Lost in commemoration: the Armenian genocide in memory and identity

Therapeutic forgetting, agonistic remembrance: Conflicting memories of Izmir’s Kültürpark and contested narratives in contemporary Turkey

“…The initial interest, accompanied by commodification of nostalgia and popularization of history, was mainly a reaction to the ‘administered forgetting’ of the Ottoman past by the Republican reformers who entertained a decidedly modernist, future-oriented and progressive vision. Nevertheless, as the growing interest for the past since the 1990s demonstrates, the systematic efforts to establish a unitary official narrative and ‘to foster forgetfulness’ failed to erase past memories altogether (Özyürek, 2007: 6; Üngör, 2014: 149). This public upsurge of memory has taken many forms: growing interest in genealogical roots; different kinds of national commemorative events and new museums; explosion of interest in memoirs, historical novels and films; and emergence of a greater attention to the multicultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire and, particularly among the conservative segments of Turkish society, its stress on Islam.…”

“…Today many scholars concur that this scholarly and historiographic agreement can be viewed as an extension of the official narrative of the Turkish Republic that has suppressed not only the multicultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire but also the legacy of past wrongs and conflicting memories (Göçek, 2007: 340, 350; Özyürek, 2007: 3; Ugur Cinar, 2015: 17; Üngör, 2014: 150–153). Özyürek (2007), in a pioneering collection of essays on Turkish memory debates she has edited, argues that the process that led to the formation of the Turkish Republic included unprecedented levels of mass violence in which unwanted communities were ‘massacred, deported, or encouraged to migrate in the name of establishing a homogenous national identity’ (p. 11).…”

A Struggle for Genocide Recognition: How the Aramean, Assyrian, and Chaldean Diasporas Link Past and Present

“…The lack of legal status as a recognized minority makes the feeling of oppression even worse than for Armenians. The de facto legitimacy the government enjoys through Turkey's membership in the UN, and the Erdogan government's combination of nationalism and Islamism (Melson 2013;Ümit Üngör 2014), only amplify the Christians' feelings of hopelessness.…”

“…During World War I these three inter-related communities experienced genocide at the hands of local Kurdish tribes and the Ottoman army in an ethno-religious conflict zone where Kurdish-Islamic locals had for some time manifested a murderous predisposition vis-à-vis Christian minorities (Melson 2013;Ümit Üngör 2014;Belçim Galip 2016). When the small number of Aramean, Assyrian, and Chaldean survivors eventually found the means to escape from Turkey during another wave of persecution in the 1970s they entered into a worldwide diaspora that included significant centers in Western Europe.…”

The Istanbul Armenians:

“…Historically the coexistence of diff erent narratives has not been tolerated, and regardless of the apparent democratization and liberalization policies since 2000 they are interpreted as developments that need to be suppressed, and opposed. Despite this, recent oral history projects have unearthed a hesitant emerging space for counter-memories and counter-narratives (Mills 2008;Üngör 2014Üngör ). Mills (2010 remarks, "Th e price of belonging in Turkey comes at a cost-the forgetting of particular histories at the expense of the frequent retelling of others and the silencing of particular memories that cannot entirely be repressed. "…”