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From Praise to Condemnation

This article observes how architectural practice and symbolic appropriations interconnectedly produced space in 1920s’ Ankara, the new capital of the new Republic of Turkey. The once magnificent and powerful Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, had its centuries long authority removed to disassociate the country from corporeal memories of its Ottoman past. The old capital was associated both with imperial and Islamic characteristics, and the republicans aimed to build a capital that spatially represented modernity. Interestingly, however, they employed Ottoman Revivalism, the architectural style in vogue at the time, to embody the political power of the new republic. This article emphasizes the contradiction between the “retrospective” politics of Ottoman Revivalism and the “modernist” vision of the republicans. It explores the sudden collapse of the revivalist approach by tracing the trajectory of modernist discourse as it was influenced by the political dynamics of the time.