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The Modern Myth of Turkey with Arie Akkermans - Modern Myth - Episode 6
656 Plays4 years ago
Archaeology is not just about buried treasure, post-excavation analysis or even what issues exist in modern academia. Sometimes in order for us to understand where we are, we must walk in someone else’s shoes or hear from their perspective. This month’s Modern Myth Episode, I speak with Arie Akkermans, art critic, lecturer and expert in classical Greek history. Arie lives in Turkey, on the Princes Islands and gives us an ear to the ground with respect to the modern and present conflicts in the middle east as well as the way in which history plays a role in justifying aggression as well as its effect on the culture of Istanbul.
Nationalism is not confined to any one country and Arie speaks frankly on the ways in which Turkey has developed a layer of history that separates out what is focused on and what is discarded in the minds of the general public. Its not all serious though, we do have a wonderful interjection by Arie’ two cats, and he explains what it is like to be a cat in Istanbull.
Arie writes for Hyperallergic and The Mantle, please see links for more of his work
He is on Twitter @byzantinologue
Host Tristan is @Anarchaeologist
Follow the Network on @ArchPodNet
5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE PODCAST NETWORK – DEC 2019 – Stay Tuned for extra content!
Music – Danny Boyle (Modern Rome, Adam Grant & Open Doors)
Links
- Links
- Affiliate - Timeular
Contact
- Tristan
- [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. I call upon my ancestors to judge me and my clan.
00:00:29
Speaker
In this age of light
Challenging Misconceptions through Lyrics
00:00:42
Speaker
We will rise! Now it's clear Misconception to hell, dear They told you what you wanna hear Why can't you say that the truth will set you free? Expose this modern myth with me! A myth!
Background in Classics and Cultural Studies
00:01:40
Speaker
I studied classics and philosophy once in a time, more than a decade ago, and in between I spent a lot of time working in the art world.
00:01:51
Speaker
As a music curator, as an art dealer, as a writer mostly. In the past few years, I've been also an instructor at university teaching something along the lines of cultural studies and sort of a cultural history.
00:02:10
Speaker
And let's try to go over with grad students or some really general topics of humanities that are not necessarily well-covered in university here.
Teaching Humanities in Turkey
00:02:23
Speaker
Looking at the foundations of archaeology, foundations of anthropology, and to try to decipher how they can help us or how these disciplines can give us tools to understand this really half-broken presence.
00:02:40
Speaker
that we are going through in this country. And so I want to kind of go over then, what's it like to be teaching that in the place that you are teaching? What sort of things do people talk about when it comes to history? What's the general knowledge?
Turkey's Relationship with Modernity and Western Influences
00:02:59
Speaker
I think always, I mean, I have to start with saying that every time that we discuss contemporary art in Turkey, which is a topic that I've been involved with for a very long time, and I mean, which is at the heart of interest of the students, we always talk about this problem with history in the sense that Turkey has this sort of really difficult relationship to modernism and to modernity in general.
00:03:25
Speaker
the national, I mean, I guess this would be the direct and the national idea of modernity has been very much ill-defined by Western imperialism, by colonialism, the end of the Ottoman Empire, genocide, and many other things that happened in this country. And so when we talk about history in Turkey, we are discussing something which is not really there. And history is this really ambiguous term
00:03:52
Speaker
that, I mean, if you go by the way, it's used in Turkish language, again, but by history, we just mean historiography. But history in this sort of political, philosophical concept that Europeans, or that modern Europeans somehow understand, it's a bit too abstract for Turkey. At the level of teaching, I suppose,
00:04:20
Speaker
There is a level of privilege in both, meaning it's an English-speaking university where students, I mean, it's also a public school. Students tend to come from, I would say, upper-middle class and above, which also changes the conversation very much.
00:04:40
Speaker
Also, there is the, depending who you are in this country and where you're coming from or what's the background of your family, so the notion of history, I guess, tends to be very different.
Nationalist Archaeology and Historical Perspectives
00:04:50
Speaker
But in general, if you go by what the education system understands as history, it understands history as a foundation, meaning anything that precedes the creation of the Turkish Republic is some sort of prehistory.
00:05:07
Speaker
that doesn't necessarily have a significant weight. It doesn't hold enough power to, you know, to be a serious subject of study. The study of history, I'm saying the study of pre-modern history is actually a very new field in this country. I'm very new, I'm saying like 20 or 30 years before that.
00:05:34
Speaker
if you would see maybe Anka or Istanbul universities had some sort of approach to the classics and to archaeology which was based on the one hand on the study of language which is necessarily a critical historical discourse. On the other hand in archaeology there is a
00:05:59
Speaker
crucial component in the educational aspect of archaeology, that is what we call in Turkey, the Turkish history thesis, which is a proposal made in a grand area of nationalism at the beginning of the Turkish Republic, where some scholars, or I don't know if we can call them scholars, some student scholars set out to prove a theory that the Turks are directly descended from Sumerians,
00:06:27
Speaker
And that therefore, any population that has lived in Anatolia since the second millennium BC is actually an offspring of Turks. And there is an entire nationalist program under this national archaeology, which was taught at the universities for years and years. And we are still in a period in which we haven't completely shed off this false history.
Ethno-nationalist Discourse and Regional Policies
00:06:54
Speaker
So I guess history in Turkey also means
00:06:57
Speaker
to rectify what we mean when we say history. Obviously there's a kind of situation going on at the moment that's quite dangerous and I'm just wondering actually just broadly what kind of like information with regards to history is being used by for example you know political parties and that.
00:07:20
Speaker
I mean, I guess this is something that is very closely related to what I just said now about the idea and concept of history in Turkey. I think there is a few things. One is, right now, as the country descends into this ethno-nationalist euphoria, there is the return of the discourse about the greater Turkey, which means
00:07:46
Speaker
The idea that the Turkish army will go into Syria, into Iraq, and return the map of the Ottoman Empire, including the trace in Eastern Greece and some of the Greek islands. This is a discourse that had been dormant for a very long time. I think that now it's back in the cards. It's something that you can, it's in the newspapers, it's on Twitter, something that people are talking about.
00:08:15
Speaker
Maybe not something which is necessarily a real possibility. It's not like the Turkish army is going to go and conquer those places. I mean, we don't know. But at least it's logistically very difficult. It doesn't necessarily have the level of political support that would be necessary for this. But what I'm saying is the discourse is back on the cards.
00:08:40
Speaker
Then there is another aspect of something that has been central to the Turkish intervention in the Syrian civil war, that is the protection of Turkish minorities in the Arab world, in both Syria and Iraq. This is a bit of a very doable story. You're talking about these very small communities of Turkmen that have been separated
00:09:06
Speaker
geographically from the mainland of Turkey for a very long time. Therefore, the language is no longer intelligible to Turks. And I'm saying this is just a very small group of people. And ultimately, there is an even grander narrative about how
00:09:27
Speaker
Turkey, as one of the largest, let's say, geopolitical powers in the region, has the right, I would say, obligation to put the house in order. Nevertheless, it is also, the country has historically, and by historically, I mean for the last few decades, has pushed a very aggressive Islamist program. Therefore,
00:09:55
Speaker
many of the events, which I'm not going to recount now, but a lot of the elements in the Syrian conflict that have taken place in this region are partly Turkey's fault. So basically, in the same way that Americans will do it in many places, they are creating a problem, which then they say that they're going to correct in order to create another problem.
00:10:19
Speaker
The big narrative about the current situation in Turkey is that they are saying that they're going to clear this area. By clearing, I guess we mean something close to genocide or forced removal of population in this area. And then the idea that they're going to transfer 3 million Syrian refugees to live there.
00:10:45
Speaker
Of course, under the assumption that somehow these people, these 3 million people willingly are going to get on the bus and go to live in those areas.
Political and Military Strategies in Turkey
00:10:54
Speaker
Also, underlying the fact that in order to clear these areas, and I'm saying in big quotation marks, it means clearing out the Kurdish population and fill the area with Muslim Sunnis, which steals the political and demographic balance of the region in Turkey's favor.
00:11:14
Speaker
And obviously it's such a shocking kind of series of things to be happening. And we definitely, I definitely have like, I'm absolutely shocked at what's going on,
Personal Journey and Historical Interest in Turkey
00:11:24
Speaker
but I want to draw kind of more on your background. How did you kind of get into the position that you did? What did you kind of study and what kind of things, and how did you get to living on the Prince's Island? Well,
00:11:45
Speaker
When I came to Turkey in 2012, which was almost accidental, I wasn't really meaning to be here, I was actually working in Bahrain.
00:11:57
Speaker
I was kind of very involved in the art world. I was working at an art gallery with a relative closeness to the Ministry of Culture. And then for some personal circumstances, they had to leave the country. I would say like, okay, where am I going to go? Turkey seemed a place which was relatively close on the borders of Europe.
00:12:25
Speaker
Somehow very livable at the time. This was in 2012, mainly before the protests that dropped in the country in 2013. The Turkish lira was still extremely high. To the dollar, there was a currency exchange with something like 1.6 liras to the dollar, which is now six almost.
00:12:52
Speaker
in a period of just less than seven years, so you also have to imagine how the county has changed. At the time, there was a big contemporary art hype for Istanbul, and some of the first art institutions were just created at the time.
00:13:09
Speaker
uh there are lots of foreigners who live in turkey and it was kind of a really rare thing an exciting place to be in um i mean life has changed a lot since then and still we're still kind of i mean at the in the center of of of this universe of turkey which has this gateways to so many other places and to different regions so the similar one from another um well i
00:13:40
Speaker
When I started working with contemporary art, which is something that happened as a byproduct of being a journalist, briefly for an Egyptian newspaper, I never thought that my background in classics would become useful again, or I don't know if the word is useful, if it's something that I would want to dig into again.
Rich History of the Prince's Islands
00:14:03
Speaker
But living in Turkey, or living in Istanbul, it exposed me to the very complex history of the Asia Minor and the histories of the Greek and Jewish and Armenian minorities of this country.
00:14:18
Speaker
I mean, tragic in many ways. On the background of this era of the Armenian genocide and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of this republic, which was built
00:14:35
Speaker
I mean, on an extremely racist notion of citizenship and also accounts that was built on wealth, which was taken from the creation of the Asian minor and given to Turks, who had been historically another class on their Ottoman rule.
00:14:58
Speaker
the literacy rate among Turks at the beginning of the Republic was something like, I mean, less than 20%. And then the previous islands came into the picture because of an artist, of a Greek Armenian artist from Istanbul. I heard a book that she had about whom I, I will, I mean, I will have to go back to her a bit later.
00:15:26
Speaker
She introduced me to this microcosmos of the previous islands, which, like I said, is a district of minorities. With lower history, it was one of these islands, which is the island where I live, Halki, called Hebeliada in Turkish. It's mentioned by Plato.
00:15:48
Speaker
and by Herodotus, as a place where there were some copper mines. And, uh, when, uh, Misanzo Megara, which was a Megaran, uh, officer, was on his way to Ligos, which is, um, a place somewhere in Istanbul to, to, to found the city that at the time would be called Byzantium, the, the, the European ancestor to Byzantium. Um, he, he also reportedly saw these islands and,
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, these people stopped there for a while. During the Byzantine era, they served as a place of exile for the citizens of the royal family.
00:16:33
Speaker
who were thrown on the islands as a part of all these plots and intrigues and coups that play a basic and political life. And because of this isolation of the islands and the relative proximity to the city, they also became a place of monastic foundations. Many monasteries were found on the islands in late 10th century.
00:17:01
Speaker
Furthermore, after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the islands changed in character. They were slightly abandoned for a while. The Ottomans also used them as prisons. Actually, even the Turkish Republic used one of the islands as a prison at some point. One of the former presidents was even executed there.
00:17:30
Speaker
Nevertheless, during the ultimate era, this place became important again because it was a focal point for the survival of Christianity in the Middle East.
00:17:42
Speaker
There was a lot of diplomacy between the Princess Islands and Russia, and my Grace, to a certain extent, who was in the Ottoman room, and Italy, and other European-Christian countries. And so I'm saying, these are a place that have a very long and distinguished history, which has never been really properly style. I mean,
Diplomatic Tensions: Halki Seminary
00:18:04
Speaker
there has never really been an archaeological dig of the islands.
00:18:09
Speaker
the Turkish Republic has never has never permitted. There are a few things that you can find at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, some on forests or something that I mean things which are really easy to find and the paranoia of the Turkish state regarding history on the islands goes to such degree that even today there was an article in the newspaper about a diver
00:18:35
Speaker
In the 18th, I think, perhaps early 19th, who was on trial for five years for bringing out of the sea a group of eight amphoras, which were rumored to be 1,500 years old. I think it was 300 years really, that's the mechanism.
00:18:54
Speaker
And so there is, I mean, there is the stratigraphy of the islands, I suppose it's very long and complicated. Also, I mean, also in geological terms. All of this remains a bit obscure. As I said, there have never been proper excavation of the islands.
00:19:13
Speaker
And there is, on the island that I live, there is a monastery, or we will say it's a theological seminary, the Theological School of Halki. It was one of the most important theological similarities of Orthodoxy. It was closed by Turkey in 1971. At the time, when they nationalized all the foreign schools in Turkey,
00:19:40
Speaker
With time, all of the schools, including the French schools, German schools, Italian schools, they received their status back with a new kind of semi-private arrangement with the Ministry of Education. This was not the case with Halki. The monastery has been closed since then. The place is historically very significant. Metrophen is the third, founded a library there in the 15th century.
00:20:09
Speaker
uh bringing some books a group of like 300 books manuscripts they are now and they are the patricket of conceptinople in Istanbul uh created one of the first
00:20:20
Speaker
Greek libraries in the Ottoman Empire, which is still a very, I mean, it's a very, very important place for classical philology, but like for Byzantine philology, for medieval studies. The school is still closed, and it is at the center of a very long diplomatic rift between Turkey and Greece.
00:20:43
Speaker
uh with uh turkey promising for many years that they will reopen the school and give it to political pressure there is a lot of uh every couple of years uh there has been a letter from Washington to from Washington DC to turkey about the reopening the school so i'm saying this place is this place and this group of islands they lie on a very
00:21:10
Speaker
on a very turbulent, let's say, tectonic line, tectonic form, also political and cultural. This has been, as it has been the case with Istanbul, it also has been a piece of earthquakes.
00:21:26
Speaker
In fact, one of the islands was sunken in the 10th century, I believe.
Common Misconceptions about Turkey
00:21:33
Speaker
And this sunken island was found recently, or recently, as is maybe three or four years ago, by some divers off the coast of Maltepe, which is very close here on the on the Anatolian side of Istanbul. And I also feel that that
00:21:49
Speaker
The islands represent this sort of complexity which has been lost to a great degree in Turkey's current nationalism and Islamist programme. I find that really interesting because that's quite a contrast with what people might understand about Turkey. Obviously you do a lot of travelling and I'm just kind of wondering
00:22:17
Speaker
What are the main things that people get wrong about Turkey? Wow, I think I mean, the answer to this is very, very long. But I would say if I would if I want to summarize these things, I guess, I mean, I guess that people will get wrong about Turkey, almost everything. I'm saying this because Turkey anyway, I mean, Turks are very unique.
00:22:45
Speaker
group of people in the sense of it's not Europe in the sense that Greeks are white Europeans to some degree. But it's also not the Arab world. It's not the Islamic world in a classic sense. The Ottoman Empire had a very, I would say, reform version of Islam that may have seen heretical at the time to many Muslim leaders in the Islamic parts of the Middle East.
00:23:15
Speaker
The history of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is still something which is very poorly understood, even by Turkish historians and even by Turkish intellectuals. I mean, there are so many questions that remain unanswered. But in general, I would say people underestimate how bad things are in Turkey. And they also underestimate how good they can be. And what I'm trying to say is when people talk about
00:23:45
Speaker
racism people talk about. I mean, supremacy, which is not necessarily why there is a kind of talk supremacy in this country. There is a very, like I said before, there is a very racist concept of citizenship. The violations of human rights that are in everyday life in this country, the violations of press freedom, the treatment of journalists, the treatment of Kurdish people, the status of minorities,
Modernity and Human Rights in Turkey
00:24:14
Speaker
It is so much worse than people can imagine. It's just that the country, it's still a functional country. I mean, there is a great tradition of esthetism in this place. The armies are strong, police are strong, the ministries are gigantic. And so when you see a country so functional, in the sense of like, this is not Iraq or Syria, meaning there is a parliament, there is elections,
00:24:41
Speaker
There is an education system, there is universal health care, there is doses of metro lines in Istanbul, the national bus system works very well, there is ferries, there is top schools, there are 50 billion dollars in the country, there is still a lot of money in the country. So when you look at this from outside, it seems like it's such a functional place.
00:25:06
Speaker
And then you get a little bit confused because you say, how can the country be so functional and at the same time violate human rights of all its minorities and majorities as well for that matter, press freedom. So people tend to underestimate the situation of human rights in the country. And I'm saying it's much worse what it looks like. On the other hand, because the inner orientalism with which people are looking at the Middle East, they were saying,
00:25:37
Speaker
I mean, Turkey is a modern state. And I'm saying modern in the sense of a few weeks ago, so much said to me that I mean, someone tried to
00:25:50
Speaker
to make this argument with me about progress in societies, certain societies that grow and progress in a very teleological European way. And I think that modernity functions as an isotropic space, meaning it is the same time
00:26:09
Speaker
everywhere in modernity. So it's 2019 in Turkey and it's 2019 in America and it's 2019 in Colombia and it's also 2019 in the Sentinel Islands. It's just like, I mean, what this means in practice is different, every place is different, but we are all living in the same time zone of modernity.
Comparing Political Systems: Turkey vs. the West
00:26:32
Speaker
So this is not some sort of a backward tribal stake, actually even the way in which traditional societies inside of Turkey are talking about like Alevis and Kurds are structured. I mean, this is really a very
00:26:51
Speaker
modern country and sometimes people are reluctant to use the word modern in relation to Turkey because we have been
00:27:18
Speaker
I would like to balance that out with saying that also I don't think modern countries like America and UK are progressive either.
00:27:36
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's not a progressive country, but what I'm saying is Agnes Heller, who was a wonderful guy, a philosopher, who happened to be my teacher many years ago, always used to say these things. I mean, of course it was a different time and age. And we're saying that America is a country where the institutions of government tended to be somehow more liberal than the citizens.
00:28:04
Speaker
And then you can see that the way that rights are articulated in the United States are slightly different than here, for the simple reason that if you look at the situation with Trump, though there have been some massive changes in the way that Americans experience certain things. To change the American Constitution is an extremely difficult process.
00:28:34
Speaker
are ridiculously, like the American Constitution is a bit of a false something which is very difficult to change. It takes many years to do the smallest changes, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because of the continuity of institutions and it is a bad thing simply because
00:28:53
Speaker
It takes just too much time to tackle inequalities of economic and legal status. Turkey, on the other hand, if you are the ruler, you are the ruler, you can change the constitution, you can change the electoral law, you can change the political system. We are seeing it. Since Erdogan is in power, I think the political system of Turkey has changed three times.
00:29:22
Speaker
the constitution changes like every couple of months there is something new and so at the same time that it is a modern state it doesn't necessarily have a 100% modern bureaucracy so sometimes you would think oh it's a dictatorship but
00:29:43
Speaker
If you go by political theory of what a dictatorship means and how laws work in a dictatorship, things here are a little bit random.
00:29:57
Speaker
Like abuses are not necessarily as systematic as you think they would be. And I think that this is some of the greatest strengths, I'm saying this in a bad way, like one of the greatest strengths of our current economic system is this liquidity, this fluidity.
00:30:15
Speaker
in which nothing is necessarily grounded at any point, everything is a bit in the air, everything is a bit formless. The benefits of the Western structures of power and law, of course, are collapsing as we speak and we are seeing that we can see it. I mean, we could talk about this for days. But here, the structure has never been
00:30:39
Speaker
to begin with so it's kind of everything is possible to a degree and you can mean a situation that of things that happen I mean not not too long ago I'm saying things that happened like 10 years ago or so when a Kurdish politician or political activist would say was jailed for
00:31:01
Speaker
whatever and propaganda against the state, the terror against the state, all the usual charges in these cases and so he was acquitted from all charges and he was released and the next day he was re-arrested and sentenced to death.
00:31:17
Speaker
So this is the kind of things that are possible in the Turkish state because the structure is so formless. And the fact that the structure is so formless, it means many things. It means that it's a place where everything is possible. And you can go tomorrow and open a business without permits. And if it works, you get the permits.
Social Media and Censorship in Turkey
00:31:35
Speaker
And you can make ridiculous money in this country with nothing. Miracles can happen. But on the other hand,
00:31:44
Speaker
It's also, these places where everything can happen, it also eat animals. When we say everything, we meant really everything. And so sometimes you can end up in jail for a couple of years over a tweet. Oh, that's pretty bad. So I know you're quite active on Twitter. I am. Have you ever gotten into trouble?
00:32:10
Speaker
I haven't necessarily gotten into trouble. Okay, there is a few reasons for that. First one is I do it almost exclusively in English. I know the language, I read Turkish. Sometimes I respond to something in Turkish, but I don't necessarily
00:32:33
Speaker
to it systematically Turkish. Also, I sort of, as I, you know, I have lived in, I live in Lebanon, I live in the Emirates, Bahrain. So somehow I understand this fine line of censorship of how far you can go. And I can, I play with these borders all the time. I know that there are things that one really should not say. Let's say like some things should be said
00:33:03
Speaker
Uh, like you shouldn't attack the person by name. You know, you should not say, um, mister such and such, but because of the president or, or the ruler.
00:33:14
Speaker
and things like that. On the other hand, I have been told by a lot of my Turkish friends how I should be more careful. I mean, I try to be, but I can help myself. That's the problem. The fact that I'm a foreigner, it also gives me, I mean, a bit safe sometimes, safe because it will be
00:33:39
Speaker
more difficult to really travel over this as a foreigner, but not safe in the sense of there is a massive amount of surveillance in this country. And if you said somebody and if you say something on Twitter that somebody like they will find in 15 minutes.
00:33:57
Speaker
Oh my God, I can't believe that. You know, they will take you out of your eyes. I mean, the amount of surveillance to phones, to cameras, CCTV cameras, it's unbelievable. I mean, these people know what you're going to have for lunch tomorrow. That's crazy. So we are in the very heavy surveillance. On the other hand,
00:34:20
Speaker
I also felt, as I said very recently to friends, that this, and I'm saying like, as someone who signed Hannah Arendt for a good number of years, and I'm thinking of this sort of Iranian reading of politics and democracy, probably this ability to speak and to speak together is maybe the last freedom that we have left.
Memes as Political Expression
00:34:48
Speaker
in a truly political sense, and then we should use it, you know, up to the last moment that we're able to do so. Yes, I can see how that's important. I know that that's all quite difficult to deal with. That's quite heavy. But I really, really wanted to ask you, kind of from your art background,
00:35:12
Speaker
What do you think about memes? Well, I think that memes are an extremely important medium, I would say. It's something that I use almost every day in casual conversations with friends.
00:35:33
Speaker
I think that whatever we mean by art today, you know, the definition is really, really broad. I guess that we don't necessarily know or we cannot really say what's art. Maybe we can say what's not art.
00:35:48
Speaker
but we don't really have a centralised definition of the thing as we had in the 60s or 70s. I think that especially in a place like Turkey or not just in Turkey, like you can see that it's also in Lebanon, in Syria, in the Arabian Gulf, in Greece, it's also a thing. It has developed a kind of a new language
00:36:18
Speaker
which is often, I mean, it tends to be very political side of times. One of the things that makes me or that made me very interested in memes, at least in the context that I know, which is, for example, Turkey and Lebanon, it is that they are somehow politically neutral in the sense of memes are extremely popular on the left, but they are also extremely popular on the far right.
00:36:46
Speaker
And usually one is a commentary on the other. I mean, there is a sort of loop. I think that as it happens still with photography and with film, which are things that even though they are ubiquitous, they are everywhere around us.
00:37:10
Speaker
And we consider them part of our everyday life as a species. We have not lived with them for so long. So we still cannot predict how internalized in our conscience they're going to become in the way that, for example, painting is part of our human consciousness about things, about how we experience ourselves and the idea of culture.
00:37:39
Speaker
I think that memes have also predefined this course of the 70s about low culture and higher culture, which is, I mean, this boundaries of releases. I mean, and it exists in a world in which memes are not alone. Memes have a counterparty music in video games. This will cause it to popular culture.
00:38:00
Speaker
And this popular culture, I guess, I mean, we also need a better world in popular culture because to the same degree that classicists who are some of the most, I would say, elitist professions in the academic world, you know, classicists play a lot of video games and use a lot of memes.
00:38:22
Speaker
So, I don't know if what we're talking about is a popular culture, but I would say that they are somehow redefining our political communication, if not in the other way. I mean, there is also the pointless ones, kind of, that, I don't know, that you said to your friends in the morning, but they are shifting the balance of how we say things.
00:38:49
Speaker
And there is artists that think about people like Ryan Tricarti, who is an American video artist. Once upon a time, a brother experiment, and now a very famous artist who shows in very famous galleries and biennials, who has adopted a lot of the meme aesthetics to make some of his films and some of his animated videos. So I think that this medium, this format, is going to have a long way.
00:39:18
Speaker
I think memes are really cool in the sense that they can provide some sort of respite for people in terms of the political aspect of it. Do you have a favourite meme? Yeah. I mean, I think at the moment I have many of them.
00:39:41
Speaker
And basically, I'm really using many of them. But I think that the meme of the day considered the situation in Turkey because we have been actually, I mean, I've seen it around on Twitter a couple of days today when there is this girl that's
00:40:04
Speaker
I mean, as I said, the discourse of the greater Turkey is back in the discourse, especially this week, when they're saying that we're going to take trace of the Greek islands, we're going to take Mosul, we're going to take Aleppo, something, something, something.
00:40:19
Speaker
and so the the meat that I received from four or five different people in the in the in the Turkish social media was the one that says that site cannot stop me because I can't read which is that yes I love it yeah Lisa Simpson oh no it's um from no it's from Arthur
00:40:40
Speaker
yes and so this is and so this that's I can stop it because I can read it's a reference to our to our that is the nationalist peers who obviously have never opened a history book to know that that you know you cannot just go and take countries
00:40:56
Speaker
And also, actually, there is an extra detail on this relationship to invasions and occupations.
Historical Context of Invasions and Global Reflection
00:41:04
Speaker
Of course, we have the understanding all over the world that invasions and occupations are bad.
00:41:11
Speaker
But there is a president, a very important president in Turkey, and he really is connected with this name and how people were discussing it today. Because people are not reading history books, they don't know that the last time that Turkey engaged in a full invasion of a foreign country, it was in the 70s with the occupation of Cyprus.
00:41:34
Speaker
And when they invaded Cyprus, it was the Republican Party who was in power. I mean, the opposite of what is now the opposition. And after this occupation, now it is 778, they were never again in power because it was not just the human cost, but the financial and political cost for invasion of this country is so high
00:41:59
Speaker
that there is a chance for a single part to stomach it all alone. So not saying that we're hoping that the story will repeat itself, but just this wording of invasions are very costly.
00:42:16
Speaker
And I guess this is something that the British and American public should know very well by now how much it has cost them for decades to have troops on ground in Kansas in the Middle East. You know that meme where the monkey is looking awkwardly at the camera? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Britain and America looking at invasions.
00:42:42
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I hear you. Because one of the things that is interesting about our political life today is I remember when I was in the States, shortly after Trump was elected, I was talking with one of my colleagues at the time I used to, I was a writer for Hyperallergic.
00:43:04
Speaker
who was a kind of a very high profile cultural art magazine based in New York, Orleans Magazine. And one of my colleagues at the magazine was saying to me, my God, but how are we gonna live with this guy? Like the guy is crazy and he's a moron and he's a racist. And this is how are we gonna do this? And the point that I'm trying to raise is this infinite innocence of white people.
00:43:31
Speaker
that they cannot possibly understand how can you live with a maniac despot, with 90% of the world have done it for so many years on their account. And I think that now when you have all these systems of, as I said, all these instructions of law and power breaking apart, you understand that there is this sort of this equalizing factor of like, as you were saying before, we are all kind of living in lawless states.
00:43:59
Speaker
Oh yeah, I hear that 100%. I think that's the thing is, you know, Britain is like one of the worst. You know, we're actively saying we don't listen to the judges anymore.
Istanbul's Cat Culture
00:44:12
Speaker
One of the main key things about memes, however,
00:44:16
Speaker
is their inclusion of cats. And I know you like cats. I mean, I like cats, but also I have two cats. They're both actually quite young. They are a little bit over a year old. But also, I don't know if you know, but this is like Turkey. It's a famously cat country. Istanbul has one of the highest worldwide densities of street cats.
00:44:44
Speaker
And there is a cultural history of this cat-loving Istanbul, one which goes back to Islam and some hadids, some legends about the prophets and cats. And the other goes back to the beginning of the 20th century when a number of fires ravaged Istanbul, which at the time it wasn't more or less, it was a city built mostly, it was mostly woodhouses.
00:45:12
Speaker
In the aftermath of these fires, as the city was modernizing and transitioning to concrete, there was a lot of diseases around and a lot of rats. So the sultan at the time was probably Abdul Mirjid II or his father. They asked to bring a large
00:45:39
Speaker
population of cats from the islands and from other parts of the country to take care of the rat population in the city. And so there was this struggle between the cats and the rats. Obviously, the cats were successful. And since then, they became the sort of the sort of objects of cults in Turkish culture. So what is it like being an ensemble around the cats? I mean,
00:46:06
Speaker
Cats would say, I would say they have a kind of an okay life. Municipalities are caring for them to some degree, but it's mostly people in the neighborhoods who are feeding the cats and they are providing food and shelter for cats very often. Many, many people, I would say everybody, but a lot of people have cats at home.
00:46:30
Speaker
who are not necessarily cats that you went like you went and adopt a cat but just suddenly on a winter night a cat landed in your porch and never left a kind of situation I mean they also have a hard life because there are many of there just too many of them
00:46:52
Speaker
But there is an amount of cat petting and cat love going around
Beauty and Challenges of Living in Turkey
00:46:58
Speaker
in the city. Like if you go to a coffee shop or you go to a restaurant and there is a cat napping upon a chair, you have to sit in a different table. You cannot bother the cat.
00:47:10
Speaker
And also, it's a bit crazy. Yes, of course. I mean, come on, have some civilization. Yeah, I mean, this is something that you was like, I mean, I was born in Colombia, where the treatment of animals is completely different, where this can be really rough.
00:47:29
Speaker
But at the same time, sometimes it's surprising to see in this country, which is a place where there is so much violence and so much aggression that people actually have such a dedication to pets and to street animals. I mean, but maybe you cannot just be bad all the time, right?
00:47:49
Speaker
No, I don't think anybody's inherently bad. I think that's a mistake to kind of like identify somebody like that. But I think it's always on balance, isn't it? I mean, you'd say like if somebody was asking me a few days ago, I mean, if I was happy in Turkey or if I had been happy in Turkey and
00:48:11
Speaker
I mean, it's a question which is difficult to answer because, as I said, we're living in such a terrible world that these notions of joy are so different than they are traditionally constructed.
00:48:27
Speaker
But then when you are in this place, I mean, it's a gigantic country that has water and greenery from one corner, I mean, from beginning to the end. And it's such a fertile, beautiful land with lots of really incredible people and this crazy history. It's like a dreamland for someone who is interested in antiquity, with someone who is interested in archaeology.
00:48:55
Speaker
So I guess I have been happy to some degree. I've been happy that if I was living in the Williamsport paying $2,000 a month for a bedroom in a flat without kitchen, I guess I'm happy with that.
00:49:11
Speaker
But alas, it's not I mean, we wish the country was different. We wish the country was more livable because it is actually a wonderful place with with really great people. But such is the world. Yeah, and it's happening everywhere. It's not as if any country is like really innocent.
Western Imperialism and Global Issues
00:49:32
Speaker
I agree with you. And then this I mean, I'm saying like a
00:49:37
Speaker
This country is a mess because it's in the middle of a lot of mess. One of the things that the Turkish history or I mean the Turkish historiography doesn't give enough credit for the mess is the role of Western imperialism in the awful birth of the Turkish Republic. Somehow, the Turkish historiographers, they believe that
00:50:07
Speaker
that it was that the Turks were of independence, which
00:50:15
Speaker
In a lot of places, it's not more of in the Paris, it's called a catastrophe because this was the recent moment when they batchered the Greeks and the Armenians and the Assyrians and displaced many others and the course from Anatolians were. But basically, as this happened and as the Greeks were drowning or being slaughtered by the Turkish soldiers, it was the French and the Americans and the British in the Gulf of Izmir,
00:50:45
Speaker
sitting on their vessels watching this happen. So I'm saying, if today you look at most of the world, I mean, maybe there is an exception to this. But if you look at most of the world, I mean, 90% of everything that we are suffering in the world today, as people everywhere in the world, is the result of the European colonial adventure. And directly or directly, but mostly directly.
Art, Archaeology, and Classical Influences
00:51:14
Speaker
you have a lot of outlets online where you write about a lot of different things could you kind of tell me a bit about what you what do you write about online well I let's say I covered
00:51:34
Speaker
The art world in general, I mean like things like I write lots of exhibition reviews. I guess that when I was younger, I used to write lots of gallery reviews.
00:51:45
Speaker
Now I feel that I want to challenge the format a little bit, so I tend to focus on things which are higher profile, like, I mean, large art shows, like, I mean, things that concern artists that are more significant. From time to time, I would pick young artists here and there to write. So this is one side of the other things that I'm writing about. I mean, this is very art industry material.
00:52:13
Speaker
On the other hand, I'm also interested in all kinds of intersections. So now cats are fighting. Oh, dear. Yeah, you can hear the cats are fighting. I'm very interested in these intersections between between, I mean, art, not necessarily like art in general with archaeology.
00:52:43
Speaker
and classics, not just classicism and antiquity but also with the reception of classics. With the years, I have become aware
00:52:54
Speaker
of the very significant impact that classical antiquity has over the aspirations of contemporary art, this sort of, this sort of desire for immortality, for the classical definition of the work of art that is left behind, something that has a longer lifespan than we do. And a lot of the things that are wrong
00:53:22
Speaker
with, I mean, our world or with our perceptions, have been largely shaped, not necessarily by antiquity, but by a European reading of, like this European Christian reading of antiquity. I think that this combination of factors, I mean, talking about archaeology together with contemporary art class in history, is not something that would work everywhere. And if you are in New York and you're seeing the exhibitions of the Whitney Museum, or at the new museum, this probably could not work.
00:53:52
Speaker
But if you're living in this part of the world, like me, I mean, if you're living in Turkey, boy, in this space of Turkey and Greece, Lebanon, even Israel and the internet, Iran and Italy, in Italy, for example, I mean, you understand how present are all these rocks in our everyday life. And I'm calling them rocks because I remember I was in a cattle fighting. Okay, just a second.
00:54:23
Speaker
Are they okay? Okay. Sorry. That was a cut, cut moment. Did they do that a lot? No, they, they don't just probably they, I mean, it's the beginning of winter, so I don't let them out anymore.
00:54:42
Speaker
for a few months. Oh, and obviously, you know, it's a podcast recording, so they have to come on. Exactly. They need to be around. They're looking at me with this space of, did we do something right?
00:54:59
Speaker
Anyway, what I was saying is I was calling them all rocks because once I was in a dinner in Athens at the house of this art collector slash oligarch and someone was talking about
00:55:16
Speaker
how foreigners were coming to our country, meaning Greece, how foreigners are coming to our country to take our jobs. And then there was this wife of this oligarch, I'll correct this man, who was a local politician and say, what jobs are you talking about? The only thing we have in this country is these old rocks.
00:55:36
Speaker
And so here as well, we live surrounded by rocks from all these rocks from so many different periods. These things are part of our everyday life. They kind of shape our consciousness of things. They are also tools. They're also political tools in defining how certain things are written into history or not. And I'll give you an example.
Archaeology and Political Narratives
00:56:01
Speaker
If you would go to the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, and you will find
00:56:08
Speaker
a relief from the Hittite period, which is something that is very politically important for Turks because they see that they are descendants of the Sumerians. They are also descendants of the Hittites. In a period when Turkey was more secular than Islamists,
00:56:30
Speaker
like the heat type story was kind of very present in political discourse and it's still there not to a same degree. And so if you see a relief from heat type period, you have all the details where it was found, what is the dating, who are the characters involved, who found it, who was their geologist. You have like a very, very long description type. On the other hand, there is a very big amphora
00:56:59
Speaker
I mean it's a gigantic amphora that was found on one of the previous islands. Obviously this is something which comes, I mean it has a it has a Greek heritage and all what you can see in the description written by the museum is ancient jar middle ages.
00:57:19
Speaker
It doesn't have a period, it doesn't have a function. Nobody discovered it. There is no taxonomy. And when this taxonomy is missing, you understand that there are some political reasons to leave this information out. And so the politics of archaeology, and not just the politics of the past, but also the politics of how the present is stitched together.
00:57:48
Speaker
And I think that because contemporary art has had, for a period of some 10, 15 years, a very broad interest in archaeology and how archaeologists work. Sometimes not very successfully, sometimes it's just a pastiche, a recycling.
00:58:08
Speaker
some very banal idea of a process. But sometimes really interesting things happen in which artists really look at the method of archaeology and not just look at the method of archaeology but at the faults of this method of how
00:58:26
Speaker
how this method is also ideologically constructed. I mean, criticism of the foundations of humanities, which is a very important aspect of decolonization. Like you have to disestablish the master's house. And as you know, I mean, this is something that we discuss often on Twitter of how instrumental
00:58:54
Speaker
archaeology was for the intellectual program of colonization.
Conclusion and Themes Recap
00:59:00
Speaker
And all of these things are kind of very, I mean, these are things that I'm in touch with all the time because of the circumstances that I live in, because mostly because of the place where I live is inescapable when you are surrounded by the 6,000 years of history of the city.
00:59:17
Speaker
to not be confronted with the politics of the past, which are actually the politics of the future, of what are we writing into history and what are we leaving behind. That's great. I couldn't have said it any better at all. So I want to thank you again for coming to speak to me. If people want to find your work, where do they look?
00:59:44
Speaker
I mean, other than filing me on Twitter, I have a very boring Instagram with only some art stuff. But writing-wise, my work isn't hyper-allergic. My work is in the San Francisco Arts Quarterly. Art Asia Pacific is a magazine based in Hong Kong. It's also in Canvas. It's a print magazine from Dubai.
01:00:09
Speaker
And recently, I have begun a collaboration with the Centety Antique, which is a very, I would say, popular
01:00:18
Speaker
block in and around classics. I have done a long piece there about actually the history of our college in Turkey. I will continue contributing regularly, so I guess that's where my work, I mean, whatever appears there, that is there now or will appear there now. It's more the direction that my work is taking right now as I'm
01:00:42
Speaker
Almost on my way back into academia, trying to begin a PhD next year and see where it takes me. But that's it so far. Excellent. Thank you again. All right. Thanks to you.
01:01:19
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.