TheElazığ Girls' Institute (Turkish:Elazığ Kız Enstitüsü, EGI) was a boarding school for Kurdish girls and young women established inElazığ,Turkey. The boarding school was opened in 1937 to counter the KurdishDersim rebellion.[1][2]
OnMustafa Kemal Atatürk's orders, the Minister of the InteriorSükrü Kaya supervised the creation of an environment which permitted theTurkification of the Kurdish girls and the raising of future Turks.[3] In 1937, the Inspector GeneralAbdullah Alpdoğan [tr] of theFourth Inspectorate General demanded that the Girls Institute was to be established in a building which originally was to be the new hospital of Elazığ.[4] The city Elazığ was chosen as it had aTurkish speaking andSunni muslim majority at the time.[5]
The recruited girls were a divided into two departments. The first was for the daughters of civil servants and they received a regular high school curriculum.[6] The second department was for Kurdish girls including the daughters of tribal leaders, orphans from parents killed in clashes with the Turkish army or girls abducted from rebels.[7] Those students had to go through a three-year-long assimilation process, which included learning basic housekeeping. The Kurdish girls were not expected to continue with their education but to carry Turkish ideals to the Kurdish rural population.[6] The school was intended to create housewives and mothers who would speak Turkish with their children.[7] The institute was described as transforming "savage Kurdish" girls into "civilized" i.e. "Turkicised"[7] young women[8][9] and compared to an American factory where cows entered at one end and sausages came out the other.[7][10][9] Of the Kurdish alumni, photographs from the time of their arrival and their departure from the institute were taken to show the progress in their assimilation towards Turkishness.[11] As Kurdish names were seen as detrimental to the assimilation process, many alumni had their names changed into a Turkish one upon their arrival to the boarding school.[12] The assimilation process was observed by several Turkish politicians and bureaucrats including the Turkish Presidentİsmet İnönü who visited the school in person.[11]
Initially the students were mainly from theDersim region, but others were also fromÇermik,Ergani orDiyarbakir province.[3] At the time, the local population did not send their girls into school, and they doubted if their daughters would be treated well if they sent them to the Girls Institute.[2] But there was little they could do, the order to send a girl per village to the institute came from the Inspector General.[13] In later years, when the recruiting process was supervised by a civilian, resistant villagers disguised the girls as boys or married them off so they were not taken.[14]
For the first year, twenty-eight girls were recruited as students.[13] From 1939 onwards, the school was for most of the time administered bySıdıka Avar, a Turkish teacher from Istanbul, who became the principal of the institute.[5] She left the school for a short period in 1942 to work at theTokat Girls' institute, but returned in 1943.[5] She transformed the teaching from an authoritarian and punitive style to a more compelling cooperative one.[5] Avar forbade the use of their native language in the students' private communication and the teaching of the Turkish language was a major part of the curriculum in the first year.[15] After having observed the progress the girls made when they accomplished their three-year-long education and returned to their villages, she noticed that the girls often faced difficulties readapting to the village life.[16] She demanded a better education for the best of the students, so they would be able to become teachers like herself.[17] The Inspectorate General granted permission and the first graduates of the further education were sent as teachers to the Akçadağ Village Institute. Avar taught about a thousand girls until the school was closed and she had to leave. In 1959, under the Government of theDemocrat Party, the section for girls from Dersim was closed.[18]