Expropriating the dead in Turkey: how the Armenian quarter of İzmir became Kültürpark

Abstract

ABSTRACT The İzmir fire of 1922, as well as the subsequent re-building of the area of the fire according to a new master plan, have been studied quite extensively. But so far, nobody has looked into the politics of the expropriation and compensation surrounding them. This article studies the expropriation of the İzmir fire area in the late 1920s and the subsequent urban renewal project of the 1930s by contextualizing them within the history of the dispossession of Armenians and Orthodox Greeks in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. As Morack shows, some property owners in the fire area were able to negotiate much better terms for their expropriation than others. Those who had been killed or expelled in 1922 and whose physical property had been destroyed in the fire were also expropriated, but never compensated. Their physical dispossession was thus repeated in the legal realm. Based on a variety of archival sources from archives in Germany, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, this article shows that Armenian compensation claims were appropriated by the İzmir municipality and other state agencies. This, however, aroused the interest of the national treasury, which in 1941 claimed those compensation sums that should have been paid for plots in the former Armenian quarter now covered by a large park known as Kültürpark. Morack argues that the treasury did so because the Abandoned Property Law of 1922 had officially made it the universal custodian of ‘disappeared’ (mütegayyip) property owners.