Haunted Winds of Alçıtepe: Hauntological Practices of Art, Memory, and Migration at Kirte School
Mounted on the narrow white column of the former village school[1], the nine dark, rectangular images do not so much introduce a single artwork as condense the atmosphere of the entire exhibition. They carry ghostly fragments of human bodies striking gestures drawn from wax figures depicting a field hospital during the Gallipoli War in Alçıtepe, formerly Kirte. Each frame is composed of two layers: ink transfers on cotton percale and on an almost see-through silk organza. This makes it so that the printed bodies hover a few millimetres above their tinted grounds in blues, greens, violets, almost black. The figures seem to waver between presence and disappearance. They never quite settle into focus, floating there like after-images, ghosts of gestures that refuse to disappear.
These ghosts do not announce themselves with spectacle; they linger in the slight misalignment of layers, in the soft blur of ink, in the tiny gap between cloth and wall. They are the unsettled residents of a past that has not entirely passed: a past of forcibly displaced inhabitants whose houses survive as a few scattered stones and half-remembered stories, and of families resettled here by state policy, asked to begin again among someone else’s ruins. The predecessors of current villagers did not witness the Gallipoli battles that made Kirte a name of war; they were living elsewhere when the shells fell. Yet, once resettled in Alçıtepe, they found themselves folded into these ghostly narratives, inheriting tales of the dead and sometimes insisting that they still see them; figures moving through the village at night, as if the landscape itself were quietly replaying a history they never lived but can never quite escape.
Thus, the wind that crosses Alçıtepe never arrives empty. It moves through sunflower fields, over broken stones, across the outlines of foundations that no longer hold houses, carrying with it names that are rarely spoken aloud: Kirte, İmroz, villages in Greece and islands in the Aegean, towns in Bulgaria and Romania from which people were pushed, traded, and resettled. Here, the past does not sit neatly behind the present as a finished chapter. It clings to place as rumour and residue: a few surviving walls, a line of trees planted by those who left, stories of ghosts who still walk the roads at night, and the official narratives that try to smooth over these fragments into a single, heroic history of war and nationhood. What we call Alçıtepe today is already a layered settlement of displacements: Greeks forced out during and after the First World War, Muslim families brought here from the Balkans by state resettlement schemes, and their descendants who are asked to live inside the legend of Gallipoli, even though it is not their own remembered war.
Kime Açar Rüzgâr Kapısını? (To Whom Wind Opens its Doors?) begins from this tension between what is remembered and what is no longer quite sayable. Rather than presenting memory as a stable archive, the exhibition treats it as something that arrives belatedly, like a draft under a closed door: a spectral, unfinished presence that insists on being felt even when it cannot be fully known. The works gathered under the EGEHUB project do not simply illustrate local history. They listen for the frequencies at which different pasts interfere with one another: the nearly erased lives of the Greek inhabitants; the difficult journeys from Bulgaria and Romania; the official story of Gallipoli that overlays the village like a second skin; and the quieter, everyday attempts of residents to inhabit a landscape saturated with other people’s dead.
It is in this haunted, wind-swept setting that a narrow white column in the former village school becomes more than architecture. It turns into a fragile hinge between times, a place where ghosts of wars, displacements, and unfinished homecomings gather and ask who, exactly, the wind is opening its door for.
Hauntology as a Way of Seeing
Hauntology, following Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), names a particular experience of time in which the present is structurally out of joint. The now is not self-contained but shot through with what should belong to the past; the specter is Derrida’s term for a strange kind of presence in which someone or something from the past is neither simply present nor simply absent yet still organizes the present.
For Avery Gordon, “the way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening,” because “the ghostly haunt gives notice that something is missing—that what appears to be invisible or in the shadows is announcing itself” (Gordon 1997, 8, 15). Mark Fisher extends this hauntological insight into the register of everyday life and popular culture, arguing that our contemporary moment is haunted not only by past catastrophes but by futures that failed to materialize and remain spectral; paths history might have taken but did not (Fisher 2014).
In a hauntological frame, then, ghosts are not special effects but one of the forms “by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known…” (Gordon 1997, 8). They mark unresolved violence, uncompleted mourning, and enforced forgetting. They appear as atmospheres, as repetitions of language, as gestures and routines whose origins have been displaced or effaced. They also appear as landscapes. Karen Till, for instance, speaks of “wounded cities”—densely settled locales “harmed and structured by particular histories of physical destruction, displacement, and individual and social trauma” in which the material environment itself bears the traces of state violence and exclusion (Till 2012, 6). Similar ghostly effects shape the city of Mardin in Zerrin Özlem Biner’s work: the Armenian genocide and later waves of dispossession persist in defaced and repurposed church interiors, in ruined and reoccupied houses, and in the everyday practices of “public secrecy” through which loss and absence are both acknowledged and disavowed (Biner 2010; 2020; 2021).
Kirte is precisely such a wounded, haunted geography. It is not just a location for the EGEHUB project; it is an active agent in it.
Haunted Aegean Geographies
As Gülay Uğur Göksel said in foreword, Kirte remembers itself loudly. The war memorials around the village give the Gallipoli campaign a monumental, seemingly finished narrative: the nation’s dead are named, the battle lines are fixed, the past is carved into stone. Yet beneath this loud memory lies another history that is usually quieter: the displacement of Greek Orthodox residents before and during the World War I, the resettlement of Muslim families from the Balkans and Thrace in 1930s, the slow work of rebuilding houses and lives on land saturated with other people’s ruins.
This layered history produces what we might call a concentrated Aegean hauntology. Military cemeteries coexist with collapsed farmhouses; former vineyards reappear as place-names and tastes rather than as visible terraces; stories of “the old owners” surface in fragments during everyday conversations. The landscape is full of indications that lives once unfolded differently here, even when no clear markers remain.
Here, people live with what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial debris”: not spectacular ruins, but lingering material and affective residues of earlier regimes of power (Stoler 2008). The Aegean wind that lends the exhibition its title moves across these remains: over military cemeteries and former vineyards, between renovated pensions and collapsed stone houses, through Kirte School’s repurposed classrooms. It carries more than dust and salt; it carries a sense that something unfinished is still in the air. Biner’s ethnography of Mardin also shows how such debris is not only material but also spiritual and juridical: unresolved property claims, rumors of buried treasure, jinn stories, and compensation disputes keep past violence active in the present, long after the original events have ostensibly ended (Biner 2016, 2020, 2021)
Ghosts of the Olive Trees
One of the clearest hauntological scenes in Kirte does not involve ruins or monuments at all, but olive trees. Before being forcibly removed, the Greek inhabitants of the village and its surroundings lived within a dense culture of olives: knowing which trees belonged to which family, how to prune and graft, how to press and store the oil… When Muslim newcomers from the Balkans and other regions were resettled here, they arrived with different agricultural repertoires and urgent needs. Not knowing how to care for olive trees – or what to do with olives beyond firewood – they cut down many of the groves simply to survive the winters and cook their food.
The story that circulates in Alçıtepe today is that only later, as markets changed and technical knowledge spread, did subsequent generations understand what had been lost. The same hillsides that once held Greek-owned groves were replanted by the grandchildren of those who had felled the trees. The result is a layered landscape in which every young olive tree is also a ghost: it stands in the place of an absent ancestor, rooted in soil that remembers another family’s labor, another liturgy, another seasonal rhythm. The grove becomes a double exposure, where absences and presences, cutting and replanting, are folded into the same trunks and terraces.
The Zeytin Hafızası (Olive Memory) workshop that took place in Alçıtepe as a part of the EGEGUB project was not simply about sharing pruning techniques, grafting methods or intricate details of oil pressing. When the workshop created a space within which the past and the present met, they were, often without naming it, moving through a field thick with spectral kinship. Each trunk carries two genealogies at once; the Greek families who planted and tended the earlier groves, and the migrant families who cut them down, only to replant olives as their own economic and affective future. In this sense, the olive trees of Kirte are not just part of the scenery; they are ghostly interlocutors, living archives of dispossession and re-rooting that quietly insist on being felt whenever people cook, harvest, or rest in their shade.
EGEHUB as a Hauntological Practice
EGEHUB approaches this haunted terrain not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to inhabit. Following Avery Gordon’s understanding of haunting as “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” that generates a “something-to-be-done” (Gordon 1997, xvi). I consider the project’s method – long walks, dialogue circles, shared kitchens, rhythm and body workshops, musallat olan hikâyeler (haunting stories) sessions – as a kind of haunting in itself: collective practices that allow hidden histories to become perceptible without forcing them into a single reconciled narrative.
Crucially, the art residency that took place in Kirte School refuses rigid separations between researchers, artists, and residents. Everyone is treated as a co-inhabitant of a shared field. This configuration resonates with Karen Barad’s account of quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance, in which selves, others, and times are materially bound together, including with those who are already dead and those not yet born (Barad 2010). To share meals under the olive trees, to listen to stories in the evening, to repair a fence or prepare funeral helva together is to enter a dense web of inherited obligations and unspoken comparisons.
The works produced during the residency are thus not freestanding objects but crystallizations of these entanglements. Each one functions as a different register of haunting; aural, tactile, textual, cartographic, cinematic, ludic. Taken together, they form a hauntological constellation anchored in Alçıtepe and its wider surroundings.
Spectral fabrics, spectral foods
Art pieces in the exhibition explore haunting through intimate, domestic materials: fabrics and foods that normally circulate far from museums.
Zelikha Zohra Shoja’s triad of works (To Those That Remained, The Last Mother, gel benimle helva yap) relocates the epic language of war and displacement into the scale of the hand and the kitchen. In To Those That Remained, the wax hands of nurses, doctors, and soldiers at the Hilal-i Ahmer WWI hospital museum are pulled out of their didactic and nationalistic context and transferred onto layers of cotton percale and silk organza. The figures lose their national framing and become floating fragments, inviting touch. Wax, already a ghostly imitation of flesh, becomes doubly spectral when translated into translucent textile. The museum’s official narrative is not rejected but rendered porous: kittens sleep on the reconstructions[2], visitors brush against fabrics that remember other bodies.
The Last Mother is haunted less by ghosts of the past than by what never quite arrived. Borrowed from a family in Alçıtepe, the three-generation yorgan is unfolded, inverted, and reworked in collaboration with its owners, so that each new stitch maps a migration path while still carrying the touch of the hands that once prepared it as a dowry blanket. Turned into a potential carrier – something that could be lifted, packed, stored away at a moment’s notice – it hovers between heirloom and emergency bundle, echoing practices in Türkiye and Afghanistan where scarves and textiles are knotted into makeshift containers during abrupt departures. The work is haunted by grandparents who died before the artist’s birth, by dowry items that never reached her generation, and by the unfulfilled promise of inheritance. In place of those missing objects, this collaboratively reworked yorgan becomes a surrogate dowry and a shared carrier: an offering for those in the village and across the region whose ties to the past have been severed by war, intergenerational loss, and displacement.
In gel benimle helva yap, Shoja turns to food as a medium of spectral connection. Funeral helva is a ritual for the dead, but it is also a technique for keeping the living together in the face of loss. Cooking and eating helva in Alçıtepe while watching bombs fall on Tehran and Gaza on a phone screen produces what one might call a haunted simultaneity: different historical catastrophes resonate with one another, not because they are identical, but because they share structures of vulnerability and grief. The looping video of friends preparing halwa elsewhere extends the ritual into a distributed, asynchronous seance. Across time zones, participants “stir the same pot together,” enacting a transnational musallat: a deliberate allowing of the dead and the displaced to sit at the table. Like the compensation struggles and “debts” that, for Biner, can never quite settle the cost of past dispossession, the shared helva does not resolve loss but gives it a form that can be carried and re-circulated without closure.
Archives that refuse to stay still
Other works address haunting through archives such as photographic, textual, cartographic, and audiovisual.
Dilek Yaman’s Cereyan: Guguk Kuşu is built from two personal photographic archives separated by nearly twenty years and held together by the image of a spiraling tree encountered in Kirte. The archive, here, is not a neutral storehouse but a restless entity: images from an earlier rupture call to those from a later one, demanding to be re-read. The cuckoo, who lays its eggs in others’ nests, functions as a figure of spectral belonging: to live in Kirte, as a bird or as a human, is to inhabit a house that once belonged to someone else. The tree itself is a kind of vegetal ghost, bent not by a single storm, but by an ongoing torque whose origin is uncertain. In Yaman’s sequencing, the tree becomes a hinge where personal postmemory (the artist’s own earlier departures) and the village’s exchange history fold into one another.
Büşra Aydagün’s Geri Dönenler follows the route of her family’s migration from the Razgrad region to Alçıtepe and back. The film is full of literal ghosts of movement: roads that ancestors took without leaving written testimonies, houses remembered only through hearsay, kilim motifs stamped onto the ground as if trying to call the departed back. When villagers see the film and exclaim, “My mother came here just like that,” they experience what Gordon calls “a something-to-be-done”: an obligation that arises when a haunting becomes recognizable. The documentary does not close the story of return; it exposes the paradox that one can “go back” to a place never personally known, a place that itself has changed and carries its own ghosts.
In Meli R. Öztürk’s board game Cultural Return, historical artifacts displaced by colonialism, war, and trade are turned into restless game pieces that want to move. Players must navigate UNESCO conventions, legal loopholes, and wild-card events that echo real repatriation struggles. The game-table thus becomes, quite literally, a haunted stage: looted sculptures, stolen icons, and excavated ceramics acquire agency, while players argue about where these objects “belong.” Here the ghosts are material; they sit in storerooms and display cases, but they also sit in the collective conscience.
Ferhat Tunç’s cartographic and sound-based works (Cartographic Soundings) add another layer by mapping routes that are not fully speakable: unofficial paths across hills, remembered but unmarked shortcuts, former front lines now used as tractor tracks, clandestine crossings toward labor migration. Tunç’s maps and recordings evoke what Mark Fisher (2016) calls the eerie: situations in which a place is structured by absences or inexplicable presences that raise unanswered questions about what kinds of agencies are at work. For villagers, these diagrams of lines and sounds recall “paths we remember but do not speak of.” They are haunted maps, tracing not the infrastructure of the state but the improvisational routes of survival.
The School as Spectral Infrastructure
All of this unfolds in and around Kirte School, itself a key hauntological actor. Once an instrument of national pedagogy, the school is now an independent art initiative where local residents and visiting artists cohabit. Michel Foucault treats such schools as paradigmatic disciplinary institutions—one node in a wider carceral architecture in which, as he famously asks, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (Foucault 1995, 228). In its current form, the school has slipped out of that role. It is no longer exactly a school, but it still shapes how bodies move, where voices echo, how light enters. It has become, in Derrida’s terms, a hauntological structure: its original function is both absent and powerfully present.
The exhibition does not hide this. Works are hung in classrooms whose walls bear the ghosts of blackboards and maps; performances take place in corridors that remember children lining up; communal meals spill into a courtyard that still feels like a playground. The small vertical column of images near the pink-and-white wall is one among many devices that make this spectral architecture visible. It is not the work of the exhibition, but a compact emblem of how EGEHUB treats the entire building as an apparatus for summoning, and living with, ghosts.
Haunting as an Ethical Opening
What, then, does hauntology offer to a project concerned with migration, memory, and contemporary hostility toward refugees? One answer lies in the shift from identity to vulnerability. Haunting does not ask, “Who are we?” but rather, “Whom do we owe, and what unfinished histories live inside our present?”
When villagers in Alçıtepe, after visiting the exhibition, say, “We were just like Syrians are today,” they are not claiming a perfect historical equivalence. They are recognizing what Barad describes as an ethics of entanglement, in which “our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are” (Barad 2010, 266). This echoes Biner’s argument that contemporary relations in southeast Turkey are “haunted by debt”. Calculative regimes of compensation, debt, and entitlement can never fully cover the losses of massacres, expulsions, and confiscations, yet continue to structure how neighbors imagine what is owed to whom (Biner 2016, 2020).
The ghosts that EGEHUB helps make perceptible are not only those of expelled Greeks or lost Balkan villages; they also include Syrians, Afghans, Palestinians, labor migrants and seasonal workers whose futures are being cut off now.
In this sense, the exhibition practices what we might call spectral solidarity. It does not ask participants to identify with specific others in a straightforward empathy exercise. Instead, it invites them to feel how their own lives are already haunted, structured by displacements, absences, and broken promises. From that recognition, new forms of relation become possible. The wind that opens its door does so only to those who accept being unsettled, who agree to share their space with those who are no longer, or not yet, fully present.
To whom does the wind open its door?
Seen from hauntology, the title question of the exhibition is less rhetorical and more demanding than it first appears. Winds do not respect property boundaries, borders, or carefully curated narratives. They move across cemeteries and olive groves, over ruined farmhouses and new holiday homes, in and out of museums and schools turned into art spaces. The Aegean wind that visitors feel on their skin as they walk through Kirte is not empty; it carries layers of stories, some spoken, many not.
The works gathered under Kime Açar Rüzgâr Kapısını? do not provide a single answer. Instead, they collectively perform the act of leaving the door ajar. Textiles, images, routes, objects, songs, and recipes are rearranged so that ghosts can pass through, not to be domesticated, but to be acknowledged. Hauntology, here, is neither an academic buzzword nor a morbid fascination. It is a practical ethics: a way of living with the awareness that our presents are crowded with others, that our “homes” are built on sites of previous departures, and that the futures we fear or hope for will themselves one day haunt those who come after us.
The wind opens its door, briefly, onto this crowded time. The exhibition, and the wider EGEHUB project, invites us to step through together, knowing that we do so in the company of the not-yet and the no-longer, the remembered and the forgotten, the neighbors and strangers whose lives are already entangled with our own.
References
Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3 (2): 240–68.
Biner, Zerrin Özlem. 2010. “Acts of Defacement, Memory of Loss: Ghostly Effects of the ‘Armenian Crisis’ in Mardin, Southeastern Turkey.” History & Memory 22 (2): 68–94.
———. 2016. “Haunted by Debt: Calculating the Cost of Loss and Violence in Turkey.” Theory & Event 19 (1, suppl.): Article 4.
———. 2020. States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2021. “Digging: The Spiritual-Material Imagination of (Dis)possession in Mardin, Southeast Turkey.” In Reverberations: Violence across Time and Space, edited by Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, and Seda Altuğ, 158–85. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.
Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books.
———. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. 2nd Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books.
Gordon, Avery F. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191–219.
Till, Karen E. 2012. “Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care.” Political Geography 31 (1): 3–14.
[1] The closed village school was transformed into Kirte School in 2023 by Büşra Aydagün, with the support of the Alçıtepe Mukhtar’s Office.
[2] As part of the EGEHUB project, we organized a group visit to the Hilal-i Ahmer First World War Hospital Museum. The artists took the photographs later used in To Those That Remained during this visit. While we were there, a litter of kittens was sleeping among the wax figures.
