Project Background

The Republic of Turkey emerged and evolved out of a series of traumatic events. The most important ones include crises in the Balkans and the Caucaus, the loss of major territories, forced migration, and the occupation of much of the provinces making up contemporary Turkey. These traumatic events, starting with the ethnic cleansing of the local Muslim population during the Greek uprising of the early 19th century, shaped oral literature, especially many widely popular songs, and provided the core theme for a number of bestselling books. Most importantly, these traumatic events constituted the collective memory of the founders of the modern Turkish Republic. One cannot fully understand the collective identity of the Turks by ignoring these formative events. The project will focus on such migration and trauma before and after World War I to understand the collective memory of the Turks.

By organizing a series of conferences and disseminating their proceedings through a number of avenues, the project hopes to open a new "conversation over these narratives" and understand their causes and consequences for the Turkish collective identity. Today, modern Turkish memory is fragmented and in a state of loss. Both Turkish domestic and foreign policies have been deeply shaped by this gragmented memory in the Balkans and the Caucasus. The recent genocidal campaign again the Bosnian Muslims, the occupation and forced deportation of Azeri Turks in the Caucasus, and the massacres of the Turkish minority in Cyprus reactivated these fragmented memories and images and released deep emotions recalling earlier defeats and persecution in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Thus, each event after the end of the Cold War has triggered the recollections of the past trauma and this, in turn, led to the polarization of the Turkish society. The project will examine the process of recovering the previously repressed memories of mass killings, ethnic cleansing, deportation, rape, and migration and its impact on the contemporary Turkish national identity.