VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Eastern Thrace has hosted various ethnic and religious groups in different periods and has been a bridge between the cultures of the several communities. Kırklareli, the city at the heart of the region, which made many empires from the Greeks to the Byzantines a part of its history and its geography, has a unique social morphology formed by the ethnic identities diversified by Armenians, Jews, Bulgarians, Greeks, Gacals, Tatars, Gagauzs, Pomaks, Albanians, Yoruks, Coptic Gypsies, Bosnians and their cultural reflections, although not all of them exist today. Therefore, Kırklareli and its villages present eligible spatial, sociological, and cultural elements with their establishment stories specific to migration and settlement policies that allow to correlate between the past and the future. Considering that one of the significant reflections of migration in terms of its consequences is that it creates a memory for the continuity of the common heritage arising from the cultural interaction of the communities, Kırklareli draws attention as an area that preserves this memory. Thus, this study, based on research that was completed in 2021 in which I was also involved, aims to investigate the social, economic, spatial, and cultural effects of the migration mobility from the past to the present on Kırklareli and to reveal the importance of its diversified cultural identity. The migration history, settlement policies, and intangible cultural heritage values of Kırklareli due to migrations were examined from a holistic perspective through intensive literature review, archive research and interviews with local historians in addition to field study.
Kumru is an urban planner. She received bachelor’s degree at the Dep. of Urban and Regional Planning in 2008 and M.Sc. at Urban Planning programme in 2010 at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2019 at Istanbul Technical University. Since 2014, she has been working as a lecturer at MSFAU. She carries out studies within multidisciplinary platforms and volunteers in NGOs. Her research interests include planning theories, urban policies, urban transformation, participatory processes, local democracy, neighborhood planning, migration-space relation, urban&rural sociology.