A Ghostly Landscape: Harput Between Confabulation and Denudation

A Ghostly Landscape: Harput Between Confabulation and Denudation

I. Confabulations

On a hot August morning, I am traveling by minibus with my friend Mustafa, a local historian, to Harput from Elazığ, leaving behind a city sprawling across the plain at a scale too large for its population of merely 400,000. The seven kilometer distance between the two is relatively sparsely built, though the foothills are getting steadily developed. Large swaths of the land are taken up by restricted zones invisible behind high walls and reserved for the military since the nineteenth century, intimating Elazığ’s origins as garrison town. As we ascend further, I catch a glimpse of the giant crescent and star above the word Harput inscribed on the foothills—a typical post-1980 practice by the military particularly in Kurdish majority provinces. We take the last wide curve, and are greeted by the Balak Gazi Monument (Figure 1), erected in 1964 commemorating the 12th century Artukid martyr, whose short governorship over an area stretching between Harput and northern Syria is now considered legend.

Figure 1. Balak Gazi Monument at Harput’s entrance  (Photograph by Dick Osseman. Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Figure 2. View of the southerly plains from Harput, the southwestern edge of the Keban Reservoir is also visible. Photograph by author.

As soon as we get off the minibus, a welcome fresh breeze hits my brow, and I take in an eyeful of the expansive views that Harput commands, hovering 300m above the surrounding plains (Figure 2). On a clear day you can see the southern edges of the Keban Reservoir and beyond from here.  It’s not hard to understand the strategic and microclimatic reasons that must have informed the choice of location nearly 4000 years ago.

Figure 3. Harput Municipal Guest House. Photograph by author.

Figure 4. Harput Preservation Office. Photograph by author.

Figure 5. Harput Press Museum interior courtyard and café. Photograph by author.

Figure 6. Repaved streets at the entrance of Harput and the Üç Lüleli Fountain. Photograph by author.

At Harput’s entrance are recently restored historic homes, now used as the Municipal Guest House, the Harput Survey and Preservation Office, and the Press Museum (Figures 3-5). The road has been repaved—older homes closer to it have received a lick of paint. Some of Harput’s famous fountains have been restored although no water seems to be coming out of them (Figure 6). Harput has made a bid for inclusion in the UNESCO list of world heritage sites, spurring a feverish activity both above and below the ground. Near the majestic castle, teams of archaeologists from the nearby Fırat University are hard at work busily excavating Harput’s long buried past.

Several mosques, baths, and other social-religious structures have been restored albeit in a rush and with little attention to detail. New museums—the contents of which appear to be random collections barely related to the region’s history or sometimes border on the absurd—are being opened (Figures 7 and 8).

Figure 7. Construction hoarding panels surrounding the restoration site of the Kurşunlu Mosque. The panels advertise the sponsorship of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture and the State General Directorate of Pious Foundations. The slogan in the middle states “Since 1848: The Promise of our History: The Essence of our Civilization.” Photograph by author.

Figure 8. Harput Coffee Cup Museum. Photograph by author.

Figure 9. Harput House. Furthest right on the same hilltop is the Coffee Cup Museum. Photograph by author.

Some attractions are housed in existing structures, but others are in newly built ones such as the Harput House, which, as a composition, vaguely evokes a generic Turkish house, but one that’s more typical of Western/Northwestern Turkey and the Balkans, not so resonant with Harput’s historic vernacular. With its generous proportions and dominant place within the town’s silhouette—competing with the Castle no less— it looks distinctly out of place and out of scale. After a long period of disuse—a bit like a white elephant—part of the compound has now been converted into the Harput Music Museum and there are rumors about converting the other side into a gastronomy museum (Figure 9).

Figure 10. Harput Religious Training Center. Photograph by author.

Figure 11. Hoarding panel by the construction site for the Harput Religious Training Center from 2019. Photograph by author.

In the northeastern quadrant of town, the new Harput Religious Training Center, completed in 2023, has replaced a similar facility that had a more utilitarian appearance on the same site (Figures 10-11). This sprawling complex now takes up nearly a quarter of Harput’s surface area. Built to embody the stylistic characteristics of the so-called Turco-Islamic synthesis, it not only fundamentally differs in its spatial logic from the precedents it supposedly honors, but in its materiality, detailing, and workmanship, it unwittingly betrays the perverse incentives inherent in crony capitalist practices of bid preparation, procurement, and site management.

Figure 12. Mansur Baba Tomb. Photograph by author.

Figure 13. Şefik Gül House—restored for ÇEKÜL, a preservation oriented NGO. Behind the building the top of the white roofline of the Religious Training Center is visible. Photograph by author.

As we walk, we see many visitors rambling about, a woman with two kids in tow approaches us, asking to see if we know of any other mausolea to visit—it is as if she is on a scavenger hunt ticking them off her list. Truth be told there is no shortage of such pilgrimage sites, both historic and contrived. We take them to the Mansur Baba Tomb (Figure 12), dating from 12th century—one of the first structures in Harput to be restored in the early 1960s, under the leadership of the then Minister of Tourism Nureddin Ardıçoğlu at around the same time Balak Gazi monument was erected. It appears that the building had been in a dismal state before the works begun. Mustafa remarks that stones for the “restoration” were brought from Ahlat, near Van, which have a conspicuously different color than the stone quarried locally. On closer inspection, it is clear that the building has been retrofitted using modern techniques without much regard to its original construction. Thereafter, on our way out of the painstakingly restored local history NGO, another woman, impeccably dressed in designer wear, asks us whether we know of similar mansions for sale because she would like to buy something authentic (Figure 13).

Figure 14. Afternoon picnic in by the castle. Photograph by author.

Figure 15. Nighttime entertainment in Harput’s main square. Photograph by author.

In the late afternoon minibuses carry more passengers from Elazığ, families coming for picnics spread out into the park by the castle, restaurants fill out despite the deep recession and street food vendors and souvenir stands start doing brisker business (Figures 14-15). Rather than an inhabited town, though, Harput looks like an outdoor museum or a theme park perennially under construction with an occasional sprinkling of residential quarters. At night it all empties out under a blanket of silence. As one local journalist cynically protests—Is Harput Elazığ’s guest room? With all the connotations “misafir odası” implies in Turkish—a pristine room separate from a family’s everyday spaces, dedicated primarily to hosting guests.

Figure 16a. An aerial view of Harput illustrating the gaps in its urban fabric. Google Earth Map and Google Earth Map reworked by the author.

Figure 16b. An aerial view of Harput illustrating the gaps in its urban fabric. Google Earth Map and Google Earth Map reworked by the author.

There are large gaps in Harput’s urban fabric, especially in the center, where one would expect a concentration of houses (Figure 16 a/b).  The terraces on the steep eastern and western slopes, with a smattering of conifers that look like the survivors of a neglected reforestation project, are, in fact, what remains of the Armenian and Syriac neighborhoods. Nothing is left of them but a few crumbling churches—and there is no visible effort to rescue or restore them as part of Harput’s UNESCO bid (Figure 17).

Figure 17. Harput’s empty hills, site of the former Armenian neighborhood. To the right of the image the ruins of the Red Church, which belonged to the town’s Armenians is visible. Photograph by author.

My purpose here is not to take pot shots at the flimsiness of the historicist references or the quality of construction in Harput’s new “old” buildings——tempting though it maybe. Nor will I probe the networks of power and influence facilitating their realization. Instead, I want to draw attention to Harput’s emptiness—and the compulsion by state and local authorities with intense lobbying from some local notables to fill the void, inexorably adding new sites to the list of attractions to install a stage set that supports a particular historicist narrative, deliberately leaving physical markers of their possession of this town—but it never seems to feel enough. In this telling, history unfolds as an unbroken chain of events since the 1071 victory of Turkish tribes against the then disintegrating Byzantine Empire at nearby Marzikert, culminating in the consolidation of a homogenous muslim (read Sunni) population in the land we now call Turkey—Harput is portrayed as an important milestone in this process.

Figure 18. Bust of Çubuk Bey with the Harput House in the background. The bust previously was situated in the main square, it has recently been relocated between the Coffee Cup Museum and the Harput House. Photograph by author.

On the one hand, historical actors who previously might have been relatively minor players such as Balak Gazi or Mansur Baba, or Harput’s first Turkish Muslim conqueror Çubuk Bey (Figure 18) are foregrounded as avatars of this narrative, and implicitly—if anachronistically—assigned a modern ethnic and religious self-awareness with a teleological sense of purpose. On the other hand, actors whose presence complicates this preordained unfolding of events—no matter how central they might have been at the time of their lives—are consigned to being losers, schemers, or enemies or are completely edited out and so are the physical traces of their existence. This applies to Harput’s non-Muslims—and with particular poignancy to its Armenian residents who historically constituted nearly a third of its population until the 1915 Genocide and for whom Harput was as important a cultural center as it was for their Muslim counterparts. The removal of the debris remaining from their neighborhoods during Mansur Baba Tomb’s restoration, ordered and personally overseen by Ardıçoğlu, one of the earliest proponents of Turco-Islamic historiography, was, in effect, a material manifestation of the erasure demanded by this emergent ideological persuasion.

Such collective collective confabulations, that is, replacements of gaps in memory with falsifications believed or desired to be true drive historic Harput’s remaking. These anxious and somewhat slovenly activities remind me of horror vacui, a concept I will borrow from art history. Described as the fear of empty space that results in the over-marking of the canvas, horror vacui is the use of excessive decoration that threatens to overwhelm what is being decorated, the stuffing of gaps and caesura with further representation. Implied in the concept is also the uncanniness of what lies immediately beyond the canvas, a monstrous unseen that purportedly lingers just outside the frame and constantly threatens to appear within it. I suggest then we can read the recent intensifying attempts at mnemonic engineering through building Harput up as symptoms of a chronic anxiety about realizing the near impossibility of hermetically sealing access to other narratives that can destabilize the preferred version of history. This should hardly be surprising since the proponents of the now ascendant Turco-Islamic synthesis thesis themselves worked relentlessly to discredit and displace the secularist Early Republican definitions of Turkish history and identity, which they deeply resented.

Although the rapid accretion of new interventions over a relatively short span of time threatens to compromise the legibility of anterior layers of more capacious and plural histories, probing the discrepancies between what is learned and what is witnessed can pry apart the space between sanctioned narratives and subjugated knowledges to finally confront the ghosts among us.

II. Denudation

In “Harput Şehrengizi” published just at the outset the current spate of construction and restoration activity that started in the early 2000s, conservative author Metin Önal Mengüşoğlu wrote:

Oh dear city, who did this to you? Who rendered your visage so unrecognizable?

We did it—us, with our ruthless blows, we destroyed you beyond repair, polluted your soil, dismantled your buildings and cemeteries, and moved them stone by stone to construct the building stock of the new republic in Elazığ

And now we are not ashamed to tout your name, to pique the curiosity of would be visitors from faraway lands.

We are all responsible—and it might just be this disconsolate remorse that compels us to stand up for you

For most to its nearly 4000 year history, Harput, was a naturally impregnable hill town perched on a promontory overlooking a vast and fertile plateau dotted with myriad farming villages irrigated by carefully engineered qanat systems and countless streams flowing into the Euphrates. Starting from mid-19th century, however, Harput and its surroundings, which had long been home to a diverse population of Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Syriac Christians, and some Greeks were frequently shaken by bouts of violence spurred on by local—mostly Kurdish— resistance to Ottoman efforts to centralize state authority, rising nationalist sentiments and ethno-religious strife, as well as the broader geopolitical designs of rival European powers. The Ottoman state also gradually turned on its non-Muslim subjects, Armenians in particular, deploying Kurdish paramilitary troops, ostensibly formed to patrol the Turco-Russian border, against them in very violent ways.

Figure 19. Armenians being marched in columns from Harput to Elazığ in 1915 (Creative Commons License).

These tensions culminated in the Ottoman participation and catastrophic defeat in WWI, which not only brought about the Empire’s collapse but unleashed waves of genocidal violence, decimating Armenians and the other non-Muslim populations of Harput and beyond wiping out entire settlements (Figure 19). WWI had also internally displaced many Kurds, leaving Eastern Turkey almost completely in ruins in its wake. The Kurds’ longstanding (and occasionally very violent) frictions with the centralizing state intensified as the neophyte Turkish Republic’s leaders demanded not just subservience from them—as their Ottoman predecessors had—but also cultural assimilation. The new nation-state’s population policies, which aspired to forge a homogenous polity, compelled the remaining non-Muslims, who rightfully felt threatened, to leave the lands they had always known as their home. At the same time, compulsory and voluntary post-WWI population exchanges brought Muslim emigrants, who had no roots in the region, from the Balkans to resettle in the now abandoned villages to boost population numbers further complicated the demographic picture. It is in this turbulent context that Elazığ, a garrison town founded in mid-19th century on Harput’s outskirts, as an outpost for the Ottoman state’s administrative, institutional and internal security concerns was enlisted to reprise this role and the built environment became a vital instrument of this strategy.[1]

Figure 20. Modern Elazığ in the early years of the Republic. Reworked from personal postcard by the author.

The founders of the Turkish Republic envisioned Elazığ as a model urban landscape where the spatial practices of a new social and political order—both mundane and ritualistic—could be enacted publicly as shared formative experiences of a new national identity (Figure 20). Until then Harput and Elazığ had maintained their character as separate entities, even though by the late 1880s the former's hilltop town’s position and distance to the main Samsun-Baghdad caravan route had begun to put it at a disadvantage. With the republic the distinctions between the two became more pronounced, as Elazığ’s fortunes rose Harput’s ebbed.

Figure 21. Window detail from the People’s House, the white stones are gravestones brought from Harput.

The dismantling, of which Mengüşoğlu speaks in his book, started then: in the 1930s, Elazığ’s officious governor, Tevfik Gür initiated the stripping of Harput for building parts to be used in the construction of Elazığ to expedite the process. In fact, unmaking Harput and to make Republican Elazığ by transporting building components for use as spolia became a business in those years—and Harput folk, as Mengüşoğlu fesses up to it, willy nilly became part of this enterprise (Figure 21). The process was likely to have been prompted by the lack of funds, state capacity, building materials, as well as the demise of experienced Armenian master builders,  not to mention  Gür’s own personal ambitions for advancement as a zealous republican bureaucrat, who wanted to expedite the transformation. Consequently, in the 1950s, while Elazığ became a sprawling mid-sized administrative town in Eastern Turkey, most of Harput had been leveled and many of its landmarks were in a state of utter disrepair.


III. Hauntings

Although written as a paean to Harput, Mengüşoğlu’s book is an effectively elegy—both for a lost home and for his son Yasir, a university student who died in 1999, in Istanbul after a confrontation with the police while protesting the headscarf ban at Turkish universities—then a legacy of the secularizing reforms under the republic.[2] It is to grieve both that Mengüşoğlu returns to Harput—his prose fuses both sorrows and it is not always clear which irretrievable loss he is speaking of.

Mengüşoğlu is one of the younger members of a cadre of conservative intellectuals from Harput who—starting from the 1950s—with the loss of the Early Republican leaders’ grip on power—began to openly lament the destruction of their hometown and pushed for a change in course and install a Turco-Islamicist narrative of the nation’s history.  Uprooted from their hometown to live, study, and work in other cities—such as Istanbul, these intellectuals were heartbroken to find the Harput they had carried for so long in the eyes of their minds was gone forever: Its narrow streets eerily bereft of houses, with the pitter patter of children running through them silenced, its once exuberant fountains dried up, and the sounds of women chatting by them long drowned out, its renowned orchards gone waste, no bursts of blooming almonds, apricots and plums in the spring.

Although, in their writings, their main grievance appears to be about the Republican regime’s dogged purge of Islam from the public sphere, these authors also cast an unexpected light on Harput’s demise during the violent transition from a pluralistic empire to a unitary nation-state, which preceded the so-called feverish phase of reconstruction that is now taking place. They resent the disintegration of entire life worlds, from the death of local crafts to that of foodways, and the suppression local knowledges and exclusion—or rather extermination—of identities deemed undesirable—all in all, they unequivocally begrudge the irrevocable parochialization of Harput, now severed from the networks that had connected it to a wider and more vibrant world.

Notably absent from their narratives, though, are the Armenians and their brutal demise even when they come eerily close to confronting it. For example, Ishak Sunguroğlu’s four-volume and 1500-page oeuvre, often regarded as a key reference for Harput’s local history, dedicates a mere 2-3 pages to the death and deportation of his neighbors—sanitized and implicitly accusatory as if they had it coming. Considering incoming Armenian deportees various from destinations were compelled to camp on the plains just outside Harput before being dispatched toward the Syrian desert it is very unlikely he did not see any of it. Instead Armenians surface unexpectedly when these authors start providing the reasons for their own departures from Harput. 

Figure 22. General view of Western Harput. The large buildings in the back are the premises of the Euphrates College ran by American missionaries. The adobe houses stacked on the hillside  behind the children is the Armenian neighborhood of Surp Agop. (Courtesy of Salt Araştırma)

They write of elite Armenian families sending their children first to study at the local missionary schools (Figure 22) and then abroad for higher education so they would return to set up shop  as professionals—doctors, pharmacists, engineers… Or of the skilled craftsmen and gifted manufacturers whose factories now lie derelict, of the prospects that foreclosed with their demise compelling Sunguroğlu and his ilk to leave Harput because there were no prospects left  there for them either.

Haunting—writes Avery Gordon—is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with or when their oppressive nature is denied.  Haunting compels us to locate long extinguished presences through their absence, and at times, through the anxious removal and covering up of their traces from the record. Although the rapid accretion of new interventions over a relatively short span of time threatens to compromise the legibility of anterior layers of more capacious and plural histories, probing the discrepancies between what is learned and what is witnessed can pry apart the space between sanctioned narratives and subjugated knowledges to finally confront the ghosts among us. Afterall, the grief of loss and the guilt of complicity reside in the same minds.

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Mustafa Balaban, who as always has provided generous help and thoughtful insights to this project, and Yahya Biçer, whose curiosity, company and logistical support have enriched this work.

This research was made possible with a small grant from the British Institute at Ankara.

Citation

Zeynep Kezer, “A Ghostly Landscape: Harput Between Confabulation and Denudation,” PLATFORM, August 18, 2025.

Notes

[1] Elazığ, located in Mezre, on the plains south of Harput, was first used as a military garrison in the 1834, following extended occupation by the Egyptian Khedive’s army. When the Ottoman state introduced modernizing reforms and centralize its authority, the military garrison acquired administrative roles, and commercial outfits also began concentrating around it. In 1862 it was named Mamuret-ül Aziz, after Sultan Abdülaziz, and in 1878 it was designated formally as a provincial seat, which was commonly shortened to Elaziz. In 1937 the Republic’s founder and first president Atatürk renamed it Elazık (land of bountiful food) in recognition of its bountiful harvests. Thereafter, because it rolls of the tongue more easily in Turkish, it was renamed Elazığ.

[2] The headscarf ban was introduced in Turkish universities in the early 1980s, following a military coup, the leaders of which interpreted the donning of scarves by female students as a breach against the secularist principles of the republic. The continuation of the ban long after Turkey’s re-transition to democracy, and especially students and political organizations espousing more conservative views frequently protested it. The ban was finally lifted in 2013, nearly a decade after the current conservative AKP government took office.

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