Inheritance without the heritage: fig trees and the ecological effects of imaginative attachments to fetih (conquest)

Turkey’s transformation from a multi-religious and multi-ethnic empire into a nation-state has caused the dismissal, transformation, replacement, denial and destruction of several unrecognised material and immaterial heritage. The livelihoods and diverse artisanship once ingrained into nature and its medians have been shattered after decades of war, generations killed in violence and later with the destructive effects of neoliberalism. Built on the understanding that heritage is beyond the cultural and the human, this paper connects a series of ethnographic data collected in a historically Jewish and Greek neighbourhood of Istanbul, Balat and Fener, to understand the interplay between the heritage as an imagined realm and the physical relationship to the inherited. Specifically, it focuses on how the new inhabitants have been developing rapport and making sense of this historic area and its native flora (ie fig trees) through fetih (conquest). The paper reads fetih as an imaginative heritage-making attempt and a reference point used in the processes of heritage removal and ecological destruction perpetrated by the area’s inhabitants of 1950s onwards. By studying the interplay between cultural and ecological heritage as co-created realms, it questions the limits of the very idea of heritage as a social concept.