1. I am grateful to Patricia Morton for her astute editing and guidance on this essay. My thanks also to İpek Akpınar, Panayiota Pyla, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, and Cânâ Bilsel for their feedback on earlier drafts. The comments of the graduate students who took my course Architecture, Conservation, and Biopolitics at UCLA in fall 2015 aided me in working out the ideas presented here.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” trans. Loïc J. D. Wacquant and Samar Farage, Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (Mar. 1994), 3.
3. For the Conservation Law of 1983, see “2863 Sayılı Kültür ve Tabiat Varlıklarını Koruma Kanunu,” Resmi Gazete, no. 18113, 23 July 1983.
4. One of the world's first postgraduate degree programs in “the restoration of historical monuments” was introduced by Cevat Erder under Dean Abdullah Kuran at Middle East Technical University in Ankara in 1964–65. At Istanbul Technical University, Doğan Kuban led the foundation of the Architectural History and Restoration Institute. See Neriman Şahin Güçhan, Her dem yeşil yapraklı bir ağaç: Cevat Erder'e armağan (Ankara: ODTÜ Mimarlık Fakültesi, 2003).
5. For the revisions to the Conservation Law in 2004, see “5226 Sayılı Kültür ve Tabiat Varlıklarını Koruma Kanunu ile Çeşitli Kanunlarda Değişiklik Yapılması Hakkında Kanun,” Resmi Gazete, no. 25535, 27 July 2004. See also Emre Madran and Nimet Özgönül, Son yasal düzenlemelerde kültür ve tabiat varlıklarının korunması ve yerel yönetimler el kitabı (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanligi and TBMMOB Mimarlar Odası, 2005).