Remembering through Material Culture: Local Knowledge of Past Communities in a Turkish Black Sea Town

This article looks at the interaction between narratives and material culture in Tirebolu, a Turkish Black Sea town. The focus here is on developing a methodology, going from material culture to narrative and from material culture back to narrative, rather than on rewriting the history of ethnic relations in that part of Anatolia. In a context where the material traces of earlier communities were washed out by the wild climate and the forces of modernization and nation-building, oral history is the only significant approach to pursue a local history research in the Black Sea area, focussing on the community structure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the case of Tirebolu, objects of material culture, such as old houses, church remains, cemeteries, shops and gardens became important elements which stimulated the narratives about past communities.