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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”

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

modernization.

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AFTERNOON SESSION: OPEN DISCUSSION

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SYMPOSIUM PARTICIPANTS

NUR ALTINYILDIZ

Born in 1955 in Istanbul, Nur Altªnyªldªz studied architecture and restoration at Istanbul Technical

University. She spent a year in Rome, ICCROM, taking a course in architectural conservation. Back

in Istanbul, she worked at the Central Laboratories for Restoration and Conservation. In 1990, she

began teaching at Bilkent University’s Department of Interior Architecture in Ankara and consequently

started her Ph.D. at Istanbul Technical University. Her dissertation, titled “Circumstances Specific to

Turkey in the Conservation of the Historical Environment: Istanbul 1923–1973,” was completed in

1998. She moved back to Istanbul in 2002 and is currently working as a part-time Assistant Professor

at Bahçe ehir University and Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

CAN B LSEL

S. M. Can Bilsel is an architectural critic and cultural historian and is Assistant Professor at the

University of San Diego. Having received a professional degree in architecture from Middle East

Technical University in Ankara, Bilsel completed his graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology and Princeton University. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Architecture in the Museum:

Displacement, Reconstruction, and Reproduction of the Monuments of Antiquity in Berlin’s Pergamon

Museum,” investigates the problems of historic representation and modern ideology in the German

reconstruction and display of antiquity. In addition to his work on the history of modern architecture

and the theory of historic preservation, Bilsel has also written about the history of twentieth-century

urbanism, particularly in France. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the

Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a two-year residential grant from the Getty Research

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Institute, Los Angeles. Bilsel is the author of Zeus in Exile: Archaeological Restitution as Politics of

Memory (Princeton, 2000).

S BEL BOZDO AN

Sibel Bozdo an holds a professional degree in architecture from Middle East Technical University in

Ankara (1976) and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1983). She has taught architectural

history and theory courses at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1986–1991), MIT (1991–1999) and as a

visitor at the GSD, Harvard University (1999–present). Her interests range from cross-cultural histories

of modern architecture to critical investigations of technology, modernity, and national identity as they

have informed the culture and production of architecture in Turkey and across the globe. She has

published articles on these topics, has coauthored a monograph on the Turkish architect Sedad Hakkª

Eldem (1987) and coedited an interdisciplinary volume, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in

Turkey (1997). Her Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early

Republic (Seattle, 2001) won the 2002 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural

Historians and the Köprμlμ Book Prize of the Turkish Studies Association.

ZEYNEP ÇELºK

Zeynep Çelik is Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Her publications include The Remaking of Istanbul (Washington, 1986; California, 1993), Displaying

the Orient (California, 1992), Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations (California, 1997), and (as

coeditor) Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (California, 1993), as well as articles on cross-

cultural topics. She served as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

(2000–2003) and is currently completing a book, titled Public Space, Modernity, and Empire Building:

Ottoman Syria, French Maghrib, 1830–1914, and coediting an interdisciplinary collection of essays,

Walls of Algiers: Artistic, Cultural, and Urban Forms in the Colonial and Postcolonial City. She has

recently been granted a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies

Fellowship.

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AHMET ERSOY

Ahmet Ersoy has been an Assistant Professor at the History Department at Bo aziçi University,

Istanbul, since 2002; he formerly taught at Sabancª University, Istanbul. He received his B.A. (1988)

and M.A. (1991) from the Department of Architecture at Middle East Technical University, Ankara. In

2000 he completed his Ph.D. degree at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard

University, with a dissertation titled, “On the Sources of the ‘Ottoman Renaissance’: Architectural

Revival and Its Discourse During the Abdμlaziz Era (1861–76).” His work mainly deals with the

transformations of Ottoman culture in the nineteenth century, a period of intense modernization. He

particularly focuses on questions related to the late Ottoman politics of identity, and examines the

various visual and scholarly forms of representation it engendered. His publications include “A

Sartorial Tribute to late Tanzimat Ottomanism,” Muqarnas 20 (2003), an introductory essay in Elbise-i

Osmaniyye (Istanbul, 1999).

FINBARR BARRY FLOOD

Finbarr Barry Flood is Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, New York University. He

was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in

1993. From 1993 to 1995 he was Nasser D. Khalili Research Fellow in Islamic Art and Architecture at

the University of Oxford. In the United States, he has held research fellowships at the Aga Khan

Program at Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Gallery of Art in

Washington, DC. His research interests include Islamic architectural history and historiography, cross-

cultural dimensions of Islamic art, iconoclasm, technologies of representation, and Orientalism —

topics on which he has published in a range of academic journals in Europe, the US, the Middle East,

South Asia, and Australasia. In 2001 he published his first book: The Great Mosque of Damascus:

Studies on the Making of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden, 2001). He is currently completing his

second book, Objects of Translation: Artifacts, Elites and Medieval Indo-Persian Encounters, while

working on a wide-ranging study of iconoclastic practice in the Islamic world.

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SHIRINE HAMADEH

Shirine Hamadeh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University, where she

began teaching in 2003. As a recipient of a 2005–06 postdoctoral Getty grant, she is currently on leave

to conduct research on her new project on Ottoman public spaces in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT (History, Theory, and Criticism, 1999) and has published in

Muqarnas and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her forthcoming book, The

City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century, to be published by the University of Washington

Press, is based on her dissertation, which was awarded the 1999 Malcom Kerr Dissertation Award in

the Humanities by the Middle East Studies Association. Her interests range from Ottoman architectural

and urban culture and processes of Ottoman modernity to artistic exchanges between the Muslim world

and Europe, and nineteenth-century colonial cities.

RENATA HOLOD

Renata Holod is Professor of the History of Art, Director, Program for Visual Studies, and Curator,

Near East Section, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She

carried out archaeological and architectural fieldwork in Syria, Iran, Morocco, Central Asia and

Turkey, and an archaeological/ethno-historical survey on the island of Jerba, Tunisia. She was

Convenor, Steering Committee Member, and Master Jury Chair of the Aga Khan Award for

Architecture. She served as consultant to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Arthur Ericson

Architects, and Venturi Scott-Brown Architects. The Islamic Environmental Research Centre honored

her in 2004 with an Award for outstanding work in Islamic Architectural Studies. She has co-authored

the following works: City in the Desert: an account of the archaeological expedition to Qasr al-Hayr

al-Sharqi, Syria; Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today; Timurid

Architecture of Iran and Central Asia; The Mosque and the Modern World. She is co-editor of

Modern Turkish Architecture. Jerba Studies, the account of the Jerba Project, is currently in

preparation.

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CEMAL KAFADAR

Cemal Kafadar is Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies in the History Department at Harvard

University. His study of early Ottoman history, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the

Ottoman State, has been translated into Arabic, Greek, and Turkish (all of them forthcoming). Ever in

search of fun in the archives and libraries, his serendipitous discoveries there have led to works on

autobiographical writing and to the editing of a Sufi lady's mid-seventeenth-century dream log. He is

pursuing his interest in the narratives of modernity and tradition through research projects related to

Ottoman social and cultural life in the late medieval and early modern era. He plans to publish a book

on one of his central concerns, the politics of crowds and rebellions in Istanbul from the late sixteenth

to the early nineteenth century. He continues to work on what he considers to be related topics,

including the history of coffeehouses, uses of the night, communities of dissent, and early history of

Bektashism.

G˜LRU NEC PO LU

Gμlru Necipo lu has been the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard

University and the Editor of Muqarnas and Supplements to Muqarnas since 1993. She received her

Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1986 and began teaching there in 1987. Her articles include

comparative studies on early modern Islamic art and architecture (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal), and deal

with cross-cultural exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. She has published

Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapª Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

(Cambridge, MA, 1991), The Topkapª Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa

Monica, CA, 1995), and The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London,

Princeton, 2005). Her Topkapª Scroll, winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East

Studies Association and the Spiro Kostoff Book Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, has

recently been translated into Persian (Iranian Academy of Art, Tehran, 2003).

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OYA PANCARO LU

Oya Pancaro lu is currently Departmental Lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture in the Oriental

Institute, University of Oxford. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000 with a

dissertation on the transformation of figural art in the late Seljuk period. Her research interests include

the cultural context of figural representation in medieval Islamic art and various aspects of cross-

cultural exchange and overlap in medieval Anatolia. Her recent publications include “Caves,

Borderlands and Configurations of Sacred Topography in Medieval Anatolia,” Mésogeios 25–26

(2005), “The Emergence of Turkic Dynastic Presence in the Islamic World: Cultural Experiences and

Artistic Horizons, 950-1250” in Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600 (London, 2005), and

“The Itinerant Dragon Slayer: Forging Paths of Image and Identity in Medieval Anatolia,” Gesta 43/2

(2004).

SCOTT REDFORD

Scott Redford currently divides his time between Georgetown University’s McGhee Center for Eastern

Mediterranean Studies, in Alanya, and Koç University’s Anatolian Civilizations Institute, in Istanbul.

He is the author of articles and two books on the archaeology and architecture of medieval Anatolia:

The Archaeology of the Frontier in the Medieval Near East: Excavations at Grittile (Philadelphia,

1998) and Landscape and the State in Medieval Anatolia (Oxford, 2000). He received his Ph.D. from

Harvard University in 1989 with a dissertation titled “The Ceramic Sequence from Medieval Gritille,

SE Turkey.” His present research interests include the publication of the medieval levels from the site

of Kinet Höyμk, Hatay, Turkey, and of the inscriptions on the city walls of Antalya. KISHWAR RIZVI

Kishwar Rizvi teaches the history of Islamic art and architecture at Barnard College, Columbia

University. Her primary research is on representations of religious and imperial authority in the art

and architecture of Safavid Iran. She is finishing work on her book, The Safavid Dynastic Shrine:

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Architecture, Piety, and Power in Sixteenth and Seventeenth –Century Iran. She also writes on issues

of gender, nationalism, and religious identity in the contemporary art and architecture of Iran and

Pakistan. With Sandy Isenstadt, she has edited a forthcoming book, Modernism and the Middle East:

Politics of the Built Environment.

DAVID ROXBURGH

David J. Roxburgh started teaching at Harvard University in 1996 and was promoted to Professor of

History of Art and Architecture in 2003. He received his Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University

of Pennsylvania in 1996. He is the author of two books, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art

History in Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden, 2001) and The Persian Album 1400–1600: From Dispersal

to Collection (New Haven, 2005), and has published articles on the history of the Islamic book,

painting, and calligraphy. Recent research projects include studies on pilgrimage and Ibn Razzaz al-

Jazari’s book on automata in addition to an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, titled

Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years 600-1600 (2005). He edited the exhibition catalogue and with

Nazan Ölçer and Filiz Ça man was a cocurator of the exhibition.

WENDY MERYEM KURAL SHAW

Wendy Meryem Kural Shaw has taught as Associate Professor in Bilgi University and Kadir Has

University in Istanbul. She is interested in the visual effects of cultural adaptation during the modern

and contemporary periods, with a primary focus on Turkey in its relationship both with its own past

and with the European Other. She is the author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology,

and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (California, 2003), as well as articles

concerning contemporary art and modern ideologies surrounding archaeology as part of nationalist

discourse production.

HEGHNAR WATENPAUGH

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Heghnar Watenpaugh is an Associate Professor at UC Davis. She formerly taught at Rice University

and at the History, Theory and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial

Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden,

2004), as well as articles on early modern and modern Islamic architecture and urbanism. She has been

awarded numerous fellowships including the J. Paul Getty Post-doctoral Fellowship in the History of

Art and the Humanities; the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Grant; the President's

Faculty Research Award in the Humanities, Rice University and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at

the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Her ongoing research

addresses issues of gender and space, as well as the preservation and commodification of architecture

in the era of colonialism and nationalism in modern Middle Eastern societies.