Sufi tekkes as Museums or Cultural Centres: The seal of secularity?

Ms. Lucía CIRIANNI SALAZAR, PhD candidate, Free University of Berlin

With only a few exceptions, the Turkish tekkes that survived the closure commanded by law 677 in 1925 no longer function as gathering places for Sufi tarikats. The large majority of the recently restored tekkes that were not turned into mosques upon their closure officially exist nowadays under the secular figure of a museum or a cultural centre. The restoration of tekkes has been undertaken with the explicit motivation of recovering the cultural heritage that was lost with the secularist reforms of the early republican years, yet the disconnection created between these places and their original inhabitants is irreversible. Moreover, the concept of “cultural heritage” is a modern and secular approach to Sufi activities, and what it can retrieve from these places’ past is necessarily limited. What is preserved and what losses are “sealed” by the conversion of tekkes into museums and cultural centres? In this paper, these observations about the condition of the majority of the restored tekkes are critically analysed in relation to the discussion about secularism and secularity in contemporary Turkey, using examples from the fieldwork research I conducted in Istanbul, Bursa, Konya, and Samsun between 2016 and 2019.