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In this article, I examine the politics and practices of apprenticeship in the “traditions” of Turkish folk music through playing the bag˘lama, or saz. The saz has become iconically representative of a folk music collected and preserved in the era of nationalism, and I examine the meaning of such a self‐conscious and reflexive tradition's claims to traditionality. I outline the ways in which that tradition is acquired as an aesthetics of self, requiring one to consciously shape the self to become the type of person who can play the saz and, hence, improvise within the sensibility of a tradition.

In the aftermath of war, those who remain must rebuild lives in spaces that bear the scars of conflict. This essay focuses on one such space, the unrecognized state in north Cyprus, which has experienced waves of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation and redistribution of “enemy” property. Families raise children in plundered spaces; grandchildren play in gardens replanted after war; houses are furnished with the remains of others’ lives. In such contexts, the questions of what belongs to whom, and who belongs where, or with whom, are particularly contested, while the future of these places and objects remains uncertain. This essay asks what everyday historical work may be done with looted homes and objects, and it shows how practices with and stories about belongings may also be ways of helping us to “belong” in history. [temporality, materiality, history, memory, belonging, Cyprus]

The image has become an iconic one: five young men in dirty uniforms kneel in the middle of a dusty plain with their hands behind their heads. They squint in the blinding midday sun, their faces expressing anxiety and a measure of fear. A Turkish soldier leans to talk to one of them, appearing calm, even friendly. To one side another Turkish soldier whose face we do not see stands guard. This photograph has become one of the most famous images to come out of the Cyprus conflict. The men's kneeling posture, the fright in their eyes, and the apparent calm of the soldiers all evoke a vulnerability to violence. And like the bloody photo of a woman and her children murdered in their Nicosia home that was used for decades by the Turkish Cypriot administration, or like certain photographs of distraught women crying for losses that we can only imagine, the image of these five young men has been reprinted in pamphlets and brochures, newspapers and books, in ways that take for granted its power to evoke their uncertain fate.