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Paper short abstract

I examine UNESCO-listed Ani Ruins on the closed Turkey–Armenia border, discussing how the continuum of political violence both enables and unsettles universal, secular and national heritage regimes. I argue absences in official heritage discourse find their presence in haunted stories of the ruins.

Paper long abstract

Ani Ruins, located on Turkey’s border with Armenia, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 and are recognized for their unique multicultural medieval architecture. However, Turkish state emphasizes the Muslim–Turkish historical continuity of the site, as exemplified by the opening of the Menucihr Mosque for public use in 2022. This approach disregards the site’s connection to Armenian identity in the present, confining it to a frozen relic of the past. Such selective heritage discourse reflects the denialist policies regarding the Armenian Genocide and functions to “scientifically” establish Turkish identity and history on the ground (Al-Haj 2001). As a result, the ruins of Ani expose the problems of Eurocentric and secular understandings of universal heritage, enabling state practices to gloss over continuum political violence.

Against the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006) of the Turkish state and UNESCO, this research approaches Ani’s heritage through affective stories. Drawing on hauntology studies (Derrida 1995; Gordon 1997), affect studies on violence (Navaro et al. 2021), and actor-network theory (Latour 2006), I argue that the Ani Ruins carry the “remnants” (Navaro 2021) of the past, where collective and personal memory is entangled with spatial and material relationships, producing assemblages of a nonlinear and unsettled past. This theoretical framework is planned to be implemented on-site through decolonial heritage practices (Lazzari, Larsen, and Orlandi 2024), using a qualitative methodology complemented by archive elicitation. I will employ trace ethnography (Napolitano 2015), narrative interviews, guided tours with visitors (Everett and Barrett 2012), and counter-mapping workshops (Schofield 2014).