Nation-Building in Modern Turkey: The ‘People’s Houses’, the State and the Citizen

322 Pages·2015·1.606 MB·English

by  Alexandros Lamprou

Alexandros Lamprou teaches in the Faculty of Languages, History
and Geography, Ankara University. He has formerly taught at the
University of Crete and holds a PhD from the University of Leiden.
‘Alex Lamprou's study of the People’s Houses is important and
innovative in that it does not limit itself to the cultural policies of
the Turkish Republic as formulated in the centre, but rather looks
at the way the cultural and ideological clubs of Atatürk’s People’s
Party functioned in their local environment. Lamprou shows that
the People’s Houses were not simply instruments to spread the
message of party or state, and that control over them was often
contested between the representatives of the state, the party and
local elites. It is part of the new wave of Turkish historiography
that privileges local case studies to bring to life the realities of
Turkey in the first decades of the republic.’
– Erik J. Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, University of
Leiden and author of Turkey: A Modern History
‘Nation-Building in Modern Turkey is an original, well-researched
study that draws upon an array of previously unused primary
sources on the Kemalist reform movement, and presents new ways
of thinking about reform in the early years of the Turkish Republic.
By going against mainstream scholarship, Lamprou focuses on the
social dynamics that were created by social actors and how these
actors “consumed” the state’s reforms. This compact study is truly
a gem that deserves to be widely read.’
– Political Studies Review
‘Perhaps the most detailed study of the People’s Houses available
in English.’
– Hurriyet Daily News
NATION-BUILDING
IN MODERN TURKEY
THE ‘PEOPLE’S HOUSES’,
THE STATE AND THE CITIZEN
ALEXANDROS LAMPROU
New paperback edition published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
First published in hardback in 2015 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Alexandros Lamprou
The right of Alexandros Lamprou to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this
book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
ISBN: 978 1 78831 394 0
eISBN: 978 0 85773 731 1
ePDF: 978 1 78673 940 7
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Preface vii
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. The People’s House 19
2. People’s Houses in Provincial Urban Centres 59
3. People’s Houses and Local Politics 95
4. People’s Houses vs Coffee Houses 125
5. Women on the Halkevi Stage 153
6. People’s Houses in the Countryside 185
7. Conclusions 217
Notes 227
Bibliography 281
Index 301

Preface
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been the Prime Minister of Turkey since
2003. In his public contestation with the secularist opposition,
the popular Islamist politician has repeatedly spoken with
disapproving words about the single-party rule of the Republican
People’s Party (1924–46), condemning it on various occasions
for many antidemocratic and authoritarian policies, such as
for restricting the freedom of religion, for praising dictators
like Hitler, for turning mosques into stables, or for introducing
children to alcohol. Surely this constant condemnation of the
‘single-party mentality’ is a political tactic aimed at discrediting
the main opposition of the Republican People’s Party in the eyes of
a conservative electorate that detests its secularist credentials. But
it also expresses a genuine dissatisfaction with the authoritarian
and antidemocratic rule of the single-party era and of later
periods, something shared by many conservative Islamists but
also leftists and liberals since the period in Turkey.
This negative narration of the single-party period has gained
momentum with the rise of Islamist political parties and NGOs
in the last two decades. It has initiated animated public debates
about a part of the country’s past whose critical exploration was
until very recently considered almost taboo given that Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of the Republic,
was in charge during most of the said period. In this lively debate,
discourses that emphasize the state repression of the population
contrast with a highly positive narration of the period. In its most
obstinate variation, this narration would declare the period and
the reforms of Kemal Atatürk off-limits; more flexible variations
would argue that the authoritarian and antidemocratic ruling was
viii NATION-BUILDING IN MODERN TURKEY
temporarily necessary for the establishment of a ‘modern’ state in
the context of the population’s ‘backwardness’.
What is common in both narrations is their polarized view
of state elites and population that treats them solely as opposing
enemies. The people are portrayed either as country dupes to be
enlightened or as the oppressed and resisting people; the state
elites either as enlightened leadership or as degenerate oppressors.
Neither narration leaves room for any degree of communication
and negotiation between state and society. The period is
equally portrayed either as the dark age of Premier Erdoğan’s
lamentations or the most illustrious period in Turkish history, the
age of Atatürk. Neither could the reforming state elites be totally
characterized by monolithic radicalism, nor could the population
necessarily react uniformly against the reforms. Although both
were quite legitimate options, they were also verging on the very
extreme of practices of everyday life. They were rather highly
ideological options and, in that sense, we might suspect that they
were appealing to rather restricted social groups in the 1930s
and 1940s in Turkey. Clearly less ideological and essentialist
interpretations of the period are needed.
This book argues for a more moderate stance and offers an
alternative picture of the period, based on the study of the People’s
House, an institution whose aim was to propagate the reforms
to the population in the 1930s and 1940s. Without negating the
authoritarian and antidemocratic nature of the political regime,
I present a more nuanced account through the study of everyday
moments of cooperation and negotiation between state and
societal forces that occasionally resulted in the modification
of state policies by local societies and populations. The period
was until very recently studied with the help of rather restricted
sources, mainly official publications, newspapers and published
memoirs. The increasing availability of archival material since the
late 1990s assisted historians in producing more comprehensive
works on a period that is still widely considered a black hole in the
history of modern Turkey, especially in respect to social history.
I consider this book to be a part of a recent trend in Turkish
PREFACE ix
historiography that emphasizes social and cultural history and
alternative viewpoints in the study of state–society relations as it
favours perspectives ‘from below’ or ‘from the periphery’ rather
than the state centre.
This book started as a PhD thesis and since the beginning of
the research ten years ago a number of institutions and several
friends and colleagues have decisively contributed to its fruition.
A scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece
(IKY) provided the financial means to complete my doctoral
dissertation upon which this book is based. The bulk of the
research took place in the State Archives of the Turkish Republic
in Ankara. My deepest thanks go to the administration and
personnel for their assistance and professionalism. I would also
like to thank the personnel of the library of the Turkish Grand
National Assembly, the Turkish National library in Ankara, the
Beyazit and Atatürk libraries in Istanbul, as well as the libraries
of the Leiden University and the International Institute of Social
History in Amsterdam.
The writing of this book would have been impossible without
the support of many friends and colleagues in the Netherlands,
Turkey and Greece. I am deeply indebted to the supervisor of
my thesis, Professor Erik Jan Zürcher, for his support and
encouragement. I am grateful to professors Turaj Atabaki, Leon
Buskens, François Georgeon, Lex Heerma van Voss, Jan Schmidt
and Hans Theunissen for their commentary and suggestions. I
owe many thanks to my friends and colleagues from Leiden and
the Department of Turkish Studies: Özgür Gökmen, Umut Azak,
İsmail Hakkı Kadı, Nikos Christofis, Mehmet Emin Yıldırım,
Tryfon Bampilis, Guy Loth, Demet Varlı, Amber Gemmeke, Aris
Perperoglou and Yiorgos Portokalides. I also thank my friends
and colleagues at the History and Archaeology Department of
the University of Crete, especially Antonis Anastasopoulos, Elias
Kolovos and Marinos Sariyannis, for an unforgettable stay in
Crete in 2010–11.
I am grateful to Aydın Ayhan, Ekrem Balıbek, Mustafa Durak,
İbrahim Oluklu, Yakup Özkül, Zeki Özalay, Yakup Sahan and
x NATION-BUILDING IN MODERN TURKEY
Mehmet Sahin for their hospitality and assistance in Balıkesir.
Yiannis Bonos, Özgür Gökmen and Yiannis Moutsis read and
commented on draft chapters. Aydın Ayhan provided me with
rare newspaper clips from local newspapers of Balıkesir, and
Ahmet Yüksel of Sanat Kitabevi with the front picture from a rare
periodical of the period. I would like to thank my friends for their
continuous support for me and their contributions to this book:
Lazaros Kazias, Dimitris Kouklakis, Yiannis Leventis, Georgios
Loukas, Yianna Profiri, Onur Yıldırım, Oktay Özel, Damla
Demirözü, Ulus Baker, Süha Ünsal, Özhan Önder, Nikos Sigalas,
Evsen Yesert Akçay, Leo Moiras, Leo Karakatsanis, Sertaç Erten,
Faruk Tuncay, Tansu Açık, Koutsoukos Vasilis, Özge Çelikaslan,
Tolis Papaioannou and Bülent Varlık.
İrem has witnessed the making of this book from the very
beginning. I thank her for her patience and kind support and for
being there in Ankara, Crete, Edinburgh, Rotterdam, Leiden, and
Ankara again.