Session details
Organizer(s)
Belgin Turan Özkaya (METU) and Semra Horuz (Bahçeşehir University)
Keywords
19th Century Ottoman Empire – Tanzimat, Ottoman Travel Cultures – Museology, Collecting and Displaying in the Late Ottoman Empire
Abstract
From the 18th century onwards, the Ottoman state instigated major transformations after overtly facing the fact that the imperial glory of the past could not be restored solely with military reformations. Throughout the 1800s, technological developments and intellectuals’ awareness of social transformations incited unprecedented cultural mobilities. The vibrant modes of Tanzimat reforms ushered in an impetus to understand Europe systematically on both governmental and public levels. Forged by the ever-changing transportation infrastructures, vital urban milieu and novel understanding of history, Ottoman intelligentsia embarked on solo journeys, pored over European cities, published accounts, created, displayed and circulated personal archives and collections. Concurrently, vocal press culture became an essential engine of knowledge production and discussion on grand concepts such as progress and heritage and civilization. All these practices were pivotal for the formation of the spaces that frame and exhibit the past, modern museums, and fields like archeology.
Stressing the contextual and conceptual aspects of these activities and formations, this session welcomes researches on Ottoman participation and responses to the international 19th century culture of travel, collecting and display. It particularly focuses on the mobility and circulation of people and objects around Ottoman and connected contexts; Ottoman encounters and exchanges en route; the journeys of intellectuals, collections and archives in the late Ottoman Empire. In addition to the bureaucratic attempts and initiatives of the capital, personal imageries, reception and appropriation of various localities, stories of archeological and architectural pieces as well as those of non-professionals, interactions between locals, foreigners, dilettanti and experts are some of the tracks that might be explored.
In the scholarship there is a clear subordination of 19th century Ottoman cultural mobilities to the bureaucratic transformations and diplomatic concerns. The aim here is not to disregard such interconnectedness and the dependence of cultural policies to political missions but pay attention also to the movements of artefacts and people. Rejecting essentializing oppositional constructions of the East and West but also chauvinistic counter arguments that lose sight of the obvious asymmetrical relations, failures and constraints, the purpose is to discuss ways for analyzing 19th century Ottoman transformations via a transnational paradigm.
Papers
‘Artful Diplomacy’ as Modus Itineris: Reflections on the Journeys of the Hyphenated Manases across Europe
Author(s)
Gizem Pilavcı (British Institute at Ankara)
Keywords
Armenian, Interactive History, Mobility
Abstract
This paper delves into the under-explored lives, careers, travails, and aspirations of the imperial portraitist-cum-diplomat brothers Rupen and Sebuh who hailed from the Catholic Armenian Manas family of multi-generational court artists and offers a particularised sliver of their stories and agency, through the conceptual lenses of movement and cross-cultural exchange. To this end, this exercise ruminates on the brothers’ ‘peripatetic existence’ between Istanbul and Europe and across European capitals by situating them as cosmopolitan, hyphenated individuals with a solid cultural background and wherewithal into the global spatiotemporal matrices of cultural exchange in a way that transcends their social, ethnic, confessional, and professional layers of identity, while also using these subjectivities to decipher their mental universe. The individual motivations, career choices, and thought processes that prompted and enabled the mobility of these ‘cultural brokers’ are handled as two separate, but interrelated terrains. The stories of Rupen and Sebuh are laden with a certain degree of privilege while also marked by darker moments of exile and disenfranchisement, legible against a backdrop of countervailing modalities of imperial rule that incentivised and awarded its various subjects for service, but also at times marginalised and disenfranchised them.
Just as the artists themselves, the imperial portraits of the Manases traversed cultures, both physically and aesthetically, and were displayed to and engaged with by multi-variegated audiences both within the Empire and abroad, entering new sites of reception and acquiring new meanings. This micro-historical research informed by an ‘interactive history’ approach draws on my dissertation project and relies predominantly on a newly unearthed cache of archival documents, almanacs, newspapers, as well as the artworks of the Manases, while parsing these sources through a new lens to reveal novel conclusions in the outlined context. The paper will furthermore reflect on the challenges of studying Rupen and Sebuh Manas, while also contemplating on the ways in which a study using these actors as a nexus is able to problematise current historiographical traditions and liberate them from dichotomising frameworks that sever Armenian reality from its historical context and overlook the dense entanglements.
The Ottoman Empire at the 1900 Paris Exposition: Orientalism, Representation, and Identity
Author(s)
Gizem Tongo (Middle East Technical University) and Vazken Khatchig Davidian (Oriental Institute, University of Oxford)
Keywords
Ottoman Empire, 1900 Paris Exposition, Ottoman Art and Culture
Abstract
This paper explores the participation of the Ottoman Empire at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 organised in Paris, with a focus on the art of painting. The Ottoman Empire had already been an active participant in previous international exhibitions and often sent a rich diversity of paintings by its Armenian, Greek, Muslim, and Levantine artists. The 1900 Paris Exposition was no exception. Whilst canonical accounts of modern art tend to overlook Ottoman participation in these international displays, Turkey’s official art historiography, with its emphasis on Turkish and Muslim identity, is largely silent about the plural, cosmopolitan, and inclusive understanding of Ottoman culture—one aspect of the ideology of “Ottomanism”—which the empire was seeking to present and promote in those exhibitions. Drawing on archival sources, exhibitions catalogues, art reviews, diaries and memoirs, this paper tries to answer the following questions: What were the goals of the participants at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and what roles were played by the Ottoman state and cultural elite in its organization and promotion? Who were the painters and the members of the selection committee, and what were their social, economic, and artistic affiliations? How were these Ottoman artworks and artists received and understood by their audiences abroad? And finally how did the political, social, and military conflicts in Europe and in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century affect Ottoman art and artistic relations?
Archaeology in the Making: Trans-national Curators and Bureaucrats of Early Archeology in Ottoman Lands
Author(s)
Belgin Turan Özkaya (Middle East Technical University)
Keywords
Ottoman Antiquities, Ottoman Imperial Museum, Early Archaeology
Abstract
This paper focuses on a decade prior to what has been sanctioned as the formation period of the Ottoman Imperial Museum under the directorship of Osman Hamdi Bey beginning in 1881. Taking issue with nationalist and Eurocentric perspectives privileging Ottoman Muslims such as Osman Hamdi, and the European trajectory of museology as model, which are pivotal in mainstream histories, my work probes a trans-national and trans-imperial network where ancient “marbles,” individuals, and newly emerging archaeological concepts were entwined in constant flux, while archaeology and museology were in the making in Europe and the Ottoman lands.
I trace the formation of an Ottoman sensibility about antiquities and museology as a history of potentialities, manifested in initiatives and processes rather than as a completed project. The encounter between Phillip Anton Dethier, the German director of the Ottoman Imperial Museum and longtime resident of Ottoman Istanbul, Ottoman Armenian Clement (Kghemes) Sibilian, a Mekhitarist priest who served as Ottoman Imperial Museum’s deputy director, and the Oxford trained Hormuzd Rassam, a Protestant convert of Chaldean origins from Ottoman Mosul who operated as the agent of the British Museum, reveals a trans-national, trans-imperial circle of people in motion alongside the antiquities they remove and the ideas and concepts they circulate, which calls for a layered, intertwined history beyond national boundaries. Framed as a trans-nationally effected yet situated endeavor, Phillip Anton Dethier’s attempts, I would argue, constitute a plausible project for regulating antiquities in Ottoman lands that anticipated the network of antiquity officers and local agents later put in place by the turn of the twentieth century.
The Railway and Ottoman Engagements with Anatolian Pasts
Author(s)
Elvan Cobb (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Keywords
Railways, Archaeology, Western Anatolia
Abstract
The advent of railways in mid-19th century western Anatolia engendered new encounters with the historical and archaeological landscapes of the region. Foreign railway engineers and tourists alike partook of the emergent mobilities afforded by the railways to access the region’s Classical and Biblical heritages. Ottomans, from high level bureaucrats to railway workers quarrying stones from local archaeological sites, also interacted with the region’s past in multivalent ways. The stories of Nassif Mallouf, Colonel Reşhad Bey, and other individuals foreground the changing Ottoman engagements with western Anatolia’s cultural heritage. Mallouf, a renowned polyglot and the dragoman of the British Consulate in Izmir during the early intensive railway building campaigns, and Reşad Bey, the railway’s imperial commissary, both had privileged access to the region’s historic places. This presentation inserts their contributions into the discourse on 19th century exploration in western Anatolia.
Treasuries in Motion: The Display of the Topkapı Palace Collections during the 19th Century
Author(s)
Nilay Özlü (İstanbul Bilgi University)
Keywords
Topkapı Palace, Royal Collections, Display and Visits
Abstract
During the 19th century, the circulation of goods, money, knowledge, and people escalated precipitously. This constant movement, defined by Marshall Berman (1982) as “maelstrom of modern life”, was not only the outcome of, but also the reason for the modernizing world order. In this respect, world’s fairs, museums and tourism became new agents of cultural mobilities, encounter and self-representation.
This paper will focus on the circulation and display of Ottoman royal collections that were kept in the Topkapi Place, an imperial complex built during the mid-15th century at the tip of the Seraglio by Mehmed II (the Conqueror). During the course of the 19th century, these royal collections and treasuries, which were previously restricted to foreign gaze, started being displayed at world’s fairs, museums, and also at various royal halls and kiosks of the Topkapi Palace. Selected items from the Imperial Treasury were first displayed at the Ottoman General Exposition (Sergi-i Umumi-i Osmani) in Istanbul, later sent to the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873 and received with great enthusiasm. During the same period, the Imperial Treasury and palace grounds were opened for touristic visits. Additionally, new items of modern interest, such as antiquities and ancient costumes, were also brought to the Topkapi Palace from various parts of the empire and started being displayed in the palace grounds.
As the function of the Topkapi Palace as the seat of the empire and the house of the Ottoman dynasty ceased by the mid 19th century, certain objects from the Topkapi Palace treasuries were transferred to other newly built palaces. Especially during the reign of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909), precious items particularly from the Imperial Treasury, the Imperial Library, and from the collection of Sacred Relics were sent to the Yildiz Palace and finally returned back to the Topkapi Palace after the Young Turk revolution. Treasury registers of the era show the circulation of objects from one palace to another.
Hence, this paper is an attempt to present a specific case that exemplifies the constant circulation of objects, encounter of people, and exchange of knowledge during the late-Ottoman era, by closely investigating the display of the treasuries of the Topkapi Palace that were in motion, so were the people visiting them.