The Importance of Unremarkable Buildings

As is so often the case with places and buildings that are imbued with some sort of contemporary significance, the first glance towards the building or place suggest nothing of its importance (ie: A stupid, muddy field in Kosovo...)



Such is also the case with today's picture: The Madımak Oteli is an unremarkable, perhaps 2 or 3 star hotel, four stories of rooms, and is marked by a flat façade with some sort of burgundy/reddish trim. It is to be found just off the main road in Sivas, Central Turkey --- a somewhat medium-sized, not extremely important inland Turkish city, whose most famous export is a very large dog that can kill up to 5 wolves at once (so my fellow passengers on the bus reported --- and whose massive statue at the gates of one of Sivas' surrounding villages certainly lends credibility to such a claim). Sivas is also the home of some impressive old mosques of some antiquity --- but was the unremarkable hotel that drew me, conspirationally, to Sivas.



Why.... To be uselessly dramatic? Because on 2 July, 1993, the Madımak was burnt to the ground --- not as the result of an electrical failure, but because of its torching by an enraged, bloodthirsty, radicalized fundamentalist Muslim mob set loose by reactionary imams after Friday prayers... The cause (no, fundamentalists don't usually tend to burn down unremarkable, boring burgundy hotels in provincial centres) was a meeting held there by members of a Turkish minoritarian religious group, the Alevis.



Alevis are a liberal, Turkish-based branch of Shiite Islam, and their somewhat different religious practices often draw the ire of their more orthodox, fundamentalist Sunni coreligionists... On this day in July, however, events spiralled out of control because of the presence of one Aziz Nesin --- himself not an Alevi, but far more heinously, the Turkish translator of Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses.'



With the enraged crowd baying for blood, the hotel was set alight --- the police and firefighters looking on (either in approval or unwillingness or inability to aid those burning to death inside), 37 people died. Nesin, interestingly, was 'accidentally' rescued by firefighters --- they thought they were saving the police chief, and when they realized their 'mistake,' beat him severely while letting him live.



For years, Alevi groups have demanded that the hotel be turned into a peace museum, all to no avail --- many of the surrounding villages of Sivas are Alevi, while the centre remains steadfastly conservative and somewhat suspicious of Alevi projects (they smell too much of leftism).



Thus, those with an interest in modern Turkish history can approach only so far (and only for a very short time in December -- Sivas is not a place to hang around in at 7am --- it had to be about -6) to record such a building --- whose present façade reveals nothing about what happened before (cf. the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo...).