The Turkish House: An Effort of Memory

This dissertation traces the image of what is now called "the Turkish House" as it emerged from Ottoman obscurity into the consciousness of the new Turkish Republic, between the closing decades of the 19th century and the end of the 1930s. Using visual representations, the discourses of the politics of culture and the architectural profession (as well as its built forms,) and, most productively, the culturally thick descriptions in periodicals, novels and stories, I explore the interaction of meaning and memory in the Turkish urban imaginary, that is, in its visual repertoire as it is encoded with ideology, symbolism, desires, and dreams. Beginning with an image from Turkish Puppet-Theater, which I argue was a comfortable representation of "time immemorial," I move to the late 19th century, when the old house engaged with the future as an image of the present in need of modernization. But the political polemics of the emerging Turkish Republic re-coded this image as "the venerable past" and gave it the name "Turkish," solidifying its position as a defining image in the memorial heritage of the new nation. By examining the novels of the late Ottoman and early Republican period, I am able to discuss the emotional charge of this "Turkish House," showing how it was invested with a matrix of interiority, spirituality, and historical consciousness. I then position this memory-image of the house within the developing architectural landscape of modernism. I close by bringing the reader into the later part of the 20th century, presenting representations that struggled to remember and ached to preserve meaning for the Turkish House, images that delayed its slip into nostalgia, before it was redefined as a tourist destination, a scenographic gated community, and a coffee table book.