Cultural heritage as status seeking: The international politics of Turkey’s restoration wave
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | Lerna K Yanık,Jelena Subotić |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720970242 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720970242
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(3) 245 –263
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720970242
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Cultural heritage as status
seeking: The international
politics of Turkey’s
restoration wave
Lerna K Yanık and Jelena Subotić
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between cultural heritage politics and international
status-seeking. We advance a two-fold typology of status-seeking that explains why states
engage in cultural heritage restoration practices at home and abroad. First, cultural heritage
restoration can be an easy way to signal state respect of its multicultural past while providing
cover for continuing anti-multicultural policies of the present. States with uncertain,
challenged, or liminal international status use cultural heritage projects as a ‘standard of
civilization’ of democracy, displaying themselves on the international stage as worthy of status
and respect. Cultural heritage here is used as a strategy for international status affirmation.
Second, states may engage in cultural heritage restoration beyond their borders, supporting
or directly managing renovation of these sites in order to expand their imagined national
cultural, political, and economic domain. Cultural heritage restoration projects here serve
as a backdrop for powerful international economic alliances that can be used for status
substitution—replacing one status-generating benchmark of ‘standard of civilization’ with
another—economic prosperity. We illustrate these arguments with two recent cases of
cultural heritage restoration that involve Turkey: the ‘Akdamar’ Church in Van, Turkey and
the Tomb of Gül Baba in Budapest, Hungary.
Keywords
Akdamar/Ahtamar Church, cultural heritage, international status, standards of civilization, Tomb
of Gül Baba, Turkey
Corresponding author:
Jelena Subotić, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, 38 Peachtree Center Ave, Atlanta,
GA 30303, USA.
Email: jsubotic@gsu.edu
970242CAC0010.1177/0010836720970242Cooperation and ConflictYanık and Subotić
research-article2020
Article
246 Cooperation and Conflict 56(3)
Introduction
The fact that our cultural geography is larger than our political one shows the greatness of our
state and the depth of our nation. From Bilge Kağan and Tonyukuk Monuments in Mongolia to
Mostar Bridge; from Timbuktu Manuscript Library in Mali to Gül Baba Shrine in the Balkans. . .
our cultural presence around the world including the cemeteries of our martyrs (şehitlik)—from
the one in the Galician Front to the others elsewhere. . . —all of these show that we have a
geography that takes us beyond the limits of our political one; it shows that we have a code of
existence (varoluş kodu). . . . The presence of this geography, this greater cultural geography,
helps Turkey both politically and economically today to intervene in its immediate region and
beyond, helps to establish ties with the peoples of those regions, integrate with these regions.
In this speech delivered at the Turkish Grand National Assembly in December 2013,
Ömer Çelik, Turkey’s then Minister of Culture and Tourism, argued that Turkey’s cul-
tural heritage beyond Turkey’s borders was an asset for Turkey’s international relations.
The very same ‘code of existence’, the Minister argued, applied to all cultures and reli-
gious, ethnic identities that existed in Anatolia, and the Ministry should work on the
protection and development of these cultural heritage sites (Türkiye Büyük Millet
Meclisi Tutanakları, 2013: 73). As the Minister was trying to lay out the past and future
work of his office, what he implied was that the protection of cultural heritage was only
sometimes about the protection of cultural sites; it was often about much loftier interna-
tional goals of the state.
Use of cultural heritage for international goals is not unique to contemporary Turkey.
Russia, for example, has unveiled an imposing new cathedral Sainte-Trinité (nicknamed
‘Saint Vladimir’s’ after Russia’s president Vladimir Putin) in 2016 in the center of Paris,
to local chagrin and resentment. The new cathedral, allied with the very conservative
Patriarchate in Moscow, presents a cultural counter-narrative to the secular, multicultural
France, and positions Russia as a major power at the helm of this global counter-move-
ment of illiberal, traditional, and patriarchal political forces (Higgins, 2016).
At the same time, Russia has used cultural heritage to effectively erase traces of non-
Russian cultural identity in its political domain. The massive restoration of the Big Khan
mosque in Russian-occupied Crimea that began in 2018 has removed much of Tatar
Muslim emblems and ornaments, hidden its Arabic calligraphy, and made the Tatar iden-
tity unrecognizable, even though the 16th-century complex of which the mosque is a part
is a major cultural heritage site for the Crimean Tatars (Mirovalev, 2018). This restora-
tion allowed Russia to performatively claim its multiculturalism—a valued international
status marker—while substantively rejecting minority cultural presence.
Small and insecure states also use cultural heritage projects for their status-seeking
needs. For example, North Macedonia, a small state with a profoundly insecure status,
engaged in monumental cultural heritage projects as it sought international recognition
during the name dispute with Greece, a cultural conflict which stalled its progress toward
European Union accession. The remarkable urban reconstruction project ‘Skopje 2014’
was designed to give Skopje, the capital city, a completely new, classical architectural
style in order to make Macedonia visually join the Western European cultural space, one
that builds on the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and not the architectural
‘backwardness’ of the Ottoman and socialist Yugoslav heritage (Graan, 2013; Vangeli,
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