Patrimoines culturels et fait minoritaire en Turquie et dans les Balkans. (Anatoli. De l'Adriatique à la Caspienne: Territoires, politique, sociétés ed. by Méropi Anastassiadou

Abstract

Reviewed by: Patrimoines culturels et fait minoritaire en Turquie et dans les Balkans. (Anatoli. De l'Adriatique à la Caspienne: Territoires, politique, sociétés ed. by Méropi Anastassiadou Maria Couroucli (bio) Méropi Anastassiadou, editor, Patrimoines culturels et fait minoritaire en Turquie et dans les Balkans. (Anatoli. De l'Adriatique à la Caspienne: Territoires, politique, sociétés 6). Paris: CNRS Editions. 2015. Pp. 329. Paper €32. This is a welcome volume in the growing field of cultural history and heritage studies, with new research on the politics of national states toward religious, linguistic, and ethnic minorities in Turkey and the Balkans. In this post-Ottoman world, state authorities have developed strategies to conceal and silence evidence of past history inconsistent with national ideologies—including the presence of autochthonous minorities, a reminder of a common past strongly anchored in the background of national territories. Contributors examine state policies against heritage claims and analyze the consequences of a major contradiction between the will to build modern, homogeneous nation-states and the cultural realities facing these very state-builders since the nineteenth century: the multiethinc, multilingual, and pluri-religious dimensions of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans and Anatolia. They also examine the ways these negotiations have been influenced by the contemporary European legal and political environment and explore the importance of culture as one of the major challenges facing national authorities confronted with minority claims, especially those linked to memory and identity in Europe and Turkey. The chapters in Part 1 examine the policies of the nation-state toward autochthonous minorities from a sociohistorical perspective, with examples from Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. Yannis Kristakis underlines the importance of the notion of personal status in relation to the legal representation of minorities' interests within a sovereign state. He discusses the relevance of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to cultural policies, comparing the protection of monuments and material culture in Turkey and Greece. Thalia Dragona and Anna Frangoudaki's contribution concerns education policy and practices. They explore the limits of bilateral (Greek and Turkish) state agreements through their experience as heads of a European Commission [End Page 193] funded education program for the Muslim minority in Thrace. The project began in 1997, as Greece adopted a new policy toward the Muslim minority in Thrace, built on positive discrimination in education, a consequence of the government's acknowledgement of the European dimension of minority rights. Dragona and Frangoudaki analyze how the new policy disentangled minority education issues from the overall bilateral Greek-Turkish relations and opened the way for the implementation of new educational tools. This European project has successfully promoted equal opportunities for both children and adults through a long-term engagement of Greek public education civil servants with local authorities and community leaders. Renaud Dorhliac's chapter explores the fate of the dwindling Greek Orthodox minority in Albania, a tiny linguistic and religious community that has suffered demographic decline, comprising only 2% of the population today. The author explains how the community has successfully been assimilated into the Albanian national state, despite the Greek state's policy of support for Greek minority rights in the neighboring country. The chapters in Part 2 concern the different ways that monuments become landmarks within urban and rural space. The authors analyze specific relations between cultural traditions and religious holy sites, exploring the history of shared shrines, as well as property rights and the management of specific holy places. Bernard Lory's historical survey underlines the practical aspects of the conversions of religious monuments. He explains how F.W. Hasluck's work at the beginning of the twentieth century brought to light the fact that in the Balkans and Anatolia holy places have remained sacred through the ages, despite the religious denomination of their keepers. Moreover, he argues, holy shrines are often the only stone monuments in villages and towns of the Balkan region, whereas the most common vernacular construction materials were traditionally wood and cob. In this context, resistant materials like stone and marble were primarily destined for sacred architecture, so that converting a church into a mosque and vice versa was often no more than a pragmatic response to major social disruptions caused...