The pace that archaeology took in Turkey is much more related to the ideology of the modern Republic than to the existing archaeological potential of the country.
—Mehmet Özdo
an1
We saw in the example of Iraq how the consideration of a nation’s cultural property laws must take into account that nation’s cultural politics—how, that is, it sees its culture as a source of its identity and esteem—within the context of its contemporaneous political circumstances. This chapter and the next will consider in depth how the cultural property laws of Turkey and China are embedded in the politics of modern nation building, and the consequences of this for the practice of archaeology in those countries.
Turkey’s history is a palimpsest of different cultures. When conquered by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453, its inhabitants had long called themselves Rüm, or Romans in Greek. They lived under what we call the Byzantine Empire but what they themselves called the Roman Empire (Byzantine is a term of modern scholarship taken from the name for the much earlier Greek city-state, Byzantium, founded in the seventh century B.C.). The Roman Emperor Constantine moved the empire’s capital to Constantinople, in the second decade of the fourth century A.D., and there it remained for more than one thousand years. By the time the Ottomans came, Rüm denoted the Eastern Roman Empire, the empire in which Greek was the official language and Greek Orthodoxy was the established church.2 The name Turkey was chosen only in the twentieth century to distinguish the peoples of the new, Anatolian republic from the Arab peoples of the other former, Ottoman lands.3
From the beginning, the Ottoman court was in contact with the leading courts and trading cities of Europe and Asia. In 1479, Mehmet II requested from the Venetian Senate the services of an important painter and was sent Gentile Bellini, the city’s most prominent artist.4 Bellini came to paint the sultan’s portrait, now in the National Gallery, London, and perhaps other pictures for the New Palace (now the Topkapi Palace) including a Madonna and Child. Although the latter paintings do not survive, a group of pen and brown ink drawings depicting a Greek woman, a seated Janissary, and various Turkish men and women in contemporary dress do, and can be attributed to Bellini and his workshop. There is also an exceptionally beautiful watercolor of a young man, probably a page at the Sultan’s court, drawn by Bellini in Constantinople between 1479 and 1481.5 It was later sent to the Aqqoyunlu court in Tabriz and then on to the Persian Safavid court by 1544–1545. There it was put into an album with several Chinese Ming dynasty drawings and a sixteenth-century Italian portrait of a young boy. The album was sent on to the Ottoman court, but not before it was copied by at least two Persian artists.6
Mehmet II’s court library contained manuscripts from the earlier Byzantine court, including an Octateuch with 352 miniatures, but also other manuscripts likely acquired by Mehmet II himself, as well as Arrian’s Anabasis and Indica, the primary sources for the life of Alexander the Great, a copy of Homer’s Iliad, Hebrew and Latin manuscripts, and of course numerous Arabic and Persian texts.7 The sultan’s allegorical portrait, engraved by the so-called Master of the Vienna Passion around 1470, was presented or sold to him with fourteen other Italian engravings and later bound into an album with two watercolor portraits painted by Turkish artists, one of which was modeled after a bronze medal of the sultan by the Italian Costanzo di Moysis (or Costanzo de Ferrara).8
By the time Süleyman I became sultan in 1520, the culture of the court and the character of Constantinople was distinctly international, as befitting the character of the empire itself. Portraits of him and his successors, Selim II and Murad III, were made by the northern European printmaker Melchior Lorich and a painter in the circle of Veronese who painted twelve portraits of Ottoman sultans which are now in the Residenz Würzberg, Munich; a painted portrait of Süleyman I in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is attributed to Titian. And through a strip of woodcuts sixteen feet long published in Antwerp in 1553, Peter Coecke van Aelst represented the city of Istanbul in panorama (including a scene of Süleyman I riding through the Hippodrome) for the acquisitive European print, art, and book markets. Ten years later, the Venetian book publisher Domenico de’Francheschi published a series of nine woodcuts representing the sultan’s Friday procession.9 Perhaps the most extraordinary object attesting to Süleyman’s regard for Europe—and how he wished to be seen by it—was the jewel-studded helmet made by the Venetians Luigi Carolini and Vicenzo Levriero and sold to the Sultan for the astonishing sum of 116,000 ducats. Recent scholars believe Süleyman used the crown to signal his superiority over both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. That it was grander than either the helmet Charles V wore at his coronation or the papal tiara has been interpreted as an indication of Süleyman’s claim to universal sovereignty, a claim that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by his European challengers.10
Links between artistic patronage and trading agreements and political tactics had been a part of the Ottoman court’s engagement with Europe from the start. And it went both ways. In 1525, the French king, Francis I, sent his ring in supplication to Süleyman before going into battle against the Emperor Charles V at Pavia. Defeated, Francis I continued to seek an alliance with Süleyman against the emperor. In 1533, Süleyman sent his great admiral, Hayreddin Barbarossa, to the French court to negotiate an alliance. Two years later, Francis I sent Jean de la Forest to Constaninople to begin discussing campaign strategies. And in 1536, the two courts signed military and trade agreements, giving France direct trade with Ottoman ports (by 1620, French trade with the Ottomans was one-third of all French maritime trade, and would remain so for centuries). Queen Elizabeth’s England was no less interested in the Ottomans. In the 1580s, Elizabeth signed trade agreements similar to those enjoyed by the French, and in the early 1590s, Elizabeth and Safiye, mother of Mehmet, heir to the sultanet, exchanged gifts of costumes and finely died textiles (some twenty-three chests were shipped from England alone). All of these trade agreements were aimed against the Venetians, who had enjoyed privileged relations with the Ottomans since the fifteenth century; and not just in Constantinople but throughout much of the empire (some sixty-eight named Venetians are known to have been in Damascus between 1455 and 1457, for example) and are but a few of the many examples of the instant and continuous links between the new court in Constantinople and the courts of Europe.11
Within a century after its conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire either governed or was in contact with most of the known world, and its population reflected this. The first census of the Ottoman capital was taken in 1477 and, counting only the civilian households (not those of the military or the imperial court), recorded 9,486 Muslim Turks, 4,127 Greek, 1,687 Jewish, 434 Armenian, 267 Genoese, and 332 European families from places other than Genoa. A century later, during the reign of Murat IV, Evliya Çelebi described Galata, a suburb of Constantinople, as comprising eighteen wards inhabited by Muslims, seventy by Greeks, three by Franks [probably Europeans, generally], one by Jews, and two by Armenians. “The town,” he wrote, “is full of infidels, who number 200,000, according to the census taken in the reign of Sultan Murat IV, whereas the Muslims are only 64,000. . . . The inhabitants are either sailors, merchants or craftsmen, such as joiners or caulkers. They dress for the most part in the Algerine fashion, for a great number of them are Arabs or Moors. The Greeks keep the taverns; most of the Armenians are merchants or money-changers; the Jews are the go-betweens in amorous intrigues and their youths are the worst of all the devotees of debauchery.”12
Two hundred years later, in 1886, near the end of the empire, the city’s population had grown to 850,000, including 130,000 foreigners, primarily Europeans but also refugees from the empire’s lost territories. Among the permanent residents counted in the census of that year, 53 percent were Muslims, 21 percent Greeks, 21 percent Armenians, and 3 percent Jews. The first census taken under the new Republic of Turkey, in 1924, showed Istanbul having a population of 1,165,866, of whom 61 percent were Muslim Turks, 26 percent Greeks, 7 percent Armenians, and 6 percent Jews. Today, the city’s population is over 10 million, with all of the non-Muslim minorities making up less than 1 percent. Nationwide, the population is over 70 million, 80 percent of whom are Turkish and 20 percent Kurdish, while 99.8 percent of its citizens are Muslim, mostly Sunni, and the balance, only 1.4 million, or 0.2 percent, mostly Christians and Jews.13
The picture is clear. Over the centuries, with the end of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey and Istanbul have become almost only Turkish and Muslim, when once both included large populations of Arabs, Christians, and Jews. This is the natural result, at least in part, of the concentration of Turkish territory on Anatolia following the demise of the empire; the latter having included at one time or another Arab, Egyptian, North African, and Greek territories. But it is also the result of political and religious tensions during the first seventy-five years of the republic’s history.
Under the leadership of its first president, Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”) as he came to be known, the Turkish Republic pursued a rigorous program of modernization. The National Assembly voted to abolish the sultanate in 1922, and shortly afterward Islamic courts were dissolved and religious brotherhoods banned. At the same time, the republic instituted a unified school system, effectively replacing the medreses with secular schools that taught a new curriculum in the Turkish language only (medreses had often taught in local languages, such as Kurdish), and all dervish lodges, shrines, and mausoleums were closed and their staff dismissed. In 1925, a law was passed prohibiting the wearing of the traditional hat, or fez, which in Atatürk’s words was “a symbol of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and the hatred of progress and civilization.” And in the same year the Muslim calendar was replaced by the European one (which begins with the presumed date of Jesus’s birth), Arabic script was replaced with Latin letters, and Sunday was established as a day of rest.14 Finally, in 1926, women were granted new rights, including the right to an equal share of inheritances; divorce at the husband’s discretion was ended; religious or polygamous marriages were no longer recognized; and women teachers were permitted to work in coeducational primary and middle schools (previously they had been allowed to teach only in girls’ schools), and in law, medicine, and public services.
The republic’s most dramatic act of modernization was abolishing the caliphate in 1924. Upon the Prophet’s death in 632, his closest companions and deputies were charged with strengthening and perpetuating the ummah, or community of believers. This was no easy task. The second caliph, or principal leader of the ummah, was assassinated in 644, and the caliphate passed to Uthman, who was himself assassinated twelve years later and whose death initiated a five-year civil war. His successor, Muawiyyah I, established the Umayyad dynasty, and moved his capital from Medina to Damascus. Upon his death a second civil war broke out, with the followers of the earlier, defeated challenger to Muawiyyah I, Ali ibn Abi Talib (a member of the Prophet’s family, whereas Muawiyyah I was not), calling themselves the Shia I-Ali (or Shiites). In the middle of the eighth century, the Abassids, who had descended from the Prophet’s paternal uncle, rose up against the Umayyads, fighting under the banner of the Shiah, and established the Abassid dynasty with its capital in Baghdad. By the end of the Abassid dynasty two hundred years later, caliphates no longer had temporal power. When in the sixteenth century Süleyman I claimed both temporal and religious authority for himself—both the sultanate and the caliphate—he was recalling an earlier era of the caliphate and flexing his muscles over all of Islam as the “shadow of God” on all nations.15
By the time the republic abolished the sultanate in 1922 and deposed and exiled Mehmet VI, the Ottoman caliphate was terminally weakened. The empire itself no longer existed. The Turkish Republic would soon be established with Atatürk as its president. And the former sultan’s cousin, Abdül Mecit II, the Crown Prince, was caliph only, and not, as Ottoman caliphs had been for hundreds of years before him, also sultan. A short two years later, on March 3, 1924, with the stroke of the pen, the Ottoman caliphate itself—the traditional authority of the caliph, the deputy of God, successor of Muhammad, and historically chief civil and religious ruler of the Muslim community—was formally abolished and Abdül Mecit II deposed and expelled from the country.16 The extent of the republic’s sovereignty had been reduced to Anatolia, and the authority of imams in Turkey was made subject to the president of the new, secular state.
This was a critical moment in the history of the Turkish Muslim community. For the first time in centuries, they were without a caliph. They would soon have no Islamic courts and would be subject only to the secular law of the republic, their religious brotherhoods would be banned, and their theological schools replaced by a unified system of secular schools. Over the next twenty-five years, Atatürk and his successors would do everything in their power to limit the influence of Islam in the public life of the republic, but it would never go away.
In 1919–1920, Atatürk gave voice to the idea of a territorial nation-state. In the National Pact of that year, he wrote that “the Grand national Assembly of Turkey has a firm, positive, material policy, and that, gentlemen, is directed to the preservation of life and independence . . . within defined national frontiers. The Grand National Assembly and government of Turkey, in the name of the nation.”17 The Turkish national idea first appeared some five decades earlier as a result of a number of factors, chief among them the influence of European nationalism. A number of disenfranchised European nationalists were in exile in Turkey and a number of Turkish political exiles were in Europe during the height of European nationalism at mid-century. At the same time, European scholars were advancing the study of Turcology, or the history of the ancient history and civilization of the Turkish peoples. This was due in part to the rise of pan-Slavism in Russia and the eastern lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and took the form of Turanism, whose chief aim was the rapprochement and ultimate union—cultural, political, or both—among all peoples whose origins were said to go back to Turan, an ancient Iranian name for the country to the north-east of Persia, a kind of Shangri-La on the steppes of Central Asia. The Turkic peoples originating in this area were thought to speak related languages—Turkish, Mongol, Finnish, Hungarian—and thus be culturally and even ethnically related. While as a linguistic and ethnological classification this theory was soon abandoned, it persisted as a political idea through the early decades of the twentieth century.18
Meanwhile, in 1904 Akçuraoglu Yusuf, a Tatar from Russia, whose family had settled in Turkey but who was educated in France and was living in Russia, wrote an article for Türk, a periodical published in Cairo for Turkish political exiles (to remind us of the international character of the development of local nationalism) which, when published as a pamphlet, would have considerable influence in Turkey. He laid out three options for a Turkish national identity in the final years of the Ottoman Empire: Ottomanism, or a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religion of origin; Pan-Islamism, based of course on religion; and Turkism, or a nationalism based on the Turkish “race.” The first two were impossible since there was no Ottoman nation and the European powers would fiercely oppose an Islamist identity. And so he argued for the third option, or Turkism, which would rally the loyalties of the dominant Turkish peoples within the Ottoman Empire and reinforce them with Turks from Russia and elsewhere.19 Atatürk would argue against all three options, limiting his vision for Turkish nationalism to the Turks living within the post-Imperial borders of modern Turkey: “We do not serve pan-Islamism. . . . We do not serve pan-Turanianism. . . . Gentlemen we are a nation desiring life and independence. For that and that alone may we give our lives.”20
In 1923, the new republic established its capital in the Anatolian city of Ankara. This regional city, with a population only a fraction of the size of Constantinople’s (Constantinople would not become Istanbul until 1930), nevertheless had significant symbolic value. It had been the headquarters of Atatürk’s nationalist party, the meeting place of the National Assembly, and the seat of his government during the War of Independence. In every way it would be different from the historic Ottoman capital. Its master plan would be devised by the German town-planner Hermann Jansen, and its many government buildings designed by the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister. It was to be modern and efficient and represent the power of the state. The National Assembly would meet under the motto, “Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the nation.”
That Ankara was in Anatolia was important too. For the immediate task of the new republic was to construct a national identity distinct from that of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the republic’s early elite sought a Pan-Turkic identity in alliance with the Turkic cultures of Central Asia. But the ancient homeland of the Turkish people— Turkestan—was in the possession of Russia and China, and more than half of the Turkish people of Asia, with whom the new nation might identify itself, lived there or elsewhere outside the former Ottoman Empire. It would not be easy, nor serve the immediate best interests of the republic, to build a Pan-Turkic identity as a minority part of a population under foreign domination or otherwise living in many different countries. Atatürk argued instead for an Anatolian identity, one that looked neither east nor west but historically within Anatolia to the Sumerians and Hittites as among the earliest peoples resident within modern Turkey’s geographic borders.21 These ancient peoples thus became descendents of the modern Turks; as the Phrygians, Lydians, Carians, Selçuks, and Ottomans would after them. A theory was advanced defining the modern Turkish identity as an amalgamation of thousands of years of Anatolian cultural history. In Atatürk’s mind, Anatolia had been a Turkish land since antiquity. And he had a Museum of Anatolian Civilizations established in Ankara, to which at his direction Hittite artifacts from throughout the region were sent to Ankara as evidence of the “origins” of Anatolian Turkish identity.22
An Anatolian identity may have located the Turkish national identity squarely within the political borders of the modern state, but it did not define it as a set of commonly held assumptions about what it meant to be a modern Turk. Many of these assumptions centered on the role of religion in public life. In 1949, in anticipation of the coming elections, the government reinstated religious education in primary school on a voluntary basis. Four months later, the faculty of theology, which was closed down in Istanbul during Atatürk’s time, was reopened in Ankara. These were cautious moves, made to appeal to reformists without significantly altering government policy. But they failed to prevent an upset at the polls. Numerous changes followed, each seemingly small but together amounting to a significant challenge to the secularist state. The law requiring the Muslim call to prayer be made in Turkish rather than Arabic was repealed, and mosques were equipped with loudspeakers so that everyone could hear the original Arabic. And new mosques were built throughout the country. In all, these changes began what some have called a Sunni Renaissance in Turkey, an institutionalization of more traditional religious values in public life that had been denied at the founding of the republic.23
Twenty years later, the Sunni Islamist leader Necmettin Erbakan and his National Salvation Party joined two coalition governments, with Erbakan serving as deputy prime minister. Increasing social and political disruptions—ignited by Islamists, right-wing nationalists, and leftists alike—brought a military coup in 1980. Seven years later, Erbakan formed a third political party, the Welfare Party, and again entered politics. He campaigned energetically throughout the nation and in 1995, in partnership with the True Path Party, formed a government as prime minister, the first Islamist prime minister in the history of the nation. This was a major victory for the Islamists, but it was to be short-lived. In the face of severe economic problems, Erbakan turned to other developing, Muslim nations to create a union of economic cooperation. This was interpreted by the military and center-right politicians as an attempt to change Turkish foreign policy toward the Middle East. With pro-Islamist demonstrations breaking out across much of the country, Erbakan was forced to surrender to the military and step down from office.
One of Erbakan’s most charismatic followers, Recep Tayip Erdoan, was the Welfare Party’s chairman in the province of Istanbul and stood for mayor of the city and as a candidate for the Turkish National Assembly several times in the late 1980s. In 1994, he was elected mayor of Istanbul and president of the Greater Istanbul Metropolitan Council. But shortly thereafter he was arrested and imprisoned for having recited in public the lines of the nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp: “The mosques are our barracks, their minarets our bayonets, their domes our shields.”24 Erdogan returned to politics after his release and formed the Justice and Development Party. A constitutional amendment allowed him to run for parliament in 2002 and, with the help of the reformist wing of Islamists, whose Virtue Party had earlier been banned by the constitutional court, he was elected and became prime minister.
Erdoan is in office as I write. And while he is perceived by many to be an Islamist on the order of Erbakan, he is steering a close, moderate political line. Among his first orders of business is to secure Turkey’s admission into the European Union. Some EU member states are skeptical of the economic stability of the country. Others are critical of Turkey’s human rights record, while still others are doubtful that a Muslim nation—even a centrist one like Turkey—can share the values of the other EU members. Erdoan argues otherwise. He believes Turkey’s admission will be of benefit not only to the Union as a cooperative body but to the individual member states, since it will lead to an integration of their Muslim communities into the mainstream of national cultural and political life. He also believes it will send positive signals to other Muslim nations with regard to Europe’s understanding and respect for Islam itself.
Erdoan acknowledges the importance of religion in Turkish public life: “My government attaches importance to religion in the private sphere, but does not consider it right to pursue a policy with religion.” By any measure Turks are religious people. In a survey taken in 1999, for example, 92 percent of the respondents said they kept the Ramadan feast, 46 percent said they prayed five times daily, 62 percent said they attended Friday prayers, and 7 percent said they had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca; 53 percent said they had visited shrines of holy men and 12 percent said they had purchased amulets. But only 21 percent said they wanted the Turkish state to be founded on Islamic law, and 77 percent agreed that Turkey had moved forward as a result of the reforms introduced by the republic and its governments over the years.25 Officially, the president of Religious Affairs reports to the prime minister through a minister of state and controls a network of nearly 77,000 mosques throughout the nation. It has some 80,000 imams and other lesser staff members on its payroll. Regional muftis represent the president of Religious Affairs and keep an eye on local imams and the content of their sermons. Every politically viable effort is being made to institutionalize religion in Turkey and to create a modern synthesis of the earlier divisions between the government and the faithful.26
But the faithful themselves are not always in agreement. Most Turkish Muslims are Sunni, including the nation’s leaders. The Sunni Renaissance begun during the 1950s is judged by many non-Sunnis as being at their expense.27 The heterodox Alevi community feels particularly aggrieved. Alevis—some 25 percent of Turkey’s population— practice what has been described as a syncretic religion with elements of Shi’a Islam, pre-Islamic religions of Anatolia, and even ancient Turkic Shamanism. They typically do not worship in a mosque but in meetinghouses under the direction of an elder. Some Alevis emphasize their Shi’a origins. Others see themselves as a kind of Sufi order. Still others consider their faith a form of folk Islam. Opposition between Sunnis and Alevis has sometimes been violent, as in 1978 around Kahramanmaras
and in 1993 in Sivas, where Sunni fundamentalists set fire to a hotel where pro-Alevi intellectuals were having a conference, killing thirty-five.
Sometimes the tension between majority and minority peoples in Turkey is not based on religion. The Kurdish people, although largely Sunni, are fiercely independent. They did not get a homeland— Kurdistan—at the end of the Ottoman Empire as promised, and as Iraq, Syria, and Kuwait did. And when the Turkish Republic was established, Atatürk rejected their requests and Iran and Iraq agreed not to recognize an independent Kurdish state. Their language was outlawed and traditional culture repressed, and they were encouraged to move to large cities as a way to dilute their independent identity. During the 1920s and 1930s, they rose up in opposition to the republic, and in the 1980s, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) was established calling for formal independence. Six years later, the PKK began an armed struggle, which over the years would claim 30,000 lives and create more than 2 million refugees. In 2000, the PKK announced a ceasefire and reforms were passed in 2002 and 2003 ending bans on private education in the Kurdish language and on giving children Kurdish names. But in 2004, renamed the Kurdish People’s Congress, the party renounced the ceasefire. The matter of Kurdish independence, and of a greater Kurdish homeland, remains unresolved.28
The Greek question has a longer history in Turkey. Greeks have lived in Anatolia for millennia, especially along the Aegean coast. For a while, under Alexander, they dominated the land. And for all intents and purposes, the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire at the time) was Greek. When Mehmet II conquered Constantinople, he appointed a Greek monk to the orthodox Patriarch and allowed him to govern both the religious and secular affairs of the Greek community. The first Ottoman census, of 1477, counted half of Constantinople’s population as Greek, and four-hundred years later, even after the Greek War of Independence, it was still 21 percent Greek. The end of the Greco-Turkish War (part of the Turkish War for Independence, 1919–1922) resulted in a population exchange, which forcibly resettled some 1.5 million Greeks from Turkey to Greece, but not the 400,000 Greeks in Constantinople (nor the 25,000 Muslims in Western Thrace). The first census of the Turkish Republic counted 26 percent of Constantinople’s population as Greek.29 (The complications of this exchange were many. The Greeks of Karaman who were repatriated to Greece were Greek Christians by religion but knew almost no Greek. They spoke Turkish, which they wrote in a Greek script. And many of the Turks repatriated from Greece spoke little or no Turkish. In many ways it was a symbolic exchange of populations instigated by national politicians, resulting in an odd form of national “purity.”)30
Repressive government policies against Greeks in Turkey during the 1930s forced many Greeks to emigrate. In 1955, Greek nationalists in Cyprus launched a terrorist campaign against the British colonial administration there. Turkish Cypriots comprised 20 percent of the island’s population but were disproportionately represented in the police force in its actions against the Greek terrorists. While the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers were in meetings in London, an Istanbul newspaper reported that a bomb had been set off in the Salonica house where Atatürk was thought to have been born. Within hours, crowds encouraged by governmental officials took to the streets of Istanbul, destroying Greek property and terrifying Greek residents who were forced to flee the city to save their lives. Ten years after the so-called “Istanbul Pogrom,” the Greek population of Istanbul was only 48,000. It is said now to be a mere 5,000.
Ethnic, religious, and political differences have reduced the diversity of the city’s and nation’s population. Non-Muslim minorities now comprise less than 1 percent of Istanbul’s 10 million residents, while 99.8 percent of the nation’s citizens are Muslim. Still, Turkey’s national identity remains an unresolved issue. Alevis and Kurds are opposed to Sunni Turkish domination (with the Kurds calling for their own, independent homeland); Islamists and secularists are at odds over the role of religion in Turkish public life; and the more or less progressive citizens of Istanbul are opposed to the traditionalists of the rest of the country. However much Erdogan professes an open, democratic Turkish national identity, the nation’s identity remains contested between Islamists, secularists, and the military, and between ethnic Turks and Kurds:
[T]he national state signifies the partnership of the constituents that make up the Republic of Turkey on the basis of citizenship. Atatürk never agreed with concepts that defined a nation on the basis of race, religion or ethnic background. For him the distinguishing feature of a nation is a shared history and the will to love together. Today, Turkey is a powerful and democratic country that is comprised of constituents who have a sense of shared history and the will to live together on the basis of constitutional citizenship and who can see their differences as an enriching attribute.31
Contemporary debate about Turkey’s future and the future of its identity is constrained by politics. But so too is its consideration of its past—and especially the ancient past of the land within its modern borders.
The Istanbul Archaeological Museum was founded under the sultanate of Abdül Mecit I in 1846, when the empire’s provincial governors were ordered to ship to the capital all appropriate, moveable works of art. Twenty-two years later the collection was inaugurated as the Ottoman Imperial Museum.32 In 1881, the painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey was appointed curator-director. The Archaeological Museum as we know it today was opened in 1891, with new wings added in 1902, 1908, 1991, and 1994. From the beginning, its collection was truly an Imperial one—the Ottoman Imperial Museum—an assemblage for the capital of ancient works of art from throughout the empire. As director of the new Archaeological Museum, Osman Hamdi Bey recommended to the government that it continue this manner of acquisition and issue “orders to the numerous officials of the provinces in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to guard carefully all antiquities that may exist, to report to the Ministry of Public Instruction all new discoveries, and, when required, to transport them safely to Constantinople.”33
Antiquities found within the empire were first regulated in 1869, with the adoption of an ordinance that allowed for private ownership of antiquities found on private land, but prohibited their export to other countries.34 The subsequent Ottoman Decree on Antiquities of 1874 prohibited the excavation of antiquities without permission of the state and consent of the landowner, and required that one-third of antiquities discovered in legal excavations on private land be kept by the state, one-third be given to the landowner, and one-third to the finder. If the finder was also the landowner, two-thirds of the antiquities were given to the finder-landowner. Antiquities given to the finder could be exported with State permission.
As curator-director of the Imperial Museum, Osman Hamdi Bey was influential in the 1884 Ottoman Decree on Antiquities, which declared all antiquities discovered or to be discovered through excavations as belonging to the state, and that one-half of any antiquities found accidentally on private land would be given to the landowner. All antiquities discovered in legal excavations became the property of the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, regardless of where they were found within the empire.
Twenty-two years later, the 1906 Ottoman Decree on Antiquities declared that all antiquities found in or on public or private lands were the property of the government of the Ottoman Empire and were not to be shared with their finder or, if found on private land, the landowner. The 1906 Decree remained in effect until 1973, fifty years after the founding of the Turkish Republic, when it was replaced by a very similar law, with only modest modifications.
The current law was enacted in 1983 and extended these protections to a wider range of cultural and natural properties, as well as to any property relating to the republic’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and to the 1919–22 War of Independence (if only to make clear the relationship between cultural property and political ideology). The trajectory of legislation regulating the excavation, ownership, and trade in antiquities found within the sovereign borders first of the empire and then later of the republic has been toward ever tighter regulation. Once, antiquities could be privately owned but not exported without the state’s permission; now antiquities are exclusively property of the state.
Of course the state itself, as we have seen, has changed over the years. For centuries it was one of the largest empires the world has ever known, stretching from the Black Sea south to the Arabian Sea, west to the Atlantic Ocean, and northwest to the gates of Vienna. By 1923, it had been reduced mostly to Anatolia. Its archaeological legacy is thus one both of a source nation (in modern terms: rich with an archaeological heritage) and a colonizing power. Antiquities from many of the former empire’s territories—objects that could rightly be considered important to the cultural heritage and national identities of the modern states occupying those lands today—are now in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum. Indeed, the museum’s most important and prized antiquities—sarcophagi from the royal necropolis of Sidon, especially the so-called “Alexander Sarcophagus”—were discovered in 1887 in what is now Lebanon, and their excavation and removal to Constantinople were supervised by Osman Hamdi Bey. Because Lebanon was under the sovereignty of the empire at the time (it would remain so until the end of World War I and did not become fully independent until 1936), the Imperial Museum had the legal right to bring them to Constantinople.35
The history of archaeology in Turkey has been subject to the pressures of modern nation building. Mehmet Özdoan, a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Istanbul University, has written of the ideological foundation of early Ottoman and republican archaeology:
The emergence and the development of archaeology in Turkey took place under constraints that are deeply rooted in history. Confrontation between the traditional Islamic framework and the Western model, the endeavor to survive as a non-Arabic nation in the Middle East while the empire was disintegrating, the hostile and occasionally humiliating attitude of Europeans, and growing nationalism have all been consequential in this development. . . . [T]he pace that archaeology took in Turkey is much more related to the ideology of the modern Republic than to the existing archaeological potential of the country.36
Recent critical studies of archaeological practice have shed new light on the inevitable nationalism of modern states with a rich archaeological heritage within their borders. Some studies draw on post-colonialist theory to admit that “constructions of identity for colonized groups inevitably entail a complex interweaving of past and present, which in themselves rely on the discourses of alterity, authenticity and origins.”37 What is most important about these studies is their acknowledgment of the nationalistic framework within which archaeology is being carried out today and has always been. “Such overt [nationalistic] political bias in archaeological research and interpretation is neither new or unusual: what has changed is the willingness of archaeologists to recognize such realities.” And “by its nature archaeology has always had an obvious political dimension, and nationalism—like ethnic or cultural identity—makes manifest the character of archaeology as a social, historical and political enterprise.”38 The latter remarks were written by British archaeologists working in Cyprus, an island rich with ancient heritage but long subject to all of the pressures of modern nation building, and, since 1955, in often bloody dispute between Greece and Turkey.
During British control of the island in 1878, emphasis was on a Hellenic view of the island’s past in contrast to its centuries of control under Muslim Ottoman rule. When it became independent in 1960, it had a Greek Cypriote majority and Turkish Cypriote minority. In 1974, a Greek government-sponsored attempt to seize control of the island was met by military intervention from Turkey (twenty years earlier, anti-Greek violence in Istanbul drove thousands of Greeks from Turkey). Nine years later the Turkish-held area declared itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is recognized today only by Turkey. Although the entire island entered the European Union in 2004, E.U. Common Rights and Obligations apply only to areas under direct Republic of Cyprus control and are suspended in the areas administered by Turkish Cypriots.
The politics of archaeology on Cyprus are multiple. “The 1974 Turkish invasion and subsequent occupation of the northern part of the island precipitated a blatantly ideological, cultural cleansing of the Greek Cypriote past,” archaeologists Bernard Knapp and Sophia Antoniadou have written.39 It is charged that one group of nationalistic Cypriots ignores or willfully damages the archaeological remains important to the other, and that each accuses the other of either stealing or refusing to repatriate archaeological artifacts deemed important to, even as belonging to, the other.
Similar tensions exist in southern Turkey among the Turkish authorities and Kurdish minority population. The Kurds live in a region of Central Asia that crosses the modern borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia. They have lived in that area, called by them Kurdistan, for millennia. They were conquered by Arab Muslims in the seventh century, Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth century, and later the Safavid and Ottoman Empires. Although promised a homeland at the end of World War I, they were not given one. It is estimated that about half of the more than 20 million Kurds living in the region today live in Turkey.
Turkey has been criticized for neglecting the Kurdish cultural heritage, both its living heritage (language, clothing, and culture) and the antiquities that lie beneath the ground in southeast Turkey. Mehmet Özdoan disagrees and argues that there are archaeological campaigns in many areas of the region. He categorically denies that the Kurds’ interests are being ignored. It is, he says, “misguided to consider that applications [for excavations] are processed according to potential ethnic import of a site.” But then he wonders just what is intended by Kurdish heritage, or Kurdish archaeology, anyway:
Kurds have lived in that region for some millennia under different tribal names, without establishing any state. The area now populated by Kurdish peoples has been part of numerous kingdoms and empires, including the Assyrian, Mittani, Urartian, Persian, Achaemenid, Roman, Byzantine, Armenian, Arab, Seljuk, Artuquid, Eyyubid, Mongolian, Ottoman, and even the Crusader kingdoms. Which one of these should be Kurdish, Turkish, or Arabic?40
The Kurds are stateless people. What right then, Özdoan asks, have they to claim association with the archaeological remains beneath the lands they have inhabited, if even for millennia, but have never governed? Rights to make such claims, it would seem, come only with the sovereign authority to back them up. Without such authority, the Kurds have no claim to the region’s past. But the Turks do, and have made those claims since at least Osman Hamdi Bey in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.41
But why should state sovereignty determine ownership? (Remember: antiquities found within the borders of Turkey are, and have been since 1884, state property.) Does ownership mean stewardship—the preservation of things for the benefit of all others—or does it mean “it’s my property and not yours”? Özdoan is critical of the idea that anything but state sovereignty (ownership) can determine control over archaeological remains. Are we to impose, he asks, “a biased imposition of present conflicts onto the past?” “Is it our concern as archaeologists,” he continues, “to use the past as a tool either to prove or disprove racial origins and claims which agitate present conflicts? Or should we engender the notion that the past is past and, whatever its character, it belongs to all of us?”42 But how can it belong to all of us if it belongs to the state? Do the archaeological remains found on the lands on which the Kurds have lived for millennia belong to them in any meaningful way so long as they are the property of the Turkish state and the two peoples—the Turkish majority and Kurdish minority—are locked in political and even bloody conflict? And how can they “belong” to the rest of us, if they are owned by the state and kept by the state?
Turkey claims ownership of the archaeological remains found within its modern political borders, and to the archaeological remains found anywhere within the borders of the former Ottoman Empire that were removed to what is now Turkey prior to the end of the empire. Turkey is the legal and political heir to the empire. Sarcophagi removed from what is now Lebanon, when that land was part of the Ottoman Empire, now belong to Turkey. The Lebanese have no right to them. While in a generous moment a Turkish archaeologist might say they “belong to all of us,” they do not. They are considered Turkish property, having been removed to what is today Turkey during the Ottoman period. Were archaeological remains the property of all of us, Turkey would have no right to argue for the return of “Priam’s treasure” removed by Heinrich Schliemann.43
Archaeological remains are political property, regulated by state law. Greece has sovereignty over some of the archaeological remains found on Cyprus, and Turkey has sovereignty over others, even if the remains were deposited equally over the island during the historical periods when all of it was occupied by a single political power. And the Kurds? They have no claim to anything. The archaeological remains found on the land they consider to be their homeland belong to Turkey, and access to it is controlled by the Turkish Antiquity Service. Access is power, and power is circumscribed by modern, statebased sovereignty.
Cultures have and will always overlap and intermingle. The geographic limits of political sovereignty will always change. These are the truths by which we must consider all nationalist claims on artifacts of the past. In the case of Turkey, its diverse, polyglot past of cultures and peoples crossing Anatolia in search of commercial, political, and territorial gain over thousands of years—west along the Silk Road and from Turkistan, east from Europe, south from the Balkans and Thrace, and north from Mesopotamia and Persia—is being recast in light of modern political ambitions as the republic struggles still with the formation of a modern, secular state. “Approved” past cultures are exhibited in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum as the ancient foundation of the modern Turkish identity. The more modern Ottoman contributions are preserved and exhibited in the nearby Çinili Kösk, or tile museum, and Topkapi Sarayi Müzesi in the former Ottoman palace. A Turkish past is created. A Kurdish past is ignored. And all of the rough and tumble untidiness of the streets of Istanbul, once filled with Greeks, Jews, and Christians from throughout Europe is tidied up and left to Turks, overwhelmingly so, and mostly Sunni Muslim Turks at that. That’s the nature of nation building. It subjects the past and the present to the rigors of identity control. And archaeology and national museums are used as a means of enforcing that control.44