This article tells the story of the construction of Turkish national identity in the early republican era by addressing two canonical novels about occupied İstanbul: Sodom ve Gomore (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Biz İnsanlar (“We People”) by Peyami Safa. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkish nationalist intellectuals attempted to offer certain formulations and implemented various mechanisms to create a national self. The study aims to focus on the ways in which Karaosmanoğlu and Safa create the new Turkish national identity and deals with the questions of how occupied İstanbul was perceived by these intellectuals and how the memory of the Allied occupation of İstanbul, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the National Liberation Struggle shaped Turkish elites' self-identification as well as their formulation of the national identity.

In the 1930s, the attention of Turkey’s politicians shifted back from Ankara and Anatolian cities to İstanbul. In 1932, the Governorship-Municipality of İstanbul organized an urban design competition for İstanbul, and four foreign city planners were invited. In the meantime, Martin Wagner came to İstanbul for the preparation of urban reports. In 1937, Henri Prost, the prominent urbanist of Paris, was invited to İstanbul and prepared the first master plan of the city. In Turkey and in İstanbul, town planning processes have been significantly influenced by “Western” planning principles, cultures, and experiences while gaining a local meaning in the context of Turkish politics and the state-formation process. The aim of this study is to describe the urban design competition of 1933 and the first master plan of 1937. Beyond references to Western European cities as in the “city-beautiful” planning approach, this study, based on a series of official documents, plan reports and their rhetoric, investigates in particular the role of foreign planners/urbanists in İstanbul in the context of the construction of a nation-state. The analysis of these foreign planners’ work suggests that urban planning in Republican Turkey was closely linked to the construction of the nation state.