Review: Building Modern Turkey: State, Space, and Ideology in the Early Republic, by Zeynep Kezer, and Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey: Architecture across Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s, edited by Meltem Ö. Gürel

Zeynep Kezer Building Modern Turkey: State, Space, and Ideology in the Early Republic Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015, 344 pp., 88 b/w illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9780822963905 Meltem O. Gurel, ed. Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey: Architecture across Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s New York: Routledge, 2016, 192 pp., 32 b/w illus. $163 (cloth), ISBN 9781138806092; $49.95 (paper), ISBN 9781138104341 Two fascinating new books on early Republican and midcentury modernism in Turkey may help international audiences make sense of the recent turmoil featured prominently in the news about Turkey. Zeynep Kezer's long-awaited book Building Modern Turkey synthesizes some of the critical scholarship on how the Kemalist program shaped the nation-state in the years immediately following the establishment of the Republic in 1923. Kezer particularly emphasizes the destructive forces in this process, in addition to the constructive ones, by putting special emphasis on the transformation of the multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman Empire into the unitary and homogenized nation-state of Turkey. The first part of the book, which focuses on the construction of the new capital, Ankara, recapitulates previous scholarship without acknowledging recent important contributions; nevertheless, this section sets the stage for the second part, “Erasures in the Land,” which effectively demonstrates the authoritarian dismantling of unwanted formations. In this part of the book, readers find out that much of what they have learned in the first part about the new nation-state's creative construction was made possible by the destruction and replacement of previous landowners, institutions, and populations. In a chapter titled “Dismantling the Landscapes of Islam,” for instance, Kezer shows that the closing down of the vakiflar (the pious foundations that were central institutions in the Ottoman Empire's religious, commercial, and social activities) not only put an end to their functioning but also channeled their property and liquid assets to the new state's treasury. Most of the land on which Ankara's governmental buildings arose, and with them state-sponsored modernism, was seized through this process. This was partially how the Turkish state could offer enticing tax and land incentives to foreign countries to tempt them to transfer their embassies to Ankara, after the state realized that “Turkey's new stature in international politics …