Tag: Mehmet Aksoy

Turkey’s 100-foot “Peace and Brotherhood” monument might have been intended as a symbol of friendship with neighboring Armenia when it was erected in Kars in 2006. But one person who didn’t see it that way was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who panned the sculpture as “a monstrosity” and “weird” while bemoaning its location near an 11th century Islamic shrine.

As the BBC is reporting, the Turkish premier is getting his way, as demolition crews overrode widespread protests and began dismantling the sculpture on Tuesday. The entire process is expected to last 10 days. Still, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the statue’s impact may live on as an unlikely icon in Turkey’s election campaign.

There’s no telling what Erdogan might have done if artists had decided to erect an effigy of Peter the Great, Michael Jackson or even Sylvester Stallone as Rocky — all of which exist in spectacularly over-the-top glory elsewhere in the world — in his country.

‘Peace And Brotherhood’ — Turkey

Turkey began demolishing the 100-feet “Peace And Brotherhood” monument near its eastern border after the prime minister slammed it a “monstrosity.” The entire demolition process of the statue — dedicated to friendship with neighboring Armenia — is expected to take about 10 days, although sculptor Mehmet Aksoy is said to have vowed to re-build it elsewhere, the AFP is reporting.

via Turkey-Armenia Friendship Statue Dismantled: A Look At The World’s Ugliest Monuments (PHOTOS).

The prime minister looks on a city’s works, and despairs

Turkey and Armenia

Jan 13th 2011 | ANKARA | from PRINT EDITION

STATUES in Kars are not safe when Recep Tayyip Erdogan is around. When Turkey’s prime minister visited the city last year, the local mayor, who belongs to Mr Erdogan’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party, sought to avoid his ire by ordering the removal of a public fountain featuring bare-breasted nymphs. Last week, during another trip to Kars, which lies about 45km west of the border with Armenia, Mr Erdogan called for the demolition of a local monument designed to promote reconciliation between Turks and Armenians. The statue, of two 30-metre-tall concrete figures reaching out to each other, was, he said, a “freak”.

Mr Erdogan insisted that his distaste was purely aesthetic. Yet some suspect him of pandering to nationalist sentiment in the run-up to elections in June. Many Turks see the statue as an admission of Armenia’s charge that the slaughter of up to 1.5m Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915 amounted to genocide. In 2009 the then mayor of Kars, Naif Alibeyoglu, who had commissioned the statue, was forced out under pressure from Mr Erdogan and the city’s 20% ethnic Azeri population (egged on by Azerbaijan, which disliked Turkey’s efforts to make peace with Armenia).

Mr Erdogan has backed away from a set of protocols signed with Armenia in 2009 that foresaw the establishment of diplomatic relations and the reopening of borders. These were sealed in 1993 after Armenia’s short war with Azerbaijan over the mainly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Mr Erdogan insists that the protocols can only be ratified if Armenia withdraws from seven regions it occupies around the enclave. Armenia is threatening to scrap the deal altogether.

But there is also a whiff of Islamic orthodoxy in the air. Mr Erdogan’s tirade against the Kars statue included references to Hasan Harakani, an ancient Muslim scholar buried nearby. “They erected a strange thing next to his mausoleum… it is unthinkable,” he complained. Many Muslim scholars consider statues to be idolatrous, and other AK officials have not disguised their aversion to them. Ankara’s mayor, Melih Gokcek, has systematically dismantled statues erected by his pro-secular predecessors. “I spit on this kind of art,” he once said.

Mehmet Aksoy, the designer of the Kars monument, says that the government risks being seen as “the Taliban” if it presses its demands. But Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has backed his boss, arguing that Mr Aksoy’s work fails to blend into the Seljuk, Ottoman and Russian character of the city. He might have included Kars’ Armenian legacy, but that is being erased. A long-abandoned tenth-century Armenian church recently reopened—as a mosque.

from PRINT EDITION | Europe

via Turkey and Armenia: Two vast and ugly blocks of stone | The Economist.