FinalEthnographyMuseum

1
Sam Hausner-Levine
12/14/2015
Professors Avcioglu and Akasoy
HONS 3011H-01
The Islamic City
Putting the Nation on Display:
The Role of the Turkish Ethnography Museum in the Construction of Turkish National Identity
Perched on top of the Namzagah Hill and built of ghostly white marble, the Turkish
Ethnography Museum looms large over Ankara. Opened in 1930, the museum was an ambitious
project undertaken by the newly created Turkish Republic to build up its capital. Both physically
and culturally, the museum was one of the most prominent features of the city which had only
been a town of 20,000 in 1923.1 More than an addition to Ankara’s landscape, though, the
museum was an essential tool in the construction of the Turkish nation itself. Bringing together a
collection of objects from across the newly formed state, the museum articulated a vision of
Turkish history and a cultural legacy that was in line with the regime’s vision of a modern and
secular nation. As a feature of the city whole, but also as an institution with its own distinct
function, the museum translated this nationalist ideology of the state into material form, and
helped to articulate the Turkish identity which the Republic saw as the foundation of the new
nation’s social cohesion. It inscribed this ideology on the physical space of the city, and
demonstrated the state’s ability to actualize their vision and bring together the nation in real life.
Moreover, drawing on role of the city as a site for social exchange and communal activity, the
Ethnography Museum facilitated practices among residents which allowed them to feel they
were partaking in the creation of a society. The museum, and in turn the city as a whole, became
1
Zeynep Kezer, “The Making of a Nationalist Capital: Socio-Spatial Practices in Early Republican
Ankara,” Built Environment 22(1978): 124.

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a stage where the state portrayed itself as the agent of nationhood, and in which inhabitants could
perform the rites of national citizenship.
While capital cities and state-run institutions are concrete symbols of the nation, the
nation itself is notoriously abstract and difficult to ground the material world. In his work
Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political
community,” explaining, “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will
never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion.”2 For the citizens of nation states, there is no concrete
aspect of their daily life which inherently connects them to someone on the other side of the
country. They may share a language, history, or culture, but these are not inherent markers of
community. An identity must first be forged from these traits before a person can be taught to
feel a connection with a nation defined by these commonalities. The nation requires the
formulation of this shared identity to exist, and as an entity vested with the very material
trappings of statehood, relies on this imagined identity to unify its citizens and legitimize its own
existence.
As a physical space filled with concrete institutions, the city allows nationalists to
actualize imagined identities in material form. What is imagined throughout the country becomes
real in the geography of the city. “In order to be able to be an imagined community, the nation
has to be able to capture people’s imagination; it has to become ‘imaginable’ and ‘imageable’ in
the first place. In other words, there have to be tangible indications that abstract, vicarious
connections are grounded in some kind of concreteness,”3 writes Zeynep Kezer. In particular,
2
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 7.
3
Kezer, “The Making of a Nationalist Capital,” 136.

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through the constructions of capital cities, states can inject themselves into the process of societal
transformation and begin to take physical form. Alev Çinar writes
The state constructs itself by opening up new spaces, closing others,
inscribing them with the marks and symbols of the nation and state power, and
organizing urban space around foundational norms and principles. These are
self-constitutive acts; the state constitutes itselfas an agent of modernity vested
with the power and authority to control space, dictate the meaning of urbanity,
shape the evolution of public sphere, and suppress contending ideologies. By
constructing the city, the state becomes the agent of the nation, the author that
inscribes the nation into space, hence creating the nation-state.4
The capital city, according to Çinar, presupposes the nation it governs. By constructing the city,
the state could shape the physical landscape of the nation according to its vision, but also
demonstrate the governing powers required of a state and ability to maintain the cohesion of the
nation beyond. By creating and exercising control over urban space, the state introduces the
practices that national identity will ultimately be built.
Understanding the city as the site in which the “imagined” nation took on material form,
the importance given to the construction of Ankara during the early years of the Turkish
Republic becomes clear. On one level, the new capital would embody the values and ideology of
the state that would eventually form the bonds of nationhood, as well as signify the transition
away from the regime it was replacing. “Ankara was built upon the pillars of the founding
ideology, consisting of a West-oriented modernism, secularism, and Turkish nationalism that
distinguished itself from Ottomanism, Islamism, and other contending national ideologies at the
time,”5 writes Çinar. On the another level, the new capital would open spaces in which the state
could demonstrate its actual ability to govern. The nation as a whole could not be united along
4
Alev Çinar, “The Imagined Community as Urban Reality: The Making of Ankara,” in Urban Imaginaries:
Locating the Modern City, ed. Alev Çinar et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 154.
5
Çinar, “The Imagined Community as Urban Reality,” 155.

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the values of modernity and secularism without the creation of physical spaces where these
ideology could take form in real life.
Constructed in 1930, the Turkish Ethnography Museum was in the early years of the
Republic one of the most prominent landmarks in Ankara, and an essential component of the
project of inscribing the nation into the physical landscape. An imposing stone structure with a
domed roof at its center, the museum was built on the Namazgah Hill overlooking the newly
constructed Ataturk Boulevard, the main commercial artery of the new city center. To access the
museum, visitors first walked by a large bronze statue of Ataturk on horseback, and then climbed
two flights of white marble stairs before entering the museum through two large brass doors.
Entering the main hall, “myriad colorful artifacts such as exotic costumes, ornaments, and
antique guns lured them back in time.”6 Moving through the museum, visitors would then pass
through a series of smaller rooms, each containing glass display cases containing seemingly
random assortments of cultural artifacts collected from around Turkey, as well as a small handful
from North America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.7
The items on display were a mix of objects used for everyday use, religious items, and
ancient artifacts. The collection spanned across many historical eras, and featured objects from
Hittite, Roman, Greek, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman culture. On display were also many
religious items, such as prayer rugs and pulpits, which had, until very recently, been used for
daily Islamic worship. Although neither the size of the museum itself nor its collection were as
large as the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, it was nonetheless an impressive if not bewildering
institution for the majority of local residents who had never been exposed to either Turkey’s
ancient cultures or an actual museum.
6
Zeynep Kezer, “Familiar Things in Strange Places: Ankara’s Ethnography Museum and the Legacy of
Islam in Republican Turkey,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8(2000), 104.
7
Ibid., 104.

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The prominent position of the state-run museum in Ankara’s landscape alone mirrored
the secular state’s new role the preeminent actor in Turkish society. Kezer describes the museum
and the adjacent Turkish Hearths Association Headquarters as “Perched on a steep hill and raised
on a platform of stairs, this white marble structure provided a commanding presence when seen
from Ankara’s main boulevard, which connected the old city to the new. Such a positioning was
very similar to that of the imperial külliyes (mosque complexes) of Ottoman Istanbul.”8 She
continues that despite being “considerably more modest both in size and splendour,” the two
buildings “had an effect comparable to the külliyes, whose silhouettes…. defined the memorable
skyline of the former Ottoman capital.”9 As religious structures had dominated the landscape of
the old capital, secular ones dominated the new capital, reflecting the broader transition from a
theocratic to a secular state.
Yet more important was the ideology conveyed inside the walls of the Ethnography
Museum, and its role in the formulation of Turkish national identity. Nationalism required more
than a sense of community between citizens based on shared values and experience, but a belief
that these ties were more important than any other allegiances. As Paul Stirling writes, Turkish
nationalism was “the assertion of the uniqueness and superiority of Turkey, and the setting of
loyalty to Turkey above all other loyalties.”10 Fostering nationalist sentiments, therefore,
required conveying a concept of nationality as innate and immutable. Bozdogan writes that
Turkish nationalists espoused a “Sleeping Beauty theory of nationalism,”11 which claimed that
“nations have existed since time immemorial albeit in a latent state, waiting to be awakened to
8
9
Ibid., 126.
10
Paul Stirling, “Religious Change in Republican Turkey,” Middle East Journal 12(1958), 398.
11
Sibel Bozdogan,“Reading Ottoman Architecture Through Modernist Lenses: Nationalist Historiography
and the ‘New Architecture’ in the Early Republic,” Muqarnas 24(2007), 202.

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self-consciousness.”12 History, therefore, became an active site of contestation in nationalist
discourse, changing from the study of “what was” to “what always is.” The writing and telling of
history was a project of the highest priority for nationalists, and as Kezer notes, “Historiography,
at the hands of state officials, became a prime tool for forging national unity, used
simultaneously to fabricate venerable pasts that never were, and to erase collective
remembrances that challenged official ideology.”13 In the museum, this historiography took
physical form.
Collected from all across Turkey and from the many diverse civilizations that had
occupied the territory over the millennia, the objects on display in the museum had little in
common beyond originating within the borders of the modern state. The museum provided little
contextual information, and sorted the items neither by geographic nor by chronological order.
Zeynep Kezer writes “The indiscriminate mixture of religious, utilitarian, exotic, and
archaeological items glossed over there historical and geographic differences,”14 therefore
distanced them from the specific cultures that had produced them. “The door of a tekke(dervish
lodge) from Sivas found a place at the side of a casket of a Sufi dervish from Ankara and next to
the glass cases containing the headdresses and rosaries.”15 The museum, in this sense, obscured
the meaning of the objects on display and mystified their origins.
However, erasing their historical details, the museum inserted its own narrative. In the
absence of any other means of categorization, Turkishness became the overarching quality that
united these artifacts. The museum transformed what had been previously been Roman,
Byzantine, Turkic, Islamic, or Ottoman into Turkish culture. Moreover, presenting objects from
12
Ibid., 202.
13
Kezer, “Familiar Things in Strange Places,” 103.
14
Ibid., 106.
15
Ibid., 106.

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different eras next to each other, the museum blurred the distinction not only between different
cultures, but past and present. The ahistoric presentation of the objects conveyed a sense of
timelessness and obscured any patterns of development or evolution. In doing so, it suggested
that each object was an aspect of a civilization that had always inhabited the land that was now
the Turkish Republic.16 The museum’s exhibits, therefore, served as evidence of the claim that
nationalists made of a true Turkish identity that was not imagined, but rooted in the material.
This was not the only role the museum played in shaping national identity, however. As
nationalism requires the cultivation of national identity as the preeminent marker of community,
it inherently relies on the severing of ties which lie outside of its territory as well, and the
Ethnography Museum contributed to this process as well. Anderson writes, “The nation is
imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living
human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”17 Citizens of a
nation state must be made to understand what connects them to one another, but also why they
are unlike other people. Given the strong presence of Islam in Turkish society, this was a
particularly daunting task for the nationalist government. Kezer notes, “Previously, the basis of
social coherence in the Ottoman Empire had been umma, religious unity. The basic division in
the population had been between the mümin(believers) and kafir(non-believers).”18 Kezer further
explains, “The practice of orthodox Islam, which promoted the unity of all Islamic people,
conflicted with the premises of a nation-state because it transcended national boundaries,
expanding far into far-flung lands.”19 The building of a Turkish national identity thus required
the subordination of religious affiliation, and the severing of these transnational ties.
16
Ibid, 106.
17
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.
18
19

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The inclusion of religious objects in the Ethnography Museum helped to achieve this
goal. On one level, the inclusion of religious items from recent times in the museum’s collection
were redirected into a nationalist discourse and seen as part of a distinctly Turkish culture.
Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic heritage was not being explicitly renounced, but they were
reframed as part of a Turkish tradition, rather than used as evidence that Turkey was at its core,
an Islamic nation. On another level, the relocation of Islamic items of worship into a secular,
state-run institution disassociated them from the functions which they had served in daily life,
stripped spiritual significance from their material form. Put behind glass, these objects no longer
served as tools used to commune with other members of the umma across political borders.20
Making no reference to their ritualistic functions or religious significance, the museum denied
the connection between these objects and any traditions which lay outside of Turkey’s borders.
The Ethnography Museum, therefore, not only laid a foundation for Turkish national identity, but
also definitively marked its territorial boundaries.
Museums are not only symbols of state ideology, but institutions of state power and a
physical reminder of its agency within the city and the nation beyond. Writing about museums in
the context of European colonialism, Anderson writes that the museum “profoundly shaped the
way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion - the nature of the human beings it ruled,
the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.”21 Anderson describes how in the
European colonies of Southeast Asia, a large amount of resources and energy was devoted to
archaeological excavations and the establishment of state-of-the-art museums to display them.
Doing so, the colonial state was not only able to establish an official version of history, but
20
Ibid., 113.
21

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demonstrate its administrative capabilities as “the guardian of a generalized, but also local,
Tradition.”22
Moreover, the museum as an element of the physical environment of the capital city
established a visual discourse of legitimacy. The museum linked the power of the colonial state
to the ancient greatness of the colonized lands, and positioned them in opposition to the supposed
state of decline in which the Europeans found the natives. He writes, “Seen in this light, the
reconstructed monuments, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural poverty, said to the natives: Our
very presence shows that you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either
greatness or self-rule.”23 Anderson’s description of “surrounding rural poverty” as the opposite
of the museum also points to the significance of the museum as an urban structure, and
inextricable connection between urbanization and modernization. The museum therefore,
became not only a symbol of colonial state power, but a reminder of the need for its existence.
The Turkish Republic was, of course, not a colonial power, and claimed a common
identity with the people it governed. However, the Ethnography Museum functioned in much the
same way as it had in the colonial context. The museum not only espoused the state’s vision of
national heritage, but through the physical act of collecting and displaying these diverse items
from across the territory they ruled, demonstrated the capacity of the government to resurrect and
restore the nation’s past greatness. “These archeological and cultural artifacts serve to display the
power and capability of the state to collect and bring together, under a national frame, things that
are otherwise temporally and spatially disconnected, unrelated, and not readily accessible.”24 In
less abstract terms, many of the items on display had been confiscated from tarikats, Sufi
brotherhoods, and reminded the viewer of the state’s very real ability to police society and
22
Ibid., 181.
23
Ibid., 181.
24

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eliminate elements that it deemed threatening. The museum portrayed the state not only as the
inventor, but also agent of the nation.
In a more benign sense, the Ethnography Museum also reflected the secular state’s
newfound role in providing social services to its citizens. The museum was an unfamiliar form of
educational institution to most Turkish people at the time, and education had almost entirely
fallen under the purview of religious institutions throughout Ottoman times and into the early
Republican era. The introduction of this new mode of education that was supervised by the state
was an unambiguous sign that the state had begun to take over administrative functions
previously held by religious institutions. In this capacity, the museum provides an example how
“state constructs itself by opening up new spaces,”25 as proposed by Çinar.
The Ethnography Museum was also a symbol of state legitimacy, and while
demonstrating the state’s ability to govern, it also asserted the very need for the state to exist by
illustrating the backwardness of the regime and society it was replacing. The grouping of
artifacts from Turkey’s distant past next to items, most of them religious, from recent times
created a sense of continuity and incorporated Islamic and Ottoman traditions into a longer
narrative of Turkish identity. This worked to create a sense of continuity, and making ancient
artifacts accessible to the public was a restorative act, and revitalizes and animates what had long
been dormant. It it shortened the distance between contemporary Turkish culture and this era.
However, this act also conveyed a sense of rupture between recent history and the present.
Putting objects of everyday usage in a museum distanced them from the present, and
“deliberately attempted to seal off from the present the practices and objects that defined a way
of life that, according to the official ideology, was to remain in the past.”26 Furthermore, the
25
Ibid., 168
26

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designation these objects and the traditions they represent as belonging in the past asserts that
they are not only incompatible with modern culture, but also degrades them as primitive. As
Kezer writes, “These objects presented as props a pre-modern way of life that had already been
left behind in the nation’s quest for modernity.”27 In this regard, there is a parallel between the
message conveyed by Ethnography Museum and the colonial museum’s assertion of the colonial
state as a modernizing force.
The Ethnography Museum’s function as a legitimizer of the state and the nationalist
project was further heightened by its geographic positioning. Looking onto the newly
constructed boulevard, the museum literally faced the future, while at its back lay the old town
and citadel. “Seen from the boulevard, tall and white, it sat on the Namazgah Hill in stark
contrast against the fabric of the old town at its back,”28 writes Kezer, adding that it served as “a
jarring separator between the past and the present.”29 A viewer could not help but observe
contrast between the grandeur of this structure and the “malaria-ridden town”30, as it was often
referred to in government publications, and was therefore reminded of the role of the new state
as a force for modernity.
The similarity between the visual juxtaposition of the Ethnography Museum and
Ankara’s old town and that of the colonial museum and the impoverished countryside is striking,
and not coincidental. Like the colonial state, the Republican government legitimized itself by
emphasizing the backwardness of the society it was replacing. “The new was valorized and
celebrated not only in itself, as a symbol of progress, but more often in juxtaposition with the
27
Ibid., 109.
28
Ibid., 104.
29
Ibid., 104.
30
Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early
Republic(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 70.

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contrasting image of the old, now discredited as the mark of backwardness.”31 This binary
opposition was a prevalent theme in the government’s language of reform, and programs
designed to implement modern practices among the general population frequently referred to the
inferiority of the traditions being replaced. Moreover, this contrast was framed in an Orientalist
conception of the East as synonymous with superstition and stagnation, and the government
often spoke of its aim of “shaking off the ‘oriental malaise’”32 of the Ottoman era.
As illustrated by these aspects of the Ethnography Museum, the construction of new
urban spaces allowed the state to inscribe itself onto the physical landscape and demonstrate its
power and legitimacy in concrete form. In this regard, the Republican government employed the
physical space of the city in a way similar to its predecessors. Istanbul was, and is, filled with
grand mosques and palaces which attested to the wealth and power of the sultans and the state
that built them. Nor was this unique to the Ottomans. Many states - Republican, imperial,
theocratic - find ways to manipulate the built environment to demonstrate its power. However,
specifically as an aspiring nation state, comprised of citizens not subjects, the Republican
government relied on the city not only as a physical space, but as a space where the physical and
the social came together, to remake Turkey. However, the Ethnography Museum and other urban
projects of the early Republican era did not merely embody the abstract nation which lay beyond
the city. Rather, they facilitated practices, rituals, and interactions within the city that truly
brought the bonds of nationhood to life.
What distinguishes the nation from other political entities is that it is defined by the
people who comprise it, rather than those who rule it. The nation exists because of a sense of
equality among its members, and their belief that they have come together to form the state in
31
Ibid., 62.
32
Ibid., 63.

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which they live. Anderson writes, the nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of
the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as
a deep, horizontal comradeship.”33 The nation state does not survive solely by commanding the
loyalty of its citizens, but by reaffirming their attachments to one another, and instilling the
notion that they are active agents in the creation of the nation. Interactions between citizens are
of equal importance as the interaction between the citizen and the state. All nation states, from
the most democratic to the most repressive, assert their authority by controlling and shaping
these interactions in some way, and the sites which in which these interactions take place become
mechanisms of state power.
The city not only a physical space, but a site of social interaction and shared rituals, and
therefore essential to this aspect of nation building. Crowded streets, market places, schools, and
other features of the city facilitate countless social interactions, planned and unplanned. The state
exerts its power not only imposing itself on the urban landscape, but intervening in these
exchanges and the minutia of everyday life. “The arrangement and monitoring of public spaces
serve the function of transforming ordinary city dwellers that, just by partaking in daily routine
activity, are transformed into citizens. This is how, by creating the city of Ankara, the new
Turkish state constructed itself as secular, national, and modern.”34 Ankara’s builders saw the
city in these terms, and prided themselves for not only creating structures which would reflect
state power, but opening spaces which would facilitate social exchange and civic participation.
Falih Rifki Atay, the honorary chairman of the Ankara Master Planning Commision, summed up
the distinct aspect of this project, “The Ottomans built monuments, the Turks are the builders of
33
34

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cities.”35 The Turkish Republic did not just make physical representations of state power, they
used their power to remake society.
The replacement of religious complexes by secular, state-run institutions as the
predominant features of the urban landscape did not reflect just a shifting balance of power, but
an actual spatial reorganization of social life in the city. The külliyes had been in Ottoman times
the centers around urban life operated, providing work, shelter, education, and general social
services to the communities in which they were located. The construction of new social spaces in
Ankara “was not simply a question of whether the Republic could provide matching aesthetic
masterpieces. Rather, it was the undeniable potential their presence wielded for invoking a whole
why of life which the Republic adamantly sought to dismantle and reformulate.”36 What was
significant about the museum and the Hearths Association was not just their imposing presence
in the city, but their ability to anchor the community and draw in city dwellers by providing
services.
As an institution intended for public usage, the Ethnography Museum was an important
element of process of transforming urban life and inserting the state into the daily activities of its
citizens. Monuments, triumphal arches, and other physical structures which narrate achievements
or conquests of the state are inert and lifeless. They do not invite participation or investigation
from the viewer, and may be passed by on a daily basis without ever being more than glimpsed
at. The Ethnography Museum, in contrast, actively drew in people as an educational,
recreational, and touristic attraction. More specifically, the museum opened up space for the
viewer to move through and pass time, and in a sense, what was contained in the museum was of
secondary importance to the structure itself as a space where citizens could wander and explore.
35
Ibid, 153.
36

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“Museums and exhibitions were designed to facilitate learning through the actual performance of
circulation of space,”37 writes Kezer. Walking through the museum, even without recognizing
the nationalist narrative being conveyed in the displays before them, visitors were participating
in an activity provided and supervised by the state.
Moreover, they were participating in an activity which the state viewed a distinctly
modern practice and associated with the West. Museum visitors were not only engaging in
behaviors expected of model citizens, but also legitimizing the Turkish Republic in the eyes of
the West. As much as the museum brought the practices of Turkish citizens in lines with the
expectations of the state, it also conveyed “national identity that was to be displayed for the
European gaze.”38 As Wendy Shaw observes, art museums proliferated across Europe and the
United States throughout the 19th century, with each great city building its as a marker of status
and a sign that they had transitioned into the modern era.39 The Grand Galerie of the Louvre
Palace in Paris was the first major European art museum opened to the public, followed soon
after by the construction of the Neues Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.40 The very act of observing art in such an
environment was a performance of perceived modern behavior, and if only for a short while,
transformed the Turkish museum goer into a modern national citizen and member of
“contemporary civilization.”41The museum was a mark of status for the Republic and a sign that
it had joined the ranks of other European states.
37
38
Çinar, “The Imagined Community as Urban Reality,”157.
39
Wendy Shaw, “Museums and Narratives of Display from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish
Republic,” Muqarnas 24(2007), 256.
40
Ibid., 255.
41
Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building, 58.

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While the museum attempted to bring Turkish culture in line with the West, it also
actively distanced it from the East. Turkey had long been grouped with other Islamic countries as
part of a monolithic Islamic culture and “imagined Orient”42, a term used by the Turkish
architectural historian Celal Esad Arseven long before Edward Said had developed the concept
of “orientalism”. Turkish culture had been viewed through the lens of exotic curiosity, and was
often displayed in museums across Europe and the United States in which, as Arvesen wrote, “it
is possible to see an Egyptian mashrabiyya on a Turkish house or an Iranian minaret next to a
Moroccan dome, or the geometric ornamental patterns of the Arab next to the tulips and
carnations of the Turk.”43
Looking at contemporary objects collected from the geographical East, Turkey but also
colonized parts of Asia and Oceania, the Turkish visitor was transformed from the object to the
beholder of the Western gaze. Placing “familiar things in strange places,”44 and deliberately
omitting explanatory information on the displays, the museum attempted to simulate the sense of
novelty and estrangement a Western viewer would have felt looking at these objects. The
museum redrew the physical boundary between the West and the Orient as the glass which
separated the visitor from the objects on display. The museum was not only a symbol of
Westernization, but facilitated the subjective experience of the Western viewer for Turkish
visitors.
It is important to exercise caution, however, in casting the Ethnography Museum as an
purely Orientalist institution or a crude imitation of Western practices. While the Republican
notion of modernity was largely based off of “French bourgeois culture,”45 for Turkish leaders
42
Bozdogan, “Reading Ottoman Architecture Through Modernist Lenses,” 203.
43
Ibid., 203.
44
45

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modernity was understood as a “universal norm of civilization”46 and a “universal standard of
style.”47 Atatürk in particular did not see the adoption of Western practices as an admission of
Turkish inferiority to France or other European nations, nor a refutation of a distinct Turkish
identity. Rather, he viewed modernization as a means of joining these countries as an equal,
stating, “There are a variety of countries, but there is only one civilization. In order for a nation
to advance, it is necessary that it joins this civilization.”48 The nationalist project hoped to instill
modern practices in Turkish culture, and had no intentions to adopt another national culture.
Moreover, as Shaw notes, while the Ethnography Museum borrowed from the European
tradition of using museums to convey ideological narratives, the Turkish Republic employed
museums in a manner specific to their own needs. In European museums, art collections were
used to convey a distinct “meta-narrative” of civilizational progression.49 This meta-narrative
traced a continuation of civilization from the traditions of classical Greece and Rome, through
various stages of European history, and into the modern era where it reached its full actualization
in the nation states of Europe. Museums were symbols of national pride, but framed European
culture as the standard-bearer of civilization, which was conceived of as both universal and
historic.
The nationalist ideology conveyed by the Ethnography Museum rejected both this
Eurocentric and historical vision of civilization. “In contrast to the model of museums in the
West, Turkish museums, by not using the discourse of art as a systemic meta-narrative,
functioned not to bring together material culture into a systematic grand narrative of heritage but
46
Ibid., 156.
47
Ibid., 156.
48
Ibid., 156.
49
Shaw, “Museums and Narratives of Display,” 273.

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to provide each aspect of heritage with a separate relationship to national identity,”50 writes
Shaw. The nation was not the endpoint of the evolution of culture, but rather the inherent trait by
which these traditions had always been connected. The significance of this distinction made by
Shaw is that as a cultural institution, the Ethnography Museum was not simply a European
import, or evidence on the lack of ideological creativity on the part of nationalist leaders. Rather,
it demonstrates the Turkish Republic’s ability to articulate a unique vision of nationhood, and to
shape the practices of their citizens in ways other than crude imitation of the West.
Even more so than the Ethnography Museum, the adjacent Hearths Association
Headquarters served as a hub of secular activity in the new capital, and offered even more direct
interaction between the state and citizens. In fact, there were few, if any, non-religious
institutions in the whole of Turkey that provided such a wide array of services to the public.
Kezer offers a description of the many functions carried out by the Hearths Association:
In this new building the elaborately crafted Grand Auditoriumwas reserved for
important lectures, commemorative ceremonies, and theatrical performances.
State receptions or gatherings of the Association were accommodated at the
‘Turkish Hall’, decorated rather lavishly with vernacular motifs. The
Association also provided services similar to those found in the
külliyes(religious communal centers). Its smaller lecture halls, rehearsal
chambers, and classrooms were designed to accommodate instruction for broad
interests and age groups. Its library was modest but well attended, especially by
the younger generation.51
With its diversity of activity and patrons, the Hearths Association itself was like a small city, a
site of interaction and communal exchange. Within its walls, people could expose themselves to
new culture, pursue an education, or meet others who shared their interests, all under the
supervision of the state.
50
Shaw, 273.
51

19
Like the Ethnography Museum, the Hearths Association was as institution that attempted
to instill its patrons with state ideology with a somewhat heavy hand, and the content of the
lectures, theater pieces, and ceremonies held there were overtly nationalistic. Yet also like the
museum, the messages it conveyed were secondary to the experience it facilitated. Attachment to
the nation was not only instilled through singing of patriotic songs or receiving lectures on
Turkish history, but the knowledge that these activities were being performed together as a
community. As Kezer writes:
People not only came to the Hearths to participate in a wide variety of social-
cultural and educational functions, but they knew that their compatriots in
different parts of Turkey were reading the same books, watching or acting in the
same epic dramas, singing the same nationalist songs, and celebrating at the
same commemorative festivities. As such, the individual branches were intended
to serve as nodes with a dual function, where at the organizational level the
locus of the community was transposed from the experiential to the imagined,
and the imagined gained a concrete experientiality in communal practices which
became women into a place-bound collective memory.52
The activities performed within the Hearths Association connected its patrons to a communal
practice which extended far beyond the building and the city into the far reaches of the country.
In a similar manner as the spatial practices which occurred in the Ethnography Museum, these
events allowed visitors to partake in the international culture of modernity and become secular
citizens, and led citizens to feel that they were participating in the construction of the nation. The
intervention by the state in Ankara’s physical landscape and the construction of these institutions
can therefore be seen as having engendered a form of citizenship-as-performance.
The practices brought to life by the Ethnography Museum and the Hearths Association
serve to illustrate a broader strategy employed by the government to intervene in urban life to
establish a national identity and facilitate the performance of citizenship. “This new lifestyle was
52
Ibid., 132.

20
to be displayed in various realms of daily life from clothing, gender identities, family type,
entertainment, sports, and leisure activity to architecture, urban planning, and the arts. New
public spaces emerging under the supervision of the state became the stage from which this ne
‘civilized’ lifestyle was displayed,”53 writes Çinar. The creation of other new structures like the
Ethnography Museum were essential to this project, and in the same period many new spaces,
both private and public, opened which hosted activities associated with modernity. For example,
the Ankara Palas Hotel, opened in 1927, contained a restaurant, tea room, and a grand ballroom
which hosted banquets, dances, and other state ceremonies, and allowed Ankara’s elite to
“display their recently acquired taste in ballroom dancing, haute couture, and international
cuisine.”54 Others included the Conservatory of Music, in which Western operas and concerts
were performed,55 and the Ankara Equestrian Club.56 These were establishments were not merely
sites where Western recreational habits and material culture were put on display, but also places
in which secular social norms dominated. Most notably, men and women freely socialized with
one another in these spaces, bringing a nationalist vision of gender equality into practice.
Even policies which did not directly affect the built environment or pertain specifically to
Ankara or other Turkish cities drew on the rituals of urban life to transform society and instill
national identity. One of the most ambitious controversial interventions of the state into religious
practice was the changing of the ezan, or call to prayer, in 1928 from Arabic to Turkish.57
Translating the ezan from the sacred language of Islam to the vernacular, the government
attempted to create a distinctly Turkish form of Islamic worship, and redirect religious practice
to engender nationalist sentiments. “By chanting the ezan in Turkish, the secular state not only
53
54
55
56
57
Sterling, “Religious Change in Republican Turkey,” 398.

21
brings under control Islam that has gained a unique presence in public through sound, but also
submits it to nationalist discourse,”58 writes Çinar. As a ritual performed five times each, the
ezan is an aspect of Islamic practice deeply ingrained in quotidian life, and as Çinar notes, one
that utilizes sensory experience. The Turkish ezan would have been heard throughout Turkey,
yet it is in the cities that it would have had the most profound effect. While the words of the ezan
themselves contain a nationalist message, the experience of hearing the ezan echoing through the
streets of Ankara or Istanbul from all directions uniquely conveyed state power. Moreover, it
demonstrated the ability of the state to implement experiences shared by the community and the
nation in unison.
The Ethnography Museum was a physical manifestation of state ideology, and put on
display the cultural heritage from which nationalists hoped to from a Turkish national identity.
Establishing a narrative of history which subsumed all other traditions to this new identity, the
Museum made visible and concrete for its visitors something which had been invented in the
minds of nationalist leaders. Moreover, the museum physicality did not only illustrate this
ideology, but demonstrated the state’s ability to actually shape society along nationalist values. It
displayed both the state’s ability to control and extract resources from the far reaches of Turkish
territory, as well as to provide new services for its citizens. Furthermore, it allowed the new
regime to distinguish itself from the hold. Yet the museum’s unique capacity as a social space
and intended function as institution of learning and recreation was what gave life to this
ideology. The nationalist project employed the museum, and the city as a whole, as a site where
Ankara’s residents could not only receive a lesson from the state on Turkish identity, but actively
participate in the creation of the nation. The museum did not only convey a nationalist narrative,
but facilitated the experience of national citizenship and to see history through the same lens as
58

22
the nationalist leaders did. As a nation, rather than an empire, the Turkish Republic depended on
this sense of participation and the performative aspect of citizenship. The Ethnography Museum
and Ankara as a whole, as both physical and social spaces, was therefore essential to this process
of nation building.

24
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
Bozdogan, Sibel. “Reading Ottoman Architecture Through Modernist Lenses: Nationalist
Historiography and the ‘New Architecture’ in the Early Republic.” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 199-
221.
Bozdogan, Sibel. Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early
Republic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.
Çinar, Alev. “The Imaged Community as Urban Reality,” in Urban Imaginaries: Locating the
Modern City, edited by Thomas Bender and Alev Çinar, 151-181. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
Ergil, Dogu. “Turkish Reform Movement and Beyond (1923-1928).” Islamic Studies 14 (1975):
249-260.
Kezer, Zeynep. “Familiar Things in Strange Places: Ankara’s Ethnography Museum and the
Legacy of Islam in Republican Turkey.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8 (2000): 101-
116.
Kezer, Zeynep. “The Making of a Nationalist Capital: Socio-Spatial Practices in Early
Republican Ankara.” Built Environment 22 (1996): 124-137.
Shaw, Wendy. “Museums and Narratives of Display from the Late Ottoman Empire to the
Turkish Republic.” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 253-279.
Stirling, Paul. “Religious Change in Republican Turkey.” Middle East Journal 12 (1958): 395-
408.

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