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two the house takes on the weight of historical consciousness “Our Love was the most devastating fire of Aksaray,” wrote a poet in 1992.¹ But the Aksaray fire was in 1911, and the poet Güngör Dilmen was not yet born when it lit the Istanbul skyline, making the residents of Aksaray and its environs run for their lives with their children to Bayezit Square’s makeshift refugee encampment.² By Dilmen’s time the Aksaray fire had entered the collective memory, but in its own time it happened to real people. In the collective life of any country there are moments such as these that are felt to change both one’s personal life and the collective life at the same time. That is, these events are autobiographical in nature, but they are also communally experienced and quickly become part of a shared memory. The double nature of this event serves to reinforce (as well as refine or revise) memory, giving it added weight. Adair Lara wrote about this phenomenon in our time, pondering why she could remember where she was when John F. Kennedy was shot, or how she felt during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, or where she was when O. J. Simpson fled up the Los Angeles freeway in his Bronco. “Why should I remember that?” she asks. “I can’t remember Patrick’s first step, but I remember every detail of standing in that restaurant, watching that white Bronco, the other diners crowded around me.” She concludes that “such events, those that happen to everybody, stick in the mind because they mark a moment when something changed—and changed for us all at the same time.”³ The Aksaray fire was a shared memory that was discussed in the newspapers for days, with bit-  | imagining the turkish house ter stories and humorous poems; in fact, many of the fire victims’ only access to information about their own neighborhood was through the newspapers.⁴ Shared memory, then, is larger than autobiographical memory, but it is certainly rooted in the autobiographical and the contemporary in a way that collective memory, as Halbwachs imagined it and as we are using the term here, is not. Collective memory has no autobiographical component, for in collective or historical memory the person does not remember events directly; rather, memory is stimulated indirectly and inherited by way of memory images, such as the stories and songs that arose to recount the great Istanbul fires,⁵ or the portrayals in contemporary novels, paintings, or pageantry , such as the Karagöz plays discussed in Chapter 1. Collective memory, then, is a memory with a memory, or memory with a history. We could situate Dilmen’s poem in this type of history by discussing how the memories of Istanbul’s fires are kept alive in a variety of media such as songs and stories. Ultimately, however, we go back to a shared autobiographical moment. Just as the old wooden houses of Turkey appear in the collective memory, they can also be traced back to a shared memory. Yet the literature that deals with old houses, even at the autobiographical level or a shared moment of remembering, records a historical consciousness that is not related to memory so much as to emotions and desire. As suggested by Dilmen’s poem, it is only by looking at what appears to be memory that one can understand how the images that make up collective memory emerged and developed. It is for this reason, because we are always looking at what appears to be memory, that we must move backward in time. The child’s landscape painting of Ottoman-style houses, created in 1989, offers a useful way into the discussion. The prototypes for this painting were real houses in real places, but the painting was a memory image rooted in the collective imagination rather than an autobiographical memory of the Turkish cityscape. It marked, in fact, the central position of the Turkish house in the late twentieth-century Turkish collective imagination: the painting won first place in the 1991 Turkish unicef awards. Thus, the house was recognized in the real sense of the term, as an appropriate and emotionally believable representation of the past, as well as a hope for the future. Likewise, in the 1998 celebration of Ramazan in Istanbul, the municipality of Eminönü sponsored a “traditional” celebration. The open area of the old hippodrome, now Sultanahmet Square, was made into a “traditional” neighborhood and lined with...

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