Yedikule Museum
Since 1895, the Yedikule Fortress has been a massive, walk-through museum to its prior self called The Fortress of Seven Towers Museum. With features like "Torcher Chamber," "Bloody Well," and "The Treasure Tower," the museum makes a spectacle of what is actually a complicated and gruesome past. The decision to turn the fortress, which had since been used in many functional capacities, marks a break with its history and a move into self-conscious modernity. No longer a necessary entity for protection, schooling, or religion, colossal towers and walls joined the leagues of relics that provide the city a new kind of legitimacy resulting not from its the site's actual function, but from its stature as a historically rich site to behold, a tourist destination that attracts insiders and outsiders, and carries the prestige of a long, motley history rather than the power of a particular regime.
In recent years, an open-air theater has been installed in the fortress for productions to take place during events and festivals. It is possible, I believe, to interpret this as a move into the post-modern era, both an extension of the modern impulse toward preservation and retrospective analysis, and an added layer of community driven, shared experiences unique to the post-modern era. In a time when there is some degree of distrust toward conventional narrative histories and a fiendish obsession with "experience", the implementation of a theater within the bounds of the fortress seems to me (somewhat paradoxically as theatrical performances are largely narrative based) a move toward post-modernity. It is a move toward participation in the historical experience, rather than a view of it from the top down, or from present into history. In its ability to transform with the cultural practice of history consumption, the fort continues to represent the perspective of its time.