Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No.

1 March 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2011.01391.x

Small Towns in Turkey: Footnotes in

Somebody Else’s History johs_1391 100..115

SEZAI OZAN ZEYBEK*

Abstract This article follows the trajectories by which modernity and development
in Turkey have been constituted as an antagonism between villages and cities. Both
inspired, albeit in opposing ways, modernising/ developmental ideals, and consti-
tuted the true locus of nationalist discourses. Meanwhile, small towns with shrink-
ing populations, low-level capital accumulation and limited jobs have been left
invisible. They have been depicted as irrelevant places of the same essence, which
had nothing to add to the story. As such, the article is an analysis of how the
Republican history is constructed as a narrative of an antagonism between the West
and the East, backwardness and progress, modern and non-modern. What follows
is an exploration of how provincial places and people, which are lumped together on
either side of these binaries, are left out, silenced or marginalized.

*****

Introduction
Frantz Fanon once wrote that he felt he had been robbed after
reading Jean Paul Sartre’s assertion about negritude. According to
Sartre, negritude was the minor term, the negativity, of a dialectical
progression towards a race-less society. According to him, it carried
the root of its own destruction: negritude was a transition and not
a conclusion; a means, not an ultimate end. Here is Fanon’s reply
to Sartre:

[And] so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was
already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my
bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to
burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn
of history . . . I am not a potentiality of something; I am wholly what I am.
(Fanon 1970: 134–135)

Fanon was well aware that the dialectic relation Sartre was
proposing had already been completed. Beings were rendered
meaningful only as “effects” of a pre-described narrative. Every
component of it, with their past, present and future, were con-
tained. What was “out there”, with its own “bad nigger’s misery, bad

* Sezai Ozan Zeybek is a PhD candidate in the Geography Department at

The Open University.

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA.
 Small Towns in Turkey 101

nigger’s teeth, and bad nigger’s hunger”, was reduced into some-
thing possessing an ideal substance of progression: the “nigger”
was domesticated.
Yet, before concluding that Sartre’s proposal actually silenced its
very own historical agent(s), I propose to think about places and
people who have never been considered as agents by any account.
They have by no means been “important enough” to become “nega-
tivity”, let alone a thesis. Silencing has different layers, different
ways of limiting what we see and how we make sense of it. Once an
agent is carved out as the “true subject of history”, then a number
of places and people fall into the category of irrelevance and remain
as invisible remnants.
Both the invoked agents and the invisible remnants of history
are deprived of creation, albeit in different ways. In the case of
invoked agents, particularities are turned into sometimes-fictive
agents of known narratives and aspirations. Difference matters
as a modality, but their trajectories are already constituted else-
where and beforehand. What particularities are does not matter
as much as where they fit in (or do not fit in) established trajec-
tories of history. In the second case, however, one does not even
have to bother to know any particularity, imagined or real. His-
tories unfold without really being affected by those remnants.
So many places and people appear as a walker-on, as a figurant.
They exist, but in such a way that they disappear in stories of
others.
This article sets out to investigate these layers in relation
to each other, to analyse how places and people are lost either
way. In the first part of the article, I will look at how the village,
the alleged antagonist of modernity, is dismissed despite the
fact it was invoked as an agent of modernity. Then, I will proceed
with how small provincial towns figure in the Turkish Repu-
blican geography from a historical point of view by looking at
the literature of the period. Whereas villages and cities inspired,
albeit in opposing ways, modernising/developmental ideals, small
towns have remained as invisible trivialities in the shadow of
other stories. In the second part, I will explicate how this
tripartite division comes about and repeats itself in larger narra-
tives such as westernisation or modernity. I will argue that
narratives such as these do not only create false antagonisms
around idealised agents, but also create a number of third-degree
places which remain at the peripheries of historical events with
no or minimal contribution. This article is mainly an analysis
of third-degree places, which neither set examples nor provide
negativities of a dialectics. They rather remain trivial in-between
other agents.

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102 Sezai Ozan Zeybek

Villages That Have Never Existed

Republican geography in Turkey, for a long time, has been divided
between villages and cities. Indeed, the division between rural
and urban was the only division officially recognized by the
Turkish Republic, until a few decades ago (Sirman 2001). Class,
ethnicity, religion etc. did not exist from the point of view of
the state: people were classified as settlers either of rural or
urban locations, which together comprised the Turkish Nation.
A conflict-free society was imagined whose primary target was to
become modern as a whole.
In this representation, village and city were assumed to be the
primary agents of historical change. However, they were not simply
used as symbols of “modern” and “pre-modern places”. Rather,
a Janus-faced representation was deployed for each one that embed-
ded a tension regarding the meaning of modernity. Modernisation in
Turkey was an ambivalent project from the outset. It introduced a
debate about what to preserve and what to change, which was
frequently articulated around rural and urban life. In this respect,
one can observe two different, seemingly conflicting, lines of argu-
ment for village and city operating at the same time: one is celebra-
tory and the other is contemptuous as shown in Figure 1.
Especially in the early years of the Turkish Republic (founded
in 1923), villages have been a common interest for intellectuals,
bureaucrats and state elites. Villages were seen as the authentic
core of the Turkish Nation, where people lived up to the values of
age-old traditions and customs. Inspired by Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk’s1 well-known dictum (“The villager is the master of
the [Turkish] Nation”), rural places were treated as the kernel
from which the new nation would thrive again. As opposed to big
cities, which were “contaminated” with foreign influence (Bora and
Erdoğan 2003, see also Aykut 2007), villages allegedly “conserved”
Turkish-ness. Villages were seen as counterpoints to cities; hence
to excesses of Western influence.
In this respect, with the help of the village-figure, the modern
imperative of moving forward in time coincided with a desire of
reversing time backwards, and giving modernity a reboot, this
time within national terms. In other words, the village was an
object used to shuttle between the “spiritual” domain of the
nation and the “material” technologies of Western modernity (see
Chatterjee 1993 on the separation between spiritual and material
domains of modernity). The control of the spiritual domain
(assumed to be located in villages) was essential to assert difference
against Western modernity while technologies of the West were
being imported en masse. Therefore, villages were frequently

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 Small Towns in Turkey 103

Celebratory identifications Contemptuous identifications

Rural (Villages) • authentic • backward

• essential • ignorant

• pristine • fatalistic

• pure • reactionary

• loyal • closed to outside influence

• traditional • traditional

Urban (Cities) • exciting • mixed (ethnically)

• stimulating • degenerated

• cosmopolitan • unscrupulous

• bears diversity • unfaithful

• modern • corrupt

• open to novelties • open to novelties

Figure 1: A simplified matrix of urban/rural.

romanticised by the Turkish intelligentsia, who wished to attend

rural places as a “state of nature” (Yakın 2007).
Yet, the same reasons for celebrating villages were also used to
plead for the opposite arguments: due to age-old traditions and
customs, and the lack of outside influence, villages were seen as
impoverishing people’s mind and spirits and resulting in backward-
ness, boredom, and inertia. Although communitarian relations in
villages were partly celebrated, they were expected to give way to a
national modernity at the end.
In reality, however, villages did change only very slowly. In the
early years of the Turkish Republic, when it became more and more
apparent that villages did not really have what they were supposed
to have, this apprehension created a genuine disappointment. In
his novel Yaban [the Stranger], which is celebrated as one of the
most significant examples of the village-genre in Turkey, Yakup
Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1889–1974) tells the story of Ahmet Celâl,
a war veteran, who goes to a village and starts living there with
romantic ideals such as meeting people of his own blood and

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104 Sezai Ozan Zeybek

finding his true self that he had lost in cities. However, he soon
realises that actually he was “more a stranger to Anatolian
villagers than a Londoner to a Punjabi Indian”(Karaosmanoğlu,
1983, 1932: 56). One representation (village as an object of inspi-
ration) replaces another (as a despised object) in the novel: but no
matter what, they both obscure actual places and people out there:
a false familiarity destined to miss the other. Villagers in the novel
do not even have to talk, as Ahmet Celâl already comprehended
them.

How can I lead her [Emeti the villager] to reality? There are centuries between us.
How can I cross these centuries and reach her? . . . She is a person who was frozen
at a point in history and turned into a stone. She does not really talk. Just like
ancient scripts on epitaphs, I am the one who reads her. I spell her out.2
(Karaosmanoğlu 1983, 1932: 148–149)

The novel, based on Karaosmanoğlu’s travel notes in Turkey, pro-

duces a tension between the backward villager and the alienated
Turkish intellectual, represented by Ahmet Celâl. Yet, the whole
narrative is produced within the matrix of Janus-faced represen-
tation given in the figure above. In this matrix, there is actually only
one small step from the figure of “honest villager” to “child abuser”.

[I always assumed that] in this country there existed simple hearted, emotional, and
sincere people. The doors of the wealthy were open to the poor; and the roads out
there always ended up in warm homes. There, all women were mothers, all girls were
sisters and all children were sons/daughters . . . I assumed that I could find a
spiritual kernel despite all the poverty. But what do I see now? Anatolia! This is the
land of müftis giving advice to enemies, village chiefs showing the way to enemies,
town gentry3 looting his neighbour’s goods and backing every usurper, infidel women
keeping deserters, fake zealots who got weak due to syphilis, religious men pursuing
boys [for sexual intercourse] in the courtyard of mosques.
(Karaosmanoğlu 1983, 1932: 135–136)

Familiarity of Small Towns

No one can ever be himself in this land!
In the land of the defeated and the oppressed,
to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore I am.
Orhan Pamuk,
The Turkish Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature

While early narratives of modernity in Turkey invoked villages and

cities as genuine locations of national aspirations and the primary
agents of historical change, small towns mostly remained as trivial
addendums to the “main story”, as strange amalgams of the two. In
the rural/urban division of modern Turkish geography, it is not
clear where small towns really belong. They sometimes blend in

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contemptuous accounts deployed against cities, both of which

exploit the labour as well as the goodwill of hardworking villagers
(Gözütok 2007; Karpat 1962), and at other times, they are cited
along with villages as being a site of backward traditions and
conservatism. They preserve simplicity like villages, but not com-
pletely, and they are on their way of becoming modernised like
cities, but not entirely. Their place is almost arbitrary, neither here
nor there. Like a formless creature, they infiltrate into others’
stories. One could easily switch to towns while complaining about/
celebrating villages, or cities.
“Provincial towns”4 in Turkey are depicted as deprived of agency,
change, and worst of all, imagination. In novels, in daily conversa-
tions, in mainstream media and so forth, these places are spoken
about as if they were “one” entity. There is one word for designating
all small towns: taşra (read tush-rah). Regardless of where they are
or what they are, provincial towns are considered to be pretty much
the same place. One does not even have to identify a location
or time to be able to talk about them. They have always been out
there, always the same. In his “Travel Notes in Anatolia”, first
published in 1932, a well-known novelist in Turkey, Reşat Nuri
Güntekin, states that:

[In my travel notes] I do not indicate any time or place. Because in Anatolia, all
places and times are so similar to each other, they all look like each other. . . . Travel
as much as you want on this endless road, you will end up in the same spot. This
similarity [of Anatolian towns] gives me boredom as well as melancholy.
(Güntekin 1980: 9–11)

Small towns appear in plural – plural, yet of the same essence; one
does not need to bother to distinguish them from each other. Notice
the words in plural in the citation from Ayfer Tunç’s novel Kapak
Kızı [Cover Girl] published in 1992.

In the houses of small towns, which our train passes through, meals are cooked.
Women, who have given birth too many times, are washing clothes with their frozen
purple hands. On the ground floors of half-finished buildings, there are grocery
stores (. . .) In these towns, right now, women hairdressers are colouring the hair
of wives of bureaucrats (. . .) They are envying [their] soft white hands. Young boys
of the town are playing card games in coffee shops, or rolling around the houses of
young women they loved. (. . .) When young girls turn on the TV, it takes them to
other places, to other worlds with other men and other women . . . In these other
worlds, it is whispered by the TV, life is lived differently. And they hear the rumbling
sound of the train passing by their home. Its speed does not allow them to dream.
Trains would take their dreams along.
(Tunç 1992: 26–27, italics are mine)

Despite the numerous subjects in plural in the above quotation,

what they really produce is a big singular entity called taşra.

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106 Sezai Ozan Zeybek

Questions such as “where”, “when” or “which” do not affect the

description: “young men of this town, that town and next town are
playing games”.
As a matter of fact, the word taşra has no plural in Turkish. It can
be used either to designate a particular place (in singular), or any
and every location in Turkey (in singular again). As such, hetero-
geneity of and in place is transformed into a sheer plurality, that is,
“more of the same”. From the Western flatlands of Turkey to the
war-deprived towns of the East, from the mountainous North to the
touristy towns of the South, any place could be referred as taşra.
It is (in singular) a familiar place, familiar yet distant. The eyes
looking at taşra are accustomed to familiar objects; they take
comfort in these objects: hastily erected apartment blocks,
aimlessly roaming young boys, older women on the way to their
neighbours, teahouses full with men playing cards from dawn
to dusk . . . Every town has the same Republican buildings: police
station, post office, government office, fire station, public housing
for bureaucrats, municipal building in the town centre (almost
always the same architecture, a park with a small pool at its centre,
neighbourhoods with narrow asphalt alleys . . . everything seems
so similar in provincial towns, one is saturated with those abiding
scenes.
Paradoxically, their familiarity derives from their distance,
because familiarity, as such, is produced not by a direct gaze, but
by means of a number of discursive devices and representations;
hence “familiarity” in quotation marks. Concrete, day-to-day rela-
tions are silenced by the alleged “familiarity”. Taşra is “familiar”
only within specific temporal-spatial registers of civilising dis-
courses, which posit taşra either as “behind” in time (by way of
erasing the crucial question: “whose time counts as contempo-
rary?”) or as far in space. In this temporal-spatial register, taşra
seems to be already explained, ranked and lined up on a linear
temporal line. Yet, the more it is explained, the more it becomes an
alien; or, as Sara Ahmed puts it, what is beyond representation is
also, at the same time, over-represented and rendered familiar
(Ahmed 2000). Taşra is familiar yet an incomprehensible-alien
entity from where it is seen:

It is impossible to explain this to someone who has never been in Anatolia. Villagers
and gentry [of towns], who spent their meaningless lives in a colourless and dim
world like in medieval times, passing their entire time sitting on a sheepskin behind
a sales booth, reading Koran and rocking, did not know a thing about the new
inventions of the civilized world . . . What was crossing these people’s minds: people,
who were born and died in mud and lived at least 400 years behind the [civilised]
world?
(From Faik Baysal’s novel, dated 1955, quoted in Türkeş 2005: 173)

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“Familiar” objects, (and people, if the eye is willing to distinguish

them) make taşra a place which one allegedly knows without nec-
essarily having been there. But there is always something “more”
in taşra, which defies penetrating looks: “what was crossing these
people’s minds?” Despite all its familiarity, it remains inconceivable
for the “modern” mind to live in “non-modern” ways: having differ-
ent desires, thoughts, and a different consciousness. The represen-
tation of taşra, which replaces what is actually there, also brings
about an “insurmountable distance” alongside.
In this representation, taşra is a replication: a multiplicity of
undifferentiated, mono-plural places. One can liberally extend his
knowledge of these places because the representation of provin-
ciality replaces any and every small town. Their heterogeneity
becomes either trivial or a variation of established historical trajec-
tories. Unlike the city or the village, taşra does not function as one
of the components in a dialectical relation. It is not invoked as an
agent of established historical trajectories. It rather comes into view
-or hides- in-between village and city, the two main figures of the
early nationalist aspirations. Taşra is someone else, therefore it is.

Taşra has always been a component of a picture, whose frame is decided by others.
Its presence is made possible by a centre outside of taşra. Taşra itself makes up the
outside.
(Argın 2005: 274)

A Reinvigorated Figure of Taşra

This division between rural and urban has not persisted until
today. The “village”, as a Republican project, has lost its impetus in
the national agenda. Due to incremental migration to cities and
towns in the last 50 years, current agricultural policies, which are
implemented in line with EU schemes5, along with poverty, war and
evacuation of villages in the South-Eastern region by the Turkish
military, villages have been hollowed out. So they are not counted
as symbolic figures of the narrative of progress anymore. For the
first time in history, the urban population exceeded the rural
population in Turkey towards the end of the 1980s and reached
seventy-five percent as of 2008 (TÜİK 2008).
After intense migration waves from rural locations to urban
centres, a revised taşra figure has emerged as an expansive
category, which, it is told, started “swallowing” cities. Becoming
“provincial” (taşralaşmak) has become one of the most common
complaints in Turkey from 1980s onwards. From patronage rela-
tions in politics to new migrant neighbourhoods in cities, from the
headscarf controversy to “deculturation”, many issues in Turkey

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108 Sezai Ozan Zeybek

are being associated with becoming more taşra-like. Taşra is

also identified with coarse, selfish and cunning people, mostly of
migrant origin, who care for nothing but their self-interest: hastily
erecting buildings, cutting down trees, polluting water resources,
doing everything perfunctorily that will not last etc. all for daily,
short-term profits. In this regard, taşra points to the undesired
results of capitalism and progress: crowded, ill-proportionate,
jumbled cities unleashing uncivilized behaviours mostly of “new-
comers”. “Taşra is everywhere”, it is denounced, “it is among us!”
In this discursive formation, taşra figures as something that could
not adapt itself to the necessities of modern life such as urban
manners, professionalism, refined cultural tastes etc. In many
realms as diverse as from politics to life style, taşra connotes an
excess, a parody of a genuine modern, like a parvenu whose imi-
tation is always a bit too much to the point of absurdity. Taşra, so
to say, represents the failed version of modernity.
However, the common and casual invocation of the figure of taşra
does not really mean that small towns have become an issue. On
the contrary, taşra, the way it is frequently used in such com-
plaints, is rather invoked as an urban problem, mostly originating
from the outskirts of the big cities, from the encounters between
urban elites and newcomers.
According to Hasan Bülent Kahraman, “peripheries at the centre”
(migrant neighbourhoods in big cities) and “centre at the peripher-
ies” (the new bourgeois class residing in developed and wealthy
Anatolian towns such as Kayseri or Gaziantep6) make up the
two main components of the Turkish political scene after 1980s
(Kahraman 2008). He argues that contemporary politics in Turkey
is a struggle between the Republican elites (centre at the centre, by
implication) and these two groups. In this picture, small towns,
towns with shrinking populations, low level capital accumulation
and limited jobs, do have only a latent, if any, role. As “peripheries
at peripheries”, small towns appear only from behind urban prob-
lems, as a departure point of migrants, and as the origin of urban
degeneration. Meanwhile, actual small towns have become distant
places, distant more than ever.
So, what is left “to be” in the distant, yet familiar lands? Appar-
ently, not much! Murat Belge, a prominent writer/intellectual
defines small towns as “a place of shrinking horizons, a crushing
monotony, a suffocating conservatism, a constricted universe of
communication, a barren public space stuck within communities,
and a disciplining authority of the ordinary” (Belge, quoted in Bora
2005: 40). Each of the above statements almost always takes its
reference from somewhere else. The provincial town is always sur-
rounded by someone else, which is obviously not an arbitrary

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 Small Towns in Turkey 109

someone else, but the subjects of true history. It is always someone

else, who authorizes the significant and insignificant; what is desir-
able and what is not, and most importantly, what is historical and
what is inconsequential.
In this respect, taşra, as it is analysed here, should primarily be
understood not as a material entity or as a mere product of eco-
nomic and administrative processes but as a form of knowledge,
which lays the ground for dichotomous explanations. Its position
becomes invisible in-between the oppositional forces of the village
(authentic but inferior) and the city (modern but excessive), which
were seen as the two main agents of historical change until 80s in
Turkey. As a consequence, what is left to small towns are, at best,
hue-less a priori sociological categories (Tuncay 2005), and at
worst, historical irrelevance.
In the next section, I will expand on this idea and look at, within
a broader context, how particular discourses produce this split
between the “subjects of true history” and their spurious followers

Subjects of True History

Classification of places and constitution of a genuine history that
re-orders a multiplicity of events into a single narrative are not at
all new, nor are they specific to Turkish Republican geography.
Postcolonial literature has taught us that rupture and difference
between “them” and “us”; between locations where history is told to
happen and other locations, in which history is a derivative of some
place else (yet-to-be-modern places) is part and parcel of an hier-
archical order. History, in this set up, consists of a movement of
an agent; the rest only follows. Particular narratives on globalisa-
tion, modernisation/modernity or development posit certain actors
(usually “the West”) as protagonists, and everything else as antago-
nists, whose stories are a function of the protagonists (Bhambra
2007; Mitchell 2000; Wolf 1982; Chakrabarty 1997). Modernity,
globalisation, Westernisation or whichever notion replaces them,
become the motor of history and also the point of reference against
which all others are then to be measured. In the best scenario,
modernity appears to be a desired final destination, which latecom-
ers have their own creative ways of approaching (Bhambra 2007 for
a critique of “multiple modernities”). In the worst scenario, they are
expected to get off the stage (Hoogvelt 1997).
This picture not only flattens out provincial places, but also the
West and the East, the so-called protagonists and antagonists of
history. As any other place on the world, both actually populate a
swarm of differences, unfitting elements and ambivalent moments

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that cannot be contained in the East/West division. They challenge,

and sometimes subvert, established historical narratives.
With reference to our case, one does not only bypass taşra from
Turkish history but also distorts villages and cities by grounding
them in already-constituted narratives of progress, Westernisation
and nationalist claims of superiority. They are neither as homoge-
neous as these accounts picture them nor are they purely anta-
gonistic entities. For one, there have always been flows of ideas,
bodies, materials, information and so forth between them; the
assumed rupture has always been problematic. But within the
confines of dichotomous representations, differences either recede
from view or are arrested within ready-made oppositions of con-
trary predicates: East/West, backward/forward, village/city.
Here, I want to point out a parallel between the Turkish geogra-
phy under discussion and the geographies of colonial/modern dis-
courses in order to demonstrate how particular subjects come to
pass as antagonistic entities along with hierarchical divisions. How
does history become the history of an opposition?
The first aspect to mention is the unspecified use of time and
place of colonial/modern registers, which actually set up a rupture
of times and places between particular locations. Anne McClintock
identifies two interrelated tropes regarding places and people “out
there”: anachronistic space and panoptical time. In anachronistic
spaces, “colonized people do not inhabit history proper but exist
in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of
the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational,
bereft of human agency –the living embodiment of the archaic
primitive” (McClintock 1995: 30). Anachronistic space signifies the
denial of coeval-ness; it inserts a tabular conception of time based
on evolutionism through which different societies and places are
ordered according to their difference in time (Fabian 1983).
The other trope, panoptical time, is “the image of global his-
tory consumed – at a glance- in a single spectacle from a point of
privileged invisibility” (McClintock 1995: 30). With panoptical time,
one centre, the West in McClintock’s account, posits itself as able
to understand and locate cultures in a universal time frame, to
acknowledge their various historical and social contexts and even-
tually to transcend them and render them transparent.
In this regard, taşra is a concept that is both temporal and
spatial; but it can be talked about without specifying any time
or any place: To quote Althusser, what we observe here is “space
without places, time without duration” (Althusser quoted in
Bhabha 1994: 204) “The temporal dismissal of the Other is always
such that [it] remains integrated in our spatial concepts of logic”
(Fabian 1983: 127).

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Confiscation of particularities by quelling their spatial-temporal

composition is very much interrelated with how power is concep-
tualised. In geographies such as these, power seems to be pos-
sessed by one centre and then it permeates from there to the
receivers (Allen 2003). Processes such as modernity or globalisation
appear as already “imagined” (Chatterjee 1993). They become
modular “packages” that uncoil in different places, while most of
the world, especially places at peripheries, become perpetual con-
sumers of globalization (or modernity, or colonial violence for that
matter).
At least two problems arise from this particular understanding:
first, one loses sight of different modalities of power-differences
between manipulation, domination, seduction, persuasion, coer-
cion and inducement. Although different forms of power relations
are exercised in and between places, they are ruled out of this
representation. The only relation left is a hegemonic one. Periph-
eries could only be countering something, and “power [seems to be]
always on the other side of the wire” (Allen 2003: 186). The weak
can only be defined as the second moment in this relation; its role
is usually limited with reacting to what the powerful side has
previously enacted.
The second problem is that various places can only be seen as
“malformed” extensions of a centre. Peripheral places seem to be
determined only in their relation to one centre, and that seems to
be the only relation that matters: peripheries become familiar
through some place else. They have nothing to add to the story;
they are just added up as sheer pluralities, as “effects” of some
place else.
To summarise, the issue analysed here stems from a repre-
sentation that sublates any difference into the teleology of progress
and development, which is saturated with national aspirations in
Turkey. “Distant lands out there” become a unity by “succession
of plurals”: every town, every village, every person becomes a bare
repetition, a repetition of the same.

Every time we encounter a variant, a difference, a disguise or a displacement, we will

say that it is a matter of repetition, but only in a derivative and “analogical”
manner . . . This extrinsic material model, however, takes repetition as already
accomplished . . . [and] suppresses the thickness in which repetition occurs and
unfolds
(Deleuze 2004: 341)

What is out there, then, can only consist of more of the same
(distant yet familiar), or become the negative of something else (e.g.
village, the East) within the “iron walls of representation”, to quote
Deleuze again. Historical subjects discussed in this article are

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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No. 1 March 2011
112 Sezai Ozan Zeybek

contained in this representation. Histories that are interwoven

around protagonists and antagonists suppress not only heteroge-
neity of time but also spatial relations in place. In short, such
histories paradoxically are without time and without place.
But time and place have always been plural and explosive.
Meltem Ahıska observes that heterogeneous times spring from all
over the place and make impossible to sustain homogeneous con-
structs of the Turkish nation (Ahıska 2010). “Discrepant” stories
of Armenians, Kurds, “disobedient” women, mutinous villagers,
and other “restless” social actors reveal that the history of mod-
ernisation in Turkey has never simply been based on a separation
between peripheries and centres -villages and cities, respectively.
Different locations have had different trajectories as modernisation
has brought forth suppression, violence and denial for some and
prosperity for others. Furthermore, differential power relations
have cut across class formations, ethnic and religious affiliations,
and gendered segregations within locations.
Parallel to this, power, too, has marked and discarded particular
groups in altering ways throughout the Republican history. For
example, religion (Islam), for long, has been associated with tradi-
tions, and hence, with villages and Anatolian towns (for example
Ayata 1996; Kahraman 2008). Similarly, Kurds and women have
been considered to be the “traditional segments of society”, but
in different ways: women “upheld” traditions whereas Kurds were
“stuck in” traditions.
In this regard, the tripartite division presented in this article is
only a facet of how indeed particular groups and locations are
deprived of time and place. Depending on the intentions of inter-
locutors and according to the changing priorities in time, a number
of other subjects are marked (e.g. Turkish origin, secularist men
as against Kurds, women, religious sects etc.) as subjects of true
history. However, as long as histories are constituted around
rupture and difference, regardless of how they invoke their sub-
jects, an “undifferenciated/irrelevant plurality” will come along.
Irrelevant subjects of history will linger in distant lands out there:
obscure; yet already determined within the representation.
With regard to small towns in Turkey, irrelevance is related to a
plain lethargy attributed to towns. There are only a few questions
left one could ask: “are they developed, are they modern, is it boring
to live there?” What is left to provincial places is the lack of dreams,
as the quotation below from the Turkish Novel, Kapak Kızı, alludes:
[Living in a small town] means complying and loitering with what life has brought
forth. It even means a sort of indolence. He [Ersin the protagonist of the novel]
thought that this had to be the biggest indolence in life: having no dreams . . . Why
shouldn’t they be conservatives? They were happy. They did not even notice how

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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No. 1 March 2011
 Small Towns in Turkey 113

maddening it was to spend days of their lives, which were same as any day. They did
not have any dreams concerning future; they have forgotten all their dreams if they
had once.
(Tunç 1992: 27–28)

Thinking Through Provinces

Small towns are deprived places. Not only because they lack
capital or infrastructure, but also because they do not partake in
any important story worth telling. Or better, they do partake, but as
a function of already-established stories. They make up, not the
second, but the third moment of the relation, in-between the
alleged struggle of cities (modernity) and villages (traditions) in
Turkey. On this ground, Ahmet Çiğdem, a scholar from Turkey
can assert that “small towns cannot use their agency for change;
they do not have the necessary formation for that change. They
have imploded and then extinguished but they still cannot get
off the stage . . . Small towns are one of the ‘glorious losers’ of the
‘Old World’ ” (Çiğdem 2005: 105). For him, the only solution is
to leave small towns on their own until they accomplish their
self-destruction. Indeed, why should one even change them if one
could not even see them as historically/geographically relevant?
They are “elderly places consisting of old people, old relations and
old objects” (ibid: 105).
What are silenced in this type of “retreat” stories are not only
small towns in Turkey per se, but the very source of creation and
inventiveness. Differences are forced into previously established
identities, or they are discarded completely. Put simply, what is out
there is confined to what is already known. As a consequence,
difference turns into social distance, into a metaphorical remote-
ness, in space and/or in time: as Bhabha suggests, this is “how
newness enters the world” (Bhabha 1994). Meanwhile, places
become mere instruments in which the action of the historical
progression (be it development, modernisation or nationalism) is
embodied. They are acted upon, rather than acting themselves, in
this kind of history. They do not invent; they do not create.
What is at stake is diversity here and now. The geographical
divisions discussed in this article condition all possible experience
within the schemata of a priori determinations. If they do not fit
into them, they become provincialised: trivialised and discarded
from mainstream narratives. Provincial places are those that are
silenced in-between the other subjects.
One point is important here: Provincial places are everywhere:
“they are among us”. The indeterminate, undifferenciated multi-
plicity exists in the so-called West, East, city, village and every other
location in-between. For this reason, instead of understanding any

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Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 24 No. 1 March 2011
114 Sezai Ozan Zeybek

and every location within given categories of modern, West, tradi-

tional etc. perhaps it is meaningful to start treating every place as
“ordinary”, as Jennifer Robinson suggests (Robinson 2004). “Ordi-
nary places” calls for an understanding of spatial and historical
relations in and between different geographies, not only between
the “antagonists” and “protagonists” of world history. It calls for
excavating diversities and discrepancies within locations as well
as interconnections between them, which would complicate
geographies/histories based on ruptures.
Thinking through provinces, then, is opening up a possibility
of challenging those divisions upon which antagonistic/dialectic
histories are built and through which specificities are discarded.
Subjects, in this representation, in their many forms, are not
necessarily antagonistic entities. They do not provide a meaning-
ful framework for understanding differences and similarities.
Instead, they are simply mirror terms constituted by the same
symbolic order, which dampens any meaningful voice of provincial
possibilities.

Notes
1
The founder of the Turkish Republic (1881–1938).
2
All the translations from Turkish are made by the author of this
article.
3
Despite Yaban is a village novel, which starts and ends in a village,
notice how small towns fill into the narrative.
4
“Provincial” in the Turkish language primarily signifies small towns
mostly located in the Anatolian Peninsula. Its Turkish counterpart, taşra,
literally means “outside” and unlike in English, it does not necessarily refer
to rural places or villages.
5
EU schemes envisage a drastic reduction in rural population affecting
more than 10 million people.
6
These Anatolian cities are called as “Anatolian Tigers” to designate
their achievement. The bourgeoisie of these towns are well-connected to
other metropolitan centres and to global flows.

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