133. Today in 1920s Turkey: 6 January 1926 (A Choice for the New Year)
Türkçe
Yeni Seneye Girerken:
Dünya: Bu şapkalardan hangisini intihap etsem?…English
While Entering the New Year:
The World: Which of these hats should I choose?
Comments:
The present cartoon unfolds in an interior space, probably a department store of some sort. It features a lady earnestly eyeing two hats that have been placed on a display table. Tags are attached to each of the two items, serving as labels for the prospective customer and us readers. The hat on the left consists of an imposing arrangement of weapons, battleships, and ammunition as well as a tag that reads “war” (harp). Whereas the smaller hat on the right consists of a dove holding an olive branch in its beak. Its label, quite predictably, reads “peace” (sulh). The text above and below the cartoon provide some further information. For instance, the customer is explicitly identified in the text as “the world” (dünya) — an identification that is visually corroborated by the woman’s “global” head bearing lines representative of meridians and parallels. It is likely that the artist chose to use this alternate, or less obvious way of marking a globe because drawing continents would have obscured the woman’s face. The cartoon conveys the acute sense of uncertainty felt during the interwar period (1918–1939), as anxieties continued to spread over the possibility of another “Great War” erupting.
The text above the cartoon frames the “choice” between peace and war to be a specific conundrum of the New Year. This choice remains, however, unresolved as we are left without conclusion. It is precisely this unknown future that the arrival of every New Year (arbitrary as it may be) makes us hyper-aware of. By mid-decade, many journals of the 1920s began acknowledging and celebrating the Gregorian calendrical New Year. Even though we are six days into the nascent year, because Papağan is a weekly journal, this is its first issue of the year. Thus, it is not unusual for references to the New Year to continue up to a week later. Other examples of content related to the New Year from Today in 1920s Turkey can be found in the below posts:
#42: Justice: A Gift for the New Year
#45: Istanbul’s Request for the New Year
#47: A New Alphabet for the New Year
Originally published at https://steemit.com on January 6, 2019.
