Plural Heritages and Community Co-production

Designing, Walking, and Remembering

Christopher Whitehead, Tom Schofield, Gönül Bozoğlu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Études des musées

Plural Heritages and Community Co-production is a landmark contribution on the nature and plurality of heritages and how they can be creatively and ethically presented in urban space.

Providing an overview of the concept of plural heritages, this book explores the theory, politics, and practice of community co-production as they intersect with currents in critical heritage thinking, walking as ethnography, and digital design methods. Told through a central case study in Istanbul, Turkey, this volume aligns with cultural and political imperatives to consider the plural values, meanings, affects, and relativities of heritage sites for the multiple communities who live – or, as for diaspora and displaced groups, have lived – with them. It suggests a range of methods for locating and valorising alternative perspectives to those centrally deployed through museums or other institutions, such as UNESCO World Heritage listing, while also exploring the complexities of the past in the present and the ontology of heritage.

Plural Heritages and Community Co-production will be of great interest to researchers, academics, postgraduate students in the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, history, geography, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and politics. The book will also be of interest to heritage professionals, policy makers, and site managers involved in community engagement and participation.

Chapter 1

How many pasts?

‘Didn’t you ever climb the Walls as a kid? Everyone did. Back in the old days.’ (Soner, Plural Heritages project participant)

When the young Sultan turned his face to see the beautiful city of Istanbul…there he saw the unsurpassable city walls, great chains tightened upon entry in the Golden Horn and the never-ending will of the Greek. And the psychological perception of the impossible conquest of the never-surrendering city. (‘Achieving the Impossible’ text panel, Panorama 1453 Museum, Topkapı, Istanbul)

Walk one

We’re in Yedikule, a little-known area of Istanbul, which, with its 15 million recorded inhabitants, is the largest city in Turkey. We’ve just walked from the Marmaray Kazlıçeşme metro station past the high brick chimney of an old, disused industrial complex. Once we cross a busy road, we skirt the walls of a cemetery, before coming to a large and obviously ancient gateway. We have to stop to allow traffic to come through towards us because there is no pedestrian walkway, nor any traffic lights; a lorry passes, barely fitting through the arch (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Yedikule gate.

Yedikule means ‘seven towers’, and just through the gateway is an imposing (but closed) fortress that once indeed had seven towers. The fortress was built in 1458, five years after the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople. It incorporated some of the structure of the Land Walls, or Kara Surları, the ancient city defence dating back to Constantine the Great, then built up in the reign of Theodosius in the fifth century CE. These structures once protected the centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, and later formed the boundary to the peninsula of Constantinople, when it contained all that was left of Byzantium.

The Walls and the areas around them are now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘Historic Areas of Istanbul’,¹ but stepping inside the gateway doesn’t feel like being in a heritage site. There’s no entrance charge and no distinction between the site and the places around it. It’s hard to know where the site, if such it can be termed, begins and ends. Where does the heritage start and stop?

Figure 1.2 A market garden (bostan) at Yedikule.

To one side is a field of lettuce, cultivated in neat lines (Figure 1.2). This is one of the bostans, or market gardens, alongside the Walls that have been used for small-scale arable farming for centuries. Beyond that is an area of scrubland, maybe a brownfield site that will be built on soon (Figure 1.3). We walk a little there, on a path running along the Walls, until a kindly, concerned, twenty-something local man tells us that it’s not safe for us because of the drug dealers who frequent the place. We go back and pass through the gateway, finding two outsize bronze statues – clearly recently made– of Ottoman janissary soldiers guarding the inside, a mark of civic spending and a reminder of the Conquest for which the Walls are known (Figure 1.4). Indeed, there are films about the breaching of the Walls, a metro stop named after Hasan of Ulubat, the soldier who reputedly first raised the Ottoman flag on them; nearby is the spectacular Panorama 1453 Museum that celebrates the victory with an immersive visitor experience. In the grounds outside the museum, there are sculptures of canons and cannonballs in the grounds to represent the artillery used during the siege. The whole peninsula inside the Walls is now named ‘Fatih’ (‘Conquerer’), the sobriquet of Sultan Mehmet II, who commanded the Ottoman troops. A bus stop hoarding advertises the museum, asking ‘Have you seen the Panorama 1453 History Museum?’ and displaying an image of Mehmet on horseback, giving orders during the attack on the city.

Figure 1.3 Just inside the Walls at Yedikule, walking north on Hacı Piri Sokak.

Figure 1.4 Two over-life-sized Ottoman janissaries ‘guard’ the Yedikule gate.

Walking into the main street of the neighbourhood, we pass a Greek Orthodox church; we see old Ottoman wooden houses, some of them falling down; mechanics at work fixing cars in a garage; traditional köfte and kokoreç shops; groceries and a gym, whose presence is advertised with an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as he was circa 1985. The street is bustling: people are getting on with their day; stray dogs bask on the narrow pathways in the sun, and people step around them. There are no tourists. As we try to find our way with Google Maps, we notice that the street signs bear the UNESCO World Heritage symbol. Every now and again, we pass an interpretation panel that tells us proudly that the area is inscribed in the World Heritage List, that it has ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ for mankind, under the terms of the World Heritage Convention of 1972. Other text panels tell us about the Walls themselves, and (again) how Fatih breached them during the Conquest (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 An interpretation panel near the Walls mentioning the conquest.

Walk two

About a month later, we meet with Birol – a spry, energetic man in his early 60s from a neighbourhood just inside the Walls. We ask him to take us on a walk, visiting places around the Walls that are important to him as historical sites of one kind or another. On the walk, words tumble out. He takes us to the local amateur football club, which was an important part of the history of the area for him because of his coaching activity, but also because it goes back many decades: there are black and white photographs of the club from the 1950s, and sometimes it has been used as a location for Turkish films. People play football here, make films, bury their dead in the Christian (Armenian and Greek) and Muslim cemeteries. Another important aspect for him is the history of buying, selling, and trading pigeons near the Walls, and he takes us to the bird market area and tells us stories about pigeon-keeping around the Walls. He points out sites where buildings that were important to him had once been, and discusses urban, demographic, and social change in the area. Birol talks about where you used to be able to walk, and old routes of his, his fascination with the Chora neighbourhood, of which he collects old photographs. He mentions that he has a fear of heights and thus was – unusually – not one of the many young boys and men who walked on top of the Land Walls with friends for companionship, to play cards and look at the view. Some of Birol’s friendships have lasted until late adulthood, and we learn about how these crossed religious and ethnic lines (his ‘best friend’ is a man called Vasilis, from the Greek community, who now lives elsewhere in Istanbul). He talks of how different communities intermingled in the past, which is, Birol told us, ‘unfortunately less common now’ because society is more segregated than it was. He takes us round the areas where Greek people used to live. Because of friendships, everyday proximity, hospitality, weddings, and other shared occasions, he knows ‘everything’ about their culture. He misses them, and the neighbourliness of old.

Walk three

We are standing outside of the Sulukule Gate, watching as Soner faces the Walls with his arms spread. A cameraperson and sound engineer are nearby, and a tripod stands next to a bag bulging with lenses, microphones, batteries, and memory cards. Soner is talking animatedly, imploring the wall to answer the question he has put to it. Behind him is a patch of grass and a busy road, the traffic passing imperviously. The gateway’s lintel bears an inscription, and above it a stone is carved with a Latin inscription relating to the strengthening of the structure, possibly by a consul in the fifth century CE.² Clearly visible through the gateway is the new gated community built on the site of what had once been Soner’s home community (Figure 1.6). It is the displacement that befell this community that underpin Soner’s questions, and he invokes figures of and events from the past to answer them. Later we follow Soner and the crew as he climbs a low part of the Walls nearby. Looking out over the roof of the mosque below, he describes the lost sounds of the area: goblet drums, children playing, the sounds of processions for religious events. These are prominent in the pasts that Soner describes, but now the spaces around the Walls sound mostly of traffic: a sound with a kind of full emptiness, a consistency across the spectrum close to white noise that masks all other sounds. Soner’s talk is bitter and hard to listen to. His new home is far from this area, and to return here is to revisit an old wound. Hearing him talk about it, we are ourselves moved, and our future walks in the area fall in time with the imagined rhythms of lost music.

Figure 1.6 Soner speaks to the Walls at Sulukule.

One place, many heritages

These fieldnotes counterpose different heritages of the same place, different senses of the past and what it is from that past that matters. One is an official perspective, involving imposing architecture – a huge object marking the city, the stuff of history – an archetypal ‘great event’ in the form of the Conquest, that is also used by the state as a national story. It is big history: ...