Malls and Mezars in Ankara

In behaviour more befitting the qualities of a stubborn individual rather than anything else, I had contrived for more than four years to avoid visiting Ankara; it was not as if I had reserved special hatred for the Turkish Republic's semi-purpose built capital, but more of a case of wanting to visit something more interesting than a sprawling, brown, treeless, and waterless town known more its drab ministry buildings than its culture, food, or antique architecture.

Regrettably, having finally planted my footsteps in the sprawling, brown, treeless, and waterless town of Ankara, I must corroborate the reviews of most Turks in confirming that it is a town known more for its drab ministry buildings than anything else. Perhaps compounding the misery, however, is the fact that the local council (still led, inexplicably, by the incumbent Melih Gökçek after 12 years of fiasco) has decided that the best way to 'create an even better Ankara' (as the billboard at the city's Otogar reminds the weary traveller (at least it was something to that effect)) is to go on a mall-building spree: The boom is inescapable; doubtlessly a crow cannot relieve itself without soiling the glass façade of one of Ankara's 'shopping and life centres'. Who, exactly, in a country where income differentiation between the richest and the poorest classes is growing daily is supposed to frequent these new gleaming shopping centres is a mystery to both the Ankaralı and the traveller alike.

Away from the ministries and malls, however, the fact remains that no student of republican Turkish history can come to the country without an obligatory visit to the capital. Angora was just a dusty village when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the hero of the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı), chose the town as the setting for the new republican capital, both because of its geostrategic location (far from the marauding Allied forces who were busily divying up the country's soil) and because it was the antithesis to the supposedly imperial and decadent İstanbul. It is thus befitting then, that the man more or less responsible for saving Anatolia from a fate as bad as the modern Arab Middle East (even if contemporary hindsight might judge him less favourably on account of a failure to address the issue of minority rights -- a challenge that the somewhat crystallized doctrine of Kemalism is only slowly coming to grips with) should be honoured with a mausoleum reminiscent of the royalty of the past. Built in a neo-classical style, the mausoleum and its whitewashed square provide a symbolic (and very material) reminder of the early Turkish Republic's ideals of secularism and a Turkish homeland free from the interference of the colonial powers. Such material symbolism remains all the more poignant when compared to the nearby Kocatepe Mosque, one of the largest mosques constructed within the country since the founding of the Republic in 1923, and arguably a symbol of the (re-)assertion of the country's Islamic heritage.



















But before this turns into an overly dramatic pulsetaking of the modern Turkish battle between secularism and religion, I will leave the story in a far more humble graveyard (though far more massive than anything else in the country). On the city's northern outskirts is Karşıyaka Mezarlığı (Karşıyaka Cemetary), the final resting of tens of thousands of Turkish citizens, some illustrious, but most common. It is here, however, at Gate 2, section 17, that one finds the resting place of Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan, and Yusuf Aslan, heroes to millions of Turks, but sadly hung by the state on 6 May, 1972 during one of the state's frequent attacks on the radical Left. Denied larger graves supposedly for fear that their graves would become a rallying point for disaffected sections of society, the graves are places of quiet pilgrimage in which to remember the vision Deniz Gezmiş and co. hoped to bring to the country. When they were killed, they were accused of seeking to sell Turkey out to Soviet Communism; Gezmiş, however, always maintained that the goal was only to fulfil the dream of total independence envisioned by Atatürk. Whatever the case, their premature departure means that it must remain a matter of conjecture.

Whether the grave is grand or small, it remains clear that modern Turkish history inevitably revolves around Ankara, despite its sprawl, brownness, treelessness, and waterlessness.