Identity, Monumentality, Security: Building a Monument in Early Republican Ankara

摘要

One of the major undertakings of the newly established Turkish nation-state was the making of a modern bourgeois identity. A particularly important site for this project was Kizilay Square in the new capital of Ankara, which would serve as both the political focus of the nation-state and the locus for the social activities of the emerging bourgeoisie. The means for integrating these two functions in the same space would be the Security Monument designed for the square. However, the production of the monument would illustrate the uneasy relation between the Turkish nation-state and the formation of a modern bourgeois identity.