What this new palace symbolizes for us

As of Wednesday, Oct. 29, a tradition has come to an end. From now on, when Çankaya is mentioned, we will not think of the office of the president.

As far as I can monitor from the press, what the new unlicensed building will be called is not yet clear; a consensus has not been reached on a common name.

There are those who call it “Ak Saray [White Palace in Turkish],” “Presidential Palace” or because of the location, it is also called “Beştepe.”

Whatever its name is, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken another step on the road to erase the traces remaining from the Republic’s past. 

I was thinking what this illegally built building, which was constructed after killing a significant portion of the Atatürk Forest Farm, reminds me of and I found the answer at Cengiz Çandar’s column from Wednesday: Ceauşescu’s Presidential Palace in Bucharest.

I have seen that building, I went inside it. Süleyman Demirel was the president then. The traces of Ceauşescu were long gone in Romania, but that building stood erect at the heart of Bucharest as a symbol of the dictatorship.

This building too will be remembered as such a symbol; Turkey at the time of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as the symbol of his mentality of governing.

It has been known that there is a relation between architecture and the ruling power since the ancient times. While the ruling bodies impose their ideologies on the society, they make excessive use of this.

This was the meaning of the giant temples of antique times and so were the Soviet, Nazi and fascist Italian architecture in more recent times.

Such was the relation of these venues with time; architecture transformed people in the direction of the...