Against the backdrop of building a new country, this study explores and
evaluates the documentation culture in early republican Turkey. Having
fought the Turkish War of Independence (1919-22) against the Allied
Powers, the revolutionaries led by legendary leader Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk (1881-1938) came to engage with the idea of the West and its
cultural origin. With the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in
1923, the constitution abolished the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire
including the dynastic cultural, economic, educational, and governmental
institutions. In the redemption of the nation within the modern history
of civilizations, cultural Westernization and technical modernization
became the model for the newly found nation-state. While the new country
became the subject of reformation, historic architecture was called upon
to grant the aura of a glorious past to the Turks. Through the
materialization of 'Türk Tarih Tezi' (the Turkish History Thesis), the
founding leaders focused on the origin of Turks and the everlasting
spirit of the Turkish state. In this pursuit, architectural heritage
signified the formative power to represent the past. Supported by
state-agencies, scholars, with supreme patriotic zeal and diligence,
travelled across the remotest corners of the country to document and
study the historic architecture of the nation.
To date, the complicated question of a national identity embodied in the
built environment has dominated the contemporary scholarship on early
republican historiography. Akboy-İlk's study, however, distinguishes
itself with its focus on architectural documentation, which became an
agent of history-writing in the early years of the nation state. Curated
by the ideologies of the state, the formal documentation findings
extensively informed the republican plot of the modern progress of
Turks. For scholars interested in a closer reading of the crossing
boundaries between architectural heritage and nation-building in the
case of the modernization of Turkey, this book is revealing and
provocative in bringing forward architectural documentation, a
remarkably overlooked subject in studies of the area.
