The Masculine construction of the past between forgetting and remembering: Being a woman in Çaykara and the rejection of the past

The individuals who were forced to be uniform by the official discourse based on silence and assimilation, in some special cases, hide their differences and memories or do not know anything about them. The study focuses on Çaykaralı women’s role on the creation/forgetting/transmission of the collective memory articulated to their culture. The aim of the article is to understand how women perceive the history and cultural experiences that men wrote, played and narrated. However, it emphasizes how women perceive, internalize and transform the female roles, in this mountainous area far from the city centre. The main purpose of the study is, through Çaykaralı women’s eye, to find out the past of women who are forced to practise gender roles and their cultural identities by hiding and forgetting them. This past was hidden and even excluded by official history. The paper is built on a sociological perspective though which it examines how the women remember/forget the collective memory special to Çaykara district of Trabzon and experience femininity. The women living in Çaykara, are selected as the sample of the research. Fieldwork is conducted by using qualitative research methods. In the framework of the oral history, semi-structured interviews and observations are realised to obtain the data about Çaykaralı women’s collective memory and narratives of the participants was recorded.