Memory Triangles of the Gallipoli Peninsula: Visualizing Localness Through a Single Composition

Gülay Uğur Göksel

I read Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore three years before I ever set foot in Alçıtepe. In the novel, the painter-protagonist becomes entangled with a painting from another era: a Japanese classical scene of a murder, rendered in deliberate, almost ceremonial strokes. Later, from the painting, a figure rises from a well—half real, half symbolic, carrying the weight of things buried and unresolved (Murakami, 2018). The painting he keeps in his studio begins to bleed into his life; figures step out of the canvas and into the world. An underground space becomes a portal where metaphor and reality touch.

When I first read the book, I admired the atmosphere but treated it as fiction, safely distant from the social worlds I study. It was only much later, during the EGEHUB residency in Alçıtepe, that this well returned to me—not as a literary reference I consciously reached for, but as a quiet echo surfacing from below. The feeling preceded the memory. I sensed something in the field that I could not yet name, and the novel slipped back into my mind the way metaphors do: suddenly, quietly, and after the fact.

The Atmosphere of EGEHUB

EGEHUB created a space in which research and artistic practice intertwined almost without effort. Artists and researchers lived, worked, and wandered together. We shared meals at long tables. We listened and discussed to narratives of arrival, loss, and endurance. This atmosphere changed how I listened. Interviews became only one part of what I considered “data.” Colours, sounds, textures, and movements became equally important. The way a man’s voice dropped when he mentioned a particular village; the way a woman’s hands remained on the table even after she finished speaking; the slight pause before someone used the word yerli (local) or yabancı (outsider)—these details began to matter as much as the words themselves.

Pink (2015) argues that ethnography is always sensory, even when it pretends to be purely verbal or textual. Knowledge emerges from how bodies move together in space, how they share air, weather, and built environments. In EGEHUB, this was not an abstract methodological claim but a daily experience. The studio was never separate from the field. The field entered the studio through our togetherness. Being in this process altered my method. I found myself less interested in producing neat categories. Some things never quite became sentences but lived in gestures and glances. It was in this mixed environment—neither purely analytical nor purely artistic—that I ended up painting.

The day before our exhibition opened, the artists were busy arranging their works: testing lights, debating angles, trying out new positions for a photograph. I sat at a table with my notebook open and felt unable to write one more line of fieldnotes. Everything I had been hearing from the villages about who belonged, who arrived later, who remained “other” was too entangled to be flattened into a list of themes. I needed a surface that could hold simultaneity, tension, and contradiction.

I taped a sheet of paper to the studio wall and began.

Gallipoli as a Memory Terrain

Fieldwork on the Gallipoli peninsula means moving through a space where memory is anything but stable. It is curated in museums and memorials, contested in local narratives, and constantly reactivated by tourists, pilgrims, and national ceremonies. The landscape carries the weight of the First World War, yet it is also a place of everyday life: of shops, fields, and family houses with satellite dishes on the roof.

Within this dense environment, the villages closest to our residency formed a small constellation with its own internal grammar. There were three of them:

Seddülbahir, often described by its residents as the “oldest,” a place where people say they have been present since the time of Troy.
Alçıtepe, settled by migrants from Bulgaria in the 1930s in the former Greek village of Kirte, rebuilt after the war.
Behramlı, described by others as Romani, located a few kilometres inland, marked not by physical distance but by subtle social boundaries.

I began to think of these three villages as a memory triangle: one anchored in autochthony, one shaped by displacement and resettlement, one positioned in the realm of marginalisation and quiet witnessing.

In Seddülbahir, I heard variations of the same phrase: “Biz buralıyız, en eskisiyiz.” We are from here, the oldest ones. People sometimes added, half jokingly, “Atalarımız Truva’dan beri burada,” our ancestors have been here since Troy. Whether historically accurate or not, the narrative mattered. It functioned as what Herzfeld (1997) calls cultural intimacy: a taken-for-granted sense that one has the right to define the landscape and one’s place within it.

Alçıtepe carried a different story. Older residents told me about their families’ arrival from Bulgaria in the 1930s. Houses were in ruins, they said. They rebuilt them stone by stone. Yet even decades later, some still felt they were seen as “newcomers.” One woman said: “Evleri biz kaldırdık ama hâlâ misafir gibi konuşuyorlar.” We raised the houses, but they still speak as if we are guests.

Behramlı occupied a quieter but no less meaningful position. People described it as a place where everyone passes through but few stop. Daily interactions with other villages were friendly—people helped each other in the fields, lent tools, exchanged visits. Yet when I asked about marriages between Behramlı and the other villages, the answer was immediate and unanimous: “Hiç. Hiç olmaz.” Never. It does not happen.

This absence was striking. There was no open hostility, but a boundary remained firm, as certain as the contour of the hills. One man in Behramlı put it simply: “Biz herkesle iyiyiz ama kimse bize akraba olmaz.” We get along with everyone, but no one becomes kin with us. This is where Connerton’s (1989) argument about embodied memory becomes relevant. Social hierarchies are not maintained only through stories; they are reproduced through habits, gestures, and patterns of interaction. The absence of marriages between Behramlı and the other villages, the routes people take through space, the slightly different tone used when referring to “them”—these practices sediment over time into a shared, bodily knowledge of who belongs where.

These conversations lingered in my mind as I stood before the blank paper in the studio.

The First Lines: Drawing the Triangle

The first figure to appear on the paper was tall and dark. I started with the shoulders, then the neck, then the outline of the head. When I tried to shade the eyes, the charcoal smeared, covering them entirely. For a moment I considered correcting it, but the smudged face felt right. I left the eyes erased.

Only later did I realise how well this figure matched Seddülbahir. In the painting, the covered eyes came to stand for a kind of selective vision: a rootedness so strong that it no longer feels the need to look outward.

On the opposite side of the page, another figure emerged almost on its own. This one was shorter, wearing a skirt that opened like a triangle and a headscarf in red and white. I thought of the patterned headscarves that elderly women mentioned in Alçıtepe. The figure’s posture ended up slightly turned, as if she were looking toward the taller figure but also away from it. The twist in her torso carried both pride and vulnerability.

Alçıtepe’s history seemed to sit in this twist: settlement in an abandoned Greek village, rebuilding amid rubble, providing brides to Seddülbahir for generations, and yet remaining slightly displaced in local hierarchies. For decades, many of Seddülbahir’s men had married women from Alçıtepe. People told me this almost as a proverb: “Biz olmasaydık, Seddülbahir’in soyu kururdu.” Their lineage continued through us. The continuation of the “oldest” village depended on the “newcomers.” The bride in the painting carried this contradiction: brightly coloured, central to tradition, and yet subtly braced against a gaze she could not fully avoid.

It was only after these two figures had taken their places that I realised there was no horizontal room left on the page. I had filled the top area with Seddülbahir and Alçıtepe. Behramlı, as in local narratives, had no clear place on the same line.

Almost without thinking, I drew a circular shape at the bottom of the page—a well. Inside it, I sketched a small figure rising quietly upward. The body was light, the face turned toward the two larger figures, the hands not quite reaching beyond the circle. This was Behramlı: structurally below, always part of the landscape yet rarely centred, witnessing everything but not fully included.

Only at this point did Murakami’s well return to me. Not as a reference I had been consciously planning to use, but as an echo surfacing from somewhere deep. The field had already given me the image. Murakami provided another language to make sense of it.

Fragments, Scraps, and Broken Glass

Between the two upper figures on the paper, faint silhouettes appear—faces and bodies made from leftover prints that artist Dilek Yaman had discarded. These bits of photographic paper were studio debris, edges cut from larger works. Gluing them into my drawing felt oddly appropriate. Using scraps allowed me to acknowledge that my understanding of the villages was built from fragments, not from a single, coherent narrative.

Later, I added a thin strip of broken glass running across the page, representing a train window. Its diagonal line cut through the three figures. The glass came from thinking about time. In these villages, time does not move in a straight line. Seddülbahir imagines continuity stretching back to mythical antiquity; Alçıtepe remembers arrival and reconstruction; Behramlı lives in an ongoing present where certain possibilities have never occurred and may never occur.

The broken window interrupts linear time. It insists that different temporalities exist side by side, sometimes cutting into one another. It also hints at travel: people leaving, returning, or choosing not to. For some residents, the train is a distant object; for others, it is the path to seasonal work or permanent migration. The glass therefore carries both fracture and movement.

EGEHUB, Visual Ethnography, and Research-Creation

One of the most valuable aspects of EGEHUB was the recognition that knowledge does not emerge solely through interviews or archives. It also arises from textures, atmospheres, co-presence, and acts of making. Being around artists shifted my sense of what counted as evidence. A duvet hung being turned into a pillow, a twisted olive tree branch in the middle of archival constellations—these works revealed how materials can remember. They carried histories that had not been fully put into words.

This project sits within what has often been called research-creation: a method in which thinking and making are entangled rather than sequential. Painting, in this context, became a continuation of fieldwork—not its conclusion, and not a translation of already-formed ideas, but an expansion. It allowed me to hold three village histories in one frame, to visualise their asymmetries, and to let Murakami’s distant echo sharpen what the field had already offered me.

Pink’s (2015) work on sensory ethnography helped me understand why this felt so necessary. If ethnographic knowledge is always rooted in embodied presence, then visual and material practices are not “add-ons” to research. They are ways of thinking with the body, of registering relations that might escape purely verbal description.

Painting this image was, for me, a way of putting that insight into practice. Instead of writing yet another paragraph on “local identity” or “integration,” I allowed the relationships between the villages to become a set of lines, colours, and overlaps. The result is not more “true” than my written fieldnotes, but it holds a different kind of truth—one that is relational, spatial, and affective.

In Gallipoli, the painting became such a surface.
But a space where three realities could appear together, each holding its own weight.