Çanakkale’s recent history on display in archival show

The archival exhibition “Önceleri Çanakkale,” put together by the Çanakkale Biennial Initiative, opened on July 6 at the Mahal Art Center in Çanakkale.

July 21, 2015, Tuesday/ 

Çanakkale, a seaport city on the southern coast of the Dardanelles, was home to the Battle of Çanakkale during World War I and the city's name has become anonymous with the war since then.

An ongoing archival exhibition organized by CABININ (Çanakkale Biennial Initiative) puts the city under the spotlight, focusing on civilian life within the city towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Titled “Önceleri Çanakkale” (Once Çanakkale), the show consists of three sections, the first of which delves into the history of the town before World War I.

“Çanakkale comes to the forefront with the Industrial Revolution and the globalization of commerce. At the end of the 19th century, there are 16 consulates of different countries in the city. Eleven languages were spoken among the residents and they were from different religions and ethnic groups. Three neighborhoods out of nine and half of the population were non-Muslim. Both vegetables and ceramics produced here were sent to a large geography from Beirut to Odessa, from Marseilles to Thessaloniki. This multicultural and multiethnic structure begins to transform at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the time period amounting to World War I. The effects of the war were felt in the city directly and commerce roads and transportation were negatively influenced. Also, with the migration flows from Crete, Crimea and the Balkans, the demography of the city also changed,” Deniz Erbaş, who co-curated the show with Seyhan Boztepe, told Today's Zaman.

The second part of the exhibition focuses on the Çanakkale Battle and the following occupation period. “Two-thirds of the city becomes uninhabitable due to the bombs, all the consulates got shut down, and city is emptied, as if life was frozen. After the war, there was a five-year-long British occupation in town and the whole place was surrounded with barbed wires and everybody coming and going was checked. The city gradually loses its old identity,” Erbaş explained.

The last part shows the years after the war, the first years of the Independence War and the early Republican era. “What comes to the front in this period is the population exchange which changed the demography of both the city and the whole region. In 1927, according to the first population census, 86 percent of the city was new immigrants, meaning that not even one-fifth of the population prior to the war was there anymore. During the first years of the Republican era, the attempts at social and cultural transformation in the city, just like in any other city in Anatolia, contribute greatly to the reconstruction of life all over again, however, it was impossible to have that multicultural life they had half a century before,” Erbaş said.

The Çanakkale Biennial Initiative, which uses MAHAL, an old storage building for a special kind of acorn, as their culture and art venue, began to explore the topic two years ago during the centenary memorials to the Çanakkale Battle. The fourth edition of the International Çanakkale Biennial, which took place in fall 2014, focused on the war, while in 2015, they wanted to offer a new perspective regarding the city. “Official authorities, and the culture, art, science and academy worlds, are remembering, analyzing and examining this war, which had very tragic results in multiple contexts, however, the city itself, which is the direct carrier of this heritage, the civilian life in this city, and values of this place is not something paid attention to. We can say that the city is excluded from this process. Our objective was to document these aspects too,” the curator added.