In a brief article entitled “Places and Their Pasts,” Doreen Massey critiques the tendency to use the past as the grounds for the “real character” of a place. “These kinds of (implicitly or explicitly) internalist and essentialist constructions of the character of places,” she writes, “not only fail to recognise the long history of interconnectedness with elsewhere… they also presuppose a particular relationship between the assumed identity of a place and its history.” In place of conceiving as the past as something place-bound, she pushes us to think of it as something place-based, generated out of the shifting and ongoing social relations which link various places together. Over the past two decades, the Istanbul neighborhood of Eyüp––like many of the other neighborhoods in Istanbul––has been engaged in a project of re-engaging with ‘its own’ past. In particular, cultural activities like symposia and seminars and projects of restoration have been two ways through which Eyüp’s past has been replaced in the present. However, these engagements with the past are neither monolothic nor without debate. In this paper, I focus on one moment in the late 1990s when the Eyüp Municipality was deeply engaged in a project of claiming the past; I outline some of the actors involved in these debates and trace out some of the ongoing effects of this claiming of the past.
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