The Yücel Organization’s Perceptions of Yugoslavia and Turkey Following the 1953 Migration: The Notions of Home and of Fatherland

This study is a social memory project that deals with Yücelcis’ perceptions of Yugoslavia by viewing the social impacts of the Yücel Incident in Macedonian Turkish society as a movement, which emerged in socialist Yugoslavia. Interviews conducted with migrant Yücelcis in Turkey and their immediate relatives provide the basic source material for this study. First, attention is paid to the motivating influence of the 1953 migration to understand the development of the distinctive home/Yugoslavia and homeland/Turkey perceptions, which have been constructed in the collective memory of the group and persist until the present day. Secondly, memorial ceremonies (mawlids) that are occasionally organized by the migrant population are discussed as the means for the construction and circulation of their perception of Yugoslavia. Information provided about such rituals is based on the participant-observation method. The discourse analysis method is applied to the data extracted from the face-to-face interviews and observations of the mawlid rituals by which an attempt is made to delineate the main constituents (perceptions of home/Yugoslavia and homeland/Turkey) of the group’s collective memory. The paper argues that the migrant population in Turkey carries a fragmented identity that has been shaped by the Yücel Incident. This identity is based on perceptions distinguished under the meanings of home and homeland, and contains negative elements about the migrants’ previous home/Yugoslavia