Istanbul: Dolmabahce Palace

Crime scene following the 2015 Dolmabahce Palace attacks

In the Istanbul unit, I covered the Dolmabahce Palace, discussing how the Palace had evolved as a lieu de memoire over time. The Dolmabahce Palace was constructed in the mid-19^th century at the behest of an Ottoman Sultan. It was a manorial extravagance, intended to demonstrate the power of the Ottoman Empire. As the Turkish nationalists gained power in the early 20^th century, and especially after their leader, Ataturk, died in the Dolmabahce Palace, it evolved to represent the decline of a once powerful regime and the transition to a new national spirit. Today, its doors have been opened to the people and the site functions as a museum – the form that exemplifies the “historical” instinct – preserving and exhibiting the Turkish state’s official historicization of its past.[1]

On August 19, 2015 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] We can read the attack as what Nora calls the “flare-ups of memory” in the face of history’s continued effort mandate our relationship with the past (p. 13). In a period in which the Palace’s relationship with past meaning has become increasingly historical, there occurred a flare-up of memory in its face. The terrorists, insofar as they can be considered rhetorical agents, necessarily advocate for memorial significance that is not intellectualized and disengaged with authority. Nora’s argument that memory flare-ups constitute a “fear of a rapid and final disappearance combine[d] with anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future” should apply to such action (p. 13). The attacks represent fear over the annulation of Kurdish and Islamic memory under the historicizing regime of a secular, nationalist government. Such a flare-up recontextualizes the site for a moment, adding new memorial data to its inherent epistemological conflict.