Toys of War

What does Teknofest tell us about Turkish nationalism?

Teknofest in Istanbul, May 2023. Source: AA, via TRT

If you follow Turkish politics for a living, you’ll have heard of Teknofest. The name is short for “Aviation, Space and Technology Festival.” The first took place in 2018, and was a joint initiative between the Ministry of Technology and the Turkish Technology Team Foundation (T3), which is a foundation led by Selçuk Bayraktar. The most recent one was in my native Izmir, so I’m especially tuned into it.

Teknofest is primarily aimed at kids. It hosts competitions for students designing things like robots, chips, and jet engines. There’s plenty of stuff on civilian applications, like a competition on assistive technology. For many families in attendance, however, the highlight is being able to see the fruits of Turkey’s technology industry up close: there’s usually a real life TB2, what I take to be a Kızılelma prototype, and a whole bunch of other shiny, state-of-the-art, military hardware.

So the whole thing is a jingoistic mix of theme park, science competition, and defense sector exhibition. It produces social media output like this:

To translate, those children are standing in front of indigenously-developed military equipment, listing the names of these devices, and going, “biz yaptık,” meaning “we built it.”

For the vast majority of people in Turkey, ads like these are an undeniable win for the government. When Erdoğan voters see it, their chest swells with pride. When opposition voters see it, they feel like the other side has scored another clean point, not because they oppose it, but because they can’t. This dynamic has become so normal that few even bother thinking about it any more.

Take a step back though, and it starts getting bizarre.