk, Orhan 4, 190 Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul (P1453) 38, 43; agenda of 17–​18; colour and light in 86; common cultures of AWIM and 176–​181; dome of 87–​88; emotional prompts at 90–​91; field observations of visitors to 1–​2; greatness, will, winning on display at 91–​94; logic of figuration in displays of 49–​50; main exhibit in 23, 36; memory community at 181–​185; music and sounds in 88; narrative in 88–​90; official voices at 69–​77, 73, 76; opening of 36; panorama content 83–​86, 84, 85; panorama room 83; as panoramic museum 6–​7; resistant visitors to 108–​115; role in historical memory culture of Turkey 3–​4, 17, 155–​156; spatial organization of 87–​88; target audience for 75–​76; textual constructions of the Conquest in 80–​83; Topkapı-​Edirnekapı ramparts near 37, 37–​38; types and numbers of visitors to 19; visitor observations in 55; visitor route and its effects in 77–​79, 78, 79;

see also Conquest of Constantinople panorama, P1453; museums panoramic museums 6–​7, 46–​47; commonalities and differences between 176–​181; general public awareness of display contents in 47–​48; paradoxes in 21–​22; popularity of 19–​21; reasons for construction of 72–​73, 150; in the Soviet Union 124–​126; spatial organizations of 45, 87–​88, 143–​144, 144 Past is a Foreign Country, The 8 pedagogy of walking 149 Pera Museum 34 performative agency 39, 185 performative identity 53 perlocutionary performatives 185 Philips, Mark Salber 49, 87 practice theory 11 productions, displays as 50–​51 professional/​hobbyist visitors  52 psychoanalytic approaches to affective phenomena 8 questionnaires, visitor 55–​56, 96–​97 Ranger, T. 8, 32, 93 recharger visitors 52 Reddy, William M. 59 Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) 31 Republican memory and museums 23–​28, 92, 105–​106 Republican Museum 28 respectful pilgrim visitors 52, 187 restorative nostalgia 104 rhythms of displays 45 Rose, Gillian 45–​46, 49, 136 Rothberg, Michael 177, 181, 184 Rothman, L. 27 Rounds, Jay 53, 54, 60, 185, 188 Savino, M. 24 Sayer, Andrew 113 secularists, Turkish 18, 30, 64–​65 self-​determination 112–​113 self-​regulation  53 Seyit, Corporal 138, 139–​140, 143, 145 Sezer, Ahmet Necdet 29, 126 Shafak, Elif 4 Shaw, W. 24 Smith, Laurajane 8, 11, 14, 21, 55, 97, 104, 186 social memory 64, 92, 180 Soviet Union, the 124–​126

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220 Index spatial organization of displays 45, 87–​88, 143–​144, 144 sports stadiums 62 surrogate witnessing 22 Sytov, Alexander 125 television shows: Ottoman history represented in 33–​34, 101–​102 Thys-​Şenocak, Lucienne 151 Time Magazine 26 Tolia-​Kelly, Divya  8 Topbaş, Kadir 36, 69, 72, 175 Topbaş, Özleyiş 175 Topkapı-​Edirnekapı ramparts 37, 37–​38 Topkapı Cultural Park 69 Turkey: as ‘bridge’ between East and West 4–​5; cult of personality around Atatürk in 26–​28, 119–​121, 171–​172; emotional politics of memory in 188–​198, 196–​198; European Union and 5, 150; first museums of 24–​25; identity in/​of 25, 38–​39, 63, 118, 196; Islamization of 4, 17, 31–​32; meaning of 4; military coups in 26–​28; popularity of panoramic museums in 19–​23; presence of the past in media of 17; role of historical memory cultures in 2; secularist movement in 18, 30, 64–​65, 153 Turkish Airlines Magazine 127 Ünsal, Deniz 71 US Holocaust Museum 181 video-​gaming: emotional practice in 10 visitor routes: Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara (AWIM) 128–​131, 129, 131; Panorama 1453 Museum, Istanbul (P1453) 77–​79, 78, 79 visitors, museum: affective practices by 5, 8–​9, 54, 60–​61, 186–​188; awareness of display content in 47–​48; behaviour of 162–​166, 163; choreographed enactment by 54; connection to Ottomans felt by 98–​101; crying by 1, 58, 64, 98, 102–​103, 165, 184; and desire for restoration and reconnection to Ottomans 106–​108; ecdat and experience of 99–​100; embodiment of history in 65; emotional expression by 5–​6, 11–​12, 58–​65;

encoding and decoding framework for understanding 57–​58; encounters with history by 1–​7, 42–​44; feelings of, toward the Ottomans 102–​106; field observations of 1–​2; identity work by 53; in-​depth research on 56–​57; narrative drive in 11, 48–​49; nostalgia and longing by 104–​105; numbers of 19; observations of 55; other ways of experiencing museums 167–​170; panorama viewing by 46–​47; personal nature of 101–​102; prejudice and resistance in 108–​115; qualitative and quantitative studies of 51–​54; questionnaires of 55–​56, 96–​97; reflections of loss by 160–​162; relational study of 2–​3, 12–​13, 97–​98; route through P1453 display 77–​79, 79; seeking guidance from Atatürk 166–​167; self-​regulation  by  53; traditional research on 43–​44; types of 19, 52–​53, 64–​65, 187; working on the self by visiting museums 11; see also emotions; museums Voroshilov, Klim 124 War of Independence 11, 27–​28, 35, 38, 70, 126–​127; emotional responses to displays on 59 War of Liberation 32 Warsaw Rising Museum 94 Washington Post 198 Waterloo panoramas 20, 21, 72, 93, 196 Watson, Sheila 21, 191 West, Benjamin 86 Wetherell, Margaret 11, 49, 54, 60, 107, 113, 117, 184; on body behaviour 165; on communal affective atmosphere 61, 108; on concept of habitus 64 White, Jenny 196–​197 Whitehead, Christopher 22 Wilson, Christopher S. 26 Winter, Jay 187 Witcomb, Andrea 149 women’s rights 139, 158–​159 Work of Mourning, The 167 Yıldırım, Binali 32 Zelizer, Barbie 182 Zurcher, Eric 31