Place Making, Nation Building, and Alcohol Consumption and Its Contestation: Situating Beer and Beer Parks in the Modern Turkish Republic

Endorsed as a key marker of modernization, secularism, and civil liberties, upon Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s early 1920s consolidation of power, the Turkish republic promoted citizens’ rights to drink. Thereafter, the state established particular traditions of consumption and consumerism and simultaneously profited from alcohol revenues. The distilled liquor rakı is typically venerated as Turkey’s national drink, but beer was also prioritized. The state variously depicted it as a democratic beverage not only for men but also for women and youth, an ideal consumer product that would preserve and add value to Anatolia’s grain harvests, and a Western constituent for proper entertaining, socializing, and even outdoor enjoyment. Though propagated by individual Ottoman brewers since the mid-nineteenth century, in the Kemalist republic, the beer garden was promoted and made to function as a symbolic site for enacting the sort of progressive, modern, secular, and Western-focused lifestyles that nationalist leaders sought to encourage. In my paper, I present this history of how alcohol, place-making, and nation-building not only intersected but were also contested through time. Pursuing this spatially-centered question, I demonstrate how these shifts corresponded and contrasted with other contestations over the public sphere (e.g., veiling, schooling, privatization, and urban renewal/gentrification, among others). In doing so, I establish how past state promotions of beer and beer gardens fashioned social geographies of citizens’ notions of Turkishness and how the country’s religionists and traditionalists have likewise strived to construct alternative articulations of Turkishness, narratives of which alcohol and drinking are not only absent from public places and life but even prohibited. As beverages and places of consumption once promoted by the state, beer and beer gardens are today targeted by religionists who also deploy medicalized arguments to bolster their opposition to alcohol, its acceptance, and all else that they seek to associate it with.