Picturing modern Ankara: New Turkey in Western imagination: Fid-Bau Portal

Picturing modern Ankara: New Turkey in Western imagination

Deriu, Davide

With the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, in October, 1923, Ankara became the laboratory and showcase of the nation-building project led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. A number of European architects, planners and artists were involved in the transformation of this small Anatolian town into the political and symbolic centre of the ‘New Turkey’: as the Republic was also known. At the same time, European observers were drawn to witness a place that was described as ‘the most extraordinary capital in the world’. At a crucial juncture, in which the geopolitical space of the Orient was radically reconfigured, Ankara provided an unexpected terrain of cross-cultural encounters between East and West. This essay explores the historical traces of these encounters that emerge from an uncharted body of sources, ranging from early-1920s' travel writings to the first comprehensive accounts of the new capital published in the mid-1930s. A tropological analysis of this rich and diverse literature shows that Ankara destabilised the discursive frame through which the West had hitherto constructed the Orient as its irreducible ‘other’. The accounts of this modernist experiment reasserted the hegemony of western culture while revealing, in the process, its inner fractures and contradictions.