2015

Crime scene investigation of attack

Unrest in contemporary Turkey -- rioting in June 2013

Unrest in contemporary Turkey -- rioting in June 2013

The flaring political, social, and cultural tensions in Turkey in the contemporary moment have cast Istanbul’s lieux de memoires, like the Dolmabahce Palace, in a new light. For several years now, tension has boiled between Islamists and Turkish nationalists – a rift that has challenged Turkey’s existence since the state’s founding. This tension grabbed the international spotlight on July 15, 2016, when a group of dissidents from the Turkish Armed Forces attempted a coup over the Turkish state.[1]

About a year prior to the infamous coup attempt, these same tensions flared at the Dolmabahce Palace. On August 19, members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front threw a grenade at the Palace’s guard post and opened fire. It was the first assault on a major tourist site in Istanbul “amid an escalation in violence between Turkish forces and Kurdish, Islamic, and leftist militants.”[2]

Insofar as the terrorist attack is a sort of text, with intentional symbolic gestures selected for greatest affect, it’s interesting to consider this attack’s injection of meaning into the history of the Palace as a lieux de memoire. We have considered the site’s various symbolic significance, from intentional display of Ottoman power, to Turkish nationalist reclamation, to its eventual sublimation into museum space. We might consider that a terrorist attack on Dolmabahce is intended to recall these histories and necessarily relates them to the present political tensions in Turkey, many of which find their roots in the very memories that the Palace represents. That is, attacking a lieux de memoire like the Dolmabahce Palace recalls brings its memory signifiers and relates them to the contemporary life. While it seems incorrect to suggest that such an attack has “intentional commemorative value” it certainly has a sort of deranged authorial intention that adds a new layer to the Palace’s meaning.