KÜLTÜREL MİRASIN TARTIŞMALI SINIRLARI: TÜRKİYE-GÜRCİSTAN SINIR PEYZAJININ ELEŞTİREL BİR İNCELEMESİ

Borders extend beyond geopolitical instruments defining the state territories, they act as dynamic regimes of practices that organize belonging, exclusion and governance. As both material infrastructures and imaginary constructs, borders challenge and reshape essentialist understandings of heritage. This thesis approaches heritage as ontologically multiple, enacted through relational assemblages rather than existing as a singular entity awaiting competing interpretations. It examines how heritage practices and border-making processes recast each other across spatial, temporal, political, and socio-cultural dimensions. The study conceptualizes heritage–border entanglements as a field of onto-epistemological modulation in which the knowledge and being of both heritage and borders are continuously reconfigured. To operationalize this framework, five modal configurations are developed: heritage at the border, heritage of the border, heritage-making as bordering, border as heritage, and heritage marginalized to the border. The Turkish–Georgian borderscape in the southeastern Black Sea region provides the empirical ground for this investigation. Shaped by imperial legacies, Cold War division, post-Soviet transformation, and contemporary transboundary governance, this borderscape reveals how monasteries of Tao-Klarjeti, the Sarp/Sarpi settlements, Machakheli Gorge, and Muratlı Village operate as heritage contact zones where multiple heritage-border ontologies coexist and collide. The findings show that heritage in borderlands cannot be reduced to territorially bounded or inherently unifying narratives. Instead, heritage and borders recast one another through shifting configurations that assemble divergent futures, calling for conservation approaches attentive to ontological plurality and connectivity.