Research Catalogue

Massive Deaths of the Non-Muslims in the Ottoman and Turkey

Though the word genocide has been treated as an interdisciplinary reflection in the humanities and cultural sciences, the psychoanalytic contribution to the symptoms of the Real in describing genocide is unavoidable. Genocides in Turkey have been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, dominant, official and media narratives, with the traumatic experiences of the civilians dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions or the others questions at best. The unconscious psycho-cultural approaches contribute to the construction of fictions and beliefs within human groups. In psychoanalytic concepts of psychic truth, construction and belief, these problematize the comprehension of the real.

The symptoms in the Kültürpark in Izmir, Turkey  reveal the unusual myths encoded in these, genocides, complexes, democratic paradoxes and their connections to the cultural texts in Turkey and beyond. Doubting the tyranny of the dominant truths is the method to reformulate or adjust the truths around the web of realities. There are loci of information in these webs for the conscious and the unconscious symptoms: parks, museums, squares, or monumental places.

Kültürpark in the modern Izmir was built on the site of the final stage of the Greek Genocide, part of the neighborhoods that went on fire in Smyrna, the ancient name of the city, in the final stage of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities in 1913-1922. The Smyrna Fire unfolded in 1922 during the Greco-Turkish War (Halley 2022). Trapping terrified civilians, the fires raged for days, spreading to the neighborhoods in the city center, followed by fires in other neighboring districts (GGRC 2024). Countless Greek and Armenian civilians lost their lives or went missing.

The tragic event that took place enduring the WWII Turkey was the "Wealth Tax" (Varlik Vergisi), orchestrated by the state that sought to systematically and financially stand ready to fight and disempower non-muslims or apostates, mainly Greek and Jewish communities.

The Turkish strategy during the atrocities of the war was to leave the message of “varlik” (“war” or “existence”), literally meaning to-be-alive, to buy for one's life in the form of tax. The Wealth Tax was the continuation of systemic discrimination after the genocides and ethnic purification strategies carried out by the Ottoman government against various minorities, including Armenians and Assyrians, as the new republic, founded by Atatürk, sought to forge a unified Turkish national identity. For sure, the Greek and Armenian Genocides had involved multi-pronged strategies of mass evictions, exile, forced labor, systematic massacres, and other brutal acts of violence to the civilians. The denial of such acts severely weakens the historical reality of these horrific events by Greek, Armenian, and Jewish families.

The informative discourse of the visuals, texts and sound is one of the areas to see the formulation of the fictions of the facts, predominantly constructed through pre-learned and pre-coded affects, genres and stereotypes. The voice and the visible concern the affect of the

symptoms reveal themselves in the informative fictions. Freud questioned the affect in his description of the unheimlich, the unusual, the feeling of otherness that differs from the most common, ordinary, and familiar. The unusual is not the repressed, connected to the symbolic texts. The question for informative discourses would be if there are any ideologies and economy-politics involved in the construction of truths. For there to be a real published debate, factuality like no otherwise, there should not be fiction.