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ISSUE 1: SOLIDARITY | SEPTEMBER 2022 | FEATURE | BOOK REVIEWS
MISCELLANY

Kayseri with its Armenian and Greek Cultural Heritage

HRANT DINK FOUNDATION

Editor: Altuğ Yılmaz

Translators: Aleksandros Kamburis, Altuğ Yılmaz, Haris Theodorelis-Rigas, Merve Pehlivan, Mine Esmer, Suzan Bölme, Zeynel Can Gündoğdu

Published in 2016

Hrant Dink Vakfı Publications

Pages: 264

In an effort to afford a glimpse into Kayseri’s rich sociocultural past, this book traces the physical and built environment that has been left from the Armenian and Greek communities of the region, and presents the relationship of the urban culture of Ottoman Kayseri to its rural hinterland by way of statistical information and visual material. The book mainly comprises the findings of the fieldwork in Kayseri in the summer and fall of 2015 that was jointly undertaken by the Hrant Dink Foundation and the Association for the Protection of Cultural Heritage. Accompanied by contextualising introductory articles that shed light on the social and economic history of the Armenian and Greek communities in Kayseri, this book attests to the fact that the Kayseri that we know today is very much the product of the cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity it once enjoyed. 

At the end of the 19th century, non-Muslims constituted one-third of the population of the Kayseri Province. A significant number of their buildings have unexpectedly withstood the perils to this day, and yet they are deteriorating at an alarming pace. This book, which should be considered a 2015 photograph of this cultural heritage, was prepared with the hope that it will contribute to the processes of reconciling with the past. The latter is the prerequisite for the cultural heritage of the peoples who have been forcefully expelled from their homelands to not be neglected but to instead be protected like other cultural heritage. 

MISCELLANY

Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara and Kayseri

SURAIYA FAROQHI

Published in 2009

Cambridge University Press

Pages: 292

In her book Men of Modest Substance, Prof. Dr. Suraiya Faroqhi examines the neighbourhoods, houses, house owners, and property ownership relations in the 17th century through documents from the kadı registers of Ankara and Kayseri. The book fills an important gap in the relevant literature in that sense, and provides a discussion platform for certain important questions about Ottoman history based on tangible data rather than speculation.

When did different subgroups that made up the Ottoman Empire – an empire that was based on a society whose possibilities for ‘peaceful coexistence’ in the 17th century became unimaginable in later periods – start to drift apart from each other? To what extent did the 17th century urban societies of Ankara and Kayseri foreshadow the tensions of the 19th and 20th centuries? Did the notion that people of different religions congregated in separate neighbourhoods in the Ottoman Empire hold in every time and place? Or were there particular historical processes arising from various factors? To what extent did the Celali rebellions have an effect on the changes within the urban texture?

This important work, which is the product of a time/space journey in the narrow streets, centuries-old mansions and beautiful houses of rich and poor neighbourhoods in Ankara and Kayseri, also shares the joy of looking at history from a different and creative perspective by shaking up established patterns. 

MISCELLANY

Unutkan Ayna [The Forgetful Mirror]

GÜRSEL KORAT

Published in 2016 (7th edition 2021)

Yapı Kredi Publications

Pages: 280

‘When an event is written down, time disappears and waits for the reader's gaze to be revived.’ 

On a steppe morning in Nevşehir, on June 12, 1915: Within the scent of the pines, we rub our eyes, shivering from the chill. Life is in its usual course; death seems unfit for this world. However, everything will come running soon. In ten days, things will change. No one will ever be the same after that morning. 

In Unutkan Ayna, Gürsel Korat describes a time when humanity held its breath and gazed at Anatolia: 

It's like saying that ‘forgetting’ sometimes means ‘seeing everything completely’.

‘Look at me,’ said Mayreni, enraged. ‘We don't even know how many days we got left. Maybe we won't even have a grave. Maybe these children won’t be able to get what they want from each other.’ Mayreni's eyes filled with the shock of someone who had just understood what she was saying, her face tensed with horror, her voice grew hoarse: ‘Perhaps we’ll hold the dead bodies of our most beloved.’

MISCELLANY

Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics

ATSUKO ICHIJO VE RONALD RANTA

Published in 2016

Palgrave Macmillan UK

Pages: 205

Food, National Identity and Nationalism thoroughly examines the relationship between food and nationalism in the context of nationalist politics and global capitalism while drawing from contemporary case studies.

In the hands of power and authority, food becomes a tool that can be used to shape a nation. Symbolic debates about the national authenticity of a dish also positions this issue in an international framework. In their book Food, National Identity, and Nationalism, Ichijo and Ranta discuss how food is so intertwined with politics. This issue, which has been neglected in the studies of nationalism, is discussed in this book from different angles, from Japanese pasta to the Israelisation of Palestinian-Arab food culture and gastro-diplomacy carried out by nation-states in the international arena.

MISCELLANY

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

ANYA VON BREMZEN

Published in 2014

Crown Publishing Group

Pages: 368

What were Stalin’s table habits? How were the policies of ‘women’s emancipation from the kitchen’ implemented after the Bolshevik Revolution? What kind of food did the Soviet Minister of Food bring home from his trip to the USA? In 1960s Moscow, what would it have been like to live in ‘commune apartments’ where nearly twenty families shared a single kitchen, or to wait for hours in long bread queues? 

In Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, food writer Anya von Bremzen tells through food – both what she really ate and what she imagined she did – the history of the Soviet Union, from the traditional Russian dishes cooked by her mother to the dishes invented by people during the times of war and famine, from Lenin’s grain policies to the ‘Red October chocolates’. Recipes of dishes you've probably never heard of, widespread Soviet jokes about food products that couldn't be found, and funny anecdotes about people who shaped the history of this vast country add flavour to this colourful story, each page of which is full of surprising information.

MISCELLANY

MutfakTarih: Yemeğin Politik Serüvenleri [KitchenHistory: The Political Adventures of Food]

BURAK ONARAN

Published in 2015 (3rd edition 2019)

İletişim Publications

Pages: 348

Cuisine and food culture are intertwined with social history. They carry many hidden and obvious traces from social, economic and political history. Rethinking the vast landscape, from the classification of foods to cooking techniques, from culinary architecture to table setting and manners, together with their political and social aspects, provides interesting clues and essential information about societies and their cultures.

KitchenHistory first explores local examples: It focuses on how eating and drinking habits are transformed, the fiction of national cuisine, debates around pork, and the stages of presenting culinary culture in refined ways. Then, it draws a rich framework by focusing on the international cuisine culture transformed through wars and propaganda, nutritional regimes, calorie and statistics discussions, tactics of diplomacy around the table, and how the government meddles in the kitchen.

‘These are articles that try to open windows from history to the kitchen, from the kitchen to history, and to lean out from the windows they open to get a panoramic view to the extent possible. They touch upon many subtopics such as war, diplomacy, propaganda, gender, nationalism, consumer society, tourism, population, and religion. They aim to address these themes through food and culinary culture and try to trace the relationship, the interaction between them and the kitchen.’