Abstract
In the early Republican period of Turkey transformation of the rural areas occurred in a development programme that involved peasants. On the one hand, rural lifestyle was idealized in the nationaland cultural context. Also, the Turkish peasantry was considered as a significant labour resource for the agriculture-based economy. On the other hand, policies aimed to control the rural population in the newsettlements, which were forms of internal colonization practiced especially during the second half of 1930s. Starting from this point ofview, the new rural settlements, built from 1934 to the end of 1930s, emerged significant examples to explain the Republican programme tomodernize the village community under a united Turkish identity, even incompletely diverse localities. This paper aims to re-open the discussion of Turkey’s nation-building and modernization process from a perspective projected to the rural ideals, specifically to the Turkish village. It seeks to demonstrate how the policies of early Republican authority controlled rural Turkey in economic and socio-cultural terms,and altered the environment of the village community. It particularly focuses on the elaboration of ideas in architectural implementationduring the early Republican period of Turkey. Consequently, this paperintroduces the new rural settlements, emerging in the late 1930s inTurkey, pointing to their values as the historical monuments in Turkey’sarchitectural culture.
Highlights
The early Republican period of Turkey – from the post-First World War years to the late 1940s – emerged from an observable dynamism in terms of socio-cultural and economic reforms, which resulted in a wave of implementation in the built environment fuelled by ideals of modernization and nation building
It is a matter of consequence that architectonic implementations, which were generated in accordance with the economic and socio-cultural planning of the Turkish Village, echoed the republican venture, and became concrete examples of the ideology in rural Turkey
Idealization of the Land emerged as a vigorous concept after the “rural depopulation, anxieties about urbanization and the impact of the agricultural depression” [35: 147] in the Western World [36]
Summary
It is a matter of consequence that architectonic implementations, which were generated in accordance with the economic and socio-cultural planning of the Turkish Village, echoed the republican venture, and became concrete examples of the ideology in rural Turkey. During the first years of the Republican regime, the construction of rural settlements was generated within the frame of re-housing the existing population and settling the exchanged population coming from the former Ottoman territories after the First World War and the Greco-Turkish War. All the correspondence and ministry council decisions during the 1920s demonstrated the lack of economic and organizational structures and presented a consensus view about the urgency of housing the incoming people, sanitary improvements in existing villages and the construction of dwellings in rural areas with the modern facilities. The first years’ operations were carried out by the state, implementing the 1924 Village Law and the 1926 Settlement Law. The Ministry of Population Exchange and Housing organized the construction of new settlements in 10 regions where the larger cities and towns had sufficient infrastructure, convenient areas for village construction and abandoned properties [14: 52-53].
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