Remembering through Material Culture: Local Knowledge of Past Communities in a Turkish Black Sea Town

Abstract

This article looks at the interaction between narratives and material culture in the study of the local history of Tirebolu, a small town on the Turkish Black Sea coast. It derived from a larger project which had a different focus. The original project began in 1994 and continued until 2000. During the first part of the project (1994-96), the focus was primarily on women's knowledge of domestic life at the turn of the century.' The second part was undertaken during 2000, and looked at local knowledge, and the role of 'place' in the multiple ways of belonging to a certain locality. After interviewing a total of 32 people,2 as the manager of the project, I realized that there existed an interesting dialogue between places and people. The way narratives and material culture were interacting eventually became an inevitable methodological focus in the handling of both research projects. At times, it was a narrative that led me to chase a relic, whilst in other cases, a conversation about a neglected relic inspired a story to be told. Women, for instance, talked hours about the details of their houses, the public areas they could access, the beaches where they could swim, or the rocks which hid them. Men talked mostly about their bachelor times, the 'youth places' such as secret meeting corners, old shops, or playgrounds like cemeteries, hills and beaches. These narratives revealed a certain knowledge of the town's material culture and its historical relics. They led the researcher towards a visualization of an earlier life of the town at the turn of the century. Then, the town had a mixed population that included Turks (85 per cent), Greeks (15 per cent) and Armenians (one per cent), with an ethnic division of labour as described by E. Gellner.3 In many narratives, this earlier life of Tirebolu surfaced as fragments of stories about past communities, raising curiosity about the old appearance of the town, and stories of old relics. Remembering through material culture revealed indeed a local knowledge of past communities both Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The