Golzare_Shohada as a Memory_Place

Aqababaee, Ehsan; Zhianpour, Mehdi

Golzare_Shohada as a Memory_Place

Volume 17, Issue 67
Autumn 2015

Pages 53-68

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Ehsan Aqababaee ¹

Mehdi Zhianpour ²

¹ Assistant Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Isfahan University

² Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Urban Social – Cultural Studies, Isfahan

Abstract

In their social life, people may pass by different places; private rooms, restaurants, parks, streets… If one of these places is elevated to a unique position with various meanings attributed to it, the place will consequently constitute parts of man's social concerns. Such place is called "memory-site". The main question of this paper is to demonstrate how the graveyard of war victim's in Isfahan (Golestan-e-Shohada means the Garden of Martyrs) appears as an emotional and identical memory-place for war victims' families. A synthetic approach has been deployed in conducting the research in which for the qualitative part twenty families have been interviewed with interpretative method while 180 families have participated in the quantitative section in order to help us in gathering our data. Our findings assert that Golectan-e-Shohada can be regarded as an emotional and identical memory-place for war victims' families. Golestan-e-Shohada has functioned as a unique place in formation of the identity for the place, restoration of religious identities, persistence of familial values, arousing people's emotions and making people pay attention to some symbols.

Keywords

Golestan-e-Shohada

Memory-place

Identity

Emotions