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questioned the relationship between democracy and secularism. If democracy

is to be more inclusive, then secularism can accommodate alternate under-

standings of religion, as long as these do not undermine the secular codes.

Demands for recognition of ethnic identity:

Kurdish women

During the decades that saw the development of feminist activism and the

Kurdish conﬂict in the country, Kurdish women demanded recognition. They

opposed state policies towards the Kurds and towards women and positioned

themselves against secular Turkish feminists, who were dismissive of ethnicity,

as well as against the Kurdish patriarchy, which was dismissive of women’s

rights. Kurdish nationalism helped Kurdish women identify themselves as

Kurds, who had problems unique to their history and tradition. Yet Kurdish

nationalists and those who spoke in the name of Kurdish traditions, which

cultivated Kurdish nationalism, viewed women as inferior to men.

A core group of Kurdish feminists split from Turkish feminists in 1989 over

the usage of the Kurdish language in International Women’s Day celebrations.

The conﬂict led to the establishment of journals where nascent Kurdish femi-

nism took shape. Roza (1996–2000) and Jujin (1998–2000) identiﬁed themselves

as feministpublications.Jin uJiyan (1998–) did not, butrather underlined the sig-

niﬁcance of class struggle in analysing women’s problems, including violence

towards women and questions of sexuality. Yas¸amda

Ozg

ur Kadın (1998–2000)

and

Ozg

ur Kadının Sesi, published after the former was closed by the state,

reﬂected the problems of women and the nationalist movement.

These jour-

nals were short-lived, published irregularly and expressed an at times angry,

essentialist Kurdish feminism that nevertheless gave voice to Kurdish women’s

struggles for liberation.

Kurdish feminists deﬁned themselves primarily in opposition to the Turk-

ish state and its policies towards Kurdish women. A controversial topic was

the issue of the Multi-Purpose Community Centres (C¸ ok Amac¸lı Toplum

Merkezleri, C¸ ATOM) which the state opened in 1995 in the context of regional

development projects in south-east Anatolia. C¸ ATOMs were initiated by the

state, with the help of UNICEF as well as some civil society organisations,

34 Necla Ac¸ık, ‘Ulusal m

ucadele, kadın mitosu ve kadınların harekete gec¸irilmesi:

urkiye’deki c¸a

gdas¸K

urt kadın dergilerinin bir analizi’, in Bora and G

unal (eds.), 90’larda

urkiye’de feminizm,pp.280–2; Zeynep Kutluata, ‘The Politics of Difference with the

Feminist Movement in Turkey as Manifested in the Case of Kurdish Woman/Feminist

Journals’, MA thesis, Bo

gazic¸i University (2003), pp. 52–5.

414

Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

such as the Mother Culture Cooperative, the Women’s Human Rights Project

and the Turkish Development Foundation. The centres provided education

programmes in literacy, health services, and crafts and skills to women of

the region. Many women beneﬁted from the services offered, although oth-

ers questioned whether these centres aimed to empower the predominantly

Kurdish women of the region, or assimilate them. The centres also created

controversy because they provided birth-control measures and taught Turkish

to Kurdish women.

Kurdish women’s journals frequently argued against birth-control mea-

sures,viewing them as devices to control the Kurdish population. It was argued

in Jujin that the state aimed to control Kurdish women because women phys-

ically gave birth to and then raised potential ‘terrorists’ against the state.

Yas¸amda

Ozg

ur Kadın was more explicit in its criticism: ‘In the person of the

Kurdish woman, Kurdish people, killed in diverse ways, are to be killed as

fetuses as well . . . Because every pill and every injection (for birth control) is

seen as the killing of a “terrorist” that will be born, besides spending for mili-

tary operations, a sizable amount of money is transferred to these areas. In this

way, extermination and eradication policies are expanded through targeting

of women’s fertility.’

Another major issue that Kurdish women criticise is the availability of edu-

cation only in Turkish and the state restrictions on the use of the Kurdish

language. Learning Turkish can empower Kurdish women because it expands

their access to the public realm, which is deﬁned predominantly in Turkish.

However, many Kurdish activists see Turkish as a threat to the Kurdish com-

munity, since it limits usage of Kurdish and weakens the transmission of the

language to a new generation.

Kurdish feminists’ opposition to Turkish feminists was more complicated

than their opposition to the state. Kurdish feminists have contested Turkish

feminists in general, but collaborated with them on major issues. On the one

hand, they have tended to depict all Turkish feminists as a homogeneous

group of nationalists who dismiss Kurdish women and Kurdishness. On the

other hand, they knew that some Turkish feminists welcome Kurdish women.

The feminist monthly Pazartesi, published by a group of feminists who did

not identify themselves with a Turkish ethnic identity, defended the cause of

Kurdish women as victims of the Kurdish war, and sympathetically advocated

Kurdish feminist journals. Through Pazartesi, Turkish feminists debated what

35 Kutluata, ‘The Politics of Difference’, p. 81.

36 Quoted in ibid., p. 80, translated by Arat.

415

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their relationship to Kurdish feminists should be.

Furthermore, Kurdish and

Turkish women share similar positions on a range of feminist causes. Roza,

Jujin and Pazartesi all protested against violence towards women, including

domestic violence, virginity tests and the sexual exploitation of women, as

well as the Kurdish war and the state policies on the Kurdish issue. The growth

of collaboration between Turkish and Kurdish feminists is another example

of the expansion and diversiﬁcation of the feminist movement in Turkey in

recent years.

Conclusion

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, women have both challenged

the state and collaborated with it in order to defend their rights and expand

their opportunities. The state’s Westernising and modernising project helped

most women to promote their causes, beginning with the Family Act of 1917.

Women’s groups and the Kemalist state made instrumental use of one another

to promote their respective goals. With the inﬂuence of second-wave feminism

in the West, Turkish women strengthened their voices, and the numbers and

diversity of feminist groups increased. The extensive network of women’s

associations that emerged in the 1980s expressed women’s needs and pursued

their interests, helping cultivate a vibrant civil society. In more recent years, the

availability of the internet helped their diverse organisations to connect and

unite in political resistance. Women’s groups voiced and aggregated demands,

generated and disseminated information, and provided avenues, for women’s

political participation where access to traditional venues,including parliaments

and political parties, were substantively, if not formally, obstructed. Feminist

activists democratised Turkish politics, much as feminist groups have done in

other countries.

However, feminists in Turkey played special roles peculiar to their historical

and geographical position. They helped reshape the Turkish polity from one

where state-led modernisation deﬁned the ‘common good’ to one where citi-

zens, including those traditionally marginalised in public space, can participate

in reshaping this common good. As women have demanded their rights, they

have pushed the state to abide by international human rights standards and

pursue its aspirations to join the EU. Turkey’s ‘strong state’, which has allegedly

undermined civil society, responded to women’s needs in the changing

37 Ays¸e D

uzkan, K

urt kadınlara hizmet’, Pazartesi (April 1998); Ays¸e G

ul Karayazgan, ‘Biz

kadınlar diyemedik bir t

url

u’, Pazartesi (May 1998).

416

Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

international context. Women’s engagement with the state helped it increase

its international legitimacy and respect. Women’s activism encouraged the

Turkish state, which has often cultivated strength through authoritarian mil-

itary interventions and restrictions of human rights, to cultivate strength

through respect for human rights.

Women, in turn, have beneﬁted from Turkey’s pursuit of an alliance with the

EU and the state’s search for legitimacy through observance of human rights

conventions. Even though women have attempted to mitigate the polarities

that cross-cut Turkish society, including those between Islamist and secular

groups and between Kurdish and Turkish groups, tensions still remain. How-

ever, the current international context and the shared goal of EU membership

have helped women accommodate the potential for conﬂict that has char-

acterised women’s alliances and coalitions and their relationships with the

state.

Women have been most successful in their efforts to make their oppression

part of the public agenda, and to push legal reforms. They also galvanised

the state and organised themselves to ﬁght against women’s illiteracy and

violence against women, although much remains to be done. The adult lit-

eracy rate for women has increased from 67.4%in1990 to 81.1%in2003.

However, despite this successful ﬁght against illiteracy, many women remain

dependent on men and subject to abuse and discrimination. According to

2003 statistics, their labour-force participation rate is 26.6%, while that of men

is 70.4%. The proportion of women working for wages outside the agricul-

tural sector is only 20.6%.

Although statistics on violence are scant, stud-

ies indicate that about 40 per cent of women in the country are exposed to

domestic violence. Research carried out in shantytowns reports that 97%of

women in these districts say that they are sometimes or frequently subjected

to domestic violence by their husbands.

If we move beyond the local con-

text, Turkey ranks 94 among 177 countries ranked by the Human Development

Report, 2005 in its human development index, ‘a composite index measuring

average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development – a

long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living’. Turkey’s

ranking in terms of the gender empowerment measure, based on ‘economic

participation and decision-making, political participation and decision-making

and power over economic resources’ is 76 out of the 80 countries that could be

38 See www.nkg.die.gov.tr.

39 T

urkiye’de Kadın 2001,pp.111–12.

417

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measured.

As close observers of Turkish politics note, the poor human devel-

opment record of Turkey is mainly due to lack of women’s empowerment.

Despite their success in expanding publicdebate byvoicingwomen’s oppres-

sion and helping change the legislative framework, women have yet to build

an extensive coalition – not merely among themselves, but also with other

sectors of society that respect human rights, such as business, labour, Islamist

and Kurdish groups, to extract more resources from the state to alleviate

women’s condition. In turn, women’s groups can take a more active stand

on societal problems beyond their immediate concern, which will help them

build broader coalitions. While the challenges remain, women are vigilant

over their rights and the prospects of expanding their opportunities.

40 UNDP, Human Development Report, 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),

pp. 304–6.

41 Ersin Kalaycıo

glu, Turkish Dynamics: Bridge across Troubled Lands (New York: Palgrave,

2005), p. 191.

418

Art and architecture in modern Turkey:

the Republican period

ibel bozdo

gan

For many people, foreigners and Turks alike, ‘modern Turkish art and archi-

tecture’ is nothing more than a lamentable story of progressive decline from

the past glory of their classical Ottoman counterparts. It is still the mosques,

costumes and calligraphy of the Ottoman Empire that often represents Turkey

in major international exhibitions and cultural events, and continues to deﬁne

what most people consider to be the country’s ‘national heritage’. More

recently, however, partly triggered by the country’s rekindled prospects of

joining the EU, there is a growing recognition that the country’s claims to

‘modernity’ will ring hollow without a parallel display of modern cultural

production. Events like the 2004 opening of the country’s ﬁrst modern art

museum, the Istanbul Modern, or the hosting of the 2006 International DoCo-

MoMo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement in Archi-

tecture) Conference in Turkey,

are, without doubt, signiﬁcant ‘ﬁrsts’. Yet any

broader public awareness and appreciation of Republican modernist heritage

is still very minimal at best. Most of the time, the works themselves are threat-

ened with neglect and oblivion, if not outright destruction.

The aesthetic merits of modern Turkish art and architecture are matters of

ongoing academic debate. What is beyond dispute, however, is that Turkish

modernism deserves attention for reasons beyond the more traditional and

autonomous disciplinary concerns of art and architecture (such as stylistic,

aesthetic, technical and preservationist concerns). Although these are by no

means unimportant, it is far more provocative to look at Turkish modernism

as a compelling example of how paintings, artwork, buildings, projects and

urban spaces are as much the active means by which modern national identities

1 DoCoMoMo is an international organisation dedicated to the documentation and con-

servation of modern architecture across the globe through the work of national working

parties. The theme of the 2006 conference was Other Modernisms, focusing on modern

architectures of countries outside the canonic modern heritage of Europe and North

America.

419

ibel bozdo

gan

are produced and reproduced as they are formal/stylistic reﬂections of these

historical experiences. In recent years, the history of art and architecture has

made signiﬁcant contributionsto interdisciplinary cultural studies everywhere.

Studies of representation, space, built form and visual culture are no longer

marginal embellishments to the ‘real stuff’ of more traditional history (typically

the work of political, social and economic historians) but rather the very

substance of a new, critically and culturally conceived understanding of history

itself – one that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Proceeding from these premises, this chapter offers a broad historical

overview of how Turkey’s perennial dilemmas of cultural and national identity,

deriving from and complicated by the unique history and geography of the

country, ﬁnd compelling visual expression in modern Turkish art, architecture

and urbanism. In this anthological format, the following account of Turkish

modernism is inevitably weighted more heavily towards canonic works, ofﬁ-

cial programmes or trend-setting artistic/architectural expressions than the

numerous lesser-known examples of what can be characterised as anonymous,

popular or spontaneous modernism. The latter constitutes a fertile new area of

research and scholarship still largely unexplored. At the same time, the canonic

histories themselves are also being rewritten through new critical perspectives

focusing on the politics of culture, art and architecture, and this chapter is

informed by their insights.

In what follows, I discuss the most paradigmatic cultural, artistic and archi-

tectural works, trends and debates in Republican Turkey during four periods,

starting in the 1910s, 1930s, 1950s and 1980s respectively. The ﬁrst was a formative

period, corresponding to the creation of a modern artistic and architectural cul-

ture in conjunction with the dramatic historical transition from the Ottoman

Empire into the Republic. The second period represents the subordination of

art and architecture to the larger project of nation building and state ideology.

The third period marks the beginning of a more liberal, internationalist and

pluralist cultural scene with a diversity of trends and ideas. Finally, the period

after 1980 marks the unfolding of a ‘post-modern’ (or even a ‘post-Kemalist’)

Turkey, in which the forces of globalisation and political Islam continue to chal-

lenge the founding ideas of Republican modernity and have a visible impact on

2 For a recent study of the ‘everyday’ or ‘anonymous’ dimension of modern Turkish

architecture see U. Tanyeli,

Istanbul 1900–2000: konutu ve modernles¸meyi metropolden okumak

(Istanbul: Akın Nalca, 2004). For a critical study of the politics of the more canonic

Republican modernism in the 1930s see S. Bozdo

gan, Modernism and Nation Building:

Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press,

2001).

420

Art and architecture in modern Turkey

art and architecture. Although this periodisation is inevitably imprecise, with

blurred boundaries and numerous overlaps between the periods, the political,

economic and cultural outlines of each period are distinct enough to war-

rant the survey of their artistic and architectural expressions in this manner.

The intention here is only to map a ‘broad canvas’, rather than to provide a

comprehensive and descriptive survey of individual works. Selected works and

artists/architects are cited here only as representatives of important events,

inﬂuential ideas or broader trends in the culture, rather than in terms of their

intrinsic value as examples of form, style or technique.

First moderns: 1908–31

Although the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 is etched deeply in

Turkish collective consciousness as the single most important event of modern

Turkish history, many scholars agree that the Constitutional Revolution of

1908 marks the real turning point in the making of modern Turkey.

It is often

pointed out that the key political and ideological directions set by the Young

Turks and by their political and military organisation, the Committee of Union

and Progress (CUP), were followed by the Republican leaders and consolidated

by the single-party regime of the Republican People’s Party (RPP) after 1931.In

art and architecture too, it is important to begin by marking these continuities,

as well as obvious important ruptures with the late Ottoman period. There is a

common assumption that ‘modernity’ in Turkish culture, art and architecture

is an exclusively Republicanaccomplishment and that it representsa radical and

progressive break with the imperial Ottoman past. This assumption reﬂects,

before everything else, a rather common conﬂation of ‘modernity’ (the larger

historical process of industrial and urban transformations and people’s speciﬁc

experiences of these) with ‘modernism’ (a particular artistic and architectural

expression of the twentieth century). It also reveals more about the biases of

the Republican perspective than about the actual history of cultural, artistic

and architectural production during the ﬁnal decades of the Ottoman Empire

when major modern transformations in art/architectural theory, education

and practice were initiated and art and architecture were institutionalised

3 Erik Z

urcher treats 1908–50 as a single unit in his comprehensive book on modern Turkey

(Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994)). Feroz Ahmad characterises 1908 as

‘the opening of the 20th century for Turkey’, the marker of the historical transition from

empire to nationhood (The Making of Modern Turkey (London and New York: Routledge,

1993), p. 3).

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ibel bozdo

gan

as self-deﬁning and self-regulating disciplines with speciﬁc professional and

political agendas.

Coinciding with dramatic historical events, major wars and the forging of a

new nation out of a multi-ethnic, heterogeneous empire, the art/architectural

culture of the 1908–31 period reﬂects an increasing self-consciousness of this

larger national project on the part of Turkish artists and architects. The founda-

tions of this project had already been laid in the ﬁnal decades of the nineteenth

century by the remarkable Osman Hamdi Bey, an artist, intellectual, bureau-

crat and the founder of both the Imperial Museum of Antiquities (1881) and the

Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (1882). He had been instrumental in

highlighting the ‘national Turkish essence’ of Ottoman culture as distinct from

Arab and Persian culture, and in establishing art and architectural education, as

well as heritage preservation, as fundamental institutions of a modern nation-

state. His paintings, while academic and ‘orientalist’ in technique (especially

in his realistic details of Islamic crafts, carpets, objects and calligraphy), reﬂect

in content a modern ideal that Western-educated Ottoman elites longed for:

namely, a society that is distinctly (and proudly) oriental/Islamic, and yet mod-

ern, rational and reﬁned at the same time.

After 1908, Ziya G

okalp, the leading

ideologueof Turkish nationalism, delineated a newkind of distinction between

national culture (hars) and international civilisation (medeniyet), suggesting the

possibility of their reconciliation.

Whereas Osman Hamdi Bey had celebrated

Islamic civilisation and Islamic high culture, G

okalp emphasised the compat-

ibility between Western civilisation (corresponding to technical and scientiﬁc

accomplishments of the West) and a national Turkish culture (corresponding

to ethnic and folk elements). More signiﬁcantly, this marked the beginning of

the radical cultural shift from the multicultural artistic/architectural produc-

tion of the late empire to the monocultural Turkish nationalism of the early

Republic.

The dominant artistic/architectural formula that captured the imagination

of the late Ottoman nationalists and their early Republican followers was a

simple one: the mission of modern Turkish art and architecture would be to

4 In the context of orientalism debates after Edward Said, Osman Hamdi Bey’s paintings

have attracted a lot of scholarly attention as counter-examples of orientalist painting

trying to reverse the stereotypical representations of the orient as exotic, inferior and

irrational. See Z. C¸ elik, ‘Speaking back to orientalist discourse’, in J. Beaulieu and M.

Roberts (eds.), Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2002).

5 Z. G

okalp, T

urkles¸mek, islamlas¸mak, muasırlas¸mak (Istanbul: n.p., 1918). See N. Berkes

(ed.), Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya G

okalp (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

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Art and architecture in modern Turkey

adopt European genres, theories and techniques (i.e. civilisation) and infuse

them with national Turkish content (i.e. culture). The ﬁrst artists who took

this path were a group of late Ottoman painters, also known as the ‘1914

generation’, who encountered modern artistic trends in Paris and brought a

belated Impressionism to Istanbul on the eve of the First World War. The most

prominent among them,

Ibrahim C¸ allı (1882–1960), Nazmi Ziya (1881–1937),

Hikmet Onat (1886–1977), Namık

Ismail (1890–1935), Feyhaman Duran (1886–

1970) and Avni Liﬁj (1889–1927), sought to establish a modern, anti-academic

style in Turkish painting, distancing themselves from the academic tradition

of the previous generation, as displayed in the still-life paintings of S

uleyman

Seyyid and S¸eker Ahmet Pas¸a or the orientalist paintings of Osman Hamdi

Bey. Particularly notable in the new generation’s work is the pervasiveness

of landscapes (a genre that has been especially signiﬁcant in the formation

of a modern national consciousness everywhere, by highlighting the partic-

ularities of place and country) as well as portraits of ordinary people (which

mark the emergence of modern individual subjectivities). To what extent their

landscapes, portraits and ﬁgures were the products of their encounters with

impressionism in Paris, and to what extent they should be seen in continuity

with earlier Ottoman painting traditions, remains a point of debate among art

historians.

Nevertheless, while landscape, ﬁgure and portrait painting had a

longer tradition in the empire, the particular mood of these landscapes, as well

as subjects such as nudes and scenes of everyday life, were conspicuously new,

and underscored the ‘modernity’ of the period as perceived and promoted by

these artists. War paintings depicting scenes of the Balkan Wars, the Gallipoli

defence during the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence

constitute another distinct genre, bearing a strong testimony to the political

and historical turmoil of the period. These Impressionist artists of the 1914

generation also painted some of the best portraits of Atat

urk and other heroes

of the War of Independence such as

Ismet

onu and Fevzi C¸ akmak, further

illustrating the continuities between the last decades of the empire and the

emergence of the new Republic in 1923.

In architecture, the ﬁrst systematic programme of culture/civilisation rec-

onciliation was the proliﬁc Ottoman revivalism that dominated building pro-

duction from 1908 until the ﬁnal demise of this style around 1930. Known to

its contemporaries as National Architecture Renaissance and retrospectively

6 See, e.g., G.Renda, ‘Modern trends in Turkish painting’, in G. Rendaand C. M. Kortepeter

(eds.), The Transformation of Turkish Culture: The Atat

urk Legacy (Princeton: Kingston Press,

1986) for the former view; and S. Tansu

g, C¸a

gdas¸T

urk sanatı (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi,

1993), pp. 118–35 for the latter view.

423