Throughout my blog posts this semester, I have attempted to explore the relationships between historical migration events, the folk narratives remembering those events, and how these narratives are exploited by modern states to build nationalist mythologies. I have compared nation building through the use of mythic histories in Turkey and Kyrgyzstan. This theme is particularly […]
Nationalism
Ne Mutle Türküm Diyene! Population Exchange and Turkish Nationalism
“Ne mutlu Türküm diyene” – “How happy one is to say I am a Turk!” This expression, famously spoken by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the tenth anniversary of the Turkish Republic, demonstrates a simple and seemingly benign Turkish nationalism.1 However, Turkey’s history of compulsory international population exchange provides insight to the early republic’s determination of […]
Migration and the Construction of National Narratives in Turkey and Kyrgyzstan
As republics formed following the collapse of expansive empires, the Kyrgyz Republic and the Republic of Turkey have each utilized certain historical and cultural narratives as a means of establishing a unified ethnic national identity. In the case of Turkey, the influx of new “Turks” from the forced population exchange with Greece necessitated a unifying […]