State Imposed Place Name Change in Turkey and the Response of Giresun Residents
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STATE IMPOSED PLACE NAME CHANGE IN TURKEY AND THE RESPONSE OF GIRESUN RESIDENTS by Daniel Fields Submitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Sabancı University June 2013 STATE IMPOSED PLACE NAME CHANGE IN TURKEY AND THE RESPONSE OF GIRESUN RESIDENTS APPROVED BY: Cemil Koçak ......................................... (Thesis Supervisor) Leyla Neyzi ......................................... Akşin Somel ......................................... DATE OF APPROVAL................................ ii © Daniel Fields 2013 All Rights Reserved iii STATE IMPOSED PLACE NAME CHANGE IN TURKEY AND THE RESPONSE OF GIRESUN RESIDENTS Daniel Fields Turkish Studies M.A. Thesis, 2013 Prof. Dr. Cemil Koçak Keyword: Place Names, Toponymical Change, Giresun, Turkey Abstract: In 1913, the Ottoman state began attempting to systematically impose new place names across the territory under its control. Although the intensity of the efforts varied greatly, place name change would continue through the end of the Ottoman Empire and on into the Republic of Turkey. By 1968, when a volume containing all the changes was published by the Interior Ministry, roughly thirty percent of settlement names in Turkey had been changed. Renaming continued sporadically until the 1990s. This thesis inquires into these attempts at name change in Turkey with a focus on how people responded to the changes in their everyday lives. The value of place names as formulated in human and cultural geography is explored in order to determine why people may have rejected or accepted the state imposed names. Place name change, rather than being approached solely as a nation-building project motivated by Turkification, is also considered as being a technique of governmentality. This thesis does not refer to the changes as one project or policy that lasted from 1913 throughout the better part of the century, as does previous studies; rather, they are seen a series of attempts that did not always have the same rationale. In order to understand how people responded to the changes, this thesis relies on fieldwork carried out in the Eastern Black Sea Province of Giresun. iv TÜRKİYE’DE YER ADLARININ DEVLET TARAFINDAN EMPOZE EDİLEREK DEĞİŞTİRİLMESİ VE GİRESUN HALKININ TEPKİSİ Daniel Fields Türkiye Çalışmaları M.A. Tezi, 2013 Prof. Dr. Cemil Koçak Anahtar Kelimeler: Yer Adları, Toponimik Değişikleri, Giresun, Türkiye Özet: 1913 yılında Osmanlı Devleti, sistemli olarak, egemenliği altında olan topraklara yeni yer adlarını vermeye başlamıştır. Yer adlarının değiştirilmesi Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun sonuna kadar ve Cumhuriyet kurulduktan sonra da devam edecektir. 1968 yılına gelindiğinde, İçişleri Bakanlığı tarafından bütün yeni köy isimlerini içeren bir cilt yayınlandığında, Türkiye’nin köylerinin yaklaşık yüzde otuzunun isimleri değiştirilmiştir. Yeni yer adları 1990’lara kadar gelişigüzel bir şekilde verilmeye devam edilmiştir. Bu tez, Türkiye’de yer ismi değiştirme çabalarını ele almakta, ve insanların bu değişiklere verdiği tepkilere odaklanmaktadır. Yerel nüfusun devlet tarafından empoze edilen yer adlarını reddetmelerinin veya kabul etmelerinin saiklerini anlamak açısından beşeri ve kültürel coğrafya tarafından biçimlendirilen yer adlarının önemini araştırmaktadır. Yer adlarının değiştirilmesi, yalnızca Türkleştirme’ye sebep olan bir ulus-devlet yaratma projesi olarak algılanmanın yanı sıra, yönetselliğin bir tekniği olarak da kabul edilir. Daha önce yapılan çalışmalardan farklı olarak, bu tez yer adlarının değiştirilmesine 1913’ten başlayıp yaklaşık yüzyıl süren tek bir proje ya da siyaset olarak bakmıyor. Aksine, bu duruma bir teşebbüsler silsilesi olarak bakılıyor. İnsanların ne tür tepkiler gösterdiklerini anlamak adına bu tez Doğu Karadeniz Bölgesinin Giresun İlinde yapılan saha çalışmalarına dayanmaktadır. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people that guided me and offered assistance and moral support throughout the preparation of this thesis. My thesis advisor, Cemil Koçak deserves my continuing thanks for the instruction he provided. The insights of Professors Leyla Neyzi and Banu Karaca were very useful as I began my work on toponyms in Turkey, and to them I am very grateful. I also thank my parents, Steven and Lisa Fields, who have supported me at every step of my academic career. Without their continual support, this thesis would not have been possible. My fellow graduate students in the Turkish Studies and History Departments at Sabancı University, especially Paul Benjamin Osterlund and Tuğçe Kayaal, deserve special thanks for their moral support throughout our time together at Sabancı. My research in Giresun would not have been possible without the help of many people. Esra Ansel, Hakan Tunç, Semih Patan, Ali Tirali, and Bülent Tirali offered much needed assistance, contact information, and useful insights during my fieldwork preparation. In Giresun and the surrounding areas, Cem Feridunoğlu, Gökhan Üstün, and Heves Nefesoğlu Bozbağ proved invaluable to my research and their hospitality and generosity is greatly appreciated. The efforts of those in Şebinkarahisar and Doğankent who went out of their way to help me have contributed enormously to this thesis, and I thank them for their help. I am also deeply grateful to all the Giresun residents who were willing to discuss not just place name change with me, but a multitude of subjects that greatly added to my knowledge of the region. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….1. Existing Literature………………………………………………………….………4. Terms……………………………………………………………………….……..14. 1. THE VALUE OF PLACE NAMES AND THE POWER OF THE STATE TO CHANGE THEM……….…………………...16. 1.1. The Effect of Place…………….................................................…..………..20. 1.2. (Re)Naming as Power……………………………….……………...……….27. 1.3. Authority in Toponymical Change……………………….…………………..31. 1.4. Topography and Governmentality…………………………………………...34. 2. RATIONALES, GOALS, AND AUDIENCES………….…………………………….38. 2.1. Place Name Change as Nation-State Building…………………………….…39. 2.2. State Imposed Toponymical Change in Other Contexts………………….….41. 2.3. Audiences ……………………………………………………………….……45. 2.4. Toponymical Change for the “Nation”………………………………………46. 2.5. Toponymical Change for Local Residents…………………………….……..57. 2.6. Toponymical Change for the State…………………………………….……..61. 2.7. Toponymical Change for the “Other”…………...…………………….……..63. 3. RENAMING GIRESUN………………………..…….……………………..…………68. 3.1. First Attempts…………………………………………………….…………..69. 3.2. Institutional Structures Behind Place Name Change………………………...76. 3.3. Implementing the Changes…………………………………………………...82. 3.4. Reflecting the Changes: Giresun’s Gündüz Newspaper..................................87. 4. LOCAL RESPONSES TO PLACE NAME CHANGE IN GIRESUN……….…………..…..……………………….89. CONCLUSION……………………………………...……………...……………...……104. BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………….………120. vii LIST OF TABLES TABLE 1. PLACE NAME CHANGES LISTED IN THE 1968 KÖYLERİMİZ (OUR VILLAGES) PUBLISHED BY THE INTERIOR MINISTRY...............107. TABLE 2. PLACE NAMES CHANGED BEFORE 1968 BUT NOT INCLUDED IN KÖYLERİMİZ.......................................................................115. TABLE 3. CHANGES MADE AFTER 1968..................................................................118. TABLE 4. NATURAL PLACE NAMES, 1977...............................................................119. viii INTRODUCTION When looking at a map of Turkey, the thousands of place names seem to present a uniform identity. From the western borders with Greece and Bulgaria to the eastern and southern borders with Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the map is full of towns, and villages sporting names that appear to be “purely” Turkish.1 Names such as Beautiful Garden, White Spring, and New Village are found in abundance. The rather bland quality of many of the place names across Turkey, places that have often been inhabited for centuries, gives little or no hint to the historical fabric. On the contrary, maps of the Turkish Republic exhibit a very homogenous, often de-historicized character, even though many of these places did not always exhibit such homogeneity. The “Turkishness” of the Turkish toponymical order is no accident, but rather the product of state efforts of varying intensity over the last century to rid the country of its “foreign” toponymes.2 Such a situation is not unique to Turkey, as many other nation-states have sought to project power by excluding foreign elements and unsavory ideologies. Indeed, most of Turkey’s neighboring countries have undertaken their own attempts at changing place names. The scant critical literature over toponymical change in Turkey overwhelmingly presents it as a “project of Turkification” carried out by the bureaucrats in Turkey against the wishes of a mostly unreceptive populace. However, the term Turkification is not 1 Although etymology is clearly an important issue when dealing with toponyms, this thesis makes little attempt to comment on etymology. When the term Turkish is used to refer to place names, it simply denotes names that appear to be Turkish or are commonly accepted as being Turkish, without taking into account the actual linguistic origin. 2 I will discuss the term “foreign” in more detail in Chapter Two, but in general I will use it to mean people, names, languages, etc., not considered to have a proper place in the Ottoman/Turkish polity, those not “Turkish” enough. 1 sufficient to describe