Occupied City

Protocol XIV of the Treaty of Lausanne provided for a six-week period for the evacuation of Allied forces and naval units from Istanbul. The last contingents of Allied troops departed on 2 October 1923 following a short handover ceremony, bringing to an end a de facto occupation of almost five years. Despite its length and the number of people affected, the occupation of Istanbul was for a long time neglected in academic writing, and it is only this year that the first exhibition dedicated to the period was opened. 

“Occupied City: Politics and Daily Life in Istanbul, 1918-1923” runs until 26 December 2023 at the Istanbul Research Institute in Beyoğlu, and explores everyday life over a five-year period in which the future of the city was anything but certain. Who would remain? Who would leave? Who would rule? Rumour and speculation swirled around such questions, exacerbated by the conflicting statements of Allied statesmen, successive Ottoman cabinets, and the Ankara government. Istanbul was in flux, not only in terms of its shifting politics, but also in its social and cultural ideas and practices. These changes were produced by the multiplicity of overlapping regimes and converging populations that defined the period, including servicemen, bureaucrats, merchants, refugees, labourers, intellectuals, and artists, drawn not only from the occupying powers and their colonies, but also from neighbouring regions dislocated by conflict. 

The exhibition aims to do justice to the diversity of experiences under occupation, taking into account the cultural, social, and gender divisions between urban residents. Curated with the support of six consultant researchers with complementary thematic and linguistic expertise,[1] the exhibition brings together textual, visual, and auditory materials, ranging from photographs, paintings, songs, and film to letters, diaries, memoirs, and official documents from collections in Turkey, France, Britain, Greece, Armenia, Russia, and further afield in an effort to capture the complexity of thought and experience in occupied Istanbul.

The exhibition aims to do justice to the diversity of experiences under occupation, taking into account the cultural, social, and gender divisions between urban residents.

Building on our individual research on the post-armistice period, in 2020, we started to compile a comprehensive bibliography for the study of Istanbul under occupation. The open-access, electronic monograph, which was published last year, brought together more than 1400 primary and secondary sources in a variety of languages.[2] While preparing this bibliography, it became even more obvious to us that the interactions among Istanbul’s new arrivals and local residents had produced an archival and material legacy that makes the occupation period perhaps the most richly documented in the city’s history. Despite the wealth of sources available, however, there had yet to be any major exhibition organised on the subject, revealing the ways in which the occupation had been silenced in public memory as well as within the academy.

Thinking in three dimensions about what a display about occupied Istanbul and its politics and daily life should look like and which of these vast materials to present to the public was inevitably a challenge. The selection process, aesthetic considerations, and designing a path for visitors to trace this history would all have to be taken into consideration as part and parcel of the story of the occupied city we intended to tell.

In order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the period, we decided that, first and foremost, the exhibition should bring a human dimension to this story, a dimension which has often been neglected in the narratives of official history writing, in favour of the actions of states and “great” men. As such, our exhibition moves beyond elite national and male personalities and challenges the dominant cultural memory and narratives of the Armistice Period. It followed that this human dimension should embrace all the “humans” in the occupied city, reflecting the diversity of individuals and groups, including women as well as men, civilians as well as soldiers and bureaucrats, exiles and emigres as well as local residents who together defined the life of the city. We recovered these largely forgotten individuals and groups, not as passive observers, but as active agents, who participated in strikes in the hope of better pay and conditions, strove to better their own and others’ lives through civil society initiatives, and tried to survive and even enjoy life with concerts, art exhibitions, and other social and cultural activities.

The exhibition is organised around three rooms addressing political, social, and cultural themes. We wanted to present a comprehensive picture of life in the city, which has too often been reduced to a simple political clash between imperialism and nationalism. While providing details of the political context of the armistice, we also reveal the impact of occupation on the social and cultural spheres. To help contextualise this complex period, a timeline covering the years 1914-1923 lines the corridor connecting the three rooms.

As curators, we hope the exhibition will allow visitors to understand occupied Istanbul and its residents in a more nuanced and multivocal way. 

Notes

[1] Ceren Abi, Ekaterina Aygün, Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Claire Le Bras, Artemis Papatheodorou, Erol Ülker. 

[2] Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal and Gizem Tongo, A Bibliography of Armistice-Era Istanbul, 1918-1923 (London: British Institute At Ankara, 2022). The project was funded by the British Academy and British Institute At Ankara.

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