The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz

Unclaimed and Anonymous Death in Turkey

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Aslı Zengin

n August 2019, on one of those extremely humid Istanbul summer days, I made the twenty-odd-mile journey

I north to the suburban resort of Kilyos on the Black Sea to visit the cemetery there. Aiming to avoid the infamous
Istanbul trafc of a typical workday, I had specifcally picked a day during the religious holiday of Eid Al-Adha, the
Feast of Sacrifce (Kurban Bayramı in Turkish). However, I was prepared for another type of trafc in the cemetery,
since Muslim religious holidays are occasions when families visit not only older relatives but also the graves of their
deceased and pray for them. People approach this duty as a social, religious, and affective debt that they do not nec-
essarily fnd time to pay amid the busy rhythm of their everyday lives, especially in a bustling, global metropolis like
Istanbul. But my purpose was not to visit a family grave; rather, I was going to the Kimsesizler Mezarlığı—literally,
the Cemetery for Those Who Have No One.
When mentioned in everyday conversation, this cemetery trigers a complex mix of feelings ranging from
disturbance and bewilderment to curiosity and fascination. The bodies of the unclaimed, of the abandoned, the
anonymous and the indigent lie buried in this cemetery. The cemetery for the kimsesiz could be rendered in English
as the Victorian “paupers’ grave” or Biblical “potter’s feld” or else the more prosaic “common grave,” but these all
fall short in expressing the loaded meanings associated with the term kimsesiz in the Turkish sociocultural context,
where the bonds of familial and communal connection are traditionally so fundamental to identity, personhood,
and status in life.
Turkey’s cemeteries for the kimsesiz are located within large graveyards, and Kilyos Cemetery has the largest
in the country.1 When I arrived in Kilyos, there were quite a few people entering and exiting the cemetery gate. I
stopped at the graveyard ofce to ask the whereabouts of the cemetery for the kimsesiz and learned that there were
actually two: the new one, built in 2009, and the old one, from 1999; altogether, they constituted three lots. The new
cemetery was located on the top of the hill, where the main road led; the old one was somewhere in the middle, a
half-hour walk away, so I decided to visit the new one frst.
The road to the new cemetery had lush green surrounds with rows of small family graveyards on either side,
each displaying the family name and a distinct design and architecture. I stopped several times to go in and look
over the well-designed tombs, reading the personal details inscribed on grave stones, observing the varied artistic
styles, and generally exploring the family parcels. Different motifs and symbols were engraved on some headstones
giving clues about the life of the deceased, while the materials used for each grave structure—expensive marble or
else granite or just concrete—displayed class difference even in death.
As I continued to walk, I passed by a section allocated solely for Syrians. Since 2019, the Istanbul Metropoli-
tan Municipality has allotted a section in Kilyos for Syrian residents of the European side of the Bosporus.2 The
newer and affordable status of Kilyos Cemetery has made it possible for Syrian families in Istanbul to purchase a lot

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 163
Vol. 42, No. 1, 2022 • doi 10.1215/1089201X-9698203 • © 2022 by Duke University Press
16 4 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Figure 1. One lot for kimsesiz graves. Kilyos Cemetery for the Kimsesiz, Istanbul, 2019. Photo by the author.
there, which is difcult or impossible in the city.3 While
walking around this lot, I noticed the absence of gran-
ite and marble headstones; instead, there were wooden
slabs, with details on the deceased in Arabic. Some gra-
ves were surrounded by flowers, and some slabs were
wrapped in a kifeyyeh, a traditional scarf with black-
and-white checkered patterns that is popular among
Arabs and Kurdish people.
Upon fnally reaching the top of the cemetery hill,
with its stunning view of the Black Sea, I needed a few
minutes to locate the new cemetery for the kimsesiz.
And then I found it, an arid, neglected, and untended
section, the ground divided into regular, rectangular
sections marked by concrete and covered in weeds.
The divisions were differentiated only by an assigned
number on the side of the grave, where I assumed the
deceased’s head would have been lain since there was
neither headstone nor any other sign of a personal
marker for these grave spots. The highest number I
could see was 683 (see fgs. 1–3). Here, numerical rep-
resentation functioned as a technical tool manifesting
anonymity by transforming the previous identifcation
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into an anonymous sign, into “non/status.”4 The names
of the deceased had lost their meanings as a public
marker, as a locater in the social topographies of life and
afterlife; and the deceased were anonymized through
the abstractive capacity of numbers.
Next, walking down the hill to the old section, I
was struck by the difference. In sharp contrast with the
new cemetery, the old one was extremely disorganized.
It had hundreds of license plates sticking out of the
ground, some sparsely distributed, others on top of each
other, and it was difcult to see where one grave ended
and the other one started (see fgs. 4–7). The disorgani-
zation had an underlying logic, however, with a social
stratifcation that brought certain groups together. For
instance, I spotted one section of graves that belonged
to deceased people with non-Turkish names. These
names did not sugest any particular place of origin or
ethnicity but it was striking to see the “foreign” and the
kimsesiz buried alongside on another.
Another striking point was the adjacency of infant
graves to the graves of the kimsesiz. One could read
from the headstones of these infant graves that they all
 Aslı Zengin
Figure 2. Equally divided grave spots for kimsesiz people. Kilyos Cemetery for the Kimsesiz, Istanbul, 2019. Photo by the author.
had died before completing their frst year in life.5 The
presence of headstones in fact verifed their claimed
rather than abandoned status, but only a few of these
headstones had information that tied them to a fam-
ily line. Otherwise their names were inscribed outside
blood kinship networks, such as “Baby Ahmet” or “Baby
Nermin,” with the year of their death. One headstone
was particularly striking, with its inscription of “Baby
Türk” (“Baby the Turk”) seeming to make a nationalist
icon from the death (see fg. 8). Regardless, with the
burial here of these infants, alongside the kimsesiz,
anonymity of adult death was accompanied by anonym-
ity of infant death, assigning them both a specifc non-
place in the hierarchies of social (non)membership and
belonging in Turkey.
This tour of the mortal architecture in Kilyos is
presented here as background for the main topic of
this article: the spatial ordering of death and afterlife
in the margins of social and political life in Turkey.
In the Turkish cemeteries for the kimsesiz, the state
inters the bodies of those who remain unidentifed or
unclaimed over a certain period of time. However, these
• The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz • Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 165
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graveyards serve a wider function than that, consti-
tuting burial sites for the social outcast. This category
includes the homeless; victims of honor crimes, other-
wise disowned members of blood families; premature
babies; and, more recently, unaccompanied refugees.6
The cemeteries further contain the bodies of political
detainees who have been “disappeared” under police
interrogation and state violence. Historically, the state
has deemed “unidentifed” many radical leftists and
Kurdish guerrillas killed in various ways and buried as
anonymous corpses at the kimsesiz sites, denying fam-
ilies and communities not only the mortal remains but
also the certain knowledge of death, a proper grieving
process, and hence the possibility of emotional closure.
Taken as a whole, the cemetery for the kimsesiz consti-
tutes a spatial design that environs others, those whose
lives are marginalized in different ways.
Through its multilayered social architecture and
the workings of forlorn and anonymized death, the
kimsesiz graveyard offers a unique way to discern the
complex relationship between the state and the family
through the lenses of ethnic, religious, gender, sexual,
16 6 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Figure 3. Concrete grave markers 598–600. Kilyos Cemetery for the Kimsesiz, Istanbul, 2019. Photo by the author.
and class difference in contemporary Turkey. Different
manifestations of this relationship at the moment and
in the aftermath of death constitute a terrain for under-
standing the social and the political margins of life, as
well as the limits of social legibility and belonging. The
state, through its various actors, develops an ambiv-
alent relationship with the category of the kimsesiz,
sometimes as a necropolitical violent actor, and some-
times as a compassionate benefactor, depending on its
complicated relationship with familial, communal, and
political status of the deceased. In order to understand
this mortal topography, frst, it is salient to examine
what it means to be kimsesiz in Turkey and what kind
of social and cultural implications this has in life, death,
and afterlife.
On Being Kimsesiz
Being kimsesiz literally translates as having no one,
no person in life. The Turkish word kimse translates as
“person” or “someone,” and the sufx addition -siz gives
the negative “without.” The abstract noun sufx -lik
may also be added; thus, kimsesizlik is used to connote
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the state of being kimsesiz, which is employed as both
a noun and adjective. Conceptually, this term is laden
with an array of meanings that describes multiple social
statuses in life, ranging across destitute and unclaimed,
poor and downtrodden, abandoned and homeless, for-
lorn and outcast, anonymous and unknown. A kimsesiz
implies a person who is deprived not only of material
benefts and possibilities but also of intimate and affec-
tive ties, of social bonds and community. In its popu-
lar understanding, a kimsesiz is someone with no one
who claims, loves, protects, and looks after them. It
means to be alone, on one’s own, without support, assis-
tance, or care. In sum, to be kimsesiz is to lie outside
the dominant networks of human belonging, to inhabit
a detached location, separated, mostly, as the other-
made-alien, in some way ejected.
In Turkey, the dominant family model of the
nuclear group based on heterosexual marriage between
consenting adults occupies a primary role in the frame-
works of social membership. Extended family members
are also considered part of this structure through the
consolidation of blood ties. They have prior roles in the
 Aslı Zengin
Figure 4. New grave construction adjacent to the existing ones. Kilyos Cemetery for the Kimsesiz, Istanbul, 2019. Photo by the author.
material and cultural economies of social reproduction
and care. Children, parents, and relatives are expected
to care for one another and bond within a sociopoliti-
cal regime of responsibilities realized as an integral and
intimate debt. Parents are obliged to emotionally and
fnancially take care of their children until the young-
sters prove themselves to be self-sufcient and able to
stand on their own feet; children are similarly expected
to look after their parents as they age or if they fall into
economic hardship, which extends also to grandparents
and sometimes other members of the extended family,
such as uncles and aunts.
This mutual care economy of kinship is a strong inti-
mate currency in social life and manifests itself in var-
ious forms. The achievement of intimate intelligibility
and legitimacy as being someone (kimse) via the hetero-
reproductive couple and family life is at the center of
sociocultural life. For instance, the Turkish idiom “kimi
kimsesi olmamak” (“to not be someone to anyone”) means
being alone in the strict sense of familial and kin rela-
tions. It refers to the social state of having no one to call
family, which is generally interpreted as blood-family.
• The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz • Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 167
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Other forms of intimacy, involving friends, partner-
ships outside marriage, or neighbors, for example, are
thus downgraded, ignored, and simply not attributed
credibility. Simply put, being kimse in this hierarchy
of relatedness and social identifcation requires family.
Bachelors, for instance, often have to deal with pres-
sure from their immediate family and other relatives to
get married and start a family of their own so that they
avoid ending up being lonely and isolated and, eventu-
ally, kimsesiz.
The question “Kimin kimsen yok mu?” (“Don’t you
have anyone?”) mainly refers to having a place in a fam-
ily and kin network through blood ties. Blood ties are
crucial in giving value and defnition to the dominant
understanding of the family, enabling a map of relation-
ality that renders one intimately legible, both to others
and to oneself. People achieve the social status of being
kimse through their location within these scripts of
genetics and surnames, as we would think them now,
or family trees and peoples’ stories remembered in
the oral tradition—but in either case through blood.
Semen, womb, breast milk are also signifcant substantive
16 8 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Figure 5. A few kimsesiz grave
spots scattered in the old lot. Kilyos
Cemetery for the Kimsesiz, Istanbul,
2019. Photo by the author.
bodily flows that form kin relations, but none of them
approaches the prevalence of blood ties as a metaphor
in everyday relations and conversation.
The emphasis on the Turkish family structure and
its morality has also a strong currency in state poli-
cies and discourses. The ofcial, hegemonic ideologies
of intimate relations privilege marriage and family,
and deny recognition to others unless they represent
themselves in familial terms. The hetero-reproductive
blood family is sanctifed in a legally and religiously
secured position endowing sovereignty over the bodies
of its members. Lives outside of this structure are less
highly valued or clearly recognized and hence receive
fewer shares from various forms of social capital, such
as respectability, status, and power, as well as from the
state resources, in various forms of legal and fnancial
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protection. “Türk aile yapısı” (“the Turkish family struc-
ture”) is a common reference point in everyday public
discourse, ranging from political speeches and news
items to popular media and advertisements. In fact,
the dominant Turkish family structure functions as
the cornerstone of a broader, dominant intimate order,
guiding the formation of an intimate alliance of legal,
religious, and cultural life scripts. This intimate alliance
pivots on shared conceptions of personhood that the
state, the family, and the hegemonic religion of Sunni
Islam co-defne to solidify the terms of social legibility
and membership. And these hegemonic forms of social
membership are also reproduced and solidifed through
cemeteries.
In Turkey, as in many other countries, the hetero-
reproductive family, in its nuclear as well as extended
 Aslı Zengin • The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz
manifestations, inscribes itself on the landscape of the
cemetery. The cemetery design and architecture are
cemented in and through blood lines. Many people are
familiar with the notion of the “family graveyard” (“aile
mezarlığı”). The organization of the cemetery landscape
into privately owned autonomous lots exhibits a spa-
tial artefact, a location marker in relations of familial
property and genealogy. Having a legible and legitimate
place in these relations denotes a coordinate within the
hegemonic order of material and intimate frameworks
of life.
The cemetery is tightly linked to the notions of
home and dwelling, and hence, to belonging in land.
Graveyards mark people’s home, land, and place of
belonging.7 As Aleksandr A. Sautkin notes, “The rein-
tegration of the dead into the community of the living
• Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 169
Figure 6. More than dozen of
kimsesiz people piled onto each
other and buried together. Kilyos
Cemetery for the Kimsesiz,
Istanbul, 2019. Photo by the
author.
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is an essential element of identifcation.”8 Practicing,
claiming, and naming one’s burial comprises an archi-
tecture of memory and belonging, an artifact that carves
its place within the wider materiality of the world. “The
cemetery,” as Sautkin continues, “is a home for ‘our’
dead, who constitute a kind of a background commu-
nity . . . a ritual space of remembrance (and hence the
symbolic return of the dead into a circle of the living).”9
The cemetery as home for the dead is mainly shaped
by blood ties that divide the landscape into minor
clusters of familial genealogy and property. We can
approach this “deathscape”10 as a reafrmation of mem-
bership in normative genealogies of social and intimate
life and afterlife and their associated regimes of prop-
erty. Familial genealogy and property defne the cur-
rency of belonging in a particular spatial and temporal
170 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Figure 7. Scattered graves of kimsesiz people. Kilyos Cemetery for the Kimsesiz, Istanbul, 2019. Photo by the author.
order that consequently shapes dominant modes of
social existence and recognition. For this reason, one
should have one’s position in a family line11 and its land
and property regime in order to have a social body and
an afterlife. Otherwise, one is kimsesiz.
People may become kimsesiz as a result of being
disavowed and abandoned by their families, reject-
ing their families themselves, or by losing their family
members to death and disaster. Once the family is no
longer in the picture because of such loss or abandon-
ment, the state and civil society organizations may play
the role of benefactor, to claim and protect the kimsesiz
members of society. In this sense, then, kimsesizlik is at
least a minimal recognition of societal belonging.
When it comes to kimsesiz children, such as
foundlings and orphans, the state acts as the primary
benevolent agent for their protection and care through
its Social Services and Child Protection Agency (Sosyal
Hizmetler ve Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumu, SHÇEK).12 This
institution strictly regulates orphanage, adoption, and
fosterage, a domain within which private facilities are
not permitted. Adoption is legal and mostly preferred
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by those couples who cannot have their own biological
children. Following amendments to the Civil Law in
2005, adopted children are now granted the same legal
rights to familial membership and inheritance as bio-
logical children.13 Unless kimsesiz children are placed in
a family structure through adoption, the state remains
the principal actor in their raising as citizens until they
are eighteen and their integration into the social repro-
ductive future of the nation. In short, the state plays the
role of a grand family, providing orphans with shelter,
education, and some sort of care.
Another category of kimsesiz citizens who are the
subject of state benevolence is the elderly. The state
is concerned with the care of its senior members over
sixty-fve years of age. There is a strong social and moral
value system around age in Turkey. Senior people expect
to be honored and treated with respect. Adult children
who fail to take care of their parents and grandparents
or who place them in nursing homes are not viewed
kindly and may face moral judgments. It is a highly
regarded moral and cultural code that seniors should
be treated with respect, love, and care, and a prominent
 Aslı Zengin • The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz
social expectation that they be provided with a family
environment in their last phase of life and eventually
given a proper burial. In the aftermath of their death,
visiting and praying at their grave is a salient socio-
religious code, hence the busy cemetery at Kilyos on the
day I visited.
When it comes to the kimsesiz, especially seniors,
it is common to hear expressions of anxiety over not
having anyone to mourn one’s death and pray at the
grave.14 This remembrance and commemoration of
the departed inscribes them into the fabric of the liv-
ing even after their demise. Hence, the idea of having
no visitor at the grave communicates a terrifying feeling
of erasure, as if the deceased had never existed. During
the cemetery visits, moreover, family members perform
the religious duties of prayer and asking Allah for the
• Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 17 1
Figure 8. The grave of “Baby the
Turk.” Kilyos Cemetery for the
Kimsesiz, Istanbul, 2019. Photo
by the author.
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deceased to be forgiven. Hence, having someone to pray
after one’s death helps to ensure an Islamic afterlife to
which an intimate connection is also provided for those
still on earth. A kimsesiz is also deprived of these post-
mortem acts of religious care.
Other Meanings of the Kimsesiz
As well as being without blood family, the kimsesiz
identity also implies a class position of deprivation and
impoverishment, or isolation and alienation in social
life. Further to the (extra)ordinary vicissitudes of life
and death, unequal capitalist relations constantly pro-
duce a surplus population that lacks not only employ-
ment but also the very basic human needs such as shelter,
food, safety, and protection. This systemic exclusion
generates people as destitute, or kimsesiz, those who
172 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
are rendered unable to fully participate in the existing
circles of economic and social exchange. These classed
meanings of kimsesiz have close associations to being
garip or gariban, an old notion that captures a struc-
tural story of being unprivileged, powerless, helpless, or
subaltern, sometimes oppressed and victimized—thus,
marginalized.
Being garip/gariban has been widely portrayed
in Turkish cinema, music, and literature. The famous
Yeşilçam movie studio heyday of the 1960s and ’70s saw
the cinematic production of numerous depictions of
orphans and waifs along with stories of desperate and
deprived migrants who moved to Istanbul at an acceler-
ating rate from the 1960s. Centering everyday strugles
around economic and cultural isolation in the modern
urban context of Istanbul, these melodramas illustrate
a perspective of social realism on the everyday lives of
migrants from rural areas, in particular, from the Ana-
tolian and the Kurdish countryside.
Another venue in which urban migrant stories of
isolation, alienation, and poverty fnd voice is the musi-
cal genres of arabesk (an Arab-influenced style of popular
music) and Turkish folk. Arabesk especially is associ-
ated with the consumption habits of poorly educated
urban migrants, considered low-brow and nonmod-
ern by the committed national subjects of the secular
Turkish state’s modernization (read also, Westerniza-
tion or Europeanization) project. The leading fgures
of this genre, singers such as Orhan Gencebay, Müslüm
Gürses, İbrahim Tatlıses, Bergen, and Kibariye, became
prominent national symbols in the mass media. In
Turkish folk music, Neşet Ertaş is famous for his com-
positions that describe being garip. Informed by his
own life experience as a child growing up in dire pov-
erty and as a seasonal traveler playing at wedding and
circumcision ceremonies, Ertaş’s main musical/lyrical
theme expresses exclusion, isolation, and loneliness.
Ertaş produced countless songs under the pseudonym
Garip, identifying as the voice of the wretched poor, the
despised and insulted and outcast.
Racialization and racism can tell another story of
the kimsesiz status. Ethno-religious minorities or inter-
national migrants can feel kimsesiz insofar as they lack
social capital and the associated mechanisms of support
and protection. Estrangement and hostility may prevail
in their lives. Absence of recognition or solidarity, being
left alone, on their own, to fend for themselves, a posi-
tion of being kimsesiz results, or is assigned.
Just as people may become kimsesiz, so also can lands,
towns, and wider geographies through displacement,
• 42.1 • 2022
expulsion, eviction, and appropriation. Kimsesiz lands
tell stories of ecological disasters, violence, or deser-
tion. As a spatial adjective, kimsesiz stresses the rela-
tional character of the land. A kimsesiz land means no
one has been taking care of it through cultivation and
irrigation; it is a land without humans.
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It is only in the context of these multilayered
meanings of being kimsesiz in Turkey that one can
fully understand the meaning of the cemetery for the
kimsesiz. The underlying architecture of this graveyard
is grounded in all these multiple subtexts and impli-
cations of the kimsesiz status. Becoming kimsesiz in
death—dying unclaimed, abandoned, anonymized,
forgotten, deprived, impoverished, or marginalized—
gathers and groups as a single category dead people who
would not necessarily have interacted with one another
while alive. Some of these would have been kimsesiz at
the moment of death, but others not. Or some of these
deaths are transgressive of the hegemonic regimes of
ethnicity (e.g., Kurdish guerillas), or of gender and sex-
uality (e.g., trans women), while others not. Regard-
less, the bodies of the kimsesiz lie side by side in the
cemetery space of their fnal rest. What connects them
together is a process of social and political marginaliza-
tion that takes shape in lifetime and continues into the
domain of death and afterlife.
Mortal Design of Social Belonging
In her ethnography New Organs within Us, anthropol-
ogist Aslıhan Sanal discusses a detailed arrangement
between the Council of Forensic Medicine and medical
schools concerning the bodies of the deceased kimse-
siz. Sanal explores, for instance, how, dependent on
others, mentally ill people have been denied full per-
sonhood and rights over their own bodies since the
early years of the Republic.15 When they died, they were
deemed kimsesiz and buried in the cemetery for the
kimsesiz unless a relative claimed them or an anatomy
lab needed cadavers.16 With the release of a circular by
the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors in Octo-
ber 2011, the Council of Forensic Medicine extended
the linkage of corpses falling under the category of
homeless to cadaver regulations. According to this pro-
cedural change, the Council of Forensic Medicine is to
deliver to medical schools all those bodies not claimed
by family members within ffteen days of death, placing
these cases under the category of kimsesiz.17 Upon their
arrival at medical schools, kimsesiz cadavers are care-
fully preserved for another six-month period before
being used for educational purposes. This wait time is
 Aslı Zengin • The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz
designated to eliminate the possibility of an existing
family or a kin member who may claim the deceased
body. Some of the cadavers may be used in medical
education for as long as fourteen years unless they are
claimed by family members. If the cadaver is a kimse-
siz person, then the medical school community usually
take the initiative to organize a burial for the deceased
once they are done with the cadaver. For instance, while
examining the relevant regulations, I came across a
news story about a kimsesiz cadaver that was partic-
ularly touching. A group of medical school professors
and students organized a funeral for a kimsesiz cadaver
after working with/on him for fourteen years. They
noted, “Our cadaver was a kimsesiz person and we spent
fourteen years together with him. Hence, we wanted to
perform our last duty toward him. As students and edu-
cators, we have actually become his family after all this
time.”18 This symbolic familial claim stresses the impor-
tance of being buried by a family even as a symbolic act.
While people can request that their bodies be
donated to medical schools upon death, family mem-
bers are commonly reluctant to fulfll the donor’s
will upon their death, and the state complies with the
family’s wishes. Some medical schools had to return
corpses to families insisting on a funeral and burial. Or
some families allowed corpses to be used as a cadaver
for a certain period of time and later requested them
for burial. If family members approve their lost one’s
will to be used as a cadaver within a three-to-four-year-
long time frame, then medical schools meet the funeral
expenses, and bury the cadaver in a graveyard decided
by families.
Sociologist Berfn Atlı stresses the role of the
Forensic Department in producing the institutional cat-
egory of the deceased as kimsesiz.19 Atlı notes that when
a deceased person without identifying information is
reported, the dead body remains in the forensic morgue
longer than usual in case some family or kin member
shows up to claim the body. The forensic ofcers take
pictures of the deceased to create a visual record for
later in case someone should claim the deceased in the
future.20 There are some cases where family members
claimed their lost ones months and even years after the
burial and then transported the bones from the ceme-
tery for the kimsesiz to a regular cemetery. This is pos-
sible because, as I learned from my talks with grave-
yard employees, there is actually ID information stored
behind most of the abstract numbers assigned to each
grave. The graveyard ofce keeps a ledger which has a
record of entry for each number in the cemetery for the
• Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 173
kimsesiz. If someday a claimant wanting a body buried
in the cemetery appears, they can resort to this ledger
to sift through the numbers, learn the identity of the
deceased, and locate the grave.
This anecdote points to the state’s ambivalent rela-
tionship with the category of the kimsesiz. State ofcers
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categorize certain dead bodies as kimsesiz and render
them anonymous, yet, at the same time, preserve their
personal information in case someone claims them.
This way, the state partially represents itself as a com-
passionate benefactor who fulflls a moral obligation
toward the deceased kimsesiz. With certain kimsesiz
dead bodies, the state takes over the moral obligation
that families are expected to meet but can also delegate
this obligation back to families in case they can produce
legitimate claims to the kimsesiz dead body.
Upon hearing about the preservation of this per-
sonal information, I became curious as to why at least
the names were not written on the graves. At a regular
cemetery, a grave is a spatial marker that memorializes
the life lived by the deceased; the headstone inscribes
what is to be known and remembered about the per-
son. Inscription of the actual name on the headstone is
closely bound to an acknowledged sense of one’s place
in relations of sociality and forms of social belonging. It
also marks the need and the desire for the deceased to
be remembered. This way, the grave becomes a mate-
rial reference to integrate the deceased into the life of
the living. It is a symbolic valuation of both the life and
the death of the deceased as well as their family. And
it is precisely this symbolic order that a cemetery for
the kimsesiz makes invisible through its techniques of
erasure and anonymization—such as omitting the dead
person’s name.
When I expressed my curiosity about the absence
of names but the presence of abstract numbers on the
graves, the ofcer responded, “If there’s no one to claim,
there’s no need for a name.” I was unconvinced because
it should have been possible to honor the deceased by at
least inscribing the name instead of an abstract number.
The ofcer then made it clear that it was also a fnancial
issue: being kimsesiz in death means that there is no
one to pay for a headstone. Although a free funeral and
burial service is offered by municipalities, the remain-
ing expenses are left to the claimants. Headstone pro-
duction is specifc to the individuals involved and is
highly commercialized. Crafting a public marker of
personal identity in deathscapes involves engagement
with a commodity, one that in Turkey is only available
for purchase in the private economy. Likewise, the grave
174 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
spot. Claimants from the family are required to pur-
chase space, to buy a regular cemetery plot and transfer
their death there, as it were, rather than take advantage
of a place for free in the cemetery for the kimsesiz.
Such moments further mark the body of the dead
as a social body that is (re)produced and shaped within
the relations of kinship and family. The burial rites
represent not only the last obligations to the deceased
but also a social obligation for the blood family to pub-
licly perform and reproduce itself as the family. Some
members of society are denied these rituals of famil-
ial belonging, however, abandoned by their supposed
nearest and left to be interred in the cemetery for the
kimsesiz. This has been the case with several trans
women in Turkey.
One day in 2010, Ceyda, a trans woman of forty-
fve, told me that she had decided to donate her corpse
as a cadaver for use in anatomy courses at medical
schools. In part, she was motivated to do this in order
to avoid the desperate ending of kimsesiz. In fact, it
was while conducting doctoral research with trans peo-
ple in Istanbul in 2009–12 and when I met Ceyda that
I frst heard about the dedicated cemetery. Ceyda was
long removed from her blood family. She did not think
anyone in her blood family would contest her decision
to donate her body to science, precisely because she did
not believe that anyone in her blood family would want
to claim her corpse and organize a funeral. When blood
families abandon and disavow their transgender kin,
friends of the deceased and the LGBTQI community
usually step in and strugle to (re)claim the deceased
body and organization of the funeral rights.21 But Ceyda
did not want to burden her friends like this.
She herself was a leading trans woman activist and
would assume to take the initiative in organizing funer-
als for her trans friends who died abandoned by their
families. One day, Ceyda and I were returning from the
funeral of her friend Sibel, who had died abandoned by
her family in her early ffties. Ceyda was one of Sibel’s
many friends who claimed her funeral and practiced
burial rights. Following Sibel’s funeral, I spent the entire
day with Ceyda. She recounted another story, one in
which their efforts to gain control of the deceased body
of another trans woman friend, Ayşe, had failed when
the blood family did not let them organize a funeral.
This other family disavowed their trans daughter in her
death just as in life and specifcally requested that the
state bury Ayşe in the cemetery for the kimsesiz. Ayşe’s
blood family unclaimed her, denying her an afterlife,
rendering her anonymous, and casting her body from
• 42.1 • 2022
socially recognizable scripts of mourning. While telling
me Ayşe’s story, Ceyda also expressed how terrifed she
felt by the kimsesiz cemetery.
With a sex/gender normative death, we usually
see a harmonious work of multiple intimate and social
actors involved in bidding farewell to the deceased.
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Members of the blood family and friends, religious
authorities, and the state guide an intimate alliance
between legal frameworks, religious rituals, and com-
munity to ensure that the deceased is properly buried
and mourned. For instance, both the secular laws of the
state and the dominant religious framework of Islam in
Turkey hold the kin group responsible for funereal rites,
such as washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for
the dead body. The blood family and other relatives buy
a plot in a cemetery and have a gravestone made. This
way, they memorialize the lost one and produce a sym-
bolic value for the death and life of the deceased as well
as about themselves. With its funeral rituals and burial
practices, that is, normative death stages a social struc-
ture through which hegemonic forms of intimate and
social membership are reproduced and solidifed.
The afterlife of a sex/gender transgressive death,
however, ruptures these alliances, thus offering a win-
dow into sexual and gender margins. At LGBTQI funer-
als like Ayşe’s, the intimate legal alliances established
between families, religious authorities, and the state
might invalidate and marginalize the intimate claims
that LGBTQI people make over one another in life and
in death. Ayşe’s burial in the cemetery for the kimsesiz
leaves her life and death unmarked, undeserving of
memorialization, and, hence, unworthy of membership
in the dominant scripts of intimacy and genealogy. In
other words, the cemetery for the kimsesiz embraces
those who do not or cannot belong, who fail to belong or
who are denied belonging within the hegemonic frame-
works of intimacy and sociality. Ayşe’s story and Ceyda’s
accounts reveal that transgender funerals in Turkey
constitute a striking example of this kind of denial or
failure. Indeed, death and funerals occupy a prominent
space in trans politics.
During my research in 2009–12, the then active
Istanbul LGBTT, a trans majority LGBTQI organiza-
tion that strugled for human rights for trans, queer,
and gender nonconforming folks until 2017, organized
several demonstrations and campaigns that mainly pro-
tested the targeted killings of trans women. The unequal
legal and social treatment of these deaths by the state
and society at large was one of the key concerns in these
political events. Alongside demonstrations, the actual
 Aslı Zengin • The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz
transgender funerals themselves would become sites
of social and political strugle—which is still a crucial
issue of contestation in LGBTQI and feminist politics,
together with the killings of cis women in Turkey.22
This negation of intimacy is possible precisely
because the state inscribes intimacy as a family asset
bound by blood and assigns all rights to the blood fam-
ily members as the only legal intimate actors with a
recognized claim over the trans person’s body. In the
absence of a will or a marriage, the blood family is the
only party to be awarded the inheritance of any prop-
erty left by the deceased. Thus, trans women tell stories
about blood families who have not hesitated to deny
funeral rights to their trans children but at the same
time claimed their wealth. In Ayşe’s case, the family’s
refusal to let anyone claim the body was not just an act
that broke ties between them and the trans community
of the deceased by not allowing the latter to organize
a burial ceremony; it was also directed at ending trans
intimacies, obligations, and relations.
Through their insistence on this nullifcation, the
parents and other relatives equally denied the right of
the child to belong. Her name was deliberately omit-
ted from socially legible frameworks of remembrance
and mourning, and her death honored with neither
value nor recognition. Both her life and death were thus
denied, deemed transgressive of the cisheteronorma-
tive order, thus deserving of ofcial erasure. The solu-
tion was to transform Ayşe into a kimsesiz. Although
Ayşe was actually not kimsesiz, she had to become one.
Thus, she was anonymized in her death. An abstract
number was assigned to her grave in Kilyos to hide her
personal information, as if Ayşe had never lived.
Necropolitical Violence and Denial of Mourning
Transgressive death is not always gendered or sexed. It
may also be ethnic, religious, or sectarian. And the state
is not always in an intimate alliance with the blood fam-
ily like in the case of LGBTQI funerals. In this regard, the
identity and type of the family becomes crucial. Hence,
at times, the cemetery for the kimsesiz can turn into a
weapon in the hands of the state to be used against the
blood family or its community.
On May 22, 2020, a videoclip went viral on social
media displaying several plastic boxes full of bones
being excavated from under a concrete block that par-
celed out the lot in Kilyos Cemetery for the kimsesiz.
A few minutes into the videoclip, the viewer learned
that these bones were actually remains from the Garzan
Cemetery, located in Yukarı Ölek, a Kurdish village in
• Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 175
Bitlis, in the east of Turkey. After demolishment of the
cemetery in 2017, the bones of as many as 267 people,
fragmented and complete, had been amassed, stuffed
into boxes, and transported across the country for burial
in one of the cemeteries for the kimsesiz attached to
Istanbul. State authorities had thus rendered the bodily
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remains of Kurdish people anonymous through the
ruination of their communal space of death. The bones
were forcefully displaced and detached from the land
where they belonged. Hence, the videoclip essentially
uncovered a Kurdish mass grave in plastic boxes testi-
fying to an intimate relationship of oppression between
state sovereignty and the dead in Turkey. Family and
relatives were not able to reunite with the remains of
their lost ones until two years after the ruination of the
cemetery—that is, two years after their loss for a sec-
ond time.
The racial, ethnic, or religious identity of the dead
body might transform it into a site for strugles over
sovereignty. Scholarly interest in the politico-sym-
bolic constructions of death documents has examined
and testifed to a close relationship between death and
nationalism;23 nation-states can easily instrumentalize
the dead body of the dissenting other as a weapon so as
to reinforce their sovereign power.24 In the context of
Iran, for instance, Shahla Talebi shows how the Islamic
Republic of Iran has created two categories for the mar-
tyrs of the Iran-Iraq War: the state’s martyrs who self-
sacrifced for Islam, and the dissident martyrs who
were the opponents of the state and stigmatized as “the
warriors against God.”25 This division resulted in the
segregation of graveyards through which the state mar-
tyrs were rendered hypervisible, whereas the dissident
ones were marginalized and rendered invisible.26 Or in
the context of Palestine, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s
work demonstrates how the Israeli state penetrates Pal-
estinian spaces of death and funerals by incarcerating
the deceased bodies of Jerusalemite families’ children
in refrigerators, and hence expanding “spaces of car-
cerality” into the zone of death and denying families
proper mourning.27 Hence, it is important to approach
sovereign strugles over dead bodies as a political ter-
rain for nation-states not only in Turkey, but also in the
wider Middle East and beyond.
Building on Achille Mbembe’s famous theoriza-
tion of “necropolitics” as “contemporary forms of sub-
jugation of life to the power of death,”28 Banu Bargu
addresses these particular forms of violence as “nec-
ropolitical violence” which mainly concerns the cor-
poreal mistreatment of the deceased through burial
176 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
and funeral practices involving graves and cemeteries
and acts of mourning and commemoration.29 Writing
on the politics of death for example, anthropologist
Hişyar Özsoy notes that biological killing does not sat-
isfy the nation-state when it comes to people who pub-
licly reject and rebel against its demands.30 Instead, the
authorities seek to prevent the bodies of the dead from
gaining signifcance and social value. This way, Özsoy
continues, the sovereign kills on the symbolic as well as
the political register, endeavoring to separate the dead
from the life of a community. When the state occupies
not only the domain of life but also that of death and
afterlife, it intervenes directly into the intimate life of
communities and their ability to socially and politically
reproduce.
The landscape of Turkey has been marked by
uncountable acts of disappearances; murders whose
perpetrators remain unidentifed; dead bodies stolen
from their families and communities; looted and plun-
dered cemeteries; scattered, displaced, and broken
bones and erased graveyards, as the story of the vid-
eoclip mentioned above also demonstrates. During the
war with the separatist guerrilla of the Kurdistan Work-
ers’ Party (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), in the
1990s in particular, the Turkish state and its paramilitar-
ies adopted a widespread strategy of disappearing sym-
pathizers and dumping dead fghters’ bodies in garbage
processing sites and landflls or just out in wild coun-
tryside to prevent the community from practicing their
burial and funeral rituals. Since 2015, as the conflict
between Kurdish guerillas and the Turkish state again
intensifed, with siege conditions and mass destruction
in several Kurdish centers, similar tactics again targeted
Kurdish corpses.
Many necropolitical atrocities were committed
in Turkey’s southeast (or northern Kurdistan) in 2015.
Kurdish cemeteries in Diyarbakır, Van, Bingöl, and
Hakkari were targeted for nationalist attacks, with
many graves vandalized, headstones pulled out, and
bones removed from the ground and scattered.31 Turk-
ish soldiers exhibited the naked corpse of Ekin Wan, a
female PKK guerilla who had been tortured to death.
After Cemile Cagirga, a ten-year-old girl from the Kurd-
ish city of Cizre had been fatally shot by soldiers while
playing with her friends in front of her house, and her
family was prohibited from holding a proper burial
for her under state-of-emergency law; they had to put
the body in a deep freezer to prevent it from rotting.32
When Taybet Inan, a ffty-fve-year-old Kurdish woman
and mother of eleven, was shot to death in the streets
• 42.1 • 2022
of Silopi while returning from her neighbor’s during a
state-imposed curfew, state security forces prevented
her family from collecting the body; Inan’s rotting
corpse lay on the street for seven days.33 In their dif-
ferent ways, these cases all publicly demonstrated the
state’s power to violate bodies, defle corpses, and oth-
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erwise repudiate individual and family rights to socially
hegemonic death rituals. In 2017, seventy-year-old
Kemal Gun went on a hunger strike for ninety days to
claim the bones of his dead son, who had been killed
during a military airstrike on Dersim, a majorly Alevite-
Kurdish town in mid-Anatolia. Kemal’s wish was to give
his son a decent burial and create a decent mourning
site in his hometown. Eventually, the state sent him the
bones via regular mail.
Over the course of the dirty civil war, the state buried
the bodies of many Kurdish guerillas in the cemeteries
for the kimsesiz. There are instances in which families
and relatives were able to claim the deceased and trans-
fer the bones to another graveyard of their choice. Veysi
Karahanlı, who died during a clash with the Turkish
army in 2011, was one. His family strugled through the
Turkish bureaucracy for almost three months to have
the Forensic Department run a DNA test and produce a
report to invalidate his status as an anonymous person.
Nine months after his death, Karahanlı’s family mem-
bers were eventually able to prove their blood ties to his
body, receive his bones, and transfer them to the fam-
ily’s hometown.34
In all these Kurdish examples, racial and ethnic
otherness is produced through techniques that strip the
dead of communally recognized meanings of embodi-
ment and personhood. As enduring material, bones in
particular occupy a crucial site of necropolitical vio-
lence. The remains of the body play a powerful role in
rituals and practices of mourning, in affective registers
of reconciling with grief and loss.35 The state’s violent
intervention here transforms deceased bodies into dull
corpses in an attempt to destroy the socially, commu-
nally, and personally recognized constructions of the
Kurdish body.
The cemeteries for the kimsesiz also attracted
attention following the coup attempt against President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on July 15, 2016. In the aftermath,
the directorate of religious affairs released a statement
denying funeral rights and burial practices to sixteen
soldiers who were part of the coup. Ten of the dead
were not claimed by anyone, and their bodies remained
in the morgue until they were to be transported to
the kimsesiz cemetery. The mayor and municipality of
 Aslı Zengin • The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz
Istanbul, however, constructed an entirely new ceme-
tery for them, Hainler Mezarlığı—the Traitors’ Cem-
etery.36 The mayor wanted to prevent the coup-afliated
soldiers from receiving prayers from people who might
visit the cemetery and pray generally for the unknown,
publicly stating instead that people should visit the new
cemetery specifcally to curse and humiliate the graves
of the traitors. Eventually, the directorate of religious
affairs intervened and the municipality of Istanbul had
to remove a sign above the newly constructed cemetery
proclaiming its dedication. However, the site continues
to mark a mortal location for treason in popular imag-
ination.
Although Kurdish guerillas and Turkish soldiers
are completely different subjects in the political land-
scape of Turkey, the above-mentioned necropoliti-
cal projects ascribe similar meanings to their bodies,
devaluing and anonymizing them through the lenses
of treason. Rather than recognizing the dead body as
an index of person, there is an attempt to reduce it into
anonymity and a merely material object, and hence to
destroy or erase the possibilities of a socially meaning-
ful afterlife. This is particularly so for the enemy within,
that is, the fgure of the “terrorist.” The terrorist holds a
specifc place in the national imagination through ano-
nymity. Their names are erased in popular culture. Call-
ing them by their name, underlining their specifcity,
and representing them as real persons would upset the
carefully crafted national imagination.
Boundaries of religious belonging in Turkey also
play a central role in the kimsesiz spatial organization
of these burials. In 2013, when an Istanbulite Christian
family had to bury one of its members in the non-
Muslim section of the Kilyos Cemetery, they found this
section highly neglected. Later, the Abbot of the Prot-
estant Church complained that cows were grazing and
defecating in the lot: “We did not feel like second-class
citizens, we felt like animal feces. This cemetery unveils
our inequality and abasement. We buried our brother
among animal feces. He did not deserve this! We work
and pay our taxes for this country; we should have equal
rights. If we are treated this way, then it means we have
no value in the eyes of the state.”37 In response to this
complaint, the then head of the Directorate of the Cem-
eteries in Istanbul stated that “a large part in Kilyos has
been allocated for Turkish citizens of Christian sects,
nonbelievers, and unclaimed people” and noted that
“people also bury amputated organs in this section.”
In summation, he promised that the directorate would
“correct the relevant defciencies.”38 However, it is not
• Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 17 7
easy to ascertain what has actually changed since then.
And it is well documented that, historically, alongside
Kurds in Turkey, non-Muslim communities such as
Armenians and Jews have also experienced their share
of the violent destruction of their graveyards.39
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Conclusion
The cemetery for the kimsesiz is a material manifes-
tation of deathscapes and afterlives in the social and
political margins of contemporary Turkey. It is an archi-
tecture whose structure and design delineate the eth-
nic, sexual, gendered, and economic limits of belonging
in regimes of family, kinship, religion, and citizenship
through spatialized practices of (non)mourning and
grief. We fnd ourselves in a zone where trans people,
victims of honor crimes, premature infants, Kurd-
ish guerillas, unclaimed refugees, and underclass and
homeless people are buried together. In this mortal
topography, social and political marginalization contin-
ues in the aftermath of death through the work of ano-
nymity. The bookkeeper of death registers the bodies,
assigns a number, and inscribes them as no one for the
public eye. The dead from all sorts of social and politi-
cal margins lie side by side in a category of the kimsesiz
that reduces the social culture of individuality and per-
sonhood long before the material process of rot.
It is salient to reemphasize that not all deceased
people in these cemeteries were actually kimsesiz in
their lifetime or, even, at the moment of their death. As
previously highlighted, the state has a complicated and
ambivalent relationship with the category of kimsesiz.
Although the state sometimes plays a compassionate
and supportive role concerning the funerals of actual
kimsesiz people, it is at the same time a necropoliti-
cal organization, especially when it comes to its sub-
jects whose lives (and hence, deaths) transgress the
hegemonic order of social, cultural, or national life.
The state can deploy the cemetery as a spatial mech-
anism that transforms certain people into kimsesiz
even when they are claimed, when they do have some-
one. For instance, although some deceased bodies were
claimed by other intimate actors, such as friends in the
case of transgender funerals or family members in the
case of Kurdish guerillas, they were denied social mem-
bership and belonging after death and anonymized as
a consequence of their burial as kimsesiz. These exam-
ples demonstrate that the state develops distinct rela-
tionships with cisheteronormative and Kurdish fam-
ilies in order to manage and marginalize sex/gender
and ethnic difference: While the state may establish an
178 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
intimate alliance with the cisheteronormative family
of a deceased trans woman, and hence, collaboratively
erasing her from the social scripts of death and mourn-
ing, the same state may become an adversarial and
punitive actor against the Kurdish family of a deceased
guerilla by withholding and seizing his dead body and
burying him as a kimsesiz person.
In this sense, the state, through its organization
and use of the cemetery, prevents the production of
memory and recognition, and so of symbolic or mate-
rial value, around social outcasts. It is an active archi-
tecture for forgetfulness and eradication, a constitution
of a mortal limit to the socially specifc defnitions of
the person, kimse. Its design thus underlines a broader
spatial ordering mechanism that shapes what it is to be
considered a person and thus who meets the criteria
for that. This mechanism determines who is deserv-
ing of a body and who is to be (un)marked by identitar-
ian notions of familial, gender, and ethnic specifcities
spelling out the social scripts of death. In the design of
the cemetery for the kimsesiz, death translates into an
imminent cartography of mortal margins.
But we know that death is not an ending; it is actu-
ally a beginning for multiple afterlives. And the grave-
yard is just one example of our spatial and temporal
claims to social afterlives of death. Hence, we may ask,
can these cemeteries ever contain and completely erase
the afterlives of the anonymized? Or, may the mar-
ginalization of these deaths also carry a potential that
is capable of breaching and haunting the hegemonic
frames of death and its afterlives? What if we approach
the cemetery for the unknown as embracing a ghostly
insurgency, a “demonic ground,”40 one that bears the
traces of a social, that can emerge as a relational assem-
blage, and that can also haunt the normative construc-
tion of life?
Aslı Zengin is an assistant professor in the Department
of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers
University-New Brunswick. Zengin has widely pub-
lished in edited volumes and peer-review journals,
including Cultural Anthropology, Anthropologica, Journal
of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Transgender Studies
Quarterly. Her research lies at the intersection of eth-
nography of gender-nonconforming lives and deaths;
medico-legal regimes of sex, gender, and sexuality; crit-
ical studies of violence and sovereignty; and transna-
tional aspects of LGBTQ movements in the Middle East
with a special focus on Turkey.
• 42.1 • 2022
Notes
A short preliminary version of this article was frst published in
Allegra Lab as part of the thematic series “Afterlives” edited by Mar-
lene Schäfers. See Zengin, “Turkish Cemeteries for the ‘Unknown’.”
Several people contributed to the development of this article in mul-
tiple stages and forms over years. I am grateful to my colleagues and
friends Begüm Adalet, Elif Babül, Banu Bargu, Zerrin Özlem Biner,
Senem Erdoğan, Sinan Göknur, Aslı Iğsız, Ayşe Parla, Ali Paşaoğlu,
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Elif Sarı, Evren Savcı, Marlene Schäfers, Irvin Cemil Schick, and Seçil
Yılmaz for their incivise comments and questions. I also thank the
two anonymous reviewers and the CSSAAME editors, for giving me
the beneft of their constructive feedback and editorial sugestions.
1. The other two large cemeteries for the kimsesiz are located within
the graveyards of Sincan in Ankara and Doğançay in İzmir. For a
recent study on the one in Doğançay, see Sanders, “Death on the
Aegean Borderland.”
2. Syrians from the Asian side are buried in Hekimbaşı Cemetery in
Ümraniye.
3. In total there are 502 Muslim and 67 non-Muslim cemeteries in
Istanbul; historical graveyards in the city, such as Aşiyan, Zincirli-
kuyu, Edirnekapı, and Karacaahmet, have reached full capacity and
no longer permit new registry or sale except for those with family
members already interred there; by 2015, the total area allocated to
cemeteries in Istanbul province had increased by almost 350 thou-
sand square meters, concentrated in the districts of Beykoz, Şile, Ada-
lar, Ümraniye, Sarıyer, Silivri, Kağıthane, Büyükçekmece, Arnavut-
köy, Esenyurt, and Sultangazi. See “Istanbul’daki mezarlik fyatlari.”
4. Sharpe, In the Wake.
5. Obviously, this is not a general practice for all infants in Turkey.
One can see many infant graves in regular cemeteries where the
claimed people are buried. These burials in the kimsesiz site might
represent those dead infants of the abandoned, of the economically
marginalized, or of sex worker mothers or women who gave birth
out of wedlock.
6. Victims of COVID-19 in Istanbul have been buried in pandemic
areas similarly designated within established graveyards, starting
in March 2020 with Kilyos as one of the frst two cemeteries; see
“Istanbul’da Corona’dan olenler icin iki ayri mezarlik belirlendi.”
7. Robben, “Death and Anthropology”; Minkin, Imperial Bodies.
8. Sautkin, “Cemetery Locus as a Mechanism of Socio-Cultural
Identity,” 666.
9. Sautkin, “Cemetery Locus as a Mechanism of Socio-Cultural Iden-
tity,” 662.
10. Maddrell and Sideway, Deathscapes.
11. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.
12. The history of state orphanages in Turkey dates back to the late
nineteenth-century Ottoman rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II. In the
mid-1890s, the Hammidian Massacres resulted in some ffty thou-
sand orphans, mostly Armenians; in order to avoid international
pressure and to minimize missionary involvement in the protec-
tion and upbringing of these orphans, Abdulhamid II initiated the
establishment of state-run orphanages in several cities. See Özbek,
“II. Abdülhamid ve Kimsesiz Çocuklar.” Later, after the Armenian
Genocide of 1915, destitute Armenian children became a major
concern for the state and systematic target of assimilation through
state orphanages or adoption and fostering by Muslim families.
For further information, see Ekmekcioglu, “Climate for Abduc-
 Aslı Zengin • The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz
tion, a Climate for Redemption”; Karakışla, “Kadınları Çalıştırma
Cemiyeti Himayesinde Savaş Yetimleri ve Kimsesiz Çocuklar”;
and Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman
Empire. Fostering was a complicated intimate practice that placed
adopted children, mostly girls (called evlatlik, besleme, or yanasma)
in a servant-like position through which they were exploited for
household reproduction and, sometimes, sexual needs. See Özbay,
“Evlerde El Kızları.” There was also a racial component to this insti-
tution of fostering that included African Turks and was prevalent
until the prohibition of slavery and slavery-like practices in 1964; see
Olpak, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Köle.”
13. These amendments also made single people eligible for adoptive
parenthood (providing they meet the social and fnancial criteria);
see Kizir, “Türk Hukukunda Evlat Edinme.”
14. Funerals are held immediately within three days of the death.
Cultural religious practice has ritual gatherings with prayer for fam-
ily and friends at the home of the deceased after seven days (yedisi),
and then again at forty and ffty-two days (kırkıı and elliikisi).
15. The post–Ottoman Empire nation-state of Turkey was estab-
lished in 1923.
16. Sanal, New Organs within Us, 121.
17. “Kadavra Dagitimi Basliyor”
18. “14 yildir anatomide kullanilan kadavra defnedildi.”
19. Atlı, “Hüviyet‐i Meçhul.”
20. Atlı, “Hüviyet‐i Meçhul,” 224.
21. Zengin, “Afterlife of Gender.”
22. For recent publications on femicide in Turkey, see Zengin, “Mor-
tal Life of Trans/Feminism”; Alaattinoglu and Baytok, “Fighting
Femicide in Turkey”; Atuk, “Femicide and the Speaking State”; and
Kav, Yaşasın Kadınlar.
23. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Kaplan, “Commemorating a
Suspended Death”; Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine.
24. Feldman, Formations of Violence; Verdery, Political Lives of Dead
Bodies; Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; Talebi, “From the Light of the Eyes
to the Eyes of the Power”; Bargu, Starve and Immolate; Shalhoub-
Kevorkian, Security Theology.
25. Talebi, “From the Light of the Eyes to the Eyes of the Power,” 127.
26. Talebi, “From the Light of the Eyes to the Eyes of the Power,” 127.
27. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Necropenology.”
28. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39.
29. Bargu, “Another Necropolitics.”
30. Özsoy, Between Gift and Taboo.
31. Aydın, “Ölülerin Gücü, Devletin Hafıza Kırımı.”
32. Kamer, “Cemile Cagirga’nin Annesi.”
33. Söylemez, “Taybet Inan’in Oglu Annesini Defnedebilmek icin
Anayasa Mahkemesine Basvurdu.”
34. Erman and Yıldırım, “Oğluna Yatacak Mezar İstiyor.”
35. Semerdjian, “Bone Memory.”
36. For recent insightful work on this cemetery and its relation to
state sovereignty, see Balkan, “Cemetery of Traitors,” and Gill,
“Sense Experiences.”
• Death and Afterlives in the Middle East 179
37. Ağırgöl, “Kilyos’ta İçler Acısı Mezarlık.”
38. Ağırgöl, “Kilyos’ta İçler Acısı Mezarlık.”
39. During the Gezi uprisings of 2013, for instance, Tamar Nalcı and
Emre Can Dağlıoğlu distrupted popular assumption with a piece in
the Turkish Armenian newspaper Agos documenting the area as an
ex-Armenian cemetery (Nalcı and Dağlıoğlu, “Gezi Parkı’nın yanı
başındaki Ermeni mezarlığı”; also see Bieberstein and Tataryan,
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“What of Occupation”; Parla and Özgül, “Property, Dispossession,
and Citizenship in Turkey”). Named Surp Agop during the Ottoman
Empire and early Republican era, this was part of a larger cemetery
structure with a history dating back to the sixteenth century when
today’s broader Taksim area fell outside of the city walls of Galata.
Surp Agop was frst downsized for road construction as part of an
urban planning project in 1913 and later confscated completely by the
Municipality of Istanbul in 1939. Then in 1940, the municipality and
the governship of Istanbul approved its demolition and reconstruc-
tion with the square, park, and residential units instead (Dadyan,
“Şehrin En Büyük Mezarlığından”). Regarding the cemeteries for the
local Jews of Istanbul, these were mainly located in Haskoy, Kuzgun-
cuk, and Ortakoy, neighborhoods that had a concentrated Jewish pop-
ulation. According to historian Minna Rozen’s research on the graves
and tombstones of Jews in Istanbul, the construction of these burial
sites had started as early as in the sixteenth through seventeenth cen-
turies. See Rozen, “Metropolis and Necropolis.” None were able to
remain in their original location. The increase in urban population,
transformation of the urban landscape, and antisemitist attitudes
all combined to make of these graveyards a target for destruction or
removal to elsewhere. As Rozen notes, the construction of Çevre Yolu,
a highway system surrounding Istanbul, severely destroyed the cem-
etery in Hasköy to the extent that most of the older tombstones were
displaced and their pedestals used for construction. See Rozen, “Sur-
vey of Jewish Cemeteries in Western Turkey,” 89.
40. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds.
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