Mardin has always been at the crossroads of trades, different peoples and different religions. Prior to the invasion of the Arabs and the Turks, the region was inhabited by Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds and Syriacs.17 At the end of the Umayyad dynasty in the eleventh century, a Turkish population, the Artuklu, arrived in Mardin and governed for a few centuries before the arrival of the Ottomans. In those years, the city became an important trade centre and developed extensively.18 The Artuklu architecture has also created some of the finest buildings within the old city and has made Mardin an important tourist site. In 1514, the Ottomans conquered the region and, under their rule, Mardin continued to remain an important political and economic centre whose economy was based on trade and agriculture.19 The city started to decline after the end of the Ottoman Empire, with the foundation of the Turkish Republic and the drawing of the borders with Syria and Iraq.20 In 1915 the Armenian massacre that took place throughout the whole region was particularly cruel in Mardin, which had a large Armenian population, and it was followed by the mass migration of Syriac and Armenians to Europe and other countries in the Middle East.21 Kurds in Mardin have memories of this massacre and they are quite ready to recognise their responsibilities.
The Arabs, having consolidated their power during the Ottoman Empire by supporting the Ottoman authorities, continued in the same vein during the first period of the Turkish Republic, implementing the new State laws and rules, and helping transform Mardin into a secular and mod-ern place which reflected the politics of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. In this way, they kept their economic and political privi-leges.22 By contrast, the Kurds found themselves in a new nation where reli-gious and language minorities did not have a legitimate space and became even more marginalised and suppressed. The conflict between the Kurds and State forces has had lasting effects on people’s lives, for example in the general mistrust people have towards others in their everyday relationships.
In the last decade, the Arabs of Mardin have started to lose their power and privileges in the face of a new, more influential role for the Kurds at the national and local level. The governing AK party began negotiations with the Kurdish population that continued during the time of my field work, but stopped in summer 2015 when Ankara decided to end the peace process.23 The reforms of the last decade temporarily calmed the tense relations and
resulted in increased opportunities to improve the economic conditions and the political role of the Kurds. In the 1980s and ’90s in Mardin the Kurds typically settled in the poorest neighbourhoods surrounding the city cen-tre, while in the last decade they have started to become regular inhabit-ants of the developed and rich part of the town. ‘The Arabs are afraid of us now. They had the power for so many years, but now it’s different. They are afraid of us because we are more powerful’ was a statement I was told by numerous Kurdish friends in the city of Mardin. The Kurdish ascent in Mardin reached its height and cathartic moment at the end of March 2014, when the Kurdish political party BDP (Bariş ve demokrasi Partisi – Peace and Democracy Party) won the local election for the first time in the his-tory of the city. Up to that point, Mardin had always been ruled by the pro-government parties supported by the Arabs. That day, thousands of Kurds and BDP supporters were out in the streets expressing their happi-ness at the result of the local elections, while the Arabs remained closed in their houses mourning such a humiliating defeat. This happened when the peace process was still alive and people felt that non-violence and peaceful relations would characterise future relations between Kurds and Arabs. But at the time of writing this book, the new political course may have started a new phase in the life of the city.
Despite all this, at first glance Mardin appeared a peaceful place;
every time I started a conversation with new people, I was told: ‘Mardin is a unique place where Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, Muslims and Christians happily live together.’ In public spaces, people do not talk about politics in order to make this cohabitation possible and peaceful. Things are very dif-ferent in the private spaces of their houses, where Arabs, Kurds and Syriac Christians are free to express their disdain, or even occasionally hatred, for the other groups. So the sharp distinctions between private and public social media that dominate this volume have clear precedents in these prior offline contrasts. During the first months in the field, talking about politics was almost impossible for me, and political conversation only became pos-sible when I became much closer to people and conversations were clearly confidential. The silence surrounding politics paused only with the begin-ning of the political campaign for the local election of March 2014, when most of the public spaces were used for heated political propaganda.
Stereotypes and prejudices about Arabs and Kurds are many. Arabs are usually described by Kurds as rich people interested in power and money, without their own political ideas. They are seen as lazy opportun-ists who do not like hard work: ‘Look, for example, at the bakers. Until 10 years ago, before the town was populated by the Kurds, the bakeries closed very early in the afternoon because they don’t like working! Now
the same.’ Arab men and women are also described as obsessively passion-ate about food and meat, and they are sometimes derogatorily referred to using the Arab expression lahme (meat). In these derogatory portraits and stereotypes, food represents the approach Arabs have towards power and possession, characterised by greediness and voracity. Arab women are portrayed as modern and beautiful, interested in clothes, make-up and food. On the other side, Kurds are described by Arabs as backward rural migrants, retrograde, ignorant, not developed, obstinate like sheep, poor, aggressive, always ready to fight, and only recently developing in the direction of a more modern lifestyle.
However, it’s by no means the case that every relationship and interaction between Arabs and Kurds is dominated by dislike, antipathy and divisions. Different forms of sociality and friendship between Arabs and Kurds do exist, and cases of intermarriages and friendships are com-mon, even if always characterised by some difficulties. My Kurdish and Arab friends told me several times: ‘I have both Arab and Kurdish friends, but friendships with them are always characterised by a sort of barrier.
We talk and we drink tea together, but there is something between us that keeps the distance, we never become really close.’ Moreover, the bor-der between these two contrasting social and political forces cohabiting in Mardin is more blurred than is commonly thought: some Arab fam-ilies support the Kurdish movement and the Kurdish party BDP,24 and some Kurdish families back the government party AKP. In the 1980s and
’90s, a few Arab families joined the Kurdish cause, motivated by leftist and Marxist ideas and desires for social justice. Other Arab families, for their own economic interests, started to support the BDP a few months before the local elections in 2014, when they knew that the BDP had a good chance of winning, whereas some Kurdish families in Mardin have backed the AKP, especially after the beginning of the peace process.
The few academic articles about Mardin have focused on issues of contested representations. Kerem Oktem25 examines the struggles over different discourses, symbols and images: the State, tourist agencies and some of its inhabitants have produced a ‘poetic vision of the city’. Several Turkish TV serials and films produced in the last decades have given an Orientalist view of the city that portrays the image of Mardin as a ‘trad-itional’ place with ‘feudal’ violence, as opposed to the developed and modern west of Turkey. Human rights organisations have defined the city as traumatised as a result of the conflict between the State and the PKK.
Zerrin Özel Biner26 examined the reaction to the candidacy of Mardin as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, what these have in com-mon is a view focused only on the ‘old city’, because the ‘new city’ was demographically irrelevant until a decade ago, and also less appealing
to tourists and TV producers. By contrast, my research was carried out precisely in this new and modern part of the city, locally called Yenişehir, which has developed over the last 15 years.