Yar bana bir eğlence, Oh, For Some Amusement!
Jean-Michel Botquin
In residency in Istanbul at the time that the protest movement symbolized by
the occupation of Taksim Gezi Park was growing, Eleni Kamma was exploring
another park of the Turkish capital in the Bakırköy district, namely Florya Atatürk,
near to Yeşilköy, or “the green village”, “a charming little town on the Marmara
Sea, full of harmoniously restored wooden houses”, as describe the tourist
guides. Three spires mark the horizon: the Greek Orthodox Haghios Stephanos,
the Armenian Gregorian Surp Istepanos, and the French-speaking Levantine
Catholic San Stefano. All three share the same name, and the village itself used
to be called Ayastefanos until it was renamed in 1924, as part of Mustapha
Kemal Atatürk’s secularization drive.
It was here too that the Russian army stopped in 1877–78, never to realize the
Tsars’ age-old dream of taking Constantinople and reconstituting the Byzantine
Empire. It was also in San Stefano that the eponymous treaty was signed in
1878 bringing an end to the 93rd Russian war in a convention imposed by
the Russian Empire and reorganizing its former Balkan possessions into the
Ottoman Empire.
On this occasion, Russia also imposed the construction of a commemorative
monument in Ayastefanos: an ossuary monument in honour of the Russian
soldier who vanquished the Ottoman Empire. On the decision of the government
and the Committee of Union and Progress, this monument was razed by the
population of Istanbul on 14 November 1914. The Ottoman armies had been
mobilized since 2 September; the Russians declared war on the Empire on 1
November. The destruction of the Russian monument in Ayastfanos was thus
the ultimate expression of national dignity. Turkish nationalism born out of the
Young Turk Revolution of 24 July 1908 was gaining considerable ground. It
progressively won over the political, military and civilian elites and the urban
middle classes.1 At this moment at the start of the First World War it had never
been so strong.
After the Macedonian Yanaki and Milton Manaki brothers’ 1911 documentary
on Sultan Mehmet V’s visit to Monastir, the very first film in Turkish film history
immortalized the “Demolition of the Russian Monument in Ayastefanos”. It was
signed Fuat Uzkinay, a naval officer who one year later started working for the
Central Army Cinema Department set up on the orders of Enver Pacha, the
strong man of the government who, at this time of exacerbated nationalism, was
quick to realize the propagandistic possibilities of film. “I cannot but wonder
at the strangeness of this gesture, which consists of destroying a monument
and immortalizing at as it is destroyed”, the journalist and writer Marie-Michèle
Martinet wrote about this film during her Istanbulite wanderings, “as if the image
was the materialization of a kind of remorse, somewhere between the act of
destroying and of fixing on film the very thing that is being destroyed. Moreover,
strangely, the film disappeared after it was shot. To the point that its existence
was called into question.” 2
Eleni Kamma has decided to evoke this first film about the destruction of the
Russian monument in Ayastefano. Her own film, a diptych with adjacent images,
will thus confront current sites where no signs of the monument’s existence
remain, with accounts and evocations of that day on 14 November 1914. Eleni Kamma will ask a hayalî – which in Turkish signifies both “imaginary” and “image
creator” – to narrate this account. A hayalî is a Karagöz puppeteer; Karagöz is
the traditional shadow theatre named after the first of its two main characters,
Karagöz and Hacivat. These plays, in which the shadows of cut-out figures
are projected on a white screen, played a primordial role throughout the vast
Ottoman Empire. “The plays portrayed, and mocked, the traditions, customs and
mores of the capital and the major cities’ particularly cosmopolitan populations”,
notes Michèle Nicolas3. With the plays’ allusions to current affairs, their criticism
and grievances concerning the tyrannical authorities, this theatre served,
notably in the 19th century, to voice protest through political satire and humour.
It bemoaned the pashas, viziers and beys, all of whom incarnated religious or
military power, but were never represented as such, out of respect or fear of
reprisals. Karagöz is in fact a kind of mirror, reflecting the thoughts of the people,
a performance that expresses what the spectators do not themselves dare
express about their moral, social and political preoccupations. “People don’t
come to Karagöz”, hayalî Emin Senyer, one of the main legatees of this tradition
today, likes to say. “Karagöz comes to them.”
In the very first images of Eleni Kamma’s diptych film, we simultaneously
discover both the trunks of dozens of trees that stand like ghostly singular
presences in the Florya Atatürk Park, and the workshop of pupeteer Emin
Senyer. He cuts up a buffalo skin. He works the leather until it is almost
transparent. In his nimble fingers, a monument gradually takes form that looks
like a Russian Orthodox church. As he dyes it to create coloured projections,
he recounts the Destruction and tells a singular tale, that of Y. Bahri Doğançay,
a soldier in the 27th cavalry regiment, who declared to have been the one to
rig the explosive device that blew the monument up in 1914. Doğançay, a
thoroughly martial figure, evokes the people of Istanbul, who had already taken
pickaxes to the monument’s surrounding walls the previous day, the local police
commissioner’s astonishment and anger at this regiment’s intervention, the
magnificence of the monument, the fuses that he and his fellows lit with their
cigarettes, the danger they risked, and the difficulties they had in destroying the
building. He finally evokes the government’s indecision, the order given to stop
this destruction on the morning of 14 November, the permission finally given to
complete the work methodically, and how the monument ruins “now constituted
a danger to the population”; the spectacular U-turn of authorities caught on the
back foot.
The Karagöz projection lamp is called a şem’a, literally a candle, but is generally
an oil lamp. The images are projected on a white muslin screen, known as
the ayna, which means mirror. Imagining her work in the form of a double
projection, Eleni Kamma plays on this mirror-like set-up. While the trees of
Florya Park continue to scroll by, like hieratic shadows, puppeteer Emin Seyner
constructs his theatre, this cloth stretched on a frame like a painter’s canvas,
ready for the shadow play. When he evokes the monument’s enclosure during
Doğançay’s account, Eleni Kamma’s camera films the railings around Florya
Park. Other accounts of the event, relayed by the press at the time, back up
Doğançay’s epic narrative. The commentary that unfolds on the left side of the
diptych, in counterpoint to the narrative told by Emin Seneyr, is based, among
other sources, on articles from the Tanin, close to the Committee of Union
and Progress, or from the highly influential Tasfiri Efkar. The tone is official,
nationalistic and rather emphatic. The Tasfiri Efka details, for example, that the
monument’s four bells were transferred to the Military Museum and exhibited alongside another national symbol: the heavy chains that prevented sea access
to the Golden Horn during Mehmed II the Conqueror’s siege of the city. As soon
as the puppeteer goes behind the screen, ready to bring the Destruction to life,
his shadow figures at last ready, Eleni Kamma films another screen, a banner
strung all the way across the top of a big Yeşilköy building. Here, a stone’s
throw away from the place where the Russian monument stood, a building site
is under-way, in construction, the promoter proffering an image of what the final
result will be like.
Eleni Kamma commissions the reconstruction of a monument; in cinematic
terms, she produces a remake of its destruction. Emin Senyer performs this
undertaking. The Karagöz prologue always ends with injunction to have fun;
Hacivat indeed traditionally declares as the prologue closes, Yar bana bir
eğlence, “Oh, for some amusement”. It is Hacivat who watches and is witness
to the destruction of the Russian monument. “With his nasal twang”, Michèle
Nicholas again notes, “he is the petty-bourgeois, the village pedant who quakes
before authority. Sycophantic to the powerful and affluent, he uses a flowery
language, full of erudite words and metaphors. He knows high-society etiquette
inside out and displays upper-class moral principles. He is a cold, calculating,
opportunistic erudite, the go-between to whom people turn when they need
a service or a favour.” A cavalryman and a man on foot enter the scene. The
Russian monument is at the centre of the stage; the cavalryman and man on foot
finally set about destroying it, in a comical way. And as the Russian monument
explodes, its shadow projected on the screen, we learn that, during a meeting
with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2012, at the very moment that the Syrian situation
was at the heart of all political conversations, Vladimir Putin offered his Turkish
counterpart to restore the Russian monuments and grave stones in Turkey
and the Turkish monuments and gravestones in Russia. Including the Russian
commemorative monument in the well-to-do Istanbul suburb, Ayastefanos.
Eleni Kamma’s mirror images go well beyond recalling a historical episode at
the start of the First World War. Between the real and imaginary, the play on
shadow and light that they reveal, between a lost film, archive sources, popular
traditions, social satire, contradictions and political history, the film reactivates
memory. The images of the shadow play project us into the real: that of an
Istanbul suburb today, that of the world too. For one cannot but think of current
protests, of the current dangers of rising nationalism, of the temptations of
territorial expansionism, of the situation of minorities, and the shock of cultures
and religious conflicts. Eleni Kamma indeed cites the lines of T.S. Eliot: “Between
the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow”.
(translation: Melissa Thackway)
1 François Georgeon, “La montée du nationalisme turc dans l‘État ottoman (1908–1914). Bilan et perspectives”, Revue de l‘Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, 50, 1988.
2 Marie-Michèle Martinet, “Où est passée Zozo Dalmas”, Le Monde blog, 2009
3 Michèle Nicolas, “La comédie humaine dans le Karagöz”, Revue du monde musulman et de la
Méditerranée, 77–78, 1995.