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| Annual Babek Castle Gathering in Kaleybar, East Azerbaijan Province (Iran) — An Azerbaijani civil national movement commemoration of Babak Khorramdin, celebrated each July, symbolizing resistance, identity, and cultural pride. |
Neil Leach, the architectural theorist, argues that buildings and monuments are inherently lifeless. They carry no intrinsic meaning; rather, they merely reflect meaning. To acquire significance, they must be placed within an external narrative, becoming symbolic.
This insight becomes especially relevant when examined against the backdrop of institutionalized forms of identity-making. In Iran, the state has long monopolized the symbolic order, embedding monuments, spaces, and rituals into an official narrative of nationhood. This narrative works to construct subjectivities aligned with hegemonic Persian-centered nationalism while simultaneously erasing or marginalizing the identities of non-Persian populations.
For Turks in Iran, this exclusion has created the conditions for a symbolic struggle. Denied recognition within official frameworks, Turkish activists and communities have turned to monuments, shrines, commemorations, and even sporting arenas as spaces for counter-symbolic production. In doing so, they participate in what Nancy Fraser calls subaltern counterpublics, defined as “where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 1992, p. 123).
Consider Babak’s Castle. Extracting explicitly ethnic elements from Babak Khorramdin’s historical struggles is difficult, if not impossible. Yet today, the fortress associated with him has been symbolically reinscribed by Turkish nationalists as a marker of ethnic identity. This reappropriation is not about historical accuracy but about symbolic agency: activists, through persistent engagement, have displaced the site from the hegemonic narrative and inscribed it into a counter-narrative of belonging.
The same is true for Tractor S.C. football club. Ali Daei once suggested that fans often did not care about the match result. While he misread the situation, his comment revealed an underlying truth: the importance of Tractor lies not in victory or defeat but in its symbolic function. For many Turks, it is a living emblem through which identity is articulated, performed, and defended. It is a site of counter-hegemonic solidarity, a vernacular stage upon which erased subjectivities reassert themselves.
Symbols, monuments, and spaces thus become contested terrains. For marginalized Turks, they operate as vehicles of counter-memory and counter-identity, continuously destabilizing the homogenizing force of state narratives. They acquire meaning only within their own counterpublics, and to outsiders, they often remain opaque—precisely because they embody a refusal to be assimilated into the hegemonic frameworks of nationhood.
Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. J. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). MIT Press.