Palimpsests of Multiculturalism and Museumization of Culture: Greco-Turkish Population Exchange Museum as an Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Project

In 2010, the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange Museum opened its doors as part of the Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture (ECoC) project. Presented as the first migration-themed museum of Turkey, it is a site of cultural recollection focused on family histories. Yet the museum, Iğsız argues, beyond being a site of memory, also crystallizes larger dynamics of cultural policy and recognition of alterity. Concentrating on the European Union Cultural Policy and the Istanbul 2010 ECoC, two official institutions that fund the museum, Iğsız analyzes the transnational dynamics of institutional and official endorsements of diversity and how such endorsements “museumize” culture for display. The article examines the limits of liberal multiculturalism as promoted in the EU cultural policy, revealing how Turkish officials have “discovered” liberal multiculturalism in the Ottoman past as a history of tolerance, which is manifested as a mode of neo-Ottomanism.