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Treasure/Fetish/Gift: hunting for ‘Armenian gold’ in post-genocide Turkish Kurdistan

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Abstract

This article ethnographically attends to the widespread practice of hunting for ‘Armenian’ treasures in Eastern Turkey. It explores the double valence of shadow—as that which gives power to vision, which makes present and mediates, and as that which can overpower vision, which obscures and hides—as it manifests in treasure hunting, conceived of as a complex encounter with the Armenian history of the region. Treasures, as shadows carrying this split potential, are intimately bound up with both the Turkish nation-state project built on genocide, dispossession and denial, and with the particular position Kurds hold within this constellation. I draw on the notions of fetish and the gift to think through treasures as shadows in their double potentiality across time, as they become recognised—or not—as part of a relational matrix involving their historical makers and the present-day diggers.

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Notes

  1. Law number 2863 ‘Kültür ve Tabiat Koruma Kanunu’, published on 23rd July 1983 in the Official Gazette number 18113.

  2. Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski (2008) describe a similarly grim scene of ghoulishness unfolding after the abandonment of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka in 1944. As soon as the SS had left, locals gathered around the site of the dismantled camp digging for gold and jewellery of those Jewish victims that had been buried in mass graves before cremation began in 1943. In 1944 Soviet and Ukrainian guards arrived with heavy machinery in the service of Stalin and bombed mass graves to remove valuables from decaying corpses. Such treasure hunting apparently continued into the 2000 s (see also Gross and Gross 2012). I thank Aurélia Kalisky and Felix Ackermann for bringing this to my attention.

  3. This was something once mentioned to me in passing; I was not able to gain more detailed information as to how this was actually done.

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Acknowledgements

Research for this article has been made possible by the European Research Council (grant number ERC2011_stG_20101124). It has benefitted from discussions on an earlier version presented in Vilnius, Lithuania, as part of the ‘Shadowing the Scene’ conference. I would further like to thank Eirini Avramopoulou, Mantas Kvedaravicius and Marc Nichanian for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

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  1. Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Fritz-Reuter-Straße 5, 10827, Berlin, Germany

    Alice von Bieberstein

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Correspondence to Alice von Bieberstein.

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von Bieberstein, A. Treasure/Fetish/Gift: hunting for ‘Armenian gold’ in post-genocide Turkish Kurdistan. Subjectivity 10, 170–189 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0026-x

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