1 HISTORIOGRAPHY AND IDEOLOGY: ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF THE “LANDS OF RUM” Symposium Harvard University, 11-13 May 2006 History of architecture constitutes a major ingredient in the making of modern nationalist narratives everywhere, and modern Turkey is no exception to this. Yet few other modern nations exhibit the historical and cultural complexity of Turkey, with its tangled and difficult dilemma of identity resulting from the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural legacy of the Ottoman Empire, “caught between two worlds,” as Cemal Kafadar has put it. The medieval Islamic dynasties of Anatolia were equally complex polities, whose monumental heritage is often problematically treated as a precursor of the Ottoman period in linear constructions of regional architectural history. Consequently, both Western and native scholars are faced with a distinct problem in writing the history of “Turkish” architecture in the “Lands of Rum” (lit. Roman domains, commonly designating Anatolia and the Balkans), and their work often reflects the ideological and/or methodological biases with which they approach this topic. On the one hand, the histories of Ottoman and “pre-Ottoman” architecture sit rather uncomfortably in the general surveys of “Islamic architecture” within which Westerners have traditionally classified these traditions. In the classical texts on Islamic architecture (most of them produced at the height of Western colonial ambitions in the Middle East, during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire), the monuments of these “Turkish” dynasties are often relegated to a lesser status than those of the “Persians” and “Arabs,” which, for many Western Orientalists, represent the “purer” and “sedentary” architecture of authentic Muslim cultures, before they were overtaken by the “nomadic” Turks. On the other hand, Turkish scholars’ efforts to counter this Orientalist view have frequently been compromised by equally problematic nationalist biases, leading them, for example, to highlight the ethnic “Turkish” element in Seljuk, Beylik, and Ottoman architectures at the expense of the “Islamic”
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HISTORIOGRAPHY AND IDEOLOGY:
ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF THE “LANDS OF RUM”
Symposium
Harvard University, 11-13 May 2006
History of architecture constitutes a major ingredient in the making of modern nationalist narratives
everywhere, and modern Turkey is no exception to this. Yet few other modern nations exhibit the
historical and cultural complexity of Turkey, with its tangled and difficult dilemma of identity
resulting from the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural legacy of the Ottoman Empire, “caught between two
worlds,” as Cemal Kafadar has put it. The medieval Islamic dynasties of Anatolia were equally
complex polities, whose monumental heritage is often problematically treated as a precursor of the
Ottoman period in linear constructions of regional architectural history. Consequently, both Western
and native scholars are faced with a distinct problem in writing the history of “Turkish” architecture in
the “Lands of Rum” (lit. Roman domains, commonly designating Anatolia and the Balkans), and their
work often reflects the ideological and/or methodological biases with which they approach this topic.
On the one hand, the histories of Ottoman and “pre-Ottoman” architecture sit rather uncomfortably in
the general surveys of “Islamic architecture” within which Westerners have traditionally classified
these traditions. In the classical texts on Islamic architecture (most of them produced at the height of
Western colonial ambitions in the Middle East, during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire), the
monuments of these “Turkish” dynasties are often relegated to a lesser status than those of the
“Persians” and “Arabs,” which, for many Western Orientalists, represent the “purer” and “sedentary”
architecture of authentic Muslim cultures, before they were overtaken by the “nomadic” Turks. On the
other hand, Turkish scholars’ efforts to counter this Orientalist view have frequently been
compromised by equally problematic nationalist biases, leading them, for example, to highlight the
ethnic “Turkish” element in Seljuk, Beylik, and Ottoman architectures at the expense of the “Islamic”
2
component, or to negate any formative inputs from the many centuries of cross-cultural exchanges
with Anatolian/Balkan Christendom and Europe. Another bias of nationalist paradigms is their
anachronistic focus on the present borders of modern Turkey, to the exclusion of parallel developments
in neighboring Islamic regions such as Iran, Iraq, Syria-Palestine, or Egypt, which have their own
exclusivist traditions of Orientalist and nationalist historiography.
The premise of this symposium is our conviction that the tendency to read the past through the optics
of present-day national boundaries has long obscured the synchronic unities and complex cultural
exchanges across the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Middle East prior to the advent of modern
nationalisms, and that without considering these unities and exchanges, talking about the history of
exclusive categories like “Turkish,” “Arab,” and “Persian” architecture is highly problematic. With
recent critical theories challenging not only the Orientalist biases of Western scholarship about Islamic
cultures but also the nationalist biases of most modern local scholarship in these societies themselves,
we believe the time is ripe for a more nuanced, critical assessment of the historiography of architecture
in non-Western contexts in general, and the case of the “Lands of Rum” is a fertile starting point for
productive discussion. Focusing on the historical, ideological, and methodological questions pertaining
to how the architectural history of Islamic dynasties in this multi-cultural region was written in the
modern period, the Symposium intends to raise an open debate on a number of issues with broader
implications for other Islamic regions.
Thursday May 11:
Welcoming Remarks: Sibel Bozdo an and Gμlru Necipo lu
Keynote Lecture: Cemal Kafadar
State Building, Globalization, and History in the Lands of Rum
Friday May 12
MORNING SESSION (Chair: David Roxburgh)
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ARAB, PERSIAN, OR TURKISH? SCHOLARSHIP ON THE LANDS OF RUM AND
BEYOND
Heghnar Watenpaugh
The Legacy of Ottoman Architecture in the Former Arab Provinces
Abstract: Since the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state and its legacy — architectural or otherwise
— has been contested, erased, revived, and reviled in the former Arab provinces. In the historiography
of the visible past of these regions, the Ottoman period occupies an ambiguous position at the
intersection of European Orientalist narratives of Arab civilization and medieval greatness, nationalist
narratives of the rebirth of the Arab nation, and Islamist narratives of Islamic civilization. Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ottoman architecture was both reviled as imported and
inauthentic, and prized as a marker of imperial prestige and Islamic legitimacy.
This paper explores the complexity of such discourses by examining two key moments: Egypt under
Muhammad Ali and 1930s Syria. Both moments dramatize the different values given to the medieval
period (embodied in Mamluk architecture) and the early modern/modern (Ottoman). Under
Muhammad Ali, despite the emerging popularization of Mamluk forms, a version of an Ottoman style
was preferred for the mosque of the viceroy on the citadel. The key texts here include Orientalist
narratives of Arab art, such as that of Pascal Coste, and local responses/appropriations, such as Ali
Pasha Mubarak’s. In 1930s Syria, then under French Mandate, local intellectuals and colonial scholars
struggled to define a history for the architecture of a new nation-state. In this context, the Ottoman
heritage was denied just as it was systematically documented. Key texts here include those of Jean
Sauvaget and René Dussaud, among others, as well as those of Muhammad Kurd Ali, and Kamil al-
Ghazzi.
In the cases of both Egypt and Syria, Western or colonial as well as nationalist actors struggled to
narrativize the visual past of new states. The location or elision of the Ottoman moment in these
narratives reveals the hidden assumptions and aims of their positions.
4
Kishwar Rizvi
Arthur Upham Pope and the Survey of Persian Art: Exploring the Discourses on Iranian Art and
Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century
Abstract: In a speech delivered in 1925, Arthur Upham Pope situated the art and culture of Iran within
the framework of an ancient civilization deserving of the world’s attention and admiration. The art of
Iran was characterized as its “greatest asset” and the source of inspiration for myriad others, from
China to Europe. The arts of South Asia and Turkey were declared to be mere derivations and deemed
inferior to the “original.” Pope’s audience included Crown Prince Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who took
up the American’s challenge to invest heavily in the culture of “Persia” by recognizing its political and
propagandist potential. The speech was soon published in both Iran (1925) and London (1928),
thereby launching a national and international discourse on the history of Persian art. The aim of this
paper is to explore the varied modes and motivations for the construction of this discourse, within both
the art historical and the nationalist rhetoric employed by A. U. Pope.
A. U. Pope organized the First World Congress on Persian Art in Philadelphia in 1926 and founded the
American Institute of Persian Art and Archaeology in 1928 in New York. A number of subsequent
congresses and related exhibitions would follow, to be memorialized in the Survey of Persian Art
which began being published in 1938. In this monumental tome (1938–1939, six volumes) the
superiority of Persian art and culture was further reiterated through a dense and complicated
documentation that spanned two and a half millennia. At stake were the racial, linguistic, and national
identities of the newly modern state. In contrast to earlier Orientalist scholars like F. Sarre and E.
Herzfeld, whose association with German museums and academic institutions brought them access to
Iranian archaeological sites, A. U. Pope’s primary patron was the Shah of Iran. The exhibitions and
congresses, underwritten by both the American and Iranian governments, were thus a platform for a re-
conceptualization of history in which the artifacts of the past were seen as evidence of Iran’s greatness
– present and future.
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Just as the country was referred to both by its native name, Iran, and the Hellenized version, Persia, the
valuation of its art and architecture was presented to both a local and a Western audience. Likewise,
the discourse on Persian art was situated simultaneously in the academies and museums of Europe and
America and in the Iranian Parliament. The goal of the former was to place these cultural artifacts
within the broader realm of “Islamic art,” a problematic term itself, while the latter aimed to situate
them within the ideals of nationalist identity formation. What were the paradigms within European art
history that supported these fundamentally different approaches? Persian art’s value was augmented at
the cost of other historical and regional entities, whose heterodox and multi-ethnic reality was
suppressed. As the structures of patronage show, it is necessary to unearth the ideological motifs that
informed Pope and the authors of the Survey of Persian Art. What, ultimately, was the legacy of A. U.
Pope and the Survey in the construction of an Iranian-centered history of Islamic art?
Oya Pancaro lu
Gateways to Medieval Anatolia: Crossing the Impasses of Architectural Historiography
Abstract: Modern study of the architectural history of late medieval Anatolia between the initial
formation of Turkish principalities (ca. 1100) and the establishment of Ottoman hegemony (ca. 1500)
has been shaped by both ideological boundaries and methodological entrenchments. Twentieth-
century academic approaches to research and interpretation may be linked in part to the connections
forged with the influential Vienna School of art history and the formalism espoused by such imposing
figures as Riegl and Strzygowski. The establishment of departments of art history in Istanbul (1943)
and Ankara (1954) was led, respectively, by Diez and Otto-Dorn (both former students of
Strzygowski), who strengthened the quest for a national Turkish art (as distinct from Persian and Arab
art) with its primary roots in Asia. This idea had already been proclaimed by Ottoman-trained art
historian Arseven (Tμrk Sanatª, 1928; French trans. 1939) and formed the interpretive foundation of
twentieth-century scholarship both within and outside Turkish academia.
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In the subsequent generations of formalist academic writing on art and architecture, the complex and
variable political, social, and ethnic-religious configurations of late medieval Anatolia have been
glossed over with such wholesale categories as “pre-Ottoman,” “Turkish Islamic,” “Anatolian
Turkish,” “Seljuk,” and “Beylik.” Furthermore, the objective of taxonomic manageability has cast
buildings into typological pigeonholes so that historical and local contexts have been neglected,
obscuring the evidence they may provide for cultural and aesthetic continuities within and beyond
Anatolia. The rudimentary utilitarian value of books cataloguing mosques, madrasas, tombs, and
caravanserais is not to be doubted. However, the enduring typological overdrive of architectural
historiography has muted the voice of buildings that sit uncomfortably in rigid categories, allowing
ideological frameworks such as modern national borders and ethnic-national identities to fill the
resulting semantic gap. This adherence to formalism is not limited to modern Turkish scholarship but
is also evident in some recent Western studies of Islamic architecture (eg.Robert Hillenbrand,Islamic
Architecture: Form, Function, and Meaning [New York, 1994]).
This paper will conclude with a look at the historiography of the Mosque of Ilyas Bey in Miletus/Balat
(1404) as a case study illuminating the restrictive effect of considering buildings primarily from the
vantage point of typology while failing to tap the potential of dynastic and regional contexts. When
regarded outside of the framework of terms and types, the contextualization of such buildings can
reveal significant synchronic and diachronic connections with traditions that are ordinarily excluded
from historiography by modern mental and political boundaries. Recognizing the methodological
impasses of modern historiography constitutes a necessary first step in reversing the marginalization
and introversion of late medieval Anatolia’s complex architectural legacy.
Barry Flood
Lost in Translation? Architectural Historiographies of the Eastern “Turks”
Abstract: Generally identified as Turks (regardless of their ethnic origins), the Persianized elites of the
Ghaznavid, Ghurid, and Delhi sultanates existed between and within multiple worlds. The process of
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negotiating these worlds is highlighted in their architectural legacy and replicated in its inscription into
the canons of colonial and postcolonial art histories. Contributing to this ongoing process, the paper
analyzes the ways in which disciplinary and political boundaries have set the parameters of
architectural analysis, focusing on the historical relationships between architecture and the
construction/representation of ethnic, regional, and religious identities. It addresses the omission or
marginalization of relevant monuments in survey texts on Islamic art, relating the phenomenon to their
stylistic heterogeneity and perceived dilution or distortion of the ‘pure’ Persianate forms and media
privileged in existing architectural histories. The issue is also relevant to the reception and evaluation
of Rum Seljuk and early Ottoman monuments; the paper therefore assumes a comparative approach to
the explanatory tropes (acculturation, hybridity, translation, etc.) that have been deployed to account
for these deviations from an assumed norm. Finally, it considers recent shifts in interpretive paradigms,
the emergence of the monuments as highly politicized sites for the articulation of notions of identity
emphasizing cultural purity, and the ways in which architectural histories have been implicated in
these developments.
AFTERNOON SESSION (Chair: Zeynep Çelik)
ISLAMIC, TURKISH, OR MODERN? HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF OTTOMAN
ARCHITECTURE
Ahmet Ersoy
Architecture and the Search for Ottoman Origins in the Late Tanzimat Period
Abstract: Following the European pattern, the development of the discipline of art history in the
Ottoman Empire was largely concomitant with the rise and modification of a nationalist ideology in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The definition of an Ottoman artistic/architectural
heritage and its preservation and representation were significant assets in the process of inculcating a
national consciousness, for they helped authenticate a unified vision of Ottoman society and firmly
embedded its means of collective cultural expression in the distant past.
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This paper centers on a discussion of the Usul-i Mimari-i Osmani [Fundamentals of Ottoman
Architecture] (Istanbul, 1873), – henceforth referred to as the Usul: the earliest comprehensive study
on the history and theory of Ottoman architecture. The authors of the Usul were the first to locate
Ottoman architecture within the broader context of cultural history and examine its course with respect
to long-term changes in the history of the Ottoman state. The paper particularly aims to concentrate on
the historical discourse formed in the Usul concerning the earlier monuments of the Ottoman dynasty.
The formative stages of the Ottoman architectural tradition were significant for the authors of the Usul
because they were believed to yield to the analytical eye the very fundamentals of the Ottoman system
of building. The early Ottoman/late medieval synthesis could work as a model for contemporary
architects who were striving to devise a new synthetic idiom for late Ottoman architecture.
Furthermore, the pre-classical monuments of Bursa became an indispensable locus of interest for late
Ottoman intellectuals as they helped reconstitute and envisage the remote historical milieu within
which the Ottoman state was created, hence forming a major site for celebrating the myth of “founding
a nation from a clan.”
In embarking upon a close reading of the text, this paper aims to delineate how the late Ottoman image
of the period of architectural “origins” was articulated through a complex negotiation with European
strategies of analysis, and in response to the predominant Orientalist biases embedded in mainstream
architectural discourse. Here, the Usul will be assessed in line with other comparative works
(especially by Viollet-le-Duc students) such as Parvillée’s L'Architecture et décoration turque, and
with the hindsight provided by early republican histories of architecture. The paper also aims to
investigate how the Usul’s historical image of early Ottoman architecture was informed by and
contributed to the late Ottoman politics of identity by examining the text against the background of the
history books, popular novels, and plays of the period.
Gμlru Necipo lu
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The Creation of a National Genius: Sinan and the Historiography of “Classical” Ottoman Architecture
Abstract: The classification of Sinan’s multi-cultural legacy in such categories as “Islamic” or
“Turkish” has hindered a fuller understanding of his oeuvre, which uniquely bridges the Ottoman-
Islamic, Romano-Byzantine, and Italian Renaissance architectural traditions. Moreover, his legacy falls
between the cracks of the conventional East-West divide in global architectural history because the
“Renaissance” has traditionally been defined as an exclusively “Western” category. This paper focuses
on the dominant narratives of Sinan scholarship, both Turkish and international, that have contributed
to such an impasse: the preoccupation with defining Sinan’s architecture as a reflection of national
“character,” the anachronistic assessment of his legacy through the lens of modernism, the formalist
emphasis on his stylistic evolution and typological schemes divorced from historical context, the
controversy over his ethnic identity (Greek, Armenian, or Turkish), the debate on the origin of his style
(multi-cultural Anatolian synthesis, or pan-Turkic), and the question of his originality (revolving
around the “influence” of Hagia Sophia).
Beginning with the emergence of these narratives in the late Ottoman Empire, when the originality of
Sinan’s style (distinct from Arab and Persian styles) was promoted as a reflection of proto-national
dynastic “character,” the paper will trace their subsequent reformulation in the early republican
literature (1923–1950s), when the search for a fully-fledged national architecture was conflated with
the question of Sinan’s ethnic identity and the Turkish origins of his style. Following the lead of
German scholars, who in the second decade of the twentieth century hailed Sinan as the grand master
of the “Turkish Renaissance,” nationalist scholarship turned the “Turkish Michelangelo” into the proud
symbol of a newly born nation’s creative genius. The paradigmatic texts that have contributed to the
construction of this “national genius” will be reviewed under two narrative genres, often with
overlapping discourses. The first genre comprises the writings of architects: Usul-i Mimari-i Osmani
(1873), Mimar Kemaleddin (1905, 1917), Taut (1938), Eldem (1939), Egli (1954). The second genre is
the work of historians and historians of art/architecture: Cevdet (1897), Gurlitt (1907–12), Babinger
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(1914, 1927), A ao lu (1926), Otto-Dorn (1937), Gabriel (1926, 1936), Arseven (1939), Osman
(1927), Meriç (1938), Afet nan (1949, 1956).
The paper will conclude with a brief overview of historiography during the second half of the
twentieth century, represented by a new generation of art/architectural historians (˜nsal, Aslanapa,
Arªk, Kuban, Kuran, Sözen, Goodwin). In these more recent narratives, earlier ideological
controversies were often perpetuated in studies characterized by formalist paradigms (stylistic
evolution, typological schemes), and biologically inspired evolution narratives (rise-and-decline) were
employed to affirm Sinan’s “classical” style as the undisputed zenith of Ottoman architectural
creativity. The linear evolution from Seljuk to Beylik to Ottoman became normative, to the exclusion
or marginalization of exchanges with non-Islamic architectural traditions in Anatolia, the Balkans, and
Europe.
Shirine Hamadeh
Westernization, Decadence, and the Ottoman Baroque: Modern Constructions of the Eighteenth
Century
Abstract: In the Usul-i Mimari-i Osmani (The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture, 1873), the first
treatise to promote before a Western audience Ottoman architecture as a rational and universal
language, the ornate and hybrid vocabulary of the eighteenth century was put forth as representative of
the rich Ottoman decorative tradition. This was the first examination of the architectural heritage of
this era and it remains one of its most favorable interpretations until today. With the gradual shaping
of a modern discourse between the 1950s and the 1980s, the eighteenth century became increasingly
regarded as an era of decline, fallen prey to Western influence. Until recently, the historiography of
the period, consisting largely of formalist studies and based mostly on European visual and textual
sources, has hinged on three paradigms: rise-and-decline, Westernization, and the Ottoman Baroque.
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Through a close reading of the main texts that have shaped the historiography, this paper aims to offer
a critical analysis of these paradigms and other recurrent themes that took part in the modern
construction of the eighteenth century. The analysis begins with the isolated work of Do an Kuban in
the 1950s, in which the concepts of decline, Ottoman Baroque, and Batªlªla ma (Westernization) first
emerged. The paper then explores the way in which the notion of Ottoman Westernization gradually
became the focus of all interpretations, as interest in the period picked up in the 1970s and the 1980s.
By examining the works of Ayda Arel (1975), Aptullah Kuran (1977), ˜lkμ Bates (1979), Semavi
Eyice (1980), Serim Denel (1982), and Emel Esin (1986), the paper then attempts to uncover some of
their ideological assumptions and investigate the relative role of eighteenth-century narratives
(Montagu, Pardoe, Walsh, Yirmisekiz Mehmed Efendi) and visual sources (Melling, Bartlett) in
providing fertile grounds for their interpretations.
The analysis will extend to such paradigmatic works of Ottoman history as Ahmet Refik’s Lâle Devri,
and important architectural studies like those of Sedad Hakkª Eldem and Aptullah Kuran from the
1970s, and Maurizio Cerasi and Tμlay Artan from the late 1980s, that do not fully partake of the
dominant narrative. The interest of these studies is that while they offer new insights they also rely on
a set of unquestioned concepts and assumptions that have played a consistent part in the modern
discourse on the eighteenth century. Such pervasive notions as the Tulip Period, ephemeral pleasures,
decadence and mannerism, influence, and nationalism (or proto-nationalism) will be examined from
both a historical and a critical perspective.
Sibel Bozdo an
Reading Ottoman Architecture through Modernist Lenses: Nationalism and the “New Architecture” in the Early Republic
Abstract: Architectural culture in the early republican period is marked by a conspicuous split between
nationalist historiography and modernist practice. While nationalist narratives celebrated the classical
Ottoman heritage as the zenith of Turkish creativity, the professional discourse of early republican
12
architecture strongly rejected any formal and iconographic references to that heritage, turning instead
to an imported Central European modernism, embraced under the rubric of “New Architecture.” In
many cases, the same authors who wrote extensively on the merits of Ottoman architecture also
promoted (and designed with) the abstract modern forms of New Architecture as the most appropriate
expression of the Kemalist Revolution. Nationalist reverence for Ottoman architecture existed side by
side with arguments about the necessity of radically dissociating the modern Turkish architecture of
the new Republic from the country’s Ottoman/ Islamic past.
Through a study of representative early republican texts by influential art/architectural historians and
cultural critics (Celal Esat Arseven and Ismail Hakkª Baltacªo lu in particular) and prominent
architects (like Behçet ˜nsal, Sedad Çetinta and Sedad Hakkª Eldem), this paper examines how these
authors sought to reconcile such seemingly contradictory premises and argued that Ottoman
architecture and European modernism were in fact two different historical manifestations of the same
underlying rationality that distinguishes Turks from other Islamic cultures. In particular, the paper
focuses on their rationalist, functionalist, and secular readings of Ottoman architecture: their emphasis
on “tectonics” at the expense of decorative programs; on “human geography” rather than religion as
the determinant of cultural identity; on houses as a major component of Ottoman heritage hitherto
overshadowed by monumental architecture; and on “formal/ typological evolution” as the main
explanatory framework, at the expense of historical, cultural, and contextual particularities. The main
point of the paper is that in spite of their now-transparent ideological biases and shortcomings, these
texts contain important critical insights, as well as some profound contradictions endemic to Turkish
modernity, such as the unresolved tension between positivism and (Bergsonian) spiritualism or the
oscillation between evolutionary and revolutionary models in imagining what the desired modern/
national Turkish architecture of the twentieth century could be.
The paper concludes with the observation that in spite of all the nationalist arguments regarding the
rationality and “inherent modernity” of classical Ottoman forms (and hence, their implied potential as
legitimate models for republican architects), modern Turkish architecture has largely failed in
establishing meaningful continuities with the Ottoman architectural heritage. Rather than the gradual
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re-configuration of Ottoman spatial, structural, and aesthetic sensibilities into a uniquely Turkish
modernism as the early republican authors had hoped, the conspicuous revival of interest in the
Ottoman heritage since the 1980s seems to be unfolding as a postmodern “return of the repressed”
epitomized by the increasingly numerous replicas of classical Ottoman mosques or the increasingly
fashionable “Ottoman/Turkish house” -style villas in exclusive suburbs.
Saturday May 13
MORNING SESSION (Chair: Renata Holod)
IMPACT OF HISTORIOGRAPHIES ON INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICES: ARCHAEOLOGY,
MUSEOLOGY, AND PRESERVATION IN MODERN TURKEY
Can Bilsel
“Our Anatolia”: the Making of the “Humanist Culture” in Turkey
Abstract: The organization of archaeology in the 1930s in Ankara was guided by the “Turkish History
Thesis,” which sought to prove that the “Turkish race” was the founder of the Neolithic cultures of the
ancient Near East, and of Western civilization. The centrality of pre- and proto-historic archaeology in
the Turkish humanities, the invention of the disciplines of “Hititology” and “Sumerology,” and the
formulation of an outlandish theory about the Turkic origin of all languages (“Gμne -Dil”) —
borrowing the paradigms of the relativist German pre-history — served the Republic’s double project
of nation-building and Westernization (Aydªn, 2002). Beginning in 1938, however, a new generation
of cultural theorists sought to revise the official historiography, rejecting the ethnocentric “origins” and
demanding instead the institution of a “humanist culture.” Turkish “humanism” was made manifest in
a variety of fields including the introduction of a classical Greek and Latin curriculum in public
education, the translation of ancient Greek and French classics into Turkish (Berk, 2002), the
reorganization of classical archaeology under the traditional rubric of German philhellenism under
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Ekrem Akurgal (Aydªn, 2002), and, finally, the reinvention of ancient “Anatolia” in modern Turkish
literature as the “cradle” of civilization (Akyªldªz, 2002).
This paper examines the construction “Anatolia” in the writings of its most prominent theorists,
Sabahattin Eyμbo lu, “Halikarnas Balªkçªsª” (Cevat akir Kabaa açlª), and Azra Erhat, as well as in
the histories of art, architecture, and culture of Turkey written under their influence. Seeking to
establish continuity between the ancient and modern inhabitants of Anatolia, the Turkish humanists
documented the similarities between the culture narrated in the Homeric legends and a highly selective
and often anecdotal account of Turkish folklore. Hence the education of the Turkish halk (people) in
the classics was presented as the people’s return to its native Anatolian/“Troyan” (Trojan) identity.
In the final analysis, the construction of “Anatolia” in Turkish historiography consisted in the
conflation of a nativist identity (Anatolia) with a “universal” ideal (Hellas), not unlike the construction
of the “Hellenic” (as opposed to “Rumeic”) identity in the nineteenth-century Greece. This required,
on the one hand, internalizing nineteenth-century philhellenism — Mediterranean/Aegean culture as
the epitome of civilization — and, on the other hand, rejecting the political implications of such
ideology: European imperialism or the Greek invasion of 1919–22. Hence, as a rhetorical device,
“Anatolia” both established the rootedness of the Turkish State in its present territories and demanded
its inclusion in the West.
Scott Redford
Islamic Archaeology in Turkey
Abstract: The elites of the early Turkish Republic were ambivalent towards their Islamic heritage. This
ambivalence expressed itself, for instance, in nationalistic ideologies focusing on Anatolia as a center
of (mostly non-Islamic) cultures even as a neo-Ottoman architectural style was employed to build
prominent buildings of the new capital of Ankara. Ideological concerns were born of the conflation of
race and language common at the time in France and Germany, the two main sources of education for
the new republican elite.
15
The Turkish Historical Society was the center of early republican intellectual developments involving
history and archaeology. This paper takes as its departure Remzi O uz Arªk, a prominent member of
the Society and Director of the Ankara Ethnographic Museum, trained in classical archaeology but also
in Arabic, and the first Turkish professor of Turkish art. It then traces another kind of ambivalence in
Turkish Islamic archaeology, its disciplinarily intermediate or subordinate status relative to Bronze
Age and Classical archaeology on the one hand, and to Turkish/Islamic architectural and art history on
the other.
Wendy Meryem Shaw
Preservation/Projection: Museums and National Identity in the Republic of Turkey
Abstract: Museums preserve the past in order to project the future. Yet what they designate as past,
what they choose to preserve as historical as opposed to forgotten or ongoing, is intimately linked to
how that future is to be imagined. As the Ottoman Empire was transformed into the Republic of
Turkey in 1923 and the decades thereafter, old museums reconfigured for new needs, and the multitude
of new museums established throughout the country faced a double bind: not only were new museums
designed to frame the past as a unitary and glorious heritage for the young nation, they were also to
function within a system that imagined the multi-ethnic Ottoman, Islamic, imperial, Eastern past as
radically divorced from the ethnically Turkish, secular, republican, and Western future.
Museums in Turkey were not designed simply to preserve heritage; they were to define heritage, both
as a uniform past for a young nation and as a past to be left behind as part of the projects of
modernization, equated with Westernization. This paper will examine how the primary museums of
the early republican period — Topkapª Palace Museum, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Museum
of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, Hagia Sophia Museum, Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in
Istanbul; Ethnographic Museum and Hittite Museum in Ankara; and local archaeological,
ethnographic, and dervish lodge museums throughout the country — produced a system of memorial
where preservation has been embedded in a system of forgetting, making museums at once central to
16
the republican project and yet also perenially on the fringes of public consciousness. It will also
attempt to consider how this paradoxical relationship between remembering the past and projecting the
future may have affected the institutionalization of museums in the region.
Nur Altªnyªldªz
Contextualizing the Byzantine and Ottoman Architectural Legacy: Istanbul in the 1920s and
1950s
Abstract: Preservation in Turkey, introduced as a modern Western practice during the late Ottoman
Empire, seemingly established “international standards” in legislation and education while
conveniently overlooking the complex ideological load of the heritage itself. Preservation never
became a consistent effort nor was its object a coherent whole. Pristine planning and preservation
principles were largely ignored in the continuous shaping and reshaping of cities.
Acts of construction and conservation became powerful visual manifestations of cultural politics,
particularly those of early republican politicians as they dealt with the legacy of the past. Foremost,
interventions in Istanbul provide insight into their adverse policies and preferences as they objectified,
contextualized, and presented the Byzantine and Ottoman heritage of the city. Priorities were
continuously changed, choices made, and biases manifested as history was played off against
modernity, discourse against practice. Istanbul became a stage set where thorny issues of
modernization were masked by intricate operations of restoration and painful absences covered up by
glorified presences. National and religious sentiments of the local public were addressed as well as the
presumed expectations of Western parties. Halil Edhem, Sedat Çetinta , and Ali Saim ˜lgen stand out
as critics of preservation policies while republican administrators orchestrated urban development,
veiling or highlighting selected specimens of the patrimony. Paradoxically, republican reformists of
the 1920s preserved the legacy of Istanbul in ruins as they constructed modern Ankara, while their
conservative successors in the 1950s destroyed that same legacy in a quest for sublimating it through