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Confessions of monuments

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This book examines the role of artefacts and design practice in representing and commemorating a new political community of Turks within the cultural transformation from empire to nation-state betw...
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  • 23 June 2026
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Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, an emerging nation state built a particular relationship with the Ottoman past. In its simultaneous disavowal and inheritance of it, this was the new Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. Nation-states are areas of ideological contestation. However, they are equally visible and tangible. This is thanks to the making of a new world of artefacts in build or print that represent and commemorate them in many, often contradicting ways through design practices. This book offers a thorough account of this new Turkish material world through the trajectories of commemoration; from public monuments, print media, and festive illumination to temporary and permanent architecture from the onset of the 1908 Young Turk revolution to the demise of Turkey’s founding single-party regime in the late 1950s. If objects are silent actors of history, their confessions await.
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Price: $130.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Studies in Design and Material Culture
Publication Date: 23 June 2026
ISBN: 9781526176233
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: ART / Museum Studies, Museology and heritage studies, ARCHITECTURE / Buildings / Landmarks & Monuments, HISTORY / Middle East / Turkey & Ottoman Empire, Nationalism
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Artun Ozguner is a Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies at the University for the Creative Arts

Introduction

1 Re-imagining the empire in ink and stone

2 Building the nation in bronze: the republican network of monuments

3 Picturing the nation in paint and light

4 Modern by Tradition: monuments in the Inönü era

5 The Republic Looks Back: relics in bone and bronze

Conclusion: a tale of two monuments

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