Shadows and Reality: Confronting İzmir’s past

Talât Ulusoy

26 March 2019, DEPO 19:00

In his talk, Talât Ulusoy will elaborate on the disappearance of the Smyrna culture, the fate of forcibly exchanged properties and the larger impact of demographic changes in the region, in the aftermath of the great Smyrna fire in 1922.

Ulusoy’s archive, a personal endeavor which he undertook in 1990, includes rarely seen materials on the region in the pre- and post-fire periods. Making use of archival materials on memory spaces such as the Evangeliki School, Takfor Efendi Mansion, Esir Han, Ulusoy will be treating İzmir as a city built on a history that had been erased.

About Talât Ulusoy:

Talât Ulusoy (born 1948, İzmir) completed his bachelor’s degree at the Architecture-Engineering Department of the Istanbul Technical University followed by a master’s degree in Architecture at the Ege University. He was one of the founding members of Turkey’s first legal communist party in 1990. In 2009, Ulusoy founded Yüzleşme Atölyesi in order to raise awareness around public memory in Turkey. Ulusoy was a panelist at the 2017 conference of Hrant Dink Foundation, Izmir and the Region: Hundred Years of Social, Economic and Cultural Change. Recent articles include ‘‘Spartalıyanlar ve Kordon’daki Konak’’ (Toplumsal Tarih, 2016), ‘‘İzmir’in Hafızası’’ (Birikim Dergisi, 2017) and ‘‘İzmir’in 6-7 Eylül’ü’’ (Agos Gazetesi, 2018).