Confessions of monuments : Commemorating and representing the Turkish nation-state in the early twentieth century

This book examines the role of artefacts and design practice in representing and commemorating a new political community of Turks within the cultural transformation from empire to nation-state between 1908-50s. It offers an expanded understanding of nation-building within global, public as well as top-down official agencies. -- .

Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, an emerging nation state built a particular relationship with the Ottoman past. In its simultaneous disavowal and inheritance of it, this was the new Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. Nation-states are areas of ideological contestation. However, they are equally visible and tangible. This is thanks to the making of a new world of artefacts in build or print that represent and commemorate them in many, often contradicting ways through design practices. This book offers a thorough account of this new Turkish material world through the trajectories of commemoration; from public monuments, print media, and festive illumination to temporary and permanent architecture from the onset of the 1908 Young Turk revolution to the demise of Turkey’s founding single-party regime in the late 1950s. If objects are silent actors of history, their confessions await. -- .