ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the walk as a key mode of experiencing and remaking the past in the present and as a perpetual relational process in which both place and memory are produced. This is also an alternative mode of writing, a way to avoid a conventional ‘historical-contextual’ early chapter that provides, as it were, some kind of bedrock or benchmark of historical truth against which everything that follows can be considered. Through accounts of walks undertaken by the authors as a group and with research participants, the chapter brings into view the multiple pasts and plural heritages of the historic area of the Land Walls of Istanbul and adjoining neighbourhoods. These include the personal stories, meanings, and embodiments of people, the materialities of place that open ‘passageways’ to particular pasts, and the official heritage valorizations. The chapter reflects on the co-presence and relationality between these.
