The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey

Abstract

This paper discusses demographic engineering and the renaming of places as closely interrelated policies of nationalising states seeking to increase their hold over contested territories. Such policies comprise destructive –deportation, ethnic cleansing, population exchange– as well as constructive aspects, such as the establishment of national institutions, and the creation of narratives, foundational myths and toponymes. It argues that emerging nation-states in Southeast Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century evicted undesired ethno-religious groups and projected their national visions of time and space on their newly acquired territories. This ‘Hellenisation’, ‘Bulgarianisation’ or ‘Turkification’ was achieved, inter alia, by the destruction of the status quo ex ante that is the pre-national, heterogeneous toponymical order and by the construction of a system of place names reflecting the nascent national order of time and space. Within this context, the case of Turkey between 1915 and 1990 is particularly insightful as it illustrates the causal relationship between demographic engineering and renaming places, highlights the indispensable role of a semi-autonomous bureaucratic regime and exposes the power and the constraints of state-directed efforts imagining a purely ‘national’ order of things.