Ellinor Morack: A Story without Heroes: Nâzım Hikmet’s Kuvayi Milliye/Destan as a Work of Memory

Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 7 pm
Orient-Institut Istanbul
Lecture
Moderator: Christoph K. Neumann
Language: English

Nâzım Hikmet’s prose poem or epic Kuvayi Milliye/Destan he wrote between 1938 and 1941 while in prison, is generally considered as a work that supports the then hegemonic narrative of the Turkish War of Independence. Nâzım Hikmet reworked the text several times and eventually included only certain parts and characters of it into his much better-known Human Landscapes (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları). Kuvayi Milliye forms a text within the text of the Landscapes (Irmak 2011), which is depicts the social and economic conditions in 1940s Turkey in a way clearly criticizing the republican regime.

In her lecture Ellinor Morack shall argue that Kuvayi Milliye ultimately is a critical text, too, as it takes a perspective from below that does not goagainst the letter, but the spirit of how the national struggle was officially memorised. Morack provides an analysis of the changes and additions between different works and editions, putting special emphasis on the representations of characters: ordinary men and women, deserters, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters. In a first step, she will look at the “acts of heroism” accomplished by the heroes in Kuvayi Milliye, arguing that most of them are already in the pre-1950 version of the text highly ambiguous actions that may just as well be interpreted as a critique of the idea of heroism in war. Following that, Morack shall analyze sections of the text where Nâzım Hikmet’s poetry blurs the lines between man, beast, and machine, offering an interpretation of his poetic strategy.

Ellinor Morack is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and currently an independent researcher. She obtained her PhD from FU Berlin, then was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a research and teaching associate at Bamberg University from 2015 to January 2026. From September 2026, she will work at Bamberg University again as Akademische Oberrätin auf Zeit (senior research and teaching associate). In her first book, The Dowry of the State (Bamberg University 2017), she studied the distribution of “abandoned” property in post-1922 Turkey as a site of nation-building. In her Habilitationsschrift, she studied the contingency of collective memory of the “national forces” guerrillas in modern Turkey. She is interested in memory studies, the history of migration, law, labor relations and capitalism, nationalism and violence in Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts, lately also in modern Turkish literature. Her work has been published in various international journals. She was the principal investigator of the DFG network project “Post-Ottoman Transformations” (1922–1925) at Bamberg University. She currently prepares her Habilitationsschrift for publication as a monograph.

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VENUE

Orient-Institut Istanbul
Galip Dede Cad. 65, Şahkulu Mah., TR – 34421 Istanbul
Tel: +90 212 293 60 67 oiist@oiist.org www.oiist.org

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