Remembering through possessed treasures? Landscapes and memories of societal violence in contemporary Turkey

ABSTRACT

May narratives of treasures be interrelated to remembrances of past societal violence? Attending to imaginations of and hunts for treasures across seemingly natural interfaces, this article explores these practices not simply as quests for material riches but as occasions through which past societal violence is recounted in the present across human and non-human assemblages. The article engages with two interrelated domains of scholarly debates. The first is the emergent field of scholarly discussions and presumptions about the ways in which past conviviality, displacement, and violence (both by civilian groups and state forces) are remembered by ordinary people who identify as part of the Turkish-Muslim majority in contemporary Turkey. The second, and much wider, scholarly debate the article aims to contribute to focuses on the way non-human entities exert a forceful (psychosocial and political) effect on social relations, which, in turn, invites us to rethink the interrelationship between humans and non-human entities.

KEYWORDS:

• Treasure hunts
• landscapes
• collective memory
• violence
• hauntings
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to the reviewers, Charles Stewart, Eray Cayli, the research group of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, editors, and friends and fellows who listened to earlier versions over the past couple of years for their feedback and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Turkish Language Association's dictionary defines the verb root kır- as breaking as well as smashing, killing, causing annihilation. Nisanyan Dictionary indicates that the verb is derived from the Old Turkish infinitive kır-, meaning digging and scraping. In the additional note, the dictionary remarks that it may have been derived from the Old Turkish kıy-, which meant ‘cutting with knife, shedding blood’ in circa. Eleventh century. Soykırım, combining the words soy [lineage, progeny, kind] and kırım [destruction], is a compound word that was invented in the 1970s as the Turkish equivalent of the word genocide.

2 The word tehcir is derived from the Arabic root h-j-r, which indicates mobility and movement. As a conjugation of the root, tehcir comes to denote displacement, forcing one to migrate, exile. The word tehcir is the transitive form of the root and underlines a process through which one is made to move, migrate, and leave. Nisanyan Dictionary explains that the noun is conjugated from hacara [migrated] with a note indicating that the word was not used in Ottoman texts but entered into official jargon by 1916 and used popularly only after 1918, when the Ottoman Empire capitulated to Triple Entente.

3 For a brief discussion on affect, please see Massumi (2002) and Ahmed (2004). Following these articulations, I conceive affect as unrecognised or unconscious intensities that move the body.

4 Here, I invoke and problematize the conventional differentiation between ‘landscapes’ or other natural objects (e.g. rocks) as substances prior to their re-workings by humans and ‘artefacts’ as materials produced by the reworking of substances by humans as discussed by Ingold (2011).

5 No doubt, unsanctioned diggings have been a rather prevalent phenomenon in the Turkish context. The damages, as conservation specialists often recount, do not solely include the destruction of material artefacts of historical significance, but also the wasting of rather considerable sums of money for the soliciting of relevant ‘signs’ (e.g. maps showing the location the location or their ‘interpretation’) and instruments (e.g. detectors) to detect the promised trove. In some instances, the digging itself turns rather dangerous because of the infrastructural threats (e.g. collapse of the tunnel or well) or because of the intra-group conflicts arising from the clandestine nature of the task itself as well as the disagreements around how to share the spoils – if they are ever to be found.

6 And yet, other mythical or genuine communities of the distant time are also occasionally evoked through such narratives, as in the case of the legends around the Kingdom of Ancumah.

7 In the latest local elections, for instance, Samsun, Ordu, Giresun, Trabzon, and Rize voted for conservative-nationalist AKP candidates with the least percentage of AKP vote being 47% in Samsun. More remarkably, in 2018, too, the AKP-MHP alliance got the outright majority in all the provinces with the least proportion of the votes their electoral alliance received being 64.5% in Giresun.

8 In 2019, for instance, an Iraqi Kurdish tourist was lynched by local communities after his scarf was thought to be a flag of Kurdish separatism.

9 Although the local government in Trabzon has been infamously implementing its practice of drowning the local Armenian communities of the city, Kévorkian (2006, 484) underlines, from court records, that ‘Faik Bey, Ordu's kaymakam, dispatched two barges loaded with Armenian women and children towards Samsun, which “came back empty two hours later”’.

10 Often uttered simply as horasan, this archaic construction mix created a rather durable mortar. Treasure narratives almost universally included horasan mortar in their explanations of finding the location, methods of seeing the trove as well as techniques to retrieve it. Horasan, in this sense, marked the space as a site of past human activity, resonating with conventional differentiations between substances and artefacts (Ingold 2011).

11 Horasan plaster, I was told, dries up later in comparison to natural rock formations.

12 Gordillo (2014, 37) also reports similar trends in Latin America where locals think that troves are buried beneath ruins and that these treasures are ‘protected by jealous guardian spirits described as ghosts or devils (diablos)’.

13 In his discussion of forgetting and remembering, Freud (1953, 150. Emphases are original.) mentions certain cases where ‘the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it’.

Additional information

Funding

The research process has been supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and that the views contained are author's own.