Cathedral v. Mosque: Contestatory urban politics of place in the Greek-Turkish borderlands

Keywords: urban form, landscape, geopolitics, difference
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 22

Abstract

We explore the morphological transformation of two iconic monuments in the City of Didymoteicho in Greek Thrace – one Islamic, one Christian– as exemplary of borderlands geopolitics of difference and the intimate. Difference becomes the crucible on which institutional actors and subjects – in this case, Didymoteicho’s Muslim minority community – sort their relationship to state, nation, and civil rights. The Metropolitan Cathedral of Panagia Eleftherotra – Virgin Mary the Liberator (1992) contests the historical landscape primacy of the architecturally significant Grand Beyazit Mosque (ca. 1420) – the two structures defining the city’s skyline. The state of the Islamic monument undermines the minority community’s faith and trust in a fragile regime of cohabitation with the Christian majority, which is further complicated by the city’s situation on the geopolitically sensitive Greek-Turkish borderlands. The state’s restoration efforts have been tentative, insufficient, and ultimately failed. The Cathedral is as much an ecclesiastical as a political project. It represents a model of contestatory urban politics that instructs on how sovereigntist and “organic” politics of place are both entangled and competitive in the production of different versions of national statecraft and urban spaces with significant implications for the sectarian communities’ sense of belonging. For its part, the Cathedral project illustrates the limitations of the co-evolved State-Church-Military complex in the borderlands in managing (or mismanaging) the geopolitics of difference and the production of urban projects in the public interest.