ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on visitor studies at t Atatürk and Wars of Independence Museum. It shows that many visitors took up the opportunity offered by the museum to come face to face with Atatürk – for example in the form of panorama paintings or mannequins, and perhaps to enter into a kind of imaginary dialogue with him in which emotional practice and the affirmation of values are involved. If the ‘cult of personality’ of Atatürk itself seems regressive – something consigned to the past in Europe, where the shadows of Lenin and Stalin have been expunged from public space – it is also true that this very memory practice is fundamentally linked to the practice of a particular form of modernity in Turkey.
