ABOUT
The notion of a singular official perspective has gained greater hold with the shrinkage of civil space in Turkey paralleling the rising global trend of “post-truth”. One of the methods employed by the government in Turkey today is rewriting official history from the hegemonic perspective of our day. We believe that it is the duty of civil society in Turkey to counter this trend by making insistent reminders of serious rights violations and our need for confrontation, and by advocating for pluralism on all levels. What A City that Remembers aims to do is bring up, precisely for this purpose, the histories of places we pass through every day without giving a single thought – histories bound up in rights violations, various struggles and political violence, and thus create an alternative memory of Istanbul.
A City that Remembers, is a project involving a book and website. The project we realized with the support of Heinrich Böll Stiftung Turkey Representation takes its inspiration from the Istanbul Memory Tour started by Asena Günal in 2015 as part of the Summer School of the Regional Network on Historical Dialogue and Dealing with the Past organized by the Memory Center. In this one-day tour participants took Istanbul’s most touristic route following the traces of its political history lying outside the bounds of official narratives.
The notion of a singular official perspective has gained greater hold with the shrinkage of civil space in Turkey paralleling the rising global trend of “post-truth”. One of the methods employed by the government in Turkey today is rewriting official history from the hegemonic perspective of our day. We believe that it is the duty of civil society in Turkey to counter this trend by making insistent reminders of serious rights violations and our need for confrontation, and by advocating for pluralism on all levels. What A City that Remembers aims to do is bring up, precisely for this purpose, the histories of places we pass through every day without giving a single thought – histories bound up in rights violations, various struggles and political violence, and thus create an alternative memory of Istanbul.
A City that Remembers, is a project involving a book and website. The project we realized with the support of Heinrich Böll Stiftung Turkey Representation takes its inspiration from the Istanbul Memory Tour started by Asena Günal in 2015 as part of the Summer School of the Regional Network on Historical Dialogue and Dealing with the Past organized by the Memory Center. In this one-day tour participants took Istanbul’s most touristic route following the traces of its political history lying outside the bounds of official narratives.