Documenting the Past and Publicizing Personal Stories: Sensescapes and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey

National identification practices and nationalist historiography in Turkey have long focused on erasing differences and diversity and configuring a “homogeneous” nation. More recently, an increasing personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification in contemporary Turkey, traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. This shift in the way people engage with the past is symptomatic of nostalgia for a traceable self-identification through family histories pursued to geographies of “origin” as opposed to the “administered forgetting” of such identifications by nationalist ideologies. We can track this change over the last two decades in cultural products, such as documentary novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks, which have opened a space in the public domain to reconsider the past and to rewrite history at an individual level. The dynamics of this change are particularly evident in the case of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange and its representation in Kemal Yalçın’s documentary novel, The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange (Emanet Çeyiz).