In 2023, amidst a six-month-long field mission in Northern Cyprus, I encountered an unusual public sculpture in the small village of Çamlıköy. A sizeable memorial space had been dedicated to the local community’s only martyr [şehit], a boy named Emin İzzet, who was killed in March 1964 at the age of sixteen. His sculpture stands at the centre of an ornamental commemorative space, the proportions and placement of which initially struck me as awkward. Why not place the sculpture on the main square? Why was the commemorative space seemingly encroaching on a nearby house? It turns out there was actually nowhere else this sculpture could have been installed. Indeed, it rests exactly where the martyr was shot, on a site rendered specific by his death. Spatial specificity through blood shed.

Death as Heritage might seem conceptually abstract, and yet death is omnipresent in Turkish Cypriot daily life. Martyr monuments [şehitlik] materialise a sense of communal mourning and duty to witness. Using the blood [kan] kinship metaphor (as studied by anthropologist Rebecca Bryant), which I articulate with the art-historical tradition of bronze’s resuscitative potential, I explore how public sculpture mythologically anchors communities across Northern Cyprus. Through death and spilled blood, martyrs legitimise their descendants’ presence, be it through history or internal displacement. Via secular martyr monuments, those same martyrs are immortalised, constantly re-invoked for their capacity to specify a site, codify a place and justify a presence. As a result, the martyr sites and their related monuments take on an archaeological quality that impacts artistic scenography and historical documentation. Even in displacement after 1974, martyr monuments continued to be used to re-specify newly appropriated sites, rationalise forced displacement and embody a distant grief.

This could all appear very rigid but behind its codified aesthetic, scenography and function, this funerary adjacent public infrastructure also engenders less predictable forms of perception. Largely pedestrian in conception and design, martyr monuments and their related sites usually contrast with their immediate, overwhelmingly car-centric environments (as exemplified by occasional, accidental car crashes into public sculptures). The requisites of witnessing and remembering also manifest through the presence of ramps, stairs, paths, and seating – in other words, witnessing features. Features that are otherwise absent from other Turkish Cypriot public spaces.

Less tangible is the induced porosity between the public and the funerary in daily life. After all, hyper visible martyr monuments import with them the intimate rituals of grief and private commemoration. These behaviours, as a result, engender expectations that in turn codify the medium of public sculpture itself: who can be immortalised, where and how. The many busts, sculptures and monuments that populate Northern Cyprus’s public spaces constitute a complex heritage at the (sometimes literal) crossroad between memory, architecture and urban design. That is why I thought AMPS would be the ideal place for a first publication of the subject. Overall, this article offers a glimpse into a material history that seeks permanence in the face of invisibility and silence.

Death as heritage: Turkish Cypriot martyr monuments and their anchoring spatiality by Tarquin Sinan (Université Libre de Bruxelles/CReA-Patrimoine, Belgium) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 34.

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