This chapter looks at two competing historical narratives in Turkey in their struggles over collective memory for the production and contestation of communal identities. As Art (2006, 18) notes, ‘although many political scientists would agree that “memory matters”, there have been few studies that trace the nexus between ideas about the past and political power’. In parallel, Kansteiner (2002, 184) similarly points out that ‘despite this relatively obvious link, the connection between memory and identity has as yet been rarely discussed in memory studies’. As this chapter will illustrate, historical narratives open a fruitful strand of research into the study of society and politics that has so far been left relatively unexplored. In order to delve deeply into historical narratives at work in the Turkish case, this chapter focuses on struggles over (re)defining a nation through historical narratives by specifically focusing on the case of Ulus, Ankara. Ulus, which literally means ‘the nation’ in contemporary Turkish, became central first to the Kemalist modernisation efforts and later to the political Islamist goals of reshaping the nation once the political Islamists captured first municipal and then state level rule. The chapter compares how the secularist and Islamist versions of Turkish nationalism turned Ulus into an epicentre of hegemonic struggle by writing different historical narratives through different museums, ‘pilgrimage’ sites and monuments.

The past provides raw material for projects in the present and in the future. Like ideas, the past is not automatically transmitted either and it too needs to be mediated. History is narratological in character. It is always presented to us in narrative form, which attributes separate, objective facts, the continuity of a subject (Balibar 1992, 86). Narratives create a web of meaning around separate images and events of the past and facilitate the transmission of different perceptions of the past. Historical narratives create historical continuity between separate events. These connections are not necessarily predetermined and they involve political agency. It is always possible to narrate historical events in more than one way (White 1978; Zerubavel 2003) and different historical narratives have different political implications (Davis 2005; Ugur Cinar 2015a; Zerubavel 1995).