Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey 1923-1945

4. Celebrating National Holidays

179 5 Celebrating National Holidays National celebrations have been important instruments of political socialization , legitimacy, and mobilization in Turkey. Yet Turkish historians have rarely studied the culture of national celebrations in Republican Turkey, nor have they examined closely the emergence and functioning of that culture in the early decades of the Republic.1 While historians of the early Republic focused on the more explicitly political “reforms,” celebrations were largely assumed to exist within the separate sphere of folklore despite the very political nature of these events.2 I suggest that we study early Republican celebrations as “invented traditions,” to borrow a term from Eric Hobsbawm,3 in the context of the formation of a Turkish national identity and the consolidation of the Republican state. While reforms, including those discussed in the previous chapters, were potentially more confrontational and conflictual, national celebrations constituted a less confrontational, and potentially more participatory and inclusionary, path of social and cultural change.4 In this chapter, I first give an overview of national celebrations in Turkey. Then I turn specifically to the 23rd of April, National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, and study how the 23rd of April was celebrated in the 1930s, what those celebrations meant for those involved, which groups were included, which were excluded, and how national celebrations contributed to the creation of a collective national identity. I also examine how national days were related to and reinforced the reforms discussed in the previous chapters. Official celebrations in the Ottoman Empire revolved around Islam and the Sultan and the royal family.5 The Sultan’s accession to the throne, his girding on of the Sword of Osman, and the oath of allegiance to the Sultan were important moments that the Ottoman state celebrated with its subjects. For a republic that claimed to derive its secular authority from the nation, however, 180  Becoming Turkish celebrations that helped legitimize the Ottoman monarch were clearly irrelevant . The new state needed celebrations that would help citizens imagine a Turkish nation of which they were members, rather than a sultan to whom they owed allegiance. As Arzu Öztürkmen has noted, there were in fact the beginnings of secular holidays in the late Ottoman period, such as the Hürriyet Bayramı, based on secular European and especially French national celebrations .6 Celebrations in the Republican era were rooted in the Young Turk era celebrations, yet in an effort to distance itself from its Ottoman past, the Turkish Republic would de-emphasize any such connections between preand post-Republican celebrations. What Is Worth Celebrating? The Range of Republican Holidays National celebrations help with the creation and maintenance of a collective historical memory and a shared identity. By marking important moments in the recent, or distant, past of the nation, they provide an opportunity to remember those events collectively and interpret them in a national context. Major victories or accomplishments of the nation, as well as major calamities that the nation has survived, provide reference points for national holidays. In the post–World War I nation-building processes in the Middle East, nationalist movements and leaders under the British and French mandates, as well as the regimes in independent states, used ceremonies in their efforts to build a collective national memory and a shared national identity. In Mandatory Palestine and in Israel after 1948, the commemoration of events from the distant past such as the defense and fall of Masada (in 79 CE) and the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba Revolt against the Romans (in 132–135 CE), and the events from the recent past such as the defense of a Jewish settlement in the Battle of Tel Hai in 1920, helped with the creation of a collective Jewish/Israeli historical consciousness. The recovery and reinterpretation of these historical events that ended in defeat and death turned them into heroic myths and legends of national revival.7 In Iran in the 1930s, the commemorations and celebrations of pre-modern Iranian poets such as Hafez, Sa‘di, Omar Khayyam, and Ferdowsi as national poets, as well as the annual nowruz (new year) celebrations , and celebrations of the Shah’s birthday, became an important part of Reza Shah’s efforts to create a modern, secular national memory and identity Celebrating National Holidays  181 for Iranians. By building mausoleums for these poets to function as “secular pilgrimage sites,” and through public commemorations such as millennial celebrations of Ferdowsi, the Pahlavi regime tried...