Nation-Building in Modern Turkey

Alexandros Lamprou teaches in the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography, Ankara University. He has formerly taught at University of Crete and holds a PhD from the University of Leiden.

• PrefaceAbbreviationsIntroduction1. The People's House2. People's Houses in Provincial Urban Centres3. People's Houses and Local Politics4. People's Houses vs Coffee Houses5. Women on the Halkevi Stage6. People's Houses in the Countryside7. ConclusionsNotesBibliographyIndex

'Alex Lamprou's study of the People's Houses is important and innovative in that it does not limit itself to the cultural policies of the Turkish republic as formulated in the centre, but rather looks at the way the cultural and ideological clubs of Ataturk's People's Party functioned in their local environment. Lamprou shows that the People's Houses were not simply instruments to spread the message of party or state, and that control over them was often contested between the representatives of the state, the party and local elites. It is part of the new wave of Turkish historiography that privileges local case studies to bring to life the realities of Turkey in the first decades of the republic.' -Erik J. Zurcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, University of Leiden and author of Turkey: A Modern History