Geographical Review

ISSN: 0016-7428 (Print) 1931-0846 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utgr20

Making Memorial Publics: Media, Monuments, and

The Politics of Commemoration Following Turkey’s
July 2016 Coup Attempt

Timur Hammond

To cite this article: Timur Hammond (2020): Making Memorial Publics: Media, Monuments, and
The Politics of Commemoration Following Turkey’s July 2016 Coup Attempt, Geographical Review,
DOI: 10.1080/00167428.2019.1702429

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00167428.2019.1702429

Published online: 22 Jan 2020.

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MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS: MEDIA, MONUMENTS, AND
THE POLITICS OF COMMEMORATION FOLLOWING
TURKEY’S JULY 2016 COUP ATTEMPT
TIMUR HAMMOND

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the politics and practices of commemoration in the after-
math of Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt. Developing a concept of “memorial publics,”
this paper examines two distinct but interrelated forms of commemoration: websites that
have been set up to tell the story of the resistance to the coup attempt and a new
monument that commemorates the victim-heroes of that night’s fighting. I focus on
two shared aspects that link the digital and the physical: The use of key terms to frame
the coup attempt’s heroes and villains, and the role of website and architectural design in
focusing the audience’s attention. I argue that these commemorative projects work
together to create a memorial public in which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s position
is both naturalized and justified. This paper’s analysis contributes to geographers’ ongoing
interest in the symbolic and material dimensions of cultural and political geographies.
Keywords: geography of memory, media, memorial public, place, Turkey.

H ow might focusing on the making of a “memorial public”—in contrast to

the making of “public memory”—provide a different way to understand the p-
olitics of commemoration in Turkey following the July 15, 2016 coup attempt? In
this paper, I argue that this conceptual shift pushes us to think outside of an
assumed national frame that defines much scholarship on public memory. Ins-
tead, it draws our attention to the media and monuments through which specific
actors seek to link people, events, and places together in relations of responsi-
bility and obligation. While these relations often involve images of the nation,
the practices and politics of commemoration following since 2016 are poorly
described as “Turkish memory” or even “memory in Turkey.”
Paying attention to the government’s making of a memorial public helps us
better understand how struggles over power mobilize, on the one hand, mobile
media, symbols, and discourses, and, on the other, specific material sites. In the
more than three years since the coup attempt, government authorities and
a range of individuals and civil society organizations have worked to make
a memorial public that is ostensibly foundational (and thus prepolitical), agen-
tive (because people can choose to participate), and that naturalizes a political
arrangement focused on President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This memorial public
shares some aspects of what Michael Warner describes as the “free, voluntary,
and active membership” of publics (Warner 2002, 61) and does foster “active
participation rather than ascriptive belonging” (Warner 2002, 62). Crucially,

TIMUR HAMMOND is Assistant Professor Department of Geography, Syracuse University 130 Crouse Drive,
144 Eggers Hall, Syracyse, NY 13244; [twhammon@maxwell.syr.edu]

Geographical Review 00(00): 1–20, 2020

DOI: 10.1080/00167428.2019.1702429
Copyright © 2020 by the American Geographical Society of New York
2 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

however, the post-coup attempt memorial public emerged contemporaneously

with a legal state of emergency in a deeply divided and unequal political context.
As Josh Carney has recently argued, the nature of this public is different than the
“reflexive and agentive” publics described by Warner; instead, we should under-
stand this memorial public “as co-production between a government and some
of its citizens” (Carney 2019, 146).
In addition to contributing to debates surrounding the geographies of mem-
ory, this paper builds upon accounts of Turkey’s contemporary political, social,
economic, and cultural transformations (Erensü and Alemdaroğlu 2018; Evered
2018; Gökarıksel and Türem 2019; Küçük and Özselçuk 2019) and recent analyses
of the coup attempt (Esen 2017; Küçük and Türkmen 2017; Houston 2018; Yavuz
and Bayram 2018; Çiçekoğlu and Turan 2019). It speaks in particular to the
literature focusing on the role of commemoration within these broader contexts
(Özyürek 2016; Carney 2019; Hammond 2019).
I draw on two primary methods to develop this argument. First, I analyze two
websites produced to communicate a specific narrative about the heroes and
villains of the coup attempt. I approach these two websites—the “July 15
Martyrs” (OPRT 2016a) and the “July 15 Digital Library” (Yeni Şafak 2016)—as
textual and visual objects (Dittmer 2010) that mobilize discourses and design to
frame the events of July 15. The former, a website prepared by an official govern-
ment institution, marks one example of “state” discourses about the coup attempt.
The latter, published by the progovernment newspaper Yeni Şafak, might be
understood as a narrative emerging from “civil society.” Reading these two
websites together helps us understand that the boundary between those domains
in contemporary Turkey is so blurred as to be nonexistent.
Second, I interpret the commemorative landscape, an approach that builds on
a rich tradition of geographical scholarship (Schein 1997; Duncan and Duncan
2010). I focus in particular on the meanings communicated by design (Forest and
Johnson 2012), the choice of materials (Sci 2009), and the “public texts” (Bierman
1998) inscribed in and upon the landscape. Mobilizing these two methods of
discourse analysis and landscape interpretation helps me both highlight the
circulation of specific discourses between digital websites and physical monu-
ments and identify shared design practices that frame the relationship between the
events of July 15 and the memorial public that has emerged in relation to it. I also
note that this article is limited insofar as it does not engage questions of reception
(e.g., Bondi 1992) and further research would benefit from further exploration of
how dimensions of gender, social class, citizenship, and political affiliation shape
individuals’ perception and experience of these commemorative media, monu-
ments, and the practices that link them (e.g., McDowell 2008).
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 3

MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS

One key concept deployed by scholars of memory is that of “public memory.”
The phrase—like “public culture”—complicates a binary opposition between
official and vernacular and instead prompts us to examine the struggles over
whose past is commemorated how and where (Bodnar 1992; Gillis 1994; Phillips
2004; Özyürek 2007; Savage 2009; Ott and others 2010). In the process, they
demonstrate that the publicness of public memory is not inherently good but in
fact may be a way of marginalizing, obscuring, or excluding other claims to
belonging (Yoneyama 1999). ‘Public memory’ is not a static “object or outcome,”
but instead better understood as an ongoing and often contested “activity or
process” (Forest and others 2004, 358).
Challenging an assumption that public memory simply exists in the “public
sphere” or “public space,” geographers have drawn on concepts of place, space,
and landscape to provide more nuanced accounts of where memory is located
(DeLyser 1999; DeLyser 2003; Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Till 2005; Foote
and Azaryahu 2007; Mills 2010). For example, the construction of monuments in
urban contexts is not simply a contested commemorative practice staged in
public space but a claiming of place (Johnson 1995; Mitchell 2003) through
which identities and imaginaries are articulated and performed at multiple scales
(Till 2003). The “national” character of monuments, memorials, and everyday
practices of memory is thus not fixed but an ongoing negotiation (Mills 2010).
These places of memory become especially important in moments of crisis
and rupture, “when dramatic circumstances call existing political, economic, and
social arrangements into question” (Forest and Johnson 2002, 527). During these
periods, it becomes especially urgent to examine the ongoing struggles over how,
by whom, and for what purpose partial histories are inscribed upon the land-
scape (Till 2001; Steinberg and Taylor 2003; Foote and Azaryahu 2007; Tyner and
others 2014). The July 2016 coup attempt was one such moment of crisis. The
government framed the coup attempt as an existential threat to the nation that in
turn justified far-reaching political and legal changes (George 2018).
Despite scholars’ exploration of these geographies of memory, they have had
relatively less to say about the ‘public’ of public memory. Shifting from “public
memory” to “memorial public” redirects our attention from the types of memory
involved (e.g., collective memory, vernacular memory, official memory, public
memory) to the commemorative practices, media, and monuments through
which a public is made and reproduced. In other words, it pushes us to consider
how imaginaries, symbols, discourses, and media intersect with physical sites to
organize political and social relationships (Adams 2010).
To think in terms of a memorial public is thus to dispense with the idea that there
is an already existing public subject that remembers or a shared public space within
which memory is located. Instead, it asks us to examine how a range of commem-
orative practices, media, and sites address—and thus create—an audience: the very
4 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

public who ought to remember. Publics come into being through “poetic world-
making” that link “discursive claims” and the pragmatic effects of speeches, perfor-
mances, rallies, and rituals (Warner 2002, 82). Yet Warner’s conceptualization of
publics as “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself”
(Warner 2002, 50) elides the fundamental role that the complex materialities of urban
life play in enabling the making of publics (Iveson 2007).
Publics thus never emerge in a vacuum. Memorial publics, for example, exist
in relation to a discursive tradition (languages of commemoration in the past)
and a discursive context (the field of the present). They also depend on a set of
material and legal conditions, in particular the “regimes of publicity,” the
“relatively settled and socially agreed upon set of rules that [reflect] and
[shape] the deployment of power” (Staeheli and others 2009, 640).
In post-coup attempt Turkey, the making of a memorial public depends on
several linked conditions. These include the government’s investment in produ-
cing and circulating its preferred narratives in a range of media; their restriction
of alternative narratives; people’s capacity and desire to consume that media in
a variety of forms; a commemorative tradition of memorializing “heroes” of the
nation, particularly “martyrs”; and a commemorative aesthetic materialized in
online media, monuments, memorials, and museums. Yet even though this
particular memorial public depends on government intervention and helps to
justify a progovernment agenda, its heroes and objects of commemoration are
studiously presented as separate from “state” or “party” politics.
What is at stake is thus better understood not as a contest over “public
memory in Turkey,” but instead a struggle over how a public should be formed
in relation to the commemoration of the resistance to the coup attempt. Those
who have made and participate in this public seek to make their understanding
of Turkey hegemonic and incontrovertible. They use media and monuments to
mobilize discourses, architectural forms, and design to link the events of July 15
to a broader history and geography. As I outline below, to be addressed as part of
this memorial public involves judgments of blame and responsibility for the
coup attempt.

THE COUP ATTEMPT AND ITS AFTERMATHS

On the night of July 15, 2016, elements of the Turkish military moved to occupy
government sites, military command centers, and transportation hubs around the
country. As the first news reports began to filter out over television and social media,
military aircraft began low-altitude flights over the major cities of Ankara and
Istanbul, small groups of commandos attempted to capture key government build-
ings and officials, and groups of conscripts were deployed to close major transporta-
tion hubs like airports and bridges. Shortly after midnight, the coup plotters used the
state television broadcaster TRT to announce that they were carrying out a coup and
that the country was now under a state of martial law.
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 5

Turkey is no stranger to military interventions. In 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997,

officers either dissolved the government and suspended the constitution or
forced the ruling government to step down (Zürcher 2004). In 2016, however,
government and military officials used private televisions channels and the
Internet to forcefully denounce the coup attempt as unlawful and unauthorized.
Those speeches and the media outlets that broadcast them played an important
role in drawing tens of thousands of people into the streets (Ünver and Alassad
2016). At several critical locations, fighting erupted between opponents of the
coup attempt and the military units carrying out the coup. By the morning of
July 16, it was clear that a coup attempt had been defeated for the first time in
Turkey’s history (Esen and Gumuscu 2017).
Although the coup plotters’ name—the “Peace at Home Council”—echoed
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s geopolitical dictum “Peace at Home, Peace in the
World” (Eroğlu 1985) and thus seemed to suggest the involvement of hardline
secularist elements within the military, attention quickly shifted to the complex
network of people and institutions associated with the religious leader Fethullah
Gülen (Hendrick 2013). This movement, known to its supporters as Service
(Hizmet) and to its opponents as the Parallel State Structure (Paralel Devlet
Yapılanması) or by the derisive nickname FETÖ (Fethullahçı Teror Orgütü,
Fethullahist Terror Organization), had been engaged in a struggle with the
government since December 2013 (Yavuz and Balcı 2018). On July 20, 2016, the
government declared a state of emergency and used its expanded authority to
pursue any alleged supporter of Gülen and his movement. Even though the state of
emergency expired on July 19, 2018, the government continues to coordinate an
international effort to dismantle Gülen’s network (Watmough and Öztürk 2018).
Beyond the campaign against Gülen, the government also used the coup attempt
to justify a set of political, legal, and economic changes that consolidated power in
the Presidency (Cumhurbaşkanlığı). While the state of emergency was in effect, 34
executive decrees were issued, voters were asked to approve a constitutional amend-
ment expanding the powers of the presidency, the country’s media landscape was
increasingly concentrated in the hands of progovernment ownership, and a range of
opposition politicians and civil society organizations and activists were arrested,
marginalized, or otherwise targeted (Baser and others 2017; Sertdemir and Özyürek
2019). Now three years after the coup attempt power is increasingly concentrated in
the hands of President Erdoğan (Erensü and Alemdaroğlu 2018; Yilmaz and
Bashirov 2018; Gökarıksel and Türem 2019).
Commemoration forms a highly visible part of these recent transformations.
Just days after the coup attempt, the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul was renamed
the July 15 Martyrs Bridge (15 Temmuz Şehitleri Köprüsü). The day of July 15 was
designated an official holiday: “Democracy and Freedoms Day” (Demokrasi ve
Özgürlükler Günü). In the months that followed, streets, stadiums, schools, and
universities were also renamed, both with a generic reference to the day (e.g.,
6 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

“July 15 Martyrs Avenue”) and with the names of specific individuals who died
(e.g., “The Martyr Erol Olçok Avenue”). Meanwhile, every public school in the
country was required to set up a “July 15 Democracy Martyrs’ Corner.” Although
there is a long history in Turkey of using holidays, monuments, and public
spaces to produce a memorial public oriented toward the nation (Öztürkmen
2001; Roy 2006; Zenzirci 2012), the Justice and Development Party has attempted
since 2002 to reorient official memories from Republican Turkey to the Ottoman
past (e.g., Onar 2009; Ergin and Karakaya 2017). The resistance to the coup
attempt now provides both a narrative for and a vast repertoire of images for
their vision of “new Turkey” (Özyürek 2016).
These commemorative practices are characterized by two seemingly contra-
dictory dimensions. First, many are highly mediated and designed to be widely
circulated. The images, videos, and texts that document the coup attempt lend
themselves to sharing, duplication, and citation. Embedded within a broader
landscape of economic clientelism, political patronage, and media production
and consumption, these new commemorative forms point to the ways that
politics and culture in Turkey today are constituted through mobile and mutable
forms (Yesil 2016, Carney 2018).
At the same time, these commemorative practices are also material interven-
tions. From the erection of Martyrs’ Corners in every public school in the
country to the preservation and display of the “real” objects and traces of the
resistance to the coup attempt, these interventions ground this commemoration
in particular places and landscapes. These materials bear ostensibly unmediated
witness to the heroism and the treachery of July 15, 2016. Despite an apparent
contradiction between these highly mediated commemorative practices and the
seemingly unmediated power of material monuments, they are in fact both
necessary to the making of a memorial public.

CIRCULATING NARRATIVES, MAKING A MEMORIAL PUBLIC

A memorial public emerges in part through the publication and circulation of
narratives that link specific discourses and images to an imagined community
(Anderson 2006), often national in scale. By addressing a public, these narratives
seek to specify the geographies of their circulation (Warner 2002). Here, I use
two websites—the “July 15 Martyrs” (OPRT 2016a) and the “July 15 Digital
Library” (Yeni Şafak 2016)—to illustrate the making of a memorial public allied
with the government and yet apart from it. These websites, respectively pub-
lished by the Office of the Presidency and the government-leaning paper Yeni
Şafak, illustrate how the narrative framing of heroes and villains and the
temporal framing of the coup attempt itself create an audience organized in
relation to the commemoration of July 15.
The home page of Yeni Şafak’s “July 15 Digital Library” provides a succinct
example of this narrative:
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 7

With the dirty and expansive organization that they established within the Turkish Armed
Forces, the terrorists who on the evening of July 15 attempted a coup and occupation found
the nation (millet) arrayed against them. The children of the homeland (vatan evlatları),
shot by the putschists (cuntacılar), authored an epic that changed history … Yeni Şafak is
maintaining the recorded memory (hafıza kaydı) of those two days that changed history.
(Yeni Şafak 2016)

The narrative maps a binary opposition between two kinds of actors. On one
side, there are those who carried out the coup attempt: they are terrorists
(terörist), putschists (cuntacı), and coup plotters (darbeci). Although not present
in this particular passage, these actors are also frequently referred to as traitors
(hainler). Arrayed against them were the millet (which can be translated as both
people and nation) and the children of the homeland (vatan).1 Collectively, these
heroic actors authored an epic (destan) that changed history. The government
declared that those who died during the fighting are martyrs (şehit), while those
who were wounded are veterans (gazi). These terms are effective in part because
they link the events of July 15 to a complex discursive history.
For example, the making of the vatan was part of the project of forming a new
nation out of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire (Özkan 2012). The term
continues to function as a potent marker of nationalist politics, often envisioned as
a mappable territory (Batuman 2010). Millet shares many of these nationalist
associations, but differs in two important respects. First, and in contrast to
vatan, the term can simultaneously refer to a relatively abstract “nation” (coter-
minous with the “homeland”) and the embodied and concrete “people.” If the
vatan is an object of political identification, the millet is a political subject and
actor in its own right. Second, because millet once denoted a distinct religious
population (Barkey and Gavrilis 2015), it can also conflate ethnic and religious
identity. This capacity to signal both an ethnic and a religious identity has made
the term an important part of Islamist politics in Turkey over the past two decades
(Çolak 2006), although it is also used by opposition politicians. Taken together,
vatan and millet help to frame a narrative in which the nation is under threat by
enemies that are at once internal and external. They evoke a public that is
ostensibly foundational (and thus prepolitical) and profoundly political (because
to deny one’s association with the vatan or the millet is to be by definition on the
side of terrorists, putschists, and coup plotters). These terms’ use does not reflect
a preexisting reality but instead helps to create a condition in which “one people”
are united in sacred defense of “one nation.” As with other examples where
categories like “civil society,” the “people,” and the “crowd” help to justify political
projects (Tambar 2009; Walton 2017), these websites’ discursive framing marks
one recent instance in which technology and media work together to make actors
public and thus politically effective (Ahıska 2010; Brockett 2011).
The websites’ design and organization also help to frame this memorial
public by creating a stand-alone section for “martyrs” (şehitler). As with vatan
and millet, the language of martyrdom carries an especially charged meaning in
8 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Turkey and thus ties the commemorative forms of July 15 to a broader cultural
context. The term şehit is usually used for soldiers or for people who die in the
name of a national political project, although the term also carries religious
overtones and is often strongly gendered (Açıksöz 2017). Naming those who died
during the fighting as “martyrs”—and not simply “casualties” or “victims”—
elevates the role of the protestors to a sacred act. At the same time, this
designation has also generated debates within and between other groups of
veterans and the families of martyrs from previous conflicts (Şünbüloğlu 2019).
On both websites, each martyr is personalized with a portrait, along with
their name, occupation, and year of birth [see Figure 1 and Figure 2]. This
both individualizes them and places them in relation to each other as
members of a common group. Although the exact display order differs
between the two websites, both begin with several figures who are central
to the narrative surrounding the coup attempt: İlhan Varank, Erol Olçok,
Abdullah Tayyip Olçok, Ömer Halisdemir, and Mustafa Cambaz.2 This draws
our attention to a tension implicit in this narrative: even though all of these
individuals share a common identity as martyrs of the millet and the vatan,
some of these individuals are more important than others. Visitors to the

FIG. 1—Screenshot of ‘Martyrs’ on “July 15 Digital Library.” Retrieved February 20, 2019, from
https://www.yenisafak.com/15temmuz/sehitler. (Screenshot by the author.)
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 9

FIG. 2—Screenshot of ‘Our Martyrs’ on “July 15 Martyrs.” Retrieved April 12, 2019, from http://
15temmuzsehitleri.com/tr/sehitlerimiz-111. (Screenshot by the author.)

websites are able to page through the martyrs’ stories as they choose,
encouraging them to identify with the martyrs and creating the possibility
of organizing a memorial public as a relation between these visitors, the şehit,
the millet, and the vatan.
The final element that supports these websites’ articulation of a memorial
public is their use of timelines. Both websites feature prominent timelines that
organize the events of the coup and communicate a sense of unfolding events.
Yet timelines are also tools of selection and exclusion. By linking together
particular actors, places, and events, timelines can help to authorize certain
narratives while bracketing off other questions and alternatives. On both web-
sites, the timelines focus our attention on the clash between traitors and heroes
while either omitting or eliding two key issues.
First, there was a long history of cooperation between Gülen’s movement and
the Justice and Development Party. Particularly when the Justice and
10 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Development Party came to power in 2002, the Gülen movement mobilized an

extensive civil society apparatus (including think tanks, foundations, NGOs,
educational institutions, and media outlets) to support the ostensible “reforms”
pursued by the government. This strategic partnership began to fray in 2013;
beginning in 2014, the government moved aggressively against the sources of
support for Gülen’s movement (Tee 2018). It is likely that these struggles
eventually led to the coup attempt (Yavuz and Balcı 2018). That relationship is
entirely absent from the “July 15 Martyrs” website. In the case of the “July 15
Digital Library,” a long section called ‘The Organization of FETÖ’ (FETÖ
Yapılanması) begins instead from the 1960s. As a consequence, the cooperation
between the Justice and Development Party and the Gülen movement that
defined much of the past two decades shrinks in comparison to a much longer
alleged history of secretive growth and conspiracy.
Second, the websites’ narrative also obscures the extent to which government
institutions—particularly Turkey’s intelligence services—were aware of the coup
plot. The timeline thus helps to center the heroism of the millet while simulta-
neously marginalizing other discussions about collaboration or responsibility. By
framing the coup attempt as an attack on the nation and not, for example, as
a struggle between political networks, the government justified the state of
emergency and the consolidation of legal and political authority in the hands
of those most closely associated with President Erdoğan (George 2018). In
a speech the day after the coup attempt, President Erdoğan declared, “I do not
recognize any power over the power of the people (halkın gücü)” (OPRT 2016c).
The story that President Erdoğan tells about his political authority—one based
on the power of the people—is inextricable from the story of the postcoup
memorial public.
These websites are only two of many forms through which this memorial
public is mediated and circulated. Other forms include newspapers, conferences,
books, online video, Twitter, seminars, and official rallies. While all of these
forms play a role in the making of this memorial public, I turn now to an
especially durable and rooted form: the monument built beside the renamed
July 15 Martyrs Bridge.

GROUNDING A MEMORIAL PUBLIC: THE JULY 15 MARTYRS BRIDGE AND MEMORIAL

The Bosphorus Bridge is one of the defining landmarks of twentieth century
Istanbul, often serving as a synecdoche (Koch 2018) for the city and the country
as a whole. It also plays a key role in the region’s transportation infrastructure,
helping the E-5 expressway span the European and Anatolian shores. On the
night of July 15, 2016, the bridge was one of the first sites at which Istanbul
residents encountered military units moving to establish martial law; it later
became the scene of fierce fighting between military units and protestors and the
site of some of the most iconic images from the evening. The bridge’s renaming
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 11

as the July 15 Martyrs Bridge was both an indexical memorial of the fighting that
took place there and a symbolic appropriation of one of the country’s most
visible landmarks.
In addition to renaming the bridge, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality
moved quickly to build a new monument immediately beside the Anatolian
entrance to the bridge on the south side of the E-5 expressway [see Figure 3].
Inaugurated on July 15, 2017 by President Erdoğan, the new site—described as
both an anıt (monument) and makam (a term often linked to sites of religious
pilgrimage)—is one of the most prominent examples of the postcoup commem-
orative landscape. The park’s spatial organization, the symbolic associations of
its materials and design, and its program of inscriptions all contribute to creating
the possibility for visitors’ experience to be connected to a more expansive
memorial public.
Visitors enter into the park by ascending a sequence of shallow steps from the
level of the expressway to the level of the dome [see Figure 4]. In addition to
working with the existing topography of the site, this also helps to place the
memorial at a spatial remove from the busy world beyond. Exactly 250 cypress
trees and 250 rose bushes were planted on the hillside of the park, echoing the 250

FIG. 3—Map of Istanbul, Turkey, showing location of July 15 Martyrs Bridge and Memorial.
Cartography by Joseph Stoll.
12 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

FIG. 4—Entrance to the memorial park, showing E-5 expressway and renamed July 15 Martyrs
Bridge in the background. (Photo by the author, July 2018).

martyrs who died during the fighting. The choice of cypress trees and rose bushes is
intentional, as both are traditionally associated with Muslim burial practices in
Turkey (Bahadıroğlu 2014). As with the use of terms like “martyr” and “nation,” the
park’s landscaping connects it to an expansive commemorative tradition. However,
the novelty of the landscaping lies with the QR codes—linked to individuals who
died—placed in front of each cypress tree [see Figure 5].
The park frames the events of July 15, 2016 not just on a national but on
a civilizational and world-historical time scale. The domed structure at the
center of the park is key to this framing [see Figure 6]. As Hilmi Şenalp, the
park’s lead architect, noted in 2017 before the park was opened, the choice of
the dome was a deliberate echo of a tradition of Selçuk funerary architecture
in which the “kümbet-türbe … symbolizes infinity” (IMM 2017).3 Inside the
dome, several steps descended to a small fountain carved into a sequence of
cascading muqarnas.4 As with the shape of the dome, the use of the fountain
and the muqarnas as design elements both echo and subtly rework a long
tradition of Islamic architecture. The material form of the dome thus symbo-
lically links the park to an Ottoman and Islamic tradition (Batuman 2018).
There is a dense program of public texts (Bierman 1998) inscribed at several
points on the dome that further address and thus shape a memorial public in
relation to July 15. On entering the dome, visitors find a long inscription that
narrates the history of the coup attempt, echoing that provided on Yeni
Şafak’s website:
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 13

FIG. 5—One of 250 small plaques placed in front of cypress trees in the memorial park. Each
includes a QR code linked to an individual martyr. (Photo by the author, July 2018.)

FIG. 6—View of the central memorial dome flanked by cypress trees, designed by Hilmi
Şenalp. (Photo by the author, July 2018.)
14 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

On July 15, 2016, the coup plot of a gang—enemies of the nation (millet), traitors to the
homeland (vatan)—encountered a struggle of determined and glorious resistance against
the injustice and unlawfulness secreted in the fabric of the nation (millet). Soldier, police,
and civilian alike, 250 of our people were martyred in an inhuman and treacherous fashion,
and 2193 of our people were wounded and become veterans. May their place (makam) be
elevated and Allah’s mercy be upon them.

The inscription is followed immediately by a verse of the Qur’an in Turkish:

“And say not of those who are slain in the way of Allah: ‘They are dead.’ Nay,
they are living, though ye perceive (it) not.”5 Beginning immediately beneath are
the names of the people killed during the fighting, organized alphabetically by
first name and listed without any other information. The last element of the
dome’s internal inscriptions is inscribed at the top in Arabic, reading, “He is the
Martyr” (Hüvel-şehid).
The dome’s form and multiple inscriptions place it in relation to a tradition
of Ottoman monumental architecture (Karateke 2001), but also a broader global
style of funerary architecture. In the aftermath of the coup attempt, the alpha-
betic presentation of those who died has become a common mode of presenting
the “martyrs of the millet.” This mode of celebrating the “ordinary heroes” of
July 15 echoes, for example, Kirk Savage’s account of shifts in nineteenth and
twentieth century war memorials (Savage 2009). This memorial public,
addressed by means of the Qur’anic verse and the Arabic calligraphy at the
top of the dome, is an explicitly Muslim one. The inscription of “He is the
Martyr”—a reference to the 99 names of Allah (Gardet 2012)—also ties this dome
into a tradition of inscriptions on Muslim graves in cemeteries, although the use
of “Martyr” is a departure from the more typical reference to God as the
“Enduring” (Bâkî) or “Creator” (Hâlik) (Laqueur 1997).
Through its inscriptions and its design, this memorial park elevates the events
of July 15 to the level of civilizational history, one that transcends not just the
politics of the present but even the comparatively limited frame of the nation’s
history. It thus serves as one key place from and through which political autho-
rities seek to make a memorial public. One could argue that this monument is
simply the latest iteration of government attempts to dictate “official” memory in
Turkey. However, what makes this monument distinct—and thus part of a new
memorial public—is the way that this physical monument operates in relation to
the circulation of texts and images on websites like those discussed above.

CONCLUSION
A focus on memorial publics calls our attention to the places of memory (Till
2003) through which specific narratives are communicated, but it also asks us to
follow the circulation of discourses and images that help to consolidate
a particular public. The geographies of memorial publics are thus more complex
than simply existing in public space. They are both grounded in specific
 MAKING MEMORIAL PUBLICS 15

locations and circulate unevenly through media that connect those locations to
elsewhere (Massey 1994; Adams 2010).
This conceptual shift might further enrich our understanding of how the
“state” and “civil society” come to be created in the world. A wide range of
scholarship asks us to analyze the “state” not as a coherent actor or fixed thing
but as an entity created through ongoing boundary-making projects and prac-
tices (Mitchell 1991; Painter 2006; Harris 2012). Similarly, the naturalness of “civil
society” also depends upon similar projects and practices of boundary-making
(Walton 2013). What is striking in the case of commemorative practices follow-
ing the July 2016 coup attempt is not the demarcation of those two categories,
but their blurring. Time and again, the millet—a term that straddles the line
between “nation” and “people”—is both the target of the coup attempt and the
hero of the resistance to it. Examining the making of memorial publics provides
a new way to examine how engagements of the past produce political config-
urations in the present.
Crucially, however, memorial publics are open to change. On July 15, 2019,
the most recent anniversary of the coup attempt, Turkey’s government organized
commemorations around the country. These included the laying of a ceremonial
wreath, the inauguration of new buildings replacing those destroyed during the
fighting in 2016, and a coordinated social media campaign. However, they did
not use the July 15 Martyrs Monument. Why?
On June 23, 2019, opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu was elected mayor
of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, ending 25 years of control by parties
associated with President Erdoğan. The shift in political control at the municipal
level may have shaped how and where the national government was able to
organize commemorations. Furthermore, because the monument discussed in
this article was built on land controlled by the municipality, it is unknown
whether and how the municipality will maintain this and other commemorative
sites. Early evidence from Mayor İmamoğlu’s tenure suggests that he will indeed
seek to build a new public in relation to different histories, discourses, and
architectural forms. As political regimes in Turkey shift and new actors seek to
articulate their own memorial publics, it remains to be seen how the websites,
the monuments, and the memorial public of July 15 might change.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Members of the Moynihan Research Workshop and the Geography of Memory seminar
at Syracuse University provided useful feedback on an early draft of this paper. My
thanks to Ilaria Giglioli, Matt Huber, and Natalie Koch for their helpful comments on
later versions.
16 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

NOTES
1
The translation of millet is open to interpretation. In many instances, millet can be used as
a translation for ‘nation,’ as in the translation of ‘international’ as milletlerarası. However, in the
histories of the coup attempt published by the Office of the Presidency, millet has been translated
as ‘people’ (OPRT 2016b).
The translation of millet is open to interpretation. In many instances, millet can be used as
a translation for ‘nation,’ as in the translation of ‘international’ as milletlerarası. However, in
the histories of the coup attempt published by the Office of the Presidency, millet has been
translated as ‘people’ (OPRT 2016b).
2
İlhan Varank was a professor and the older brother of President Erdoğan’s adviser Mustafa
Varank; Erol Olçok was an advertising executive and had been closely involved in the election
campaigns of the Justice and Development Party; Abdullah Olçok was his son; Ömer Halisdemir
was a staff sergeant in the Special Forces whose killing of the General Semih Terzi played a role in
foiling the coup attempt; and Mustafa Cambaz was a photojournalist for Yeni Şafak who was shot
in front of a police station in the Istanbul district of Çengelköy.
İlhan Varank was a professor and the older brother of President Erdoğan’s adviser Mustafa
Varank; Erol Olçok was an advertising executive and had been closely involved in the
election campaigns of the Justice and Development Party; Abdullah Olçok was his son;
Ömer Halisdemir was a staff sergeant in the Special Forces whose killing of the General
Semih Terzi played a role in foiling the coup attempt; and Mustafa Cambaz was
a photojournalist for Yeni Şafak who was shot in front of a police station in the Istanbul
district of Çengelköy.
3
A türbe is a tomb, usually including the grave of the person for whom the türbe is named.
Kubbe refers to the dome, one of the most well-known markers of ‘Islamic’ architecture. A kümbet
[or gonbad in Persian] is a distinct kind of domed tomb, often topped with a pyramidal shape and
especially characteristic of Selçuk Anatolian architecture.
A türbe is a tomb, usually including the grave of the person for whom the türbe is named.
Kubbe refers to the dome, one of the most well-known markers of ‘Islamic’ architecture.
A kümbet [or gonbad in Persian] is a distinct kind of domed tomb, often topped with
a pyramidal shape and especially characteristic of Selçuk Anatolian architecture.
4
Muqarnas are another architectural motif traditionally associated with Islamic architecture
(Tabbaa 2003).
Muqarnas are another architectural motif traditionally associated with Islamic architecture
(Tabbaa 2003).
5
Yusuf Ali translation of Surah al-Baqarah (2:154). This particular verse has come to circulate
in other media commemorating the coup attempt.
Yusuf Ali translation of Surah al-Baqarah (2:154). This particular verse has come to circulate
in other media commemorating the coup attempt.

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