stambouline

[1] View of Izmir by Constantinos Kaldis, 1845. Benaki Museum, Athens

In the second installment of our two-part series on Constantinos Kaldis's views of Ottoman cities, Stambouline looks at the port city of Izmir (Smyrna). As discussed in our first post, Kaldis was a Greek Orthodox priest living on the island of Lesbos. He was a talented print-maker, and produced engravings not only of a religious nature, but also city views of the nearby Ottoman metropolises. These prints, most likely created for the local merchants of the island, offer an unique opportunity to consider the relationship of these communities with the major trading hubs that they so often frequented.

This print is also located in the Benaki Museum in Athens. The inscription at the bottom informs us, in both Greek and Ottoman Turkish, that this is a view of the port of Izmir (Θεορία Σμύρνης μαιζοριοθέσα παρά τουλλιμενος, رسم ازمير ياليسى) that was executed by Kaldis ("of the city of Plomari, Lesbos") in 1845, actually done a few years earlier than the print of Istanbul discussed in the first post. The fact that the print--done by a Greek Orthodox priest--is labeled in both Greek and Ottoman Turkish testifies to the linguistic fluidity of the area.

[2] Close-up of the "Frankish Quarter" at the Port.

In the print, Kaldis gives visual emphasis to the row of buildings located along the shore in Izmir's port, with the rest of the city receding into the distance. He also lends prominence to the dozens of ships moored in the harbor itself. Izmir was ostensibly the port of the Ottoman region of Aydın, but its commercial influence extended to Konya, Antalya, Bursa and Ankara. The city stood in the 19th-century as one of the most important trading centers within the empire. Consequently, Ottoman entrepreneurs and foreign merchants formed a key demographic in Izmir's cosmopolitan elite, whose homes and trades are emphasized in Kaldis's print. This area along the shore has been labeled in Greek as the "Frankish quarter" (Φραγγο μαχαλας). [2] The consulates and trading offices of different countries can be identified in the print by the various flags waving above the buildings, which appear to be Italianate in style with their multiple stories accented with rows of arcades and columns. From left to right, you can see the flags of Austria-Hungary, Russia (St. Andrew's flag), the Netherlands (?), France, Greece, Great Britain, and the USA. The star and crescent of the Ottoman Empire flies to the right of the Frankish quarter. What these flags represent is the significant presence of foreign trading companies in the city; some of these mercantile relationships go back hundreds of years, while others are quite new. Perhaps most indicative of this print's date in the mid-19th century are the flags of Greece (est. 1822) and the United States, who by that point had gained an increasing role in the trade networks of Izmir. What these flags also represent, notably, is that no single nationality ever gained a monopoly on the port. The buildings located on the seaside are most likely trading houses owned by various international firms: the building flying the Dutch flag, for example, was most likely the house of Henry, John and Thomas March, and likewise the Levant Trading Company for Great Britain.

[3] Close-up of the Ships in the Harbor.

The fleet of boats moored in the harbor [3] reflects both coastal and deep-sea ships waiting for their cargo to set sail to the nearby ports of Aleppo or Iskenderun or to more far-flung entrepots like Antwerp, London, Marseilles, or New York. Kaldis shows the larger vessels, bedecked like the trading offices with representing flags, as having anchors down and accessed by smaller rowboats from the shore. Another element that locates this print uniquely in the mid-19th century is the representation of steamships, with their smokestacks cheerily churning out large plumes of smoke. Steam power had only been recently introduced to Izmir in the 1830s, with the result being able to connect smaller ports on the Aegean, such as Lesbos, with the large hub at Izmir. Being located due north of Izmir along the western coast of Turkey, Lesbos (Mytilene) could be considered as an internal network of the wider Izmir trading community. The local merchants who worked within these networks--mostly Greeks, Jews and Armenians--functioned as intermediaries for arranging the transport of goods from local producers to the European merchants in Izmir. For example, Lesbos was known particularly for their wheat and olive oil production. It is therefore small wonder that Kaldis would depict scenes and activities that would have been intimately understood by his local community.

[3] Detail of the "Old Castle".

In the upper portion of the print, Kaldis shows us the periphery of Izmir, the city being framed by an upper ridge capped top with the ancient fortress of Kadifekale, labeled in the engraving as the "old castle" (Καστρον Παλαιον). [3] Behind this crest is the hinterland of the city, with small villages tucked away between the fields and orchards. This is not an untamed wilderness; Kaldis shows us a cultivated landscape that is very much connected to the economic life of the metropolis.

[4] Detail of Izmir's hinterland.

In the upper section it is possible to see mills, a factory powered with steam or coal, as well as a larger town with estates and infrastructure projects, with a large bridge spanning a river that leads into the Aegean. [4] The emphasis placed on representing the wider area around Izmir and its economic activities *may* tangentially reflect a free-trade agreement brokered in 1838 between the Ottoman Empire and multiple European countries. After this treaty, western merchants were allowed to extend their trade networks into Izmir's hinterland. At any rate, the print testifies to the broader economic system feeding the trade activity at the central port.

[5] Detail of Bornova.

[6] Smyrna, Bornova. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
1873. Private Collection.

Last, in the extreme upper-left corner of the engraving, Kaldis shows us another large settlement close to Izmir, labeled as "Bornova" (Βορνοβα). [5] The area of Bornova played an important role in the wealthy elites of 19th-century Izmir; in a similar fashion to the relationship between the yalıs on the Boshporus and Istanbul, many Levantine and foreign families constructed large mansions in the nearby Bornova. In the summer they would retire from their offices and residences in the city and retreated to these estates that offered a respite from the punishing heat with cooler mountain breezes. In a painting from the 1870s, the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot captures the idyllic scenery of the location, as opposed to the bustle of Izmir's port. [6] Kaldis locates the mansions along an inlet to the sea, with a handful of ships moored along the water. He represents the mansions of Bornova as a row of large homes with pitched roofs and wide entrance portals. From port to hinterland, in one engraving Kaldis has managed to describe visually an entire way of life, both economic and social, for the European, American and Levantine communities in one of the major port cities of the Ottoman Empire.

FRANGAKIS-SYRETT, Elena. "Commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries: The City-Port of Izmir and Its Hinterland." International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. X, No. 2 (December 1998), pp. 125-154.
ZANDI-SAYEK, Sybil. Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port 1840/1880. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

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[1] Facade of the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal.

Many people coming to Venice make a point of visiting the Jewish quarter of the city (the original "ghetto"), where diverse communities were compelled to live together in a tightly-controlled enclave. But the idea of having foreigners or a minority religious group reside in a separate area was not exclusive to the Jewish population; Ottoman Muslims also experienced similar treatment in the city. While the Jewish Ghetto was located on the ruins of an old industrial zone, however, the Ottomans were living in style in a former palace located directly on the Grand Canal: the Fondaco dei Turchi. [1] Their German counterparts were also housed within a restricted area in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a Renaissance-style palace also on the Grand Canal near the Rialto bridge. In general, a fondaco (Ven. fontego) was a place where foreign groups, in most cases merchants or bankers, lived together and plied their trade. Thus the fondaco would not only serve as a residence, but also a warehouse for goods or a market for conducting business. In the case of the Fondaco dei Turchi, there is no doubt that there also would have been some kind of mescid for prayer on the premises, and would have been the only mosque in Venice. For our blog readers who focus more on the Middle East, this type of institution might sound very similar to a khan or caravanserai; and, as Olivia Constanble argues, it is no wonder that such establishments commonly found in the Islamic lands would be integrated into the urban life of Venice, which was an important connecting point between Europe and the Dar al-Islam. The Italian word "fondaco" itself is clearly related to the Arabic "funduq,"a word that in the Maghreb or Levant referred to hostels for foreign merchants (usually Venetian or Genoese). In short, for the medieval and early modern periods, putting up foreign traders in their own digs was a shared practice throughout the Mediterranean.

[2] Engraving of the Fondaco dei Turchi, from the
Natural History Museum, Venice. Date unknown.

The Fondaco dei Turchi was established in the early 17th century, and was in active service for about two hundred years, until 1838. Even by the 1620s, however, the building allocated to the Ottoman merchants already had a long history. It was first built as a palazzo for Giacomo Palmier of Pesaro in the 13th century--hence the fancy facade, with marble paneling and rows of columns stacked on top of each other. In 1381, the Venetian Republic bought the palace for the residence of Niccolo d'Este, the Marquess of Ferrara, as well as visiting dignitaries. By the 17th century, Venice decided to transform the palace into what was essentially a one-building ghetto for the Ottoman merchants. The layout of the palace--a large, rectangular building looking onto an inner, central courtyard--was suited to its new function. Efforts to control this foreign minority, whether for reasons of security or propriety--were reflected in the management and organization of the physical space itself. Like the Jewish Ghetto and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fondaco dei Turchi had a curfew at night, requiring the foreign traders to be inside and accounted for by evening. There was also a stipulation that the courtyard of the fondaco should not be overlooked by another building, and at no times were weapons or women permitted within the walls. All of these policies limited both physical and visual access to the building, allowing these merchants to carry out their trading conveniently located in the heart of Venice, while at the same time carving out and "containing" this community of foreigners in the city. (It is not quite correct to say that the Fondaco dei Turchi was for all "Ottoman" merchants; Jewish and Greek traders, while technically being subjects of the Ottoman Empire, lived in other parts of Venice.)

[3] Interior courtyard of the Fondaco dei
Turchi, now the Museo Correr, or the Natural

Based on the present appearance of the Fondaco dei Turchi, with its grand facade and dozens of windows, it is hard to imagine this location as a closed enclave. But it should be kept in mind that what visitors see today is largely the result of a major renovation/reconstruction in the mid-19th century, after the fondaco had fallen into disuse. Even though the building is often cited as representative of early medieval palaces, Juergen Schulz has demonstrated that only the facade on the canal is from the 14th century, with over two-thirds of the structure being demolished and rebuilt. An engraving showing the building presumably during its time as the fondaco (indicated by, if nothing else, the turbaned gentleman in the bottom-left corner) conveys a space that is much more closed off from the city around it. [2] According to the image, the prominent entrance colonnade appears to have been blocked off from the canal by a low brick wall, and the side windows on the second level were also walled up.

[4] Musicanti di Brema, Maurizio Cattelan,
Installation in the Natural History Museum
as part of the 55th Venice Biennale, June 2013.

After the Fondaco dei Turchi closed in the 1830s, and the extensive renovations of the mid-19th century, the building became the Museo Correr in 1865, and subsequently has come down to the present day as the Natural History Museum of Venice. The interior courtyard of the palazzo [3], while largely a 19th-century reconstruction, still evokes a sense of how closed-off the building could have felt during its days as the fondaco. Now, as contemporary visitors wander around the galleries of the Natural History Museum, even taking in some of the more light-hearted installations in conjunction with the Venice Biennale [4], they will hopefully also come to know how this place once served as an important point of connection--and separation--between Ottomans and Venetians in the heart of the city.

CONSTABLE, Olivia Remie. Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SCHULZ, Juergen. "Early Plans of the Fondaco dei Turchi." In Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997), 149-159.

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[1] "House of the Turk." Francis Benjamin Johnston. 1937-38.
Library of Congress.

A quick confession: I kind of have a thing for haunted houses. All of those cheesy television programs on ghost hunters, or the world's most haunted hotels-theaters-mansions? Love 'em. And, now that the time is approaching for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, this year to be held in beautiful New Orleans, October 10-13, I am thinking to myself: what would a visit to New Orleans be without checking out some of the fun, kitschy sites that the city is famous for? That's when I learned about the "House of the Turk." While at MESA, you might also want to stop by what is touted as one of New Orleans' oldest haunted mansions with a dramatic--if somewhat implausible--story about a brother of the Ottoman sultan meeting his grisly death in the house's courtyard.

The stately two-story building stands on the corner of Dauphine and Orleans streets (716 Dauphine), just two blocks away from the raucous Bourbon Street. The house, with the wrought-iron balcony supported by slender posts, seems like a typical home of the old French Quarter. It was built in 1836 by a dentist from Philadelphia named Gardette, and only three years later purchased by the wealthy plantation owner Jean Baptiste Le Prete who held the property until 1873. Naturally, the building is commonly referred to as the "Gardette-La Prete House," but over the years has earned more theatrical monikers such as the "Sultan's Palace" or the "House of the Turk."

These sensational names recall a moment in the 1860s or early 70s when this house supposedly became, as one enthusiastic website writes, a "harem of horror"! Here is my own rather tongue-in-cheek rendition of the story:

[2] Modern View of the "House of the Turk,"
716 Dauphine St., New Orelans

La Prete, once a powerful business man but finding himself down on his luck after the Civil War, was approached one day by a mysterious man from Turkey who said he was looking to rent a house for his brother the sultan. Le Prete thought to himself, "Sure, why not? that sounds totally reasonable," and immediately leased his large mansion over to the Ottoman gentleman. But, even before the ink dried on the contract, the house began to fill up with a bevy of beautiful women and oh-so-many exotic textiles. A padlock appeared on the door, and, just for good measure, large-muscled men stood guard on the balconies, their scimitars glistening in the moonlight. Neighbors began to complain about the oppressive smell of incense wafting from the windows and the music of unusual instruments playing late into the night. Rumors immediately began to spread about the large parties--replete with unspeakable orgies and dancing on top of large piles of gold that this renegade Ottoman prince had stolen from the sultan. Unfortunately, the revelry eventually came to an end, when a passerby noticed that blood was oozing out from under the front door. "Well, you don't see that every day," he thought, and ran to go find a police officer. I guess the scimitar-wielding watchmen were on holiday, because the detectives quickly gained entrance to the house. What they found was a scene of abject horror: blood, arms, legs, blood, organs, and more blood (I am telling you, this place made all seven seasons of Dexter combined look like nothing.) The worst part was when they found the mysterious Turk himself in the courtyard, who had died trying to claw his way out from an earthen grave in which he had been buried alive. No one knows who committed this heinous crime...was it one of the jealous harem women, out for revenge? Or pirates, who had given passage to the Turk to New Orleans and were lusting after his treasure. Or maybe even the sultan himself, out to exterminate any potential rivals to the throne? (My vote, as always, is for the pirates.) Of course, later residents of the house have seen a fair young man wander the hallways at night in his silk caftan, only to disappear once spoken to...

[3] View of 716 Dauphine from Google Street View.

It's a really fun story, but I remain very skeptical as to any part of its veracity, as the earliest reference in print I could find was only from the 1930s. I figured that a multiple-homicide of this magnitude, with the involvement of a "mysterious Turk" no less, would be the scandal of the decade for the fair people of 19th-century New Orleans. So I decided to actually give the story due diligence and try to see if I could find any mention of the incident by searching through contemporary newspapers from the 1860s-70s (using great resources like the Chronicling America project at the Library of Congress). Unsurprisingly, with access to over 20 daily periodicals from the period, I could not find one mention of the crime in question. Also, the sultan at the time of the event in question would have been Abdülaziz, and I cannot recall any stories about a brother absconding to the US with a harem and gold, but I would be happy to stand corrected. So, for now, I would say that this legend simply remains an example of the role New Orleans and Louisiana has played (and continues to play, see: True Blood) in the American imagination as a place of fantasy and exoticism.

In the 20th century, the house at 716 Dauphine unfortunately became derelict, with a very brief stint as the school of fine arts for the WPA. In the 1960s, it was bought by realtors who divided the property into multiple private apartments, which is the state in which the house stands now. And, perhaps the best news is that the "House of the Turk" is for sale, available for a cool $2.65 million! Whether or not you have that kind of cash, I would say that it is still worth it to include the "Sultan's Palace" in your walking tour of old New Orleans.

**For an update following our visit to the site, see The House of the Turk: Part Deux

BEAR, Rob. "The Strange, Sordid Story of NOLA's Sultan Massacre House,"Curbed (April 4, 2013).
DUREAU, Lorena."Life with an Exotic Ghost,"The Times-Picayune (February 11, 1979)

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guest contribution by ZOE GRIFFITH, Brown University

[1] Commemorative Plaque commissioned by Sultan Abdülmecid I, 1853
Washington Monument, Washington D.C. US National Parks Service.

[2] View of the Washington Monument (const. 1848-84),
with the White House in the background. US Navy

What better way to mark the recent re-opening of the U.S. government than with a blog post about the historic Ottoman stamp on that great nation’s capital? (Well, one could just squint into the mid-distance and shake one’s head slowly in wordless disbelief, but a blog post is a decent alternative.) The Washington Monument, the 555-ft. stone obelisk piercing the sky above the national mall in Washington, D.C., carries even from afar plenty of physical and symbolic heft. [2] Leaving aside the cheap phallus jokes for the moment, the monument channels the civilizational legacy of ancient Egypt—being deliberately designed to conform to the proportions of pharaonic obelisks --and stood as the tallest structure in the world at the time of its erection (sorry) in 1884; it remains to this day the world’s tallest stone structure. As such, the monument’s exterior form alone speaks to the larger-than-life stature of George Washington in mid-19^th century American political discourse. Few people, however, are aware that the interior of the Washington Monument constitutes its own archive of mid-19^th century political discourse and international diplomacy carved in New Hampshire granite, Alaskan jade, and Parthenon marble: the monument’s inner staircase is ringed with 198 commemorative stones solicited by Congress in the 1850s from local organizations, U.S. states, and foreign nations to help both defray the enormous construction costs and cement relations between the then-adolescent United States and powerful parties both at home and abroad.

One of the highlights of this architectural archive is a 5 ft. x 3 ft. slab of carved marble donated to the United States in 1853 by the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I (r. 1839-61). [1] This intricate and striking composition bears the work of two of the most important Ottoman calligraphers of the mid-19^th century, in the form of the tuğra (official monogram) of Abdülmecid and an inscription in the celi ta’likstyle, attesting to the amity between the two states:

Devam-i hulleti te’yid içün Abdülmecid

Han’ın yazıldı nam-ı paki seng-i balaya Vaşinkton’da

In support of eternal friendship, Abdülmecid

Han allowed his honorable name to be written in the tall stone [memorial] in Washington

As the American recipients and subsequent viewers of Abdülmecid’s marmoreal gesture could not have been expected to read and understand the text of the calligraphic inscription, we have to ask what message the Ottomans intended to communicate through the impressive form and design of this commemorative stone. Reading into the context and visual cues of the Ottoman contribution to the Washington monument speaks to a fascinating moment in the history of Ottoman diplomacy, imperial identity, and the role of art and artists in the service of the late Ottoman state.

[3] Commemorative Stone from the town of Salem,
Massachusetts. US National Park Service.

While most of the commemorative stones lining the monument’s interior staircase are 2 ft. x 4 ft rectangles with relatively simple, sometimes austere designs, [3] the Ottoman contribution is larger and striking in its triptych composition, architectural theme and lavish yet tasteful decoration. Even for an audience of non-Ottomans, the message communicated by Abdülmecid’s stone would have resonated clearly: this calligraphic offering, etched in white marble and originally gilded in gold leaf, was intended to emphasize the sultan’s prestige, generosity, and ability to mobilize resources in the form of precious metal and stone, human skill, and cultural heritage. For the “sick man of Europe,” an invitation to send a chunk of rock to the struggling United States was an opportunity to carve out an enduring image of continued wealth, power, and relevance. At the same time, the fact that they chose to represent themselves in a monumental work of classical Ottoman calligraphy is significant. As Selim Deringil has shown for the Hamidian period, Tanzimat-era statesmen boldly asserted the empire’s presence on the mid-19^thcentury political stage even as they made sure to emphasize the empire’s distinctive Islamic identity. In this way, they insisted that the empire’s greatness lay not only in its engagement with modern technology and diplomacy, but also in its own traditions and innovative power.

[4] Tuğra (imperial seal) of Sultan Abdülmecid I
found in the Kadiköy Iskele Mosque of Mustafa
III. Modified by Stambouline in order to better see
the full title of the sultan (AbdülmecidHan
bin Mahmud el-muzaffer daima). Original image
from the websıte Kitabeler.

At the center of the Ottoman commemorative stone is the official tuğra, or royal insignia,of Sultan Abdülmecid. [4] The imperial tuğra, used consistently by Ottoman sultans since Orhan I, consists of the name of the reigning sultan surrounded by a fixed set of decorative and honorific accoutrements. As part of the centralization efforts of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1809-1839), the master calligrapher Mustafa Rakım had articulated a standard form for the tuğra which would be used as the template for all subsequent sultans. The commemorative stone sent to the United States bears the tuğra of Abdülmecid as executed by Haşim Efendi, a highly-regarded student of Mustafa Rakım.

The inscription at the bottom of the piece was written by Kadıasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi, one of the most highly regarded calligraphers of the mid-19^th century. Clearly, the Ottomans wanted to bring their best to bear on the inscription they sent to Washington. Mustafa İzzet Efendi was no stranger to high-profile, monumental works of calligraphy, having also executed the the massive medallions that ring the dome of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul in the late-1840s. [5]

[5] Roundel featuring the name of 'Ali,
designed by Kadıasker Mustafa İzzet Efendi
in the late 1840s. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.
Photo by Emily Neumeier.

Since the emergence of distinctly Ottoman scripts and genealogies of master calligraphers with the school of Şeyh Hamdullah in the late-15^th century, calligraphy had occupied a place of unparalleled prestige in the Ottoman artistic environment. Artistic standards and genealogical chains endured and flourished in the 19^th century, a period which also saw the rising prestige of art forms originating in Western Europe and what some viewed as the “deterioration” or disappearance of more traditional art forms. Up until the present day, master calligraphers continue to train their successors through a rigorous but ultimately informal (non-institutional) process of personalized instruction, with an emphasis on perfect imitation of the works of other masters. Most master calligraphers in the Ottoman empire had traditionally led double lives, drawing a regular salary from state service as scribes, teachers, or judges in the imperial bureaucracy or judiciary, and practicing and teaching their art in its spiritual and aesthetic dimensions as a higher calling. Thus, with the fateful exception of the Ottoman Calligraphers’ College (Medrese-tül Hattatin), which opened its doors in 1914, the state had no direct role to play in the training or certification of Ottoman calligraphers. At the same time that the Ottoman state drew heavily on the skills of master calligraphers in the mundane running of imperial affairs, however, it also relied on the enduring prestige and standards of calligraphy in an effort to communicate a symbolic program of imperial grandeur, continuity, and piety at home and abroad through the 19th century.

One has to wonder if the Ottomans were aware that this marble masterpiece now located in Washington D.C. would wind up largely hidden from public view, visible to only a handful of intrepid visitors. Nevertheless, opulent materials and Islamic scripts were easily recognizable markers of the identity that late-Ottoman statesmen wanted to convey to high-profile onlookers. Asked to contribute a stone in commemoration of the founder of the United States, the Ottomans simply rocked it.

View all the Commemorative Stones at the Washington Monument at the website of the US National Parks Service.

DERMAN, M. Uğur.“An Ottoman Gift to America.” Trans. by Mohamed Zakariya. Seasons (Spring-Summer 2005): 112-116.

SCHICK, Irvin Cemil. “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey.” Res 53 – 54
(2008): 220 – 21.

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[1] Elevation of the Le Pretre Mansion at 716 Dauphine, New Orleans. Historic American Building Survey, 1940.
The Historic New Orleans Collection

A quick update on the "House of the Turk" in New Orleans. As planned, during the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, some friends and I headed into the French Quarter to pay a visit to 716 Dauphine, the historic Gardette-Le Pretre House. The mansion is also known as the "House of the Turk" because of its connection to a sensational story about a mysterious relative of the sultan and his alleged murder in the 1860s-70s.

[2] Visiting the "House of the Turk," New Orleans.
October 2013. Photo by Ashley Dimming.

Although the house is now privately owned, by chance during our visit we met someone who knew a great deal about the history of the house and was willing to give us a glimpse of the courtyard, where the Turkish gentleman supposedly met his end--the legend being that he was buried alive under a date tree in the side courtyard of the building. [2] Well, there was no date tree, and the house is currently undergoing renovation, but the most interesting piece of information that we learned on our trip was that the ghost story connected to this house predates the construction of the current building (1836) by almost a century. In his book History of Louisiana (first published in French, 1846-47), Charles Gayarre shares a legend of "traditionary lore" that had been related to him thirty years before by an 80-year-old man, who had in turn received the story from his father. The tale reads thus:

In a lot situated at the corner of Orleans and Dauphine streets, in the city of New Orleans, there is a tree which nobody looks at without curiosity and without wondering how it came there. For a long time, it was the only one of its kind known in the state, and from its isolated position, it has always been cursed with sterility. It reminds one of the warm climes of Africa and Asia, and wears the aspect of a stranger of distinction driven from his native country. Indeed, with its sharp and thin foliage, sighing mournfully under the blast of one of our November northern winds, it looks as sorrowful as an exile...A sort of vague but impressive mystery is attached to it, and it is as superstitiously respected as one of the old oaks of Dodona...

[3] 716 Dauphine at night. Photo by Ashley Dimming.
In the beginning of 1727, a French vessel of war landed at New Orleans a man of haughty mien, who wore the Turkish dress and whose whole attendance was a single servant. He was received by the governor with the highest distinction, and was conducted by him to a small but comfortable house with a pretty garden, then existing at the corner of Orleans and Dauphine streets, and which, from the circumstance of its being so distant from other dwellings, might have been called a rural retreat, although situated in the limits of the city. There, the stranger, who was understood to be a prisoner of state, lived in the greatest seclusion; and although neither he nor his attendant could be guilty of indiscretion, because none understood their language, and although Governor Perier severely rebuked the slightest inquiry, yet it seemed to be the settled conviction in Louisiana, that the mysterious stranger was the brother of the Sultan, or some great personage of the Ottoman empire, who had fled from the anger of the vicegerent of Mohammed, and who had taken refuge in France. The Sultan had peremptorily demanded the fugitive, and the French government, thinking it deregatory to its dignity to comply with that request, but at the same time not wishing to expose its friendly relations with the Moslem monarch, and perhaps desiring, for political purposes, to keep in hostage the important guest it had in its hands, had recourse to the expedient of answering, that he had fled to Louisiana, which was so distant a country that it might be looked upon as the grave, where, as it was suggested, the fugitive might be suffered to wait in peace for actual death, without danger or offense to the Sultan. Whether this story be true or not is now a matter of so little consequence, that it would not repay the trouble of a strict historical investigation.

The year of 1727 was drawing to its close, when on a dark, stormy night, the howling and barking of the numerous dogs in the streets of New Orleans were observed to be fiercer than usual, and some of that class of individuals who pretend to know every thing, declared that, by the vivid flashes of the lightning, they had seen, swiftly and stealthily gliding toward the residence of the unknown, a body of men who wore the scowling appearance of malefactors and ministers of blood. There afterward came also a report, that a piratical-looking Turkish vessel had been hovering a few days previous in the bay of Barataria. Be it as it may, on the next morning the house of the stranger was deserted. There were no traces of mortal struggle to be seen; but in the garden, the earth had been dug, and there was the unmistakable indication of a recent grave. Soon, however, all doubts were removed by the finding of an inscription in Arabic characters, engraved on a marble tablet, which was subsequently sent to France. It ran thus, "The Justice of heaven is satisfied, and the date-tree shall grow on the traitor's tomb. The sublime Emperor of the faithful, the supporter of the faith, the omnipotent master and Sultan of the world, has redeemed his vow. God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet. Allah!" Some time after this event, a foreign-looking tree was seen to peep out of the spot where a corpse must have been deposited in that stormy night, when the rage of the elements yielded to the pitiless fury of man, and it thus explained in some degree this part of the inscription, "the date-tree shall grow on the traitor's grave."

Who was he, or what had he done, who had provoked such relentless and far-seeking revenge? Ask Nemesis, or--at that hour when evil spirits are allowed to roam over the earth, and magical invocations are made--go, and interrogate the tree of the dead. [p. 386-389]

Almost like an ancient Greek myth, this elaborate story of a secret assassination seems to have been created by the locals of New Orleans to explain a natural phenomenon: the unusual presence of a date tree (obviously not native to Louisiana) in the heart of the old city. Gayarre goes so far as to collapse the story of the exiled Ottoman with the tree itself, emphasizing that the plant was the only one of its kind in the region, and describing the tree as "foreign-looking" and appearing as "sorrowful as an exile." As the date-tree was said to have sprouted directly from the grave of the slain Turk, the author suggests that the exiled foreigner has become incarnate in the leaves and knots of the plant itself.

[4] The house currently located at 716 Dauphine
labeled as "The House of Tragic Mystery."
Legends of Louisiana (1922), p. 58.

Although Gayarre's story is certainly dramatic and rife with all of the trappings of Orientalism--characterized by the conflated tropes of a vengeful Ottoman Sultan, the climes of Africa and Asia, and the trees of the ancient Greek Dodona--this legend could be considered rather conservative when compared to later versions of the story, which we laid out in our previous post. By the time Helen P. Schertz writes the short story "The Brother of the Sultan" in her book Legends of Lousiana (1922), it is clear that through the second half of the 19th and into the 20th century, the tale had been further embellished with all kinds of sordid details--the Turk was now accompanied by a bevy of women, elaborate parties, etc.--and the chronology had been amended to accommodate the construction of the Le Pretre House. While Gayarre's story is said to have taken place in 1727, in a house with a large garden that had formerly sat at the corner of Dauphine and Orleans streets, Schertz sets her story several decades later, in 1792. Confusingly, Schertz identifies the house where the sultan's brother takes up residence as the home of Jean Baptiste Le Pretre, the author seemingly unaware that the house now standing at 716 Dauphine was only built in 1836 for Joseph Gardette, then sold to Le Pretre in 1839. [4] Thus, it is clear that over time, the various details of the ghost story have been evolving and adapting to the layered history of the physical site itself, with the changes keeping the legend relevant to its contemporary urban context.

Our thanks to the kind people of New Orleans who were great hosts and willing to share their knowledge about one of their city's oldest legends.

GAYARRE, Charles. History of Louisiana. 2nd edition. New York: J.W. Widdleton, 1866-67.

SCHERTZ, Helen Pitkin. Legends of Louisiana: The Romance of the Royal Oak and The Brother of the Sultan. New Orleans: The New Orleans Journal, 1922.

guest contribution by MICHAEL TALBOT, University of St. Andrews

[8] The Red Crescent medical camp at Hafir, 1916.
Library of Congress: American Colony Photograph Department.

A couple of years ago, I found myself seeking a “provincial” Ottoman experience after some time researching in the archives at the Bab-ı Ali. So naturally, I journeyed to the Negev Desert with my long-suffering better-half and her parents to take in the sites under the scorching July heat. Mad dogs and Englishmen, as they say. The trip, however, was worth the sunburn, as one place in particular proved to be quite spectacular: the ruins of a military hospital, a relic from the final days of Ottoman rule in Palestine, now straddles the modern border between Israel and Egypt. Today called by its Hebrew name Nitzana, this settlement was known in 1916 as Hafir (or Hafirülavce / Hafir al-‘Awja). Through archival photographs as well as my own holiday snaps and observations, this post aims to highlight one of the last major construction efforts of the Ottomans in Palestine, and to provide a glimpse into military and medical life on the edge of empire in World War One.

[1] The military hospital, view of the main east
entrance. This and the rest of the photographs,
unlessotherwise noted, were taken by the author.

The site itself is impressive in terms of its size and its remains. The stone hospital is situated on the hill (now called Tel Nitzana), [1] with a sweeping view over the surrounding region. A series of complexes comprising of several buildings in various states of survival--including administrative buildings, barracks, a water tower, and a railway station--lie to the south-east of the hospital in the valley below. [2] The faint outline of the old railway tracks can be seen just north of the modern road that now connects the hill to the railway complex. A large wadi that fills with water in the winter flows directly through the site from north to south, and the hospital also took advantage of underground water sources as well. A hospital camp run by the Red Crescent--a charity organization founded in the late Ottoman period, based on the model of the Red Cross--was also erected directly behind the hospital to the north-west. Today no visible evidence of the camp remains.

[2] Map of the Hafir complex. Satellite Image by Google Maps, Map by the author.

[3] Interior of a building from Hafir's train station.

Situated on the border established in 1906 between Ottoman Palestine and British Sinai, Hafir became an administrative centre (nahiye) of Beersheba (Birüssebi) only two years later in 1908. Upon the Ottoman entry into WWI in November 1914, the site became a major forward base of the Ottoman army for its operations in the Sinai and Suez regions. By the end of 1916, Hafir boasted its own station on the railway line from Beersheba as well as an extensive military base. The buildings from the train station are still largely intact [3], all typical in style to other such structures on the greater Hejaz Railway network. Hafir's impressive water tower and simple, squat station buildings are comparable to those found at a number of other intermediate railway stations, from Mismiya in Syria to Abu al-Na'am in Hijaz.

[4] View from the hospital looking south,
towards the railway complex.

The administrative buildings and military barracks, however, have barely survived. A view from the hill [4] shows the columns of an excavated Byzantine church in the foreground, with the water tower and ruins of the railway buildings further off in the distance. The administrative buildings once occupied the space directly above and around what is now this Byzantine archaeological site, but today little of the Ottoman military complex is visible even at the level of rubble.

Luckily, archival photographs give us a sense of what would have been a bustling military hub. One panoramic image taken in 1916 from almost the same vantage point on top of the hill reveals what the barracks and military base would have looked like almost a century earlier. [5] There are plots for growing food in the foreground, three large administrative buildings to the right, including one (the furthest away from the camera) flying the flag of the Red Crescent Society (Hilal-ı Ahmer Cemiyeti/ Kızılay Derneği), long barrack buildings to the left, watering holes, and numerous encampments in the surrounding desert. There is also an enclosed garden surrounding a ceremonial column, and later photographs reveal that this was used as a camp cemetery. In short, the construction of this settlement--in the middle of a war, thirty-five miles (55 kilometres) from the nearest urban centre, in the middle of the desert–is an impressive achievement indeed. And a photograph taken later in the same year (1916) demonstrates just how rapidly the site was being developed, with the buildings of the railway station in the distance having sprung up in the interim.

[5] View of Hafir from the hospital hill looking over the military base with the railway complex under construction in the distance, 1916. Library of Congress: American Colony Photograph Department.

[6] View of the hospital from the military complex,
south and east faces, 1916. Library of Congress.

The star of this complex, however, was the hospital. [6] A joint effort between the Red Crescent and the Ottomans’ German and Austrian allies, the building was simple and functional in design, with a main level of nine rooms accessed by a cross-shaped entrance hall, and a basement for stores. [7] As can be seen from the contemporary photograph, the hospital had plenty of windows to let in fresh air, but the archival photograph shows us that these windows also would have been equipped with covers or shades that kept out the blinding sunlight and choking dust.

[7] Detail of the west face. The entrance to the storage basement is visible on the bottom left.

Yet the hospital proved to be insufficient to deal with the casualties streaming back from the Ottoman assaults on the Suez Canal and brutal fighting in the desert in 1915. As a result, the Red Crescent, along with volunteers from the American Red Cross, established a large medical camp with some eighty-five beds and room for more on the floor on the plain to the north-west immediately behind the hill. Although there are almost no traces of the camp today, I think I have managed to locate its position in the landscape by looking at the archival photograph above [8], which shows the extent of the encampment with the hospital roof jutting out in the background.

[10] Ottoman soldiers in the dining tent, 1916.
Library of Congress.

We must turn again to archival photographs to give us an idea of the harsh realities of the hospital and medical camp at Hafir. Ottoman and German soldiers arrived with horrific injuries from the fighting, [9] and many must have died at the hospital camp. One photograph shows the funeral of a German soldier who succumbed to his wounds--the burial with full military honours perhaps providing an occasion for joint Ottoman-German expression of grief and unity in trying times. Soldiers were tended to by staff of the Hilal-ı Ahmer and German nuns, most likely belonging to an order such as the Borromäerinnen, who had a large convent in Jerusalem. In addition to being confronted with the grim images of the effects of conflict in these photographs, it is quite striking to see the German nuns with crucifixes on their chests and the Red Crescent on their arms. [10]

[10] Staff of the Hilal-ı Ahmer and German nurses, 1916. Library of Congress.

Some record of life in the field hospital can also be found in the accounts of two American volunteers, Dr Ward and Mr Doolittle, found in Mabel T. Boardman’s Under the Red Cross Flag at Home and Abroad (1915). One of their reports describes the arrival of a caravan of wounded at Hafir at night:

Never will these scenes be forgotten. The hurried call for duty that quickly emptied the dining tent, each seizing a lantern as he left; the gruff growling of a hundred camels as they unwillingly knelt and discharged their loads; the wounded, tired, hungry and thirsty soldiers, so glad to have come to the end of the long journey over the sands.[…]There were many difficulties to be faced in this desert hospital. One of the chief was sand storms. These came invariably at nine or ten in the morning and lasted until the late afternoon. The sand drifted under the tents, through the doors and covered everything, tables, boxes, and beds. This was particularly serious in the operating tent. Naturally one of the problems was water. From the one large, deep well of Hafir, a quarter of a mile away, it had to be carried in oil tins on mules, or by the soldiers. The thirsty, feverish patients kept crying for “Water, only a little water,” with which it was hard to keep them supplied.

Having sprung up almost overnight, the desert complex at Hafir was just as quickly abandoned. The hospital, barracks, and station were evacuated in the Spring of 1917 as the Ottoman forces concentrated further north to face off the British assault on the Gaza-Beersheba line, and the buildings gradually crumbled. Modern Nitzana tends to be more associated with the ancient Nabataean and Byzantine ruins, with the ‘Turkish hospital’ an afterthought, and the medical camp and military base almost entirely forgotten. Yet this is clearly a site of some significance for understanding the Ottoman-German alliance in action, and the ambitions and capabilities of the Ottoman Empire in its final period of rule in Palestine.

More than this, as we edge further towards an extended period of historical reflection on the horrors of the First World War, the ruins and visual records of the Ottoman hospital and military complex at Hafir enable us to focus on the traumatic experiences of soldiers and, importantly, those who cared for them. With so much focus on big campaigns and mind-boggling death tolls, we should not understate the huge numbers of wounded, the lifelong repercussions of their mental and physical injuries, and the extensive medical infrastructure developed to treat them. To use the words of the American writer Mary Borden, who ran a field hospital on the Western Front and wrote of her experiences of caring for the wounded in The Forbidden Zone (1929): "I thought, 'This is the second battlefield. The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real enemies'."

**This piece complements a post on the Red Crescent Archive in Ankara that recently appeared on our partner site, HAZINE, a blog on conducting research in the Middle East. Both Stambouline and HAZINE are part of a new online project called MENAlab. To learn more about MENAlab, click here.

BOARDMAN, Mabel T. Under the Red Cross Flag at Home and Abroad (Philadelphia & London: 1915), pp. 313-14.

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[1] Gal Weinstein's installation Fire Tire (2010) for the Thessaloniki Biennale.
The piece to the right is over 4 meters tall. Exhibited in the Yeni Camii (New Mosque),
constructed 1902 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Photo by author.

[2] Yeni Camii. Early 20th-century postcard.

Whether it's Sydney or Singapore, it seems like almost every major city in the world is now staging its own biennale, and Greece is no exception. This autumn, Thessaloniki celebrates its 4th Biennale of Contemporary Art, and, besides featuring the work of a wide group of international artists, the Biennale committee has also opened the doors of several historical monuments in the city that are not always accessible to visitors.Taking advantage of this opportunity, I recently headed out to the Yeni Camii (English: New Mosque, Greek: Γενί Τζαμί), one of the main exhibition spaces for the festival and also one of the most interesting monuments in Ottoman Thessaloniki, a bustling port city with a long past of Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities living together. [1, 2] In this post, we take you on a tour of the building, and explain how the Yeni Camii remains a place where the politics of these different communities continues to play out until the present.

[3] The Yeni Camii under construction, with scaffolding
around the minaret that was eventually torn
down. 1902. Photo from the site of Baki Sarısakal.

The Yeni Camii (New Mosque) was built in 1902--hardly "new" by today's standards--one of the last major additions to the urban fabric before Thessaloniki was incorporated into the Greek state in 1912. [3] Scholars claim that the mosque was specifically built for the so-called Dönme community of Thessaloniki, Muslims of Sephardic Jewish origin that had converted to Islam by the 17th-18th centuries (Baer 157). According to the Ottoman newspaper Sabah, on a fine autumn morning early in September 1902--at 8:30 am sharp--a crowd of thousands gathered to watch the opening ceremony for the mosque, a grand affair complete with a military band playing the "Hamidiye March" and speeches from the governor of the province and one Haci Mehmed Hayri Pasha, a field marshal in the Third Army who is named as the mosque's primary patron in the original foundation inscription.

[4] Maps illustrating the expansion of Ottoman Thessaloniki beyond the walled city, from 1850 to 1809. The Yeni Camii lies at the center of the new Hamidiye neighborhood, which appears in the right-hand map as the large area south-east of the city center, next to the shore of the bay. The Salname (Yearbook) of Thessaloniki in 1907 CE (1325 H) refers to the Yeni Camii as the "recently constructed Hamidiye Mosque." [p.565, available through ISAM]

[5] Yeni Camii (New Mosque). Photo from
the Vakıf Genel Müdürlüğü (Ankara),
Defter No. 2219. Courtesy of Sotiris Dimitriadis.

The mosque was not constructed in the city center, but rather in a new neighborhood--the Hamidiye district--which, in the 1880s, was the first major suburb to develop beyond the ancient city walls. [4] Photographs of the building under construction [3] or early postcards reveal how the mosque--which is today completely hemmed in by apartment buildings--once stood isolated in an airy square, surrounded by trees. The Hamidiye neighborhood was located south-east of the city along the shore of the bay. There many of Salonica’s wealthiest families built themselves magnificent homes with names like Chateau Mon Bonheur, or Villa Bianca, featuring views over the water to Mt. Olympos. Indeed, an old photograph from an album dated 1924, now in the Pious Endowment Directorate in Ankara, labels the building as the "Mosque of the Villas" (Yalilar Cami Şerifi).[5] Such a well-heeled community would naturally clamor for their own congregational mosque, designed in line with the latest architectural trends and fashions.

[5] Plaque located on the facade of the Yeni Camii, naming
Vitaliano Poselli as the architect in both Ottoman Turkish
and Italian, with the year 1319 AH (1902 CE). Author's Photo.

According to a plaque fixed to the outer facade, the architect of the mosque was Vitaliano Poselli, a Sicilian trained in Istanbul. [5] Poselli had been working in Thessaloniki since 1885, successful in his own private practice as well as in public contracts. He seems to have been responsible for the majority of the large fin-di-siecle behemoths that punctuate Thessaloniki's urban landscape: the Banque de Salonique (1906-8), the local Ottoman administration building (Hükümet Konağı, 1891), the Church of the Virgin Mary (1902-3) and the Villa Alatini (the residence of Sultan Abdülhamid II when he was in exile to Salonica 1909-12). Following the trend of the period, Poselli designed the mosque in what could be called an "eclectic" style, mixing together different structural elements that could be identified as Gothic (pointed arches), Renaissance/Neo-Classical (rounded arches, Corinthian capitals) and what at the time would be called "Moorish" or "Turkish" (horse-shoe arches, muqarnas, arabesque pattern-work). [6]

[6] Facade of the Yeni Camii. Photo by Author.

There is no question that at the turn of the century the Dönme of Thessaloniki promoted a vibrant culture with cosmopolitan tastes, as evidenced in the several literary and scientific journals being published by members of this community. However, the same scholars who have worked to document the role of this community in late Ottoman Salonica have, in my opinion, tended to over-stress the history of the Dönme to explain the eclectic style of the Yeni Camii. Marc Baer writes: "[The mosque's] Corinthian columns, referring to the Greco-Byzantine locality, hold up Alhambric-style Andalusian arches, referencing Islam, above which prominent bands of six-pointed stars in marble wrapping are inscribed on the building's interior and exterior, which conjures comparisons with Italian synagogues. Above the entrance, a large six-pointed star is embedded within an ornate arabesque...Because it is a fascinating melange, the distinctive mosque serves as a metaphor for the cosmopolitanism promoted by the Dönme." Looking at the Yeni Camii from the stand-point of a modern aesthetic, its combination of historical styles may strike a 21st-century viewer as unusual, or even unique. Yet the fact is that, within the context of the late 19th century, this mosque was hardly extraordinary. Eclecticism was the style of the day, and it took hold in almost every continent and translated to many different kinds of buildings: museums (PAFA, Philadelphia), churches (Immaculate Conception, New Orleans), synagogues (New Synagogue, Berlin), theaters, and yes, mosques as well. The Yeni Camii in Thessaloniki actually bears an uncanny resemblance to the Yıldız Mosque in Istanbul, the imperial foundation of Sultan Abdülhamid II. [7]

[7] Close-up view of the facade of the Yıldız Mosque in Istanbul (1884-86),
the imperial mosque of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Photo by author.

[8] Original mechanism for the double-clock
towers. Photo by author.

A brief glance at the facade shows that the Yıldız Mosque also features a six-pointed star embedded in the center of the upper decorative crest, as well as on the marble bands wrapping around the building (to the right of the crest)--this all suggests that the same craft specialists who worked on the mosque at Yıldız may very well have been brought in to decorate the facade of the Yeni Camii in Thessaloniki. In short, if stars of David prominently feature on the imperial mosque in Istanbul (as well as in many mosques throughout the world), it becomes tricky to ascribe their appearance in the Yeni Camii to the mosque's particular relationship with the Dönme community. Suffice to say that the wealthy and influential residents of the new Hamidiye neighborhood preferred to construct their new mosque in an eclectic style because they wanted to access the latest fashions in architecture. The Yeni Camii also reflected in many ways the aggressive push toward modernization that at the time affected almost every aspect of urban life in Thessaloniki. The mosque not only included a sundial fixed to the outside of the building with Ottoman Turkish instructions on setting personal pocket-watches according to the markings ("Saatlerinizi on dakika'ya geri olarak dönleriniz,""Turn back your watch 10 minutes [from the indicated time on the dial]"), but also a double-clock tower that was operated by a complex mechanism that is still in situ, and, even in a state of disrepair, still a work of fine craftsmanship. [8]

[9] One of the double-clock towers of the
Yeni Camii, with Greek soldiers
billeted on the top of the roof, 1915.

The Yeni Camii was only in service as a mosque for a decade before the city became part of Greece in 1912. After this, the building has gone on to serve a wide variety of functions: a lookout post for Greek soldiers in 1915 [9], then for a short while a place to house refugees from the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1922, and from 1925 to 1963 home to Thessaloniki's archaeological museum (hence the "Archaeological Museum" sign in Greek above the doorway [6]). Today, the courtyard of the Yeni Camii still belongs to the museum, with ancient tombstones and columns littering the garden surrounding the building, while the structure itself belongs to the municipal government, a complicated bureaucratic arrangement that I am sure is a constant source of amusement to both parties. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, although the Yeni Camii is not always open to the public, it is today frequently being used as an exhibition space for art festivals as well as avant-garde theater productions. In a country that has often struggled to come to terms with its Ottoman past, it is gratifying to see such a prominent historical monument from that time period being preserved and serving a role in the city's growing art scene. What's more, under the initiative of Thessaloniki's new--and very popular--mayor Yiannis Boutaris, the Yeni Camii was opened for prayer as a mosque for the first time in 90 years in March of this year (you can watch it on youtube). Turkish diplomats commended this step, but stated that they were waiting for Athens to be next, a veiled reference to Prime Minister Erdoğan's assertion that he would only consider re-instituting the Greek Orthodox seminary in Istanbul if the Greek government consented to opening a mosque in Athens to prayer.

If you get the chance to visit Thessaloniki, don't miss the Yeni Camii--a fin-de-siecle gem that speaks to the urban transformation of the late Ottoman port city, and continues to play center stage as an arts venue as well as a bargaining chip in international relations.

The 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art is on view until January 31, 2014.

BAER, Marc. "Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul."Journal of World History 18/2 (June 2007): pp 141-170.
MAZOWER, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
Sabah 4616 (7 Eylül 1902). Found in SAKAL, Baki Sarı, "Selanik'te Yaptırılan Son Cami Hamidiye Camisi (Yeni Cami)."

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guest contribution by BENJAMIN ANDERSON, CornellUniversity

[1] Monastery of St. Bartholomew (1911). Bachmann, Kirchen und Moscheen, Tafel 24.

[2] The view north from Albayrak (2013).
Photo by author.

The Great Zab River rises in the highlands east of Lake Van and runs some 400 kilometers down to Iraq, joining the Tigris south of Mosul. In the southeast of Turkey, the river carves out a fertile valley parallel to the Iranian border, occasionally punctuated by broad plains, where it is joined by one of its tributaries. In the center of one such plain, roughly 75 kilometers to the northeast of Hakkâri, a low hill provides fine views up the converging valleys [2].

[3] The Jandarma station at Albayrak (2013).
Photo by author.

Today, this place is known as Albayrak, the standard term for the flag of the Turkish Republic, and a fitting name for a town housing a Jandarma station [3]. The Jandarma were not the first to recognize the site’s strategic advantages. William Francis Ainsworth, who passed this way in 1840, noted the presence of a “castle, with a guard of about forty Kurds.” (296). In Ainsworth’s day, the surrounding village was known as Deir, the Kurdish word for “monastery.” This relates to a second major feature of the hilltop: the Armenian monastery of St. Bartholomew [4], whose sandy yellow ruins, cast down in the earthquake of 1966, provide an unexpected accompaniment to the pale green Jandarma barracks.

[4] Plan of the Monastery of St. Bartholomew (1911). Bachmann, Kirchen und Moscheen, Tafel 20.

The monastery was in use until the massacre of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915. When Walter Bachmann visited in 1911, the complex included houses for the priests and a hostel for the many pilgrims [1]. Since the 14th century, at the latest, these pilgrims were drawn by the relics of the Apostle Bartholomew, whose martyrdom was commemorated here.

[5] Western facade of the Monastery of St. Bartholomew,
detail (2013). The inscription at lower right reads,
“In the year 1651, this holy church was restored during
the reign of the Hagarene Ezdinšer and of Xosrov paşa.”
Translation after Thierry 1989, 476.

During most of the monastery’s heyday, the Kurdish Emirs of Hakkâri ruled the Zab valley. Although the Ottomans had been the nominal rulers since Selim I (1512-1520), an Armenian inscription to the right of the main entry commemorating the monastery’s restoration in 1651 names the Emir Izzed-Dīn Şir and his brother Xosrov Paşa as the reigning sovereigns [5]. The former is also named in an Armenian inscription celebrating the construction of a bridge across the Sortkin creek in the town of Çatak, south of Lake Van (Thierry 1989, 444). The patron of the bridge is named as a “pilgrim.” Taken together, the two inscriptions suggest development of Armenian pilgrimage sites and routes in the seventeenth century with the consent, if not the support, of the local Kurdish rulers.

Before the Emirs, this valley had been the homeland of the Armenian Artsruni dynasty, who gradually rose to become the rulers of Vaspurakan, the early medieval kingdom that stretched eastwards from Van across the northern Zagros and into present-day Iran. Architectural historians place the remains that stand today in Albayrak well after the collapse of the Arstruni kingdom, dating the rectangular enclosure that surrounds the zhamatun (meeting hall) and church to the 13th century. But some have wondered if the platform on which the structure rests might not be much older. This hypothesis was shared with a local tradition recorded by Hamazasp Oskian, according to which the church was built on the ruins of a pagan temple on top of an artificial hill (Thierry 1969, 163).

[6] Western facade of the monastery of St. Bartholomew, detail (1911).
Bachmann, Kirchen und Moscheen, Tafel 21.

The temple that came before the church is a common topos, and there would be no reason to take it seriously, were it not for the building’s very strange western facade [6].The central portal is crowned by two arches, of which the uppermost clearly postdates the lower. The complicated relief set within it need detain us no longer than it detained Ainsworth, who complained that this “handsome specimen of Saracenic architecture” had been “defaced by a colossal bas-relief of the Almighty ” (296).

[7] Lower tympanum, western facade of the Monastery of
St. Bartholomew (2013). Photo by author.

The iconography of the relief in the lower arch is more of a mystery [7]. Ainsworth had nothing to say about it, while Bachmann simply described it as a "rider on a horse, who is trampling another figure" (26). In the early twentieth century, the locals understood this to represent St. Bartholomew killing a dragon, a story that was not recorded in any of the saint’s biographies. Jean Michel Thierry was the first to suggest that the relief borrows directly from Sassanian royal iconography (compare, for example, the relief of the triumphant shah at Naqsh-i Rustam).

[8] Senmurv relief on the exterior of the Cathedral
of the Holy Cross at Aghtamar, Lake Van (2013).
Photo by author.

The Sassanians, too, had been nominal rulers of these lands in late antiquity, but we do not need to conjure a Sassanian palace in such a remote location to explain the relief. It is just as likely that the Artsrunis, who claimed descent from Sennacherib of Assyria, knew and used the royal iconography of the pre-Islamic Near East during their own heyday in the ninth and tenth centuries. This relief would then provide an explicitly royal pendant to the senmurv on the far more famous Artsruni palatine church at Aghtamar [8].

[9] North intrado, Monastery of
St. Bartholomew (2013). Photo by author.

Nothing about the rectangular enclosure indicates that it originally contained a sacred site. The remaining walls of the church inside are not bonded with the perimeter walls; they are thus later additions, and the original layout of the structure may have been completely different. And the odd standing figures in low relief set in the door-frame beneath the lower relief, although covered by a swarm of pilgrims’ crosses, do not represent saints, bishops, or the like [9]. Thierry thought that they represented architects carrying plumb lines.

In later centuries, after the collapse of the early medieval Artsruni state, the legend of St. Bartholomew found a home on this hilltop, and the rectangular enclosure was occupied by a monastic community. But it is possible that, before the church, a different kind of structure stood here, although probably not a temple. Perhaps it was a reception hall, or some other outpost of a confident Artsruni kingdom, which would thus take its place alongside the Emirate of Hakkâri and the Turkish Republic in a line of aspirational states that have made use of this hilltop to assert their control over the surrounding valley.

[10] The Jandarma station at Albayrak (2013).
Photo by author.

As for the Jandarma station, [10] it has stood empty since late 2012, when its inhabitants relocated to a new position outside of town. In July of 2013,Today’s Zaman optimistically announced that “the Armenian St. Bartholomew Monastery is once again accessible to visitors,” although it seems unlikely that pilgrims will return in anything approaching pre-1915 numbers.

Albayrak is certainly worth visiting, though, as a remarkable palimpsest on which successive states have left their mark. Such sites are not rare in western Asia – one thinks of the accumulations of rock reliefs at Nahr al-Kalb– but the specific conjunction of elements joined on the hilltop at Albayrak is unique. There is no other site that encapsulates quite so effectively this region’s periodic alternations between standing at the center of small states and sitting uncomfortably on the periphery of large ones – or, for that matter, the landscape’s persisting indifference to the claims of both [11].

[11] Sheep and goats graze on the southern slope of the hill beneath the
Monastery of St. Bartholomew (2013). Photo by author.

My thanks to the faculty and students of Spätantike und Byzantinische Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich, with whom I visited Albayrak in the summer of 2013, and especially to Franz Alto Bauer and Ayça Beygo.

AINSWORTH, William Francis.Travels and researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia,

Chaldea, and Armenia. London: John W. Parker, 1842. (On St. Bartholomew: II.295-296.)

BACHMANN, Walter. Kirchen und Moscheen in Armenien und Kurdistan. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913. (On St. Bartholomew: 23-28.)

SINCLAIR, Thomas A. Eastern Turkey: An architectural and archaeological survey. (Volume I) London: The Pindar Press, 1987. (On St. Bartholomew: 215-217.)

THIERRY, Jean Michel. “Monastères Arméniens du Vaspurakan III.” Revue des Études Arméniennes N.S. 6 (1969): pp. 162-180.

--, “Monastères Arméniens du Vaspurakan VI.” Revue des Études Arméniennes N.S. 9 (1972): 178.

--, Monuments Arméniens du Vaspurakan. Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1989. (On St. Bartholomew: 471-477.)

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Ottoman Tents, European Trophies, and Remembering the Battle for Vienna

guest contribution byAshley Dimmig, University of Michigan

[1] Three-poled Ottoman tent, ca. 17th-century, Tent gallery, Türckische Cammer, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (David Brandt, SKM).

On the thirteenth of September 1683, Jan III Sobieski, King of Poland, sat in the tent of the recently vanquished Ottoman Grand Vizier outside the city of Vienna, writing a letter to his wife to tell her of his victory in battle. He marveled at the scale and magnificence of the tents in the Ottoman camp, describing them being “‘as large as Warsaw or Lviv within the walls’” (Atasoy 240-41, Żygulski 165). [i.e., Figure 1] By Sobieski’s count, many tents were seized in the aftermath of the battle for Vienna—perhaps as many as a hundred thousand—although this estimate is most likely generous. Subsequently, the spoils of war, chief among them the magnificent seventeenth-century Ottoman imperial tents, were dispersed among the allied victors, in particular Poland, Germany, and Austria.

[2] Museum of Military History
[Heeresgeschichtliches Museum], Vienna (Unless
noted otherwise, all photos by the author.)

While the largest number of Ottoman imperial tents that survive today are in Turkish collections—namely the Topkapı Palace Museum and the Military Museum—the majority of these tents are from the 18th and 19th centuries. But because of European victories and their distribution of spoils after the wars, to this day the best place to see Ottoman tents from the earlier periods (16th and 17th centuries) is in Europe. Thus, my pursuit of Ottoman tents led me first to Vienna—to the Museum of Applied Arts (Museum für angewandte Kunst) and the Museum of Military History (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum).
[Figure 2]

[3] Ottoman banners in the “War Against
the Ottomans” permanent exhibition,
Museum of Military History
(Heeresgeschichtliches Museum), Vienna

At the Museum of Military History, the permanent exhibition entitled “War Against the Ottomans” fills a grand hall and several additional rooms beyond. [Figure 3] The vaulted ceiling is adorned with several Ottoman flags or banners—which were exhibited as trophies throughout the centuries, and in so doing came to signify the victory at Vienna. (Karl) Indeed, this instance of exhibiting fabric trophies from the Relief of Vienna is by no means new, and in fact began long before the banners and tents were ever accessioned as museum artifacts. For example, some “Oriental” tents that today reside in the Museum of Applied Arts were exhibited in the universal exhibition held in Vienna in 1873.

Furthermore, exhibitions marking the centennial, bicentennial, sestercentennial, and tricentennial of the Relief of Vienna were held throughout greater Poland and elsewhere. While the tents gained immediate fame upon their capture, it was over the subsequent centuries that their role as icons of the great victory was established. For example, in conjunction with the exhibition and festival held in honor of the 200th anniversary in 1883, the organizers published a pamphlet that situated these monumental fabric structures in a historical narrative. According to the account of the Battle of Vienna in the pamphlet, King Sobieski and the allied army arrived on September 11, 1683 to a marvelous and terrifying encampment surrounding the city. On the following day he “had given for the day all hope of the grand struggle, when the provoking composure of Mustapha, whom he espied in a splendid tent tranquilly taking coffee with his two sons, roused him to such a pitch, that he instantly gave orders for a general assault. … He himself made toward Mustapha’s tent, beating down all opposition…” (author’s emphasis, Sobowleski 22). Looking to this account, by 1883, it seems that the Ottoman tents had gained even more symbolic importance than they had had in 1683. In other words, according to the retelling of the story on the 200th anniversary, not only was Sobieski’s taking the Grand Vizier’s tent representative of the allied victory, but it was in fact the tent itself that had actually caused it. Seeing Kara Mustafa Pasha relaxing in his ostentatious tent was what had motivated Sobieski to attack, and subsequently win the battle. Regardless of this story’s veracity, the circulation of this pamphlet in conjunction with the display of the historical tents wove a narrative that further established their meaning in European cultural memory.

[4] Ottoman imperial tent wall, ca. 17th century, “War Against the Ottomans” permanent exhibition, Museum of Military History (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum), Vienna

[5] Detail of Figure 4

At the Museum of Military History in Vienna, the first tent displayed in the exhibition’s narrative is not a full structure, but just one wall of a tent, framed by a large glass display case, and accessorized with a row of rifles in front. [Figure 4] While it is near impossible to ascertain which if any of the surviving tents actually belonged to the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, and subsequently King Jan III Sobieski, this tent is executed in the finest appliqué work in a seventeenth-century style. [Figure 5] The faded crimson ground is covered with multi-colored appliquéd flowers organized in a series of fabric arches—a typical composition for Ottoman imperial tents of that time. However, it is difficult to get the full effect of the totality of such structures from one wall, regardless of the fineness of detail.

[6] Ottoman imperial tent wall and conical roof,
ca. 17th century, “War Against the Ottomans”
permanent exhibition, Museum of Military
History (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum), Vienna

In the next room, off of the main vaulted gallery, the exhibition winds through large paintings and full display cases until the golden finial atop a large canopy begins to peek out from behind. [Figure 6] While this tent is also fragmented, its display as almost whole aids the visitor in imagining how the tent may have originally looked—even though this method does sacrifice clarity of detail. [Figure 7] Regardless, zooming in, you can see that this tent’s appliqué and embroidery work are also of the finest quality. [Figure 8]

[7] Detail of the conical roof of the tent in Figure 6, “War Against the Ottomans” permanent exhibition, Museum of Military History (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum).

[8] Detail of the wall of the tent in Figure 6,
“War Against the Ottomans” permanent
exhibition, Museum of Military History
(Heeresgeschichtliches Museum), Vienna

In the Ottoman Empire, ostentatious tents were taken on hunting expeditions, military campaigns, and diplomatic missions. They functioned as mobile palatial architecture, wherein sultans and other high-ranking dignitaries received guests. And when the situation arose, they also served as ceremonial stage settings for imperial rituals such as accessions to the throne, and even as temporary mausolea. After their capture in 1683, they were used for largely the same purposes, with the Habsburgs, Polish nobility, and other European elite replacing the sons of Osman. “Oriental”-style tents (among other material objects) were particularly appropriated and assumed into the visual cultures of Poland and Austria, and even played a part in the visualization of their national identities. Old tents were conserved and restored, others were bought and imported from Istanbul, and even new tents were made in an “Oriental” style in European workshops. [Figure 9]

[9] Ottoman-style tent, applique, circa 18th century, likely Brody (a city where one of the tent workshops was established in greater Poland), now in the Regional Museum of Tarnów

[10] Children’s birthday party, “War Against
the Ottomans” permanent exhibition,
Museum of Military History
(Heeresgeschichtliches Museum), Vienna

Ottoman imperial tents—whether as fashionable commodities or hard-won trophies—made a significant impact on central European visual and material culture, especially in the eighteenth century and after. The narratives woven around these triumphal objects re-presented historical artifacts as lived history and timeless legend. Even as the tents were used, re-used, and re-fashioned over the next three centuries, they continued to denote the great victory over Vienna. Even today, the tents associated with the Relief of Vienna are on display throughout the region, in Kraków and Dresden, in addition to Vienna. In fact, in the Museum of Military History, these narratives of victory are being relayed to a brand new generation. As part of their community programming, the museum offers to host children’s birthday parties wherein “armours and noble garments await brave time travellers, who would like to transform into knights, damsels, and hearty Musketeers. During a side-trip to the far-away orient, many a strange thing is discovered, and a visit to the Turkish tent will surely remain unforgotten.” [Figure 10] Whether a child playing make-believe or a young scholar exploring dissertation topics, Ottoman imperial tents remain as awe-inspiring and all-consuming in the twenty-first century as they must have been for Turks and Europeans alike before and after the battle over Vienna.

For a fun video on the 2009 installation of the Ottoman tents in Dresden, see "The Return of a Dream" :

**Ashley Dimmig is a PhD student in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is currently conducting preliminary research for her doctoral thesis on Ottoman tents.

ATASOY, Nurhan. Otağ-ı Hümayun: The Ottoman Imperial Tent Complex (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2000).
KARL, Barbara.“Ottoman Silk Flags as Objects of Propaganda in the Conflict Between Habsburgs and Ottomans during the 17th and early 18th centuries,” (paper presented at the biannual meeting of the Historians of Islamic Art Association, New York, NY, October 20, 2012).
SOBOLEWSKI, Paul.John Sobieski: The King of Poland, Conquers the Turks Under the Walls of Vienna September 12th, 1683, and Forever After Relieves the Whole Christian World from the Iron Yoke of the Turks (Chicago: Edward C. Rozanski, Edward. J. Moskal, Tony Szplit, 1983).
ŻYGULSKI, Zdzisław, Ottoman Art in the Service of the Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1992).

Istanbul's new Metro Bridge and the political battle over the city's historic panorama

[1] Different profiles of the new Metro Bridge across Istanbul's Golden Horn, showing

how the bridge would affect the different silhouettes of the surrounding site.
Adapted from a graphic by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, 2009.

[2] Map Showing the new metro extension from
Taksim to Yenikapı. Drawn in Google Earth.

One month ago, on February 15th, Istanbul's new metro line officially went into service. The project, initiated by the Greater Istanbul Municipality in 2005, unites the city's various metro lines, extending trains in Taksim Square directly into the old city, with connections to Atatürk Airport and the opposite Anatolian shore. [Fig. 2] While the majority of this new extension runs unseen underground, the most visibly prominent feature of the line is a bridge extending across the waters of the Golden Horn (Trk. Haliç). This past autumn, residents watched as the two 65-meter-tall pylons, supporting the bridge in a cable-stay system, slowly rose into the sky. At the opening ceremony last month, Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyıp Erdoğan was quoted saying "for this metro line, we constructed a bridge on the Haliç that will enhance Istanbul's beauty." The Prime Minister was also careful throughout his speech to stress that every precaution was taken so as not to harm any of the monuments "in an area harboring a history spanning thousands of years." These platitudes about the importance of protecting Istanbul's cultural patrimony were no doubt crafted in direct response to the backlash of scathing criticism that the bridge design faced from not only the local press and academic community, but also a UNESCO mission whose findings threatened to land Istanbul on the list of "World Heritage Monuments at Risk." The main concern lodged against the new Metro Bridge is that certain features (particularly the tall pylons, suspension cables, and rail station in the center of the bridge) block the view from the north towards the historic peninsula of the old city, especially the 16th-century Süleymaniye Mosque Complex. [Fig. 3] Erdoğan would call this addition to the old city's skyline an enhancement; others, an obstruction. As the deadline for the March 30 municipal elections approaches and the city's top-brass ensure that major projects are rushed to completion, the Haliç Metro Bridge and Istanbul's historic skyline are a case study in how the current government's massive infrastructure projects have become a tense political battleground.

[3] The Haliç Metro Bridge, March 2014. Looking from the shore of Beyoğlu onto the historic peninsula, the bridge partially obstructs the view to the Süleymaniyye Mosque. Photo by Emily Neumeier.

[4] Original design proposed for the Haliç Bridge, 2007.
Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

In 2007, the original designs for the bridge by Hakan Kiran Architecture were revealed. [Fig. 4] The plans proposed two gilded 82-meter-tall pylons, which curved at the top into "horns" (Get it? Because the bridge is crossing the Golden Horn). Unfortunately for the Greater Istanbul Municipality, UNESCO does not seem to have a similar sense of humor when it comes to visual puns. The city's historic peninsula, which is clearly defined by the old land and sea walls, was inscribed on the register of UNESCO's "World Heritage Sites" in 1985. Because the new bridge would impact the view to the peninsula from the north, and construction would require the demolition of several historic buildings within the core area, the organization decided to step in. UNESCO made it clear that if significant changes were not made in the proposed bridge design, this project could demote Istanbul to the similarly-named but decidedly less-fun list of "World Heritage Sites in Danger," joining the illustrious company of Bamiyan and Damascus. So, the architects on the project scaled down the plans, most notably lowering the height of the bridge's pylons by about 20 meters, and changing their color from a golden yellow to a grey-white tone. With a few other minor alterations, this is basically what we see built on the ground today. The report from a joint UNESCO/ICOMOS monitoring mission to Istanbul in 2009 gives a sense of the farcical proceedings. When the investigators inquired after the cable-stay design, curious if any other options had been considered:

The mission was informed that 11 alternative designs [for the bridge] had been presented to the Conservation Council, but the alternatives were produced 10 years ago and were not studied proposals – they were only suggestions. Some of the suggestions were just copied and pasted from books on bridges. It seems clear that no alternative design has so far been seriously considered and, with regard to the design of the current proposal for a cable-stay bridge, during the meeting it was stated that the intention was to 'introduce a new work of art – a new contemporary element in the area.' [34]

In 2011, UNESCO finally approved the construction of the Metro Bridge, lending legitimacy to the project's backers. (Congratulating themselves on a job well done, the organization proceeded to be completely out to lunch on the destruction of the Yedikule gardens and the lightning-fast construction of a 270,000 square meter platform protruding into the Marmara Sea, slated to be inaugurated with an 1.5 million-person rally on March 23.) Many local critics, however, still felt that the changes in the design did not adequately address the primary concern of blocking the northern view to Istanbul's peninsula [Fig. 5], again summed up in the 2009 report:

The overall design of the bridge, with pylons and cable stays and the thickening of the deck through the incorporation of a station, will have a significant visual impact on key attributes of the property such as the silhouette of the Historic Peninsula...the design of the bridge is inappropriate for this position, both because it will impede irreversibly on many important views of the World Heritage Site and because the bridge, presented as a 'work of art,' will compete with the Süleymaniye Mosque, identified at the time of inscription as a work of human genius, designed by Sinan. [34-35]

[5] View of Istanbul's historic peninsula, looking from Galata.
Abdullah Fréres, ca. 1880-93, Library of Congress.

[6] View of the Inner Courtyard of the Süleymaniye
Mosque. Photo by Michael Polczynsky, 2014.

The Turkish press and local academics expressed outrage about the bridge's potential to impede on the visual integrity of the peninsula's skyline. There has been no shortage of colorful metaphors; according to various critics, the bridge threatens to "break", "stab", and "violate" the silhouette of the old city. In the eyes of many, the pointed tops of the pylons are not horns, but daggers, slicing the panorama into two. This visceral imagery characterizing the landscape as a prone body vulnerable to violent attack is a familiar leitmotif, especially in the wake of modern warfare and the large-scale urban planning projects of the 20th century. In her article on the "ideology of preservation" in Istanbul, Nur Altınyıldız traces how in the 19th century the large mosque complexes dotting the hills of the peninsula [Fig. 6], which originally were service-oriented institutions and themselves agents of urban growth and renewal, were increasingly divorced from this service context and re-classified as "historic" monuments whose preservation stood at odds with the modern signifiers of progress such as opening new roads (or new metro bridges). [234]

[7] View from the Süleymaniye Mosque Complex to the Golden Horn. Photo by Michael Polczynsky, 2014.

As the UNESCO report alludes, and commentators frequently point out, the silhouette under question is an Ottoman contribution to the city. When Sultan Süleyman commissioned the Süleymaniye (c. 1550-1558) on the top of Istanbul's third hill, he was following the precedent established by his predecessors Sultan Mehmed II and Bayezid II, who had constructed their own mosque complexes along the ridges of the peninsula in the 15th century. Significantly, the Süleymaniye complex was originally designed so that the auxiliary buildings flanking the mosque on its northern side, towards the Golden Horn, were constructed on a lower terrace so that the monument would have an unobstructed view of Galata, Üsküdar, and the Bosphorus [Necipoğlu, 106]. [Fig. 7] In this unmistakable declaration of power, the mosque, as a stand-in for its sultanic patron, commanded a wide gaze and likewise demanded to be seen. It is certainly no coincidence that the "audience" on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn was largely composed of foreigners and non-Muslim communities, who from their perch in Galata were always to some extent on the outside looking in to the city proper. Throughout the centuries, European cartographers and artists endlessly recorded this view, the Golden Horn panorama becoming its own veritable genre in the imagery of Istanbul. Now that the heart of the modern city has shifted to the area around Taksim Square, it could be argued that what was once the purview of foreigners, and Ottoman elites in the 19th century, has now been democratized (or, more cynically, commodified), becoming a monument deserving preservation in its own right.

[8] An sign advertising the opening of
the Haliç Metro Bridge. The slogan
reads "The Metro Everywhere, the Metro
to Every Place." Under the slogan is the
name and signature of the Istanbul Mayor,
Kadir Topbaş. Photo by Emily Neumeier.

Some people are wondering what the fuss is all about. The Mayor of the Greater Istanbul Municipality Kadir Topbaş points out that, in truth, the view of the Süleymaniye is only obstructed from specific vantages, primarily the Beyoğlu neighborhoods just west of the new bridge. (read: tourists don't go there, so why is everyone getting upset?) On the other hand, Edhem Eldem wonders at the public outcry when the Süleymaniye or the starchitect Sinan's genius is threatened, but the relative silence to the arguably much more egregious destruction of Byzantine-era material. The controversy is reminiscent of the frequent criticism lobbed at Santiago Calatrava's distinctive bridge designs, which are often cited for not taking the local context or geography into account, and, on top of that, being needlessly expensive and poorly-built. Almost a full month after the official opening, the Vezneciler stop on Istanbul's new metro line was still being completed. Passengers traveling from Taksim over the Haliç Bridge are currently treated to a creepy view of the unfinished station, complete with flickering lights and tubes hanging from the ceiling.

[9] A view approaching the station on the
bridge. Photo by Emily Neumeier.

A 2013 petition signed by faculty members of Istanbul's Boğaziçi University lists the Haliç Bridge as only one of many recent infrastructure projects that, the faculty argues, are being completed at such a fast rate and with so little public participation or accountability that the damage being done will be "irreversible." And that is precisely the point. It is the sincere wish of the bridge's designers (including Topbaş himself, trained as an architect) that this project will endure the test of time. Aiming to create a work of art that could rival the Süleymaniye, the current municipal government has done its best to insert their own contribution to the historic skyline, evidently full-aware of the site's significance to the public imagination of Istanbul. In hopes of finding some kind of press release on the opening of the bridge, I looked on the official website promoting the new bridge project. The website, unlike the bridge itself, was still under construction.

EMILY NEUMEIER is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

**The report of the joint UNESCO/ICOMOS 2009 visit to Istanbul can be found here.

ALTINYILDIZ, Nur. "The Architectural Heritage of Istanbul and the Ideology of Preservation."Muqarnas 24 (2007), pp. 281-305.
GUIDONI, Enrico."Sinan's Construction of the Urban Panorama." Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 1-2 (1987): pp. 20-41.
KORKUT, Sevgi."Istanbul's silhouette to change as metro line comes into view."Today's Zaman, 12 November 2012.
NECİPOĞLU, Gülrü."The Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul: ِAn Interpretation."Muqarnas 3 (1985), pp. 92-117.
VARDAR, Nilay. "Tüm İtirazların Ardından Haliç Köprüsü."Bianet, 24 January 2014.

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Searching for reconciliation in south-east Turkey
guest contribution by William Gourlay

[1] Surp Giragos in its ruined state, before the restoration. 2009. Photo by Emily Neumeier.

Ethereal music emanating from a grand church is hardly something out of the ordinary. Heavenly strains may be more remarkable, however, in Turkey, a country whose population is today predominately Muslim. All the more remarkable is music coming from a church that was, until recently, little more than an abandoned, dilapidated shell. [Fig. 1]

[2] Tara Jaff rehearsing in Surp Giragos.
June 2013. Photo by William Gourlay.

This past summer, I made my way to Diyarbakir, the largest city in south-eastern Turkey. One bright morning, in the heart of the Sur neighborhood, the city’s historical core, I wandered into the Armenian cathedral of Surp Giragos. That day, the entire church complex, which occupies a large plot of land in the center of town, rang with celestial melodies. Inside the church proper, before the central altar, sat a harpist, her fingers skipping across the strings, her music echoing amid soaring basalt arches. This was Tara Jaff, an Iraqi-born, London-based, Kurdish harpist. [Fig. 2] Raised in Baghdad, Jaff studied piano and Western classical music before immigrating in 1976 to study in the UK where she was first exposed to the harp. She has since established a loyal following as a singer and harpist, playing a repertoire of Kurdish poetry and songs. When I asked her if there are many other Kurdish harpists, she replied that she thinks she is the only one. Between rehearsing and fielding calls on her mobile phone, she kindly invited me to a recital that was scheduled for later in the week.

[3] A postcard of Diyarbakir. The belfry in the center is the original tower of Surp Giragos. It was heavily damaged by lightning in 1913, so the photograph must have been taken before this date. The inscription explains that in the summer time, the sweltering heat forced the residents of the city to sleep on the rooftops. Postcard from Osman Köker (ed), Diyarbekir Vilayetinde Ermeniler (20).

[4] The new, Gothic-style bell tower of
Surp Giragos, replacing the old belfry in
1913. The tower also included eight clocks,
a modernizing touch in the early 20th cent.
The belfry was torn down in 1915.
Photo from Osman Köker (ed),
Diyarbekir Vilayetinde Ermeniler (23).

It is unclear how long Surp Giragos Church has stood on this spot, but the current structure is said to date from 1883 [Halifeoğlu; Leylegian]. The church served as the chapel for the diocese of Dikranagerd (as Diyarbakır is known in Armenian) from this time. In its heyday, Surp Giragos employed around 100 people--including clergy and lay parishioners--who worked in the cathedral and affiliated bookshop, kitchen, Sunday school and diocese offices. The church’s original belfry [Fig. 3] was damaged by a lightning strike in 1913 (a common occurrence with minarets as well), and the congregants decided to replace it with a new, taller Gothic-style tower. [Fig. 4] At the time, the new belfry was alleged to be the highest structure in all of Diyarbakır, a fact that irked some of the town’s Muslims, and shortly after its construction local officials ordered that the tower be torn down in 1915 [Leylegian]. Such a lofty construction was perhaps indicative of the confidence and status of local Armenians, but the tensions surrounding its destruction prefigured other troubling events that were brewing.

After the traumas visited upon the Armenian population of southeastern Anatolia in 1915, the church remained a focal point for the few surviving Armenians in Diyarbakır and surrounding villages. A priest was still attached to the church until 1985, but the dwindling Armenian community was not able to adequately maintain the structure. In the early 1990s, the roof collapsed, leaving the interior of the church open to the elements and to vandals. [Leylegian] [Figs. 1 & 5]

[5] One of the seven altars at Surp Giragos,
prior to reconstruction. 2009. Photo by Emily Neumeier.

The church was a forlorn relic hinting at a glory that seemed lost forever when I first visited Diyarbakır in 1992. Its arches still stood aloft but of the roof there was only a sprawl of shattered beams and rubble atop moldering carpets at floor level. A local youth who had brought me here looked solemnly at the debris then tut-tutted as he led me away. At that time, any mention of ethnic diversity, or acknowledgement of the Armenian legacy in the city, was frowned upon. Turkish nationalist sentiments had been inflamed by the confrontation between the PKK and the Turkish military; hostilities were at their peak and Diyarbakır was the epicentre. State security personnel were a visible presence in the old city. The mood was tense; Diyarbakır’s multicultural history was officially overlooked and, in some quarters, flatly denied. Assertions of ethnic identity – whether Kurdish, Armenian or otherwise – were swiftly suppressed by police and other state apparatus.

[6] Niches with muqarnas hoods
stand between the seven altars of Surp
Giragos. 2009. Photo by Emily Neumeier.

The design of Surp Giragos Church is distinctive. It is constructed in the locally sourced black basalt that characterizes historic Diyarbakır, from mosques and churches, to houses and the city walls. Armenian church architecture from the medieval period in eastern Anatolia conforms to one of two conventions, either a centralised space surrounded by apses, as is the case with the 10th-century Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island, or a rectangular space capped by a dome, as in the 11th-century Cathedral of Ani [Sagona 158-61]. The 19th-century Surp Giragos Church does neither. Sixteen cylindrical columns crested with pointed arches support a flat roof of wooden beams topped with earth (a local construction technique). The columns divide the rectangular floor space into five arcades, which proceed to five recessed altars on the ground floor and a further two on a second-floor gallery [Leylegian]. A traveler who visited an earlier church on this site in the 1840s noted that it, too, had ‘no less than seven altars’ [Badger, 42]. The altars themselves are decorated in the fashion of the time with a Baroque confection of painted stucco and wood; while muqarnas adorn niches between the altars. [Fig. 6] With its rectangular prayer-hall, the church recalls other monumental buildings in Diyarbakır (Sagona 197-8), in particular the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque), which in turn is said to be modeled on the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

In 2009, local Kurdish politicians Abdullah Demirbaş, mayor of Sur neighbourhood, and Osman Baydemir, mayor of the Greater Diyarbakır municipality, instigated the project that would see Surp Giragos Church restored to its former glory. While other monuments in Turkey have been restored under the auspices of the Turkish Ministry of Cutlure, most notably the Armenian Church of the Holy Cross on Akdmara Island in Lake Van, this was the first time that a municipal council had undertaken such a project.

[7] Main facade of Surp Giragos after
restoration. The new bell tower above the
central portal is closely modeled on the
original, pre-1913 belfry. 2013.
Photo by William Gourlay.

The district city council contributed 1 million Turkish lira (around one-third of the cost of the restoration), with the newly formed Surp Giragos Foundation contributing the balance while also overseeing and managing the building and refurbishment work [Jones, Zaman]. Extant walls and arches were consolidated, cleaned and re-grouted where mortar had flaked away. The roof was replaced, and extraneous additions that were not part of the original plan were removed. The floor was resurfaced, and conservators were brought in to refurbish plaster adornments around the altars and other architectural detailing [Halifeoğlu]. Perhaps to avoid controversy, a reconstructed bell tower was not built to the dimensions of the pre-1915 tower, although given the plethora of multi-story buildings, it would no longer be the highest construction in the city. [Fig. 7] The church was reopened in October 2011, and has since become a place of active worship, a centre of arts and cultural activities and a focal point for those Armenians remaining in Turkey. While the Armenian church on Akdamar Island was reopened in 2007 as a museum, Surp Giragos firmly belongs to the Armenian community. (Photos and a video of the cathedral's restoration can be found here.)

Indeed, the refurbishment and reopening of the church is seen as evidence of the renewed confidence of Turkey’s Armenian community [Jones]. Beyond that, it reflects a maturing of discourse and debates in Turkey about national identity; it is evidence of an increasing willingness to acknowledge, and perhaps eventually embrace, a multicultural past that has been largely denied until recently. In earlier decades, particularly as the war against the PKK raged through the 1990s, nationalist discourse held that in ethnic terms the nation was homogenously Turkish and evidence of or manifestations of diversity were either ignored or smothered.

It is easy enough to find accounts that detail the long history of the ethnic and cultural diversity of Anatolia. The great Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi remarked upon the heterogeneity of the population of Diyarbakır when he visited in 1655. He recorded hearing locals speaking Arabic, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish as well as Armenian [Van Bruinessen, 29]. An earlier Polish traveler to Diyarbakır noted the important role that Armenians played in the city: all of the butchers, bakers, customs officers and merchants were Armenian [Van Bruinessen, 30]. Until the catastrophes visited up them in the early years of the 20th century, Armenians remained central to the life of the city. In 1914, it was noted that the deputy mayor of Diyarbakır was always an Armenian, while of the city’s jewellers, cotton merchants, silk traders, lawyers, physicians and pharmacists the majority were Christian, and most Armenian [Köker, 6-7].

It was for this reason that the Diyarbakır’s Sur district was sometimes known as the ‘neighbourhood of the infidels’ [Zaman]. While Turkish nationalist discourse may have refused to countenance such a reality, the Sur municipality has worked in recent years to highlight it. As well as the refurbishment of Surp Giragos, the municipality has also contributed to restoration work on a local Chaldean church and a synagogue, and while signage in the city was once solely in Turkish, it is now possible to find street signs in Turkish, Kurdish, Syriac and Armenian. (The restored Sülüklü Han, now reopened as a café, welcomes visitors in six languages and four scripts.) Mayor of Sur, Abdullah Demirbaş told The New York Times that in losing the multicultural fabric of the city, its diverse constituents stood to make enemies of themselves [Toumani]. The municipality has aimed to redress this, re-acknowledging and celebrating ethnic diversity, highlighting to all the citizens of Diyarbakır what they share and have in common, whether they be Armenian or Kurdish, Turkish or otherwise. A Kurdish politician, Demirbaş sees his work as being not just on behalf of the Kurds, but for all the people of his constituency [Toumani]. Demirbaş is also willing to acknowledge the role that many Kurds played in the massacres of the Armenians a century ago [Zaman]. His support and encouragement of the restoration of Surp Giragos is perhaps a measure of atonement for those terrible events.

[8] Tara Jaff, Pervin Çakar and Azad Ziya Eren performing in the Church of Surp Giragos. June 2013. Photo by William Gourlay.

If the enthusiastic masses at Tara Jaff’s evening recital in June 2013 at the Surp Giragos Church are any indication, it would seem that there are many in Diyarbakır who are willing to embrace the notion of multiculturalism. Locals gathered, taking up position in rows of pews arrayed around the performance area; it quickly became a case of standing room only. [Fig. 8] Clearly an outsider, I was welcomed by attendees in Turkish and English. When I asked about the make up of the audience, I was told that they were all locals, both Kurdish and Turkish.

Jaff and her fellow performers, Mardin-born, Kurdish soprano Pervin Çakar and Diyarbakır poet Azad Ziya Eren, held the audience transfixed with a repertoire of Kurdish and Armenian music and Turkish poetry. Seated before the main altar, in an auditorium ablaze with light, the three artists took it in turns to perform. Jaff’s intricate harp flourishes and rich singing voice rang in the grand interior of the church. She then accompanied Pervin Çakar, who sang Armenian folk songs in her resonant soprano. With crisp diction lending weight and solemnity to his delivery, Azad Ziya Eren recited his original poetry. At performance’s end the crowd surged forward, amid hearty applause, to greet and congratulate the three artists.

Hearing the cadence of languages other than Turkish in a public performance in Diyarbakır would have been inconceivable in years past, but here a crowd of around 1000 people embraced this diverse offering. In recent weeks, in the run up to the 2014 council elections, the Turkish political sphere has become increasingly polarised and rhetoric increasingly divisive; some commentators fear that with societal cleavages widening, sectarian violence is a distinct possibility. In such a situation, the Surp Giragos Church stands as a beacon of hope. This holy place for a community that disappeared in tragic circumstances has been refurbished by politicians determined to acknowledge past wrongs and has now become a site where heavenly music might bring together diverse peoples once again.

**A music video featuring Tara Jaff:

**And a video of Tara Jaff and Pervin Çakar performing live together:

WILLIAM GOURLAY blogs and is a PhD candidate researching ethnic identity and citizenship among the Kurds of modern Turkey, at Monash University, Australia.

BADGER, George Percy. The Nestorians and Their Rituals: with the Narrative of a Mission to Mesopotamia and Coordistan. Volume I. London: Joseph Masters, 1852.
HALİFEOĞLU, F. Meral. “Restoration of Diyarbakir Surp Giragos Armenian Church,” Future for Religious Heritage (31 January 2012).
JONES, Dorian. “Armenian Church Catalyst for Change in Kurdish Region,” EurasiaNet 17 (December 2013).
KÖKER, Osman (Ed). Diyarbekir Vilayetinde Ermeniler/Armenians in Diyarbekir Province. Istanbul: Bir Zamanlar Yayıncılık, 2011.
LEYLEGIAN, George A. “A Brief History of Largest Church in Middle East and Christianity in Diyarbakir,” The Armenian Weekly (25 November 2010).
SAGONA, Antonio. The Heritage of Eastern Turkey, from Earliest Settlements to Islam. South Yarra: MacMillan Art Publishing, 2006.
TOUMANI, Meline. “Minority Rules,” The New York Times Magazine (17 February 2008).
VAN BRUINESSEN, Martin and Hendrik Boeschoten. Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir: the Relevant Section of the Seyahatname. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
ZAMAN, Amberin. “Turkey’s Kurds Seek Forgiveness for 1915 Armenian Tragedy,” Al Monitor(3 September 2013).

Citation: "Resurrecting Surp Giragos," William Gourlay, Stambouline (March 30, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/03/resurrecting-surp-giragos.html

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Diplomats, soldiers and students at the American Legation in Morocco
guest contribution by Ayla Amon

[1] View of the Old Legation building, 2013.
Unless noted otherwise, all photos by the author.

In a recent article in the New York Times Style Magazine, Orhan Pamuk notes that “Museums must not confine themselves to showing us pictures and objects from the past; they must also convey the ambiance of the lost time from which those objects have come to us. And this can only happen through personal stories.” The Tangier American Legation Museum, [Fig. 1] nestled in the old medina of Tangier, Morocco, embodies this philosophy, reveling in stories of diplomacy, cultural encounters, espionage, piracy and...disco.

[2] Old Legation building, ca. 1910.
Photo courtesy of TALIM.

The building of the Tangier Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM) [Fig. 2] embodies one of the oldest relationships between the United States and a foreign government. The original Legation building was home to the first U.S. ambassadorial residence abroad, established in 1777; this same year, Moroccan Sultan Muhammad III included the U.S. in a list of countries to which Morocco’s ports were open, thus becoming the first foreign nation to publicly recognize the newly independent United States. These relations were formalized a few years later with the 1786 Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship, which was signed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Muhammad III. This treaty, ratified by Congress in July 1787, has withstood more than 220 years of transatlantic stress, making it the longest unbroken treaty in United States history.

But why establish a Legation in Tangier at all? The geography of Northern Morocco and more specifically the position of Tangier provide one clue: Morocco lies at the westernmost entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar, and the rich Mediterranean is just beyond. [Fig. 3] Second, establishing a consul in Morocco by the sea recognized a ubiquitous threat: pirates. The young U.S. could not afford exorbitant ransoms for captured sailors, nor could they afford to pay protective tribute to a foreign ruler in exchange for protection, but political recognition provided a form of maritime security from both attacks and expenses. Serendipitously, their plight lined up with the Moroccan sultan’s own development strategies, and he provided a small, stone structure rent-free to the Americans.

[3] De Leth, Map of the Straits of Gibraltar, original drawn in 1726, then printed in Amsterdam ca. 1740, hand-colored. Tangier American Legation Museum.

Located within Tangier’s ancient medina walls, the Legation building became the first U.S. property and diplomatic mission abroad on December 4, 1821, after Sultan Moulay Suliman (r. 1792 – 1822) gifted the land to the American people. Moulay Suliman (also known as Slimane) noted “I order and permit free trade with all Americans in any part of my empire… the Americans mean more to me than any other nation, and whatever footing the most favored nation is on, they are to be favored more than any other.” (1) The building’s diplomatic function lasted more than 140 years, after which the Legation assumed multiple rolls until its incarnation as a museum in 1976.

[4] The TALIM courtyard, 2013.

After a protracted length of time, the original 18th-century stone building was in need of repair. James de Long, consul from 1861 – 1862, complained of his lodgings: the dispatch and letter books were mutilated, the house dilapidated and leaking, the furniture broken, the books rotten, and the documents mildewed, if not eaten by mice [Hall, 128-30]. It was not until 1926 when Congress finally allocated funds to the new Consul Maxwell Black (serving between 1910 – 1917 and 1925 – 1941), who turned the old Legation building into an enlarged complex surrounding a courtyard, which is in essence what we see today on the ground. [Fig. 4] From 1927 – 1931, U.S. Consul Maxwell Blake undertook an ambitious program of restoration and renovation, gradually incorporating the surrounding buildings into the Legation (including a former brothel, which is now the research library). He also added doors, tilework, lanterns, grillwork, and mantelpieces from around Morocco and neighboring Spain that he meticulously selected [Wylie, 4 – 5]. The resulting harmonious blend of Andalusi and Moorish architectural traditions is still evident today throughout the museum in beautiful mashrabiya and a pavilion overlooking the courtyard.
During World War II, Tangier played a major role as a strategic entrance to the Mediterranean and hosted a number of Allied troops, including U.S. military personnel. The Legation building itself was used as a clandestine base by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and was the headquarters for military planning operations in North Africa that lead to landings in France and Italy in 1942. [Fig. 5] Tangier enjoyed a general reputation of intrigue and espionage throughout this period, which was captured in the 1942 film Casablanca (although this was filmed entirely in Hollywood).

[5] Sultan Mohammad V, President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the President’s villa at Casablanca on January 22, 1943. Image courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

[6] Ladder leading down into the cistern.
Image courtesy of TALIM.

After the end of the Spanish and French Protectorates and Moroccan independence in 1956, all foreign diplomatic missions moved to Rabat, Morocco’s new capital. The Legation building continued as the Consulate for five more years, until 1961 when it was turned first into a Western Arabic (Darija) language school for American diplomats (1961 – 1970) and then used as a Peace Corps training center (from 1970 – 1973) under Richard Holbrooke. During this time, the Legation building also developed a unique feature: a nightclub housed in the underground cistern called the Cistern Chapel, only accessible using a rickety metal ladder. [Fig. 6] It is easy to imagine the walls, still covered with graffiti, pulsing with music and candlelight late into the night. A Peace Corps volunteer from that time discusses the paintings: “one of the PC staff - a pretty good artist - did some murals, and then one night we got a little crazy with the paint and started putting our hands and feet and other body parts in paint and decorating the walls." [Fig. 7]

[7] Graffiti on one of the walls of the "Cistern Chapel." Image courtesy of TALIM.

This fond nostalgia is what infuses the walls and collections of the museum today. On July 4, 1976, in conjunction with the American bicentennial, a group of conservation-minded Americans established the Tangier American Legation Museum Society, transforming the old Legation building into a museum and cultural center. The museum and connected library document this rich history of the relationship between the United States and Morocco through its art collection, documents, seminars, concerts, lectures, and support services to the community.

[8] Malcolm Forbes Library in the Arab Pavilion, 2013.

The Legation promotes academic research in North Africa through an astoundingly deep library, one of the best on the history and culture of Morocco, which contains more than 8,000 materials in Arabic, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also contains the ambassadorial archives, memorabilia, and book collection of former Ambassador Joseph Verner Reed (1981 – 1984), and one of the only printed and bound copies of the Tangier Gazette, which ran in various forms from 1884 – 1960. Another hallmark of the library is a large collection of antique maps (some of which are on display in the museum) that document European, American, and Moroccan explorations of the region. Additionally, the Arab Pavilion of the museum houses Malcolm Forbes’ book collection and two large dioramas showing the Battle of the Three Kings and the Battle of Songhai. [Fig. 8]

[9] The Pericardis room, with Ion Paricardis’
Arab Groom and Horse (oil on canvas, c. 1880).
Tangier American Legation Museum.

The museum maintains a collection of engravings, maps, paintings, drawings, and artifacts spanning multiple media and over 1,000 years of Moroccan history. When it opened, the museum primarily featured a large gift of over 300 objects (maps, prints, paintings, mirrors, rugs, and a grandfather clock) donated to the museum by Donald Angus, many of which are still on display today. Other significant gifts came from Marguerite McBey, wife of Scottish artist James McBey, who donated her husband’s paintings and sketchbooks, and William Pickering, who donated a number of carpets from his personal collection. The ground floor of the museum showcases Moroccan and international artists who have worked in and depicted Morocco from the 17th to 20th centuries, as well as a set of rooms dedicated to the life and works of Paul Bowles, including his music recordings. The upper floors are laid out as a series of period rooms filled with antique carpets, historical prints, documents, engravings, paintings, and maps. These objects “all reflect the fascinated affectation [Tangier] has long evoked in visitors” and combine to tell engaging stories about the past [Wylie, 9] . One such room, decorated with paintings, carpets, and Angus’ grandfather clock, tells the story of Ion Pericardis. [Fig. 9]

[10] Museum display showing Raisuli (upper left)
and Pericardis (bottom right).

The room details the saga of Ion Pericardis, a Greek-American playboy prominent in Tangier’s foreign community, who on May 8, 1904 was kidnapped by Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli’s bandits. [Fig. 10] Raisuli, who has been described as a combination of Robin Hood, feudal baron, and tyrannical bandit, was considered the last of the Barbary Pirates. In return for Pericardis, Raisuli demanded a $70,000 ransom, safe conduct, and control of two of Morocco’s wealthiest districts from Sultan Abdelaziz (r. 1878 – 1943). Despite the circumstances, Pericardis came to admire Raisuli, even going so far as to say “He is not a bandit, not a murderer, but a patriot forced into acts of brigandage to save his native soil and his people from the yoke of tyranny” [Forbes, 74]. The episode eventually culminated in Secretary of State John Hay sending a wire stating: “The government wants Pericardis alive or Raisuli dead” before Pericardis was eventually released on June 21, 1904 after pressure on the Sultan to accept Raisuli’s demands. The kidnapping story was loosely adapted into the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion, with a significant Hollywood twist: Pericardis was played by Candice Bergen. The room houses paintings by Pericardis in addition to photographs of himself, his kidnapper, and a copy of the wire sent by John Hay, all attempts to bring the saga alive for visitors more than a century later.

[11] James McBey, Zohra, May 1952, oil on canvas.
Tangier American Legation Museum.

The museum is full of objects that spin stories and tell tales, including James McBey’s 1952 oil painting, Zohra, who is known as the “Moroccan Mona Lisa” for her eyes that follow the visitor around the room [Fig. 11]; a 19th-century toy theatre likely from the French Pellerin d’Epinel (a woodcutter and card maker founded in 1796) meant to entertain visitors; a letter from George Washington to Moulay Abdallah; three sets of prehistoric arrowheads from the Grottos of Hercules; a collection of posters left over from the Jazz ambassadors from the 1960s; and, last but not least, Henry Kissinger’s tie. All of these stories bring to life the collections and history of the Legation, showcasing its role as a repository of the relationship between the U.S. and Morocco. More than that, the Legation creates a cultural bridge between two worlds, between past and present, and between fantasy and reality.
**This post is part of a co-production with Tajine, a podcast about the Maghreb. To hear Ayla discuss her work with TALIM's museum collection, check out Tajine's podcast Inside the Tangier American Legation:

**The Museum, located at 8 Zankat America in the old medina, is open Monday through Thursday from 10:00 to 1:00 and from 3:00 to 5:00, and Fridays from 10:00 to 12:00 and 3:00 to 5:00, or by appointment on the weekends. To schedule a weekend or group appointment, visitors can contact Museum Curator Mohammed Jadidi (curator.talim@gmail.com or +212 539 93 53 17). To make appointments in the research library, open daily from 10:00 to 3:00, contact the Associate Director Yhtimad Bouziane (assocdirector.talim@gmail.com) or Administrative Assistant Latifa Samadi (adm.talim@gmail.com). Any additional questions can be directed to director.talim@gmail.com.

AYLA AMON currently works in the Islamic Art Department of The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is also an M.A. Candidate in Museum Studies at The George Washington University.
(1) Letter from Moulay Suleiman to Consul General John Mullowny, dated December 4, 1821. Original located at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Record Group 59).
FORBES, Rosita. The Sultan of the Mountains, the Life Story of Raisuli. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1924.HALL, Louella.The United States and Morocco 1776 – 1956. Methuen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1971.Secretary of State. The Secretary of State’s Register of Culturally Significant Property. Washington, D.C., 2010.Tangier American Legation.“A Brief History.” United States Embassy.“Strengthening U.S.-Morocco Relations.” WYLIE, Diana. Enchantment: Pictures from the Tangier American Legation Museum. Tangier: Tangier American Legation Museum, 2010.
Citation: "The Americans in Tangier," Ayla Amon, Stambouline (April 12, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/04/the-americans-in-tangier.html

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Stambouline has teamed up with the Ottoman History Podcast for the first episode of season 4. In this installment, we have have ventured out into the streets of Istanbul in search of sounds that can help us recover (or re-imagine) the urban experience of the Ottoman capital. And while the posts here on Stambouline primarily focus on the visual aspects of buildings and objects from the Ottoman world, thinking about the sounds and smells of a city offers a lively perspective on daily life. Taking our cue from scholars such as Nina Ergin or Jale Erzen, we delve into the soundscape of Ottoman Istanbul.

In conjunction with the podcast, we have created a short quiz where you can test your own knowledge of the sounds of Istanbul. Listen to a clip, and then click on the button below to reveal where these sounds were recorded in the city. See if you can guess all six locations correctly!

1. Nostalgic Journey

2. Helal Olsun!

3. Thirsty Ottomans

4. In Search of Silence

5. Hitching a Ride

6. Performing the Past

And also be sure to check out our Google Map showing where we have been recording in the city.

EMILY NEUMEIER is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania researching art and architecture in the Ottoman world.

CHRIS GRATIEN is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University researching the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East.

contribution by Emily Neumeier

Emir Hıdır Bey Mosque, 1791-92, Soma. Photograph of the interior from SALT Research.

As the rescue operations in Soma extend into a fourth day (with the most recent, and supposedly final, death count of 301 men lost in the mine), tensions continue to rise in this small town and across the country. Peoples' grief and shock have quickly transformed into frustration over the government's baffling response to these events. In the past few days, several iconic images have already emerged to define the Soma disaster: the stark contrast between the bright yellow hardhats covering soot-black faces, exhausted families and friends waiting for more news, a government aide kicking a protester prostrate on the ground, and the now ubiquitous black solidarity ribbon.

Yet, while new outlets and social media continue to be flooded with these images and more, this week my mind cannot help but keep drifting back to my visit to Soma about a year ago. Having rented a car in Istanbul and crossed the Marmara with the ferry, we made a point of taking the longer route to Manisa just to make a stop in Soma. My goal was to see the Emir Hıdır Bey Mosque, constructed in 1791-2 by a Süleyman Bey, one of the most beautiful and well-preserved buildings decorated in what could be called a lively "vernacular Baroque" style, which was prevalent throughout the Ottoman provinces in the 18th century. The day my friend and I visited Soma, it kept raining off and on, and the air was cool and crisp. When we arrived in the late morning, we discovered that the building was closed outside of prayer time, so we were invited to wait for the imam in a coffee house across the street. Plied with warm drinks and lively conversation about politics and the latest television shows, an hour seemed to fly by as we watched local workers and retirees flow in and out of the mosque. After the mid-day prayer, the smartly-dressed imam finally materialized, paid for our Nescafes, and ushered us back across the street with great ceremony. The building rightly filled him with great pride, and he told us that there were very few mosques in the world like it. I would certainly have to agree.

I came away from Soma with the impression that this was a town that not only laid claim to beautiful buildings, but also very warm people. As this tragedy continues to unfold, our thoughts are with the men and women there who have been affected.

EMILY NEUMEIER is a Ph.D. candidate at at the University of Pennsylvania.

ARIK, Rüçhan. Batılılaşma dönemi Türk mimarisi örneklerinden Anadolu'da üç ahşap cami. Ankara: Ankara Universitesi Baımevi, 1973.

Citation: "Another Side to Soma," Emily Neumeier, Stambouline (May 17, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/05/another-side-to-soma.html

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The Al-Anwar Mosque of Acre
guest contributor Michael Talbot

[1] Entrance portal to the al-Anwar Mosque, Acre. All photos by Michael Talbot.

Acre is a picturesque port city on the northern tip of the Bay of Haifa, now in Israel, but once a prominent part of Ottoman Palestine. Indeed, the settlement served as the seat of a significant sub-province (sancak) in the Galilee region. To this day, Acre retains a number of significant architectural features that mark out various stages of its history, which, as with many of the urban centres of northern Palestine, saw struggles for authority between foreign invaders, local elites, and the Sublime State.

[2] Hammam al-Basha, Steam Room

At Acre’s heart is the Old City, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its superbly preserved Crusader and Ottoman buildings and fortifications. The city has a complex history, particularly in the Ottoman period, but if Acre tourist board’s narrative is anything to go by, the founding father of modern Acre was Ahmad Pasha (1720-1804), a Bosnian slave who rose to political prominence in Egypt and then Palestine. Perhaps better known by his nickname ‘al-Jazzar’, or ‘the butcher’, Ahmad Pasha is responsible for one of the most-frequented stops on the tourist trail in Acre’s old city: the Hammam al-Basha (originally the Hammam al-Jadid). Probably first built in the 1790s, the hammam continued to function right up until the 1950s, when it was turned into a museum. A large building, it contains several rooms, including the cloakroom and treatment rooms, that are very well-preserved. But the star of the show is the atmospheric sıcaklık (hot room), a hexagonal chamber lined with very nice examples of floral tilework on the walls, beautiful marble floors, and a fountain at the centre of a marble slab used for massages and relaxation, all under an elegant dome dotted with pieces of glass that bathe the interior in sunlight. [Fig.2]

But before all this, upon entering the hamam, visitors are ushered into the large vaulted and domed room that once served as the bath’s entrance lobby, and are seated on rather precarious wooden stools to watch a film. Entitled Ha-Balan ha-Akharon / Al-Khadim al-Hammam al-Akhir (The Last Bath Attendant), the short film tells the story of Acre through the gossip of five generations of bath attendants, most notably (the fictional) al-Hajj Bashir who regales his clients with tales of the city as he lathers and slaps them. Above all, al-Hajj Bashir favours stories about Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar. In the film’s narrative, it is al-Jazzar who turned Acre into a great city, developed its infrastructure, and, most significantly, defeated the invading forces of Napoleon Bonaparte during the siege of the city in 1799. In the film, his reign also represented a period of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Acre, and the heavy emphasis that the modern municipality places on the eighteenth century as a period of harmony is clearly rooted in their aspirations for the city today. This narrative is helped along by the fact that al-Jazzar’s chief advisor was a Jew called Khayim Farkhi. However, Farkhi’s story also emphasises a concurrent narrative surrounding Ahmad Pasha’s gruesome nickname. The story goes that one day, displeased with the advice Farkhi had given him, Ahmad Pasha ordered one of his eyes to be plucked out, and his ears and nose mutilated. This is not, then, the story of a just and progressive ruler, but of a violent despot. Whether or not al-Jazzar deserves any of his reputations is another matter, but his military prowess, colourful biography, and extensive patronage of monumental buildings makes him, if nothing else, a tourist board’s dream.

[3] Al-Anwar Mosque and complex

One legacy of Ahmad Pasha that continues to dominate the old city of Acre is a large mosque, now known as the Al-Jazzar Mosque, but properly called Al-Anwar, built in or around 1781-82. [Fig. 3] The mosque’s distinctive green dome is visible across the city, but is by no means the mosque’s most notable feature. It also claims to possess a hair of the Prophet Muhammad’s beard, and purports to be the first mosque to have the women’s prayer area situated on a balcony above the main prayer hall, allegedly modelled on the layout of synagogues and evidence of the influence of Khayim Farkhi on the mosque’s design. What the building certainly does possess are some real gems of eighteenth century design.

[4] The Sebil

The first feature, the sebil (a water dispensary), greets you as you prepare to ascend the steps into the mosque complex. [Fig. 4] It was built, according to its inscription, in the hijri year 1208 (1793/1794), and constructed in the wonderful baroque sort of style found in architecture throughout the Ottoman Empire during this period. With slender columns topped with ornamented capitals, the sebil served as an elegant and functional welcome to the mosque and a sign of Ahmad Pasha’s wealth, generosity, and sophistication. As well as displaying words of piety, the inscription also reminds the reader of the ruler’s infrastructural innovations, notably the construction of water canals to bring water to Acre from the many springs near the village of Al-Kabri, some 8 miles (13 km) away.

The entrance gate to the mosque complex proper has an inscription, which sets the tone for other inscriptions and styles within. Describing the pious intentions of a certain vizier to build a mosque, it concludes by asking who was it that actually set construction in motion? The inscription replies to itself, ‘I say, “Vizier Ahmad al-Jazzar! By him I mean the most noble and exalted of men, the pouncing lion, the mighty lion in the heat of battle’ (قلت الوزير الاحمد الجزار أعني به النشهم المجلل في الورى ليث هزبر في الوغا كراز). This, at the peak of his political power in the nominally Ottoman realms of northern Palestine, was a clear statement of intent and legacy. We see Ahmad Pasha demonstrating his credentials as a ruler: caring for the welfare of his subjects as shown through the sebil, and certainly not afraid to use force.

[5] The Sundial

Moving through the gate into the carefully maintained courtyard, one gets a true sense of the beauty of the Al-Anwar complex. It contains a number of interesting features, including the tomb of Ahmad Pasha and his son Süleyman, and a number of other türbes, including a very late Ottoman example, dated 1318 (1900/1901). It also houses rooms that hosted the courthouse, medreses (including one that is still used for that purpose), and libraries. Various other monuments dot the space. Looking up rather than down, I almost stumbled over a small marble disc inscribed with the tuğra of Abdülhamid II and the hijri date 1318, almost certainly placed there in commemoration of the Silver Jubilee of that sultan in 1900. The fact that the disc is also situated underneath a tree may indicate that the tree was also planted to celebrate that event. There is also an exquisite sundial, with the inscription dedicated to Ahmad Pasha and dated 1201 (1786/1787). [Fig. 5] The inscription declares that ‘this is the sundial for the communal mosque of the lights of Ahmad’ (هذا مزولة لجامع الانوار الاحمدية) and tells us that the sundial was made by one Ibrahim al-Faradi al-Kurdi.

[6] The Şadırvan

But the real star of the courtyard is the şadırvan, the fountain used for ablutions. [Fig. 6] The octagonal structure is in many ways typical of late eighteenth-century Ottoman architecture, notable for its thin, graceful marble columns headed with carved capitals, and a distinctive cupola. The aesthetic borrowings from eighteenth-century Istanbul are clear, with design comparable to buildings such as the Zeynep Sultan or Laleli mosques, which adds an extra architectural element to the political challenge Ahmad Pasha posed to the Ottoman authorities during his period of rule in Palestine. Yet it is also, in itself, an impressive piece of design and engineering.

[7] Façade of the Al-Anwar Mosque

The façade of the mosque itself is quite striking. [Fig. 7] Six columns of granite and coloured marble columns frame the front of the building, behind which there is a dazzling array of marble facings of different colours and grains. Given the quality and type of stone, it is almost certain that they have been taken from nearby ruined Roman towns, with Caesarea the most likely location. Among the wondrous cacophony of coloured marble is an inscription above the main entrance, a poem in Arabic celebrating the dedication of the mosque in the hijri year 1196 (1781/1782). [Fig. 1] As well as expounding the virtues of visiting the mosque for prayer, it contains reference to Ahmad Pasha’s fearsome reputation, requesting that worshipers pray to God for the mosque’s benefactor, ‘that is, the noble vizier Ahmad who butchers the necks of the enemies as is proper’ (ذاك الوزير الشهم احمد من غدي جزارعناق العداة كما يجب). Once again, Ahmad Pasha does not mince his words when linking his religious patronage with his political authority. Yet here we see that his violence was not arbitrary: being violent, on occasion, was part of his duty as a ruler as a means of ensuring good governance.

[8] Interior Arcade

The mosque’s interior is lined with more marble, as well as tile-work and Qur’anic verses, both of which the mosque’s custodian believed had been added after Ahmad Pasha’s time. However, as the verses seem to be primarily taken from Sura 48 (Al-Fath), they seem rather appropriate for a conquering hero like al-Jazzar. [Fig. 8] Regardless, the interior is opulent, with a beautifully carved minbar and ornate mihrab set against a backdrop of ancient marble. [Fig. 9] The space of the mosque is light and impressive, and doubtless made a great impression on worshipers when it was completed.

[9] Interior view of the mihrab and minbar. Adapted from a photo by MartinVMtl, Creative Commons License

The city of Acre today certainly seems to have bought into Ahmad al-Jazzar’s propaganda, portraying him as a colourful character prone to outbursts of extreme and arbitrary violence. In terms of his violent reputation, he evidently took great efforts to promote it himself, but always as reasonable violence for the good of societal order and harmony; violence ‘as is proper’, as his own inscription proclaimed. It is difficult to separate the beautiful Al-Anwar mosque from the man whose name it now bears, or rather, from the reputation that has been built around him. That said, because it is still a functioning mosque, it has largely escaped the touristification that has befallen Acre's Crusader and Ottoman sites. The mosque, more than the other buildings, perhaps gives us a more nuanced picture of a man whose escapades have become almost cartoonish through the telling and re-telling of his already hazy story. Although he is most celebrated for beating back the French, and to a lesser extent for building on the work of Zahir al-‘Umar in fortifying the urban centres of northern Palestine, this particular example of Ahmad Pasha’s monumental architecture gives us more of an insight into other features of his rule. Many of his buildings, as with those of al-‘Umar, focus on social and economic prosperity and enrichment. The sebil is not only notable because it is beautiful, but alsobecause it represents the end point of a major engineering project aimed at bringing water to the city. The courtyard houses the marble-fronted mosque boasting of the Pasha’s greatness, but it also contains the key social building-blocks of education and welfare provision. The mere achievement of the construction of the great mosque itself, built in part from the ancient ruins of the surrounding region, represented economic and political stability. Ahmad Pasha may have been a butcher, but through Al-Anwar he ultimately served up a nice roast dinner to the people of Acre.

[10] Exterior of the Mosque. Photo from the collection of the American Colony (Jerusalem), ca 1898-1914.
Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

MICHAEL TALBOT is currently a teaching fellow at the University of St. Andrews.

For more information, see:

--The entry for "Jami' al-Jazzar," at ARCHnet
--The official tourism website for Old Akko.
--UNESCO World Heritage Description of the Old Ctiy of Acre

Citation: "The Lights of Ahmad," Michael Talbot, Stambouline (June 14, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/06/the-lights-of-ahmad.html

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guest contribution by Benjamin Anderson

[1] The Yenidze, Dresden (2011). Photo by author.

In recent decades, the efforts of Muslim communities in central Europe to build minarets at their places of worship have frequently met with resistance. In 2009, a Swiss referendum forbidding the construction of new minarets attracted widespread coverage in the foreign press, and the measure eventually passed with 57.5% of the vote. In Germany, opposition to minarets has repeatedly emerged at the local level. Already in the early 1990s, the planned construction of a new minaret by the Muslim community of the town of Bobingen provoked a public controversy. More recently, a new mosque in Cologne led to a protracted battle between the patrons and their architects on one side, and planning boards and community groups on the other. The size and design of the minarets played a central role in this debate.

[2] The complex of Qaytbay, Cairo.

Émile Prisse d’Avennes, L’art arabe (1869-77).

The first-time visitor to Dresden would be forgiven for thinking that the Saxon capital had overcome its minaret anxiety over a century ago. Along the banks of the Elbe, less than a kilometer from the city center in which Augustus the Strong once built a court that was the envy of Baroque Europe, a prominent four-tiered tower, executed in the alternating bands of red and white (“ablaq”) masonry typical of the medieval architecture of the Islamic Mediterranean, stands proudly beside a stained-glass art nouveau dome [Fig 1]. However, closer inspection will reveal that this is no minaret, but a (now de-commissioned) smoke-stack; and that the inscription at the base of the dome bears the name of a cigarette company.

The “Orientalische Tabak- und Cigarettenfabrik Yenidze” (Yenidze Oriental Tobacco and Cigarette Manufactory), founded in 1886, was named after the city of Yenice-i Vardar, today Giannitsa in northern Greece, where its tobacco was grown. The company’s leading brand, “Salem Aleikum” cigarettes, quickly garnered a large share of the German market, and in 1907 the firm’s owner, Carl Hugo Zietz, purchased a plot in Dresden for a new factory. For his architect, Zietz hired Martin Hammitzsch, who turned to the same publications that had been serving European designers in search of “oriental” themes since the previous century, and Émile Prisse d’Avennes’s L’art arabe (1869-77) was pilfered once more for its views of the Mamluk complexes of Cairo’s Northern Cemetery. The base of Hammitzsch’s dome, a beveled cube pierced by three portholes arranged in a triangle and a row of three narrow, arched windows, is a direct quotation from the fifteenth-century complex of Sultan Qaytbay [Fig 2].

[3] “Ein Stück Orient an der Elbe” (“A piece of the Orient on the Elbe”).
Advertisement, Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig, 1916).

[4] Facade, the Yenidze, Dresden (2011).
Photo by author.

The factory was inaugurated in 1912 and immediately pressed into service as the company’s trademark. Consider a full-page advertisement from the pages of the Leipzig Illustrirte Zeitung of 1916, at the height of the First World War [Fig 3]. The factory, viewed from the prow of a ship cruising up the river, towers over the skyline of the Baroque city, whose spires are sketched in above the arches of the Marienbrücke. The text at lower right explains that this “piece of the Orient... captures the glance of every traveler, and makes him wonder if he has landed on the banks of the Elbe or those of the Bosporus.” The “proud building,” we are told, is built in the “strictly classical Oriental style.... With its richly ornamented facade, its colorful mosaic inlays, and its Moorish window arches, whose character emerges in a different form on each story [Fig 4], the building will enchant even the well-traveled gentleman.”

[5] The Salonika Front, 1916.
Le Pays de France, 31. August 1916.

Although the mention of the Bosporus might be an oblique reference to the German-Ottoman military alliance in World War I, a different member of the Central Powers is featured in the military scene in the advertisement’s foreground. Underneath the red, white, and black of the German flag that flies from the rigging, we find the tricolor of the Kingdom of Bulgaria. To the right, a German soldier stands on the ship’s deck, his hands jauntily tucked into his pockets and a Salem Aleikum dangling from his lip beneath the signature Feldmütze. The jovial fellow seated beside him wears the red epaulettes of the Bulgarian army. In 1916, the Central Powers were pushing the Salonika front southwards, deep into the newly Greek heartlands of central Macedonia, and the advertisement may be anticipating the incorporation of Yenice-i Vardar into Greater Bulgaria [Fig 5].

[6] Fagus Werk, Alfeld, Germany.
Photo by Carsten Janssen, 2007 (Creative Commons).

In the end, of course, the Central Powers lost the war, and the town of Yenice stayed Greek. Hammitzch’s building was on the losing side of architectural history as well. His Qaytbay knockoff quickly came to seem a retardataire essay in historicism—25 years before, the complex had already inspired the “mosque” of the “Rue du Caire” constructed for the Universal Exposition in Paris. Industrial architecture was now expected to follow the functional, modernist lead of Walter Gropius’s Fagus Werk, completed in 1913 [Fig 6]. In 1929, a critic writing in the journal Der Industriebau singled out Yenidze as an exemplary failure: “this building, which can only be considered a piece of advertisement, does not have the slightest relationship to the operations that it houses.”

[7] Section, the Yenidze, Dresden (1996).
After Richter, Industriearchitektur.

Hammitzsch became a convinced nationalist. In 1936, he married Hitler’s half-sister, and nine years later, as the Allies pounded Dresden with bombs, he committed suicide. While much of the city’s historical core was leveled, Yenidze suffered only minor damage, and the factory continued to crank out cigarettes during the first decades of the Communist German Democratic Republic. Fritz Löffler, a local art historian who led the drive to rebuild the city center, simultaneously campaigned to have the Yenidze torn down. This nearly happened in 1960, but the era of militant modernism was ending. By the beginning of 1980s, Yenidze was registered as a protected historical monument, and in 1996, six years after German reunification, a healthy sum was spent on its documentation and renovation [Fig 7]. Today, the Yenidze serves as an office building. The space under the dome, however, is rented by 1001 Märchen GmbH (The Thousand and One Fairy Tales, LLC), which uses it as a stage for such entertainments as Aladdin und die Wunderlampe (“Aladdin and the magic lamp”) and Neue, überraschende Abenteuer von Sindbad, dem Seefahrer (“The new and surprising adventures of Sindbad, the Sailor”).

[8] DITIB-Zentralmoschee, Cologne.
Photo by Pappnaas666, 2013 (Creative Commons).

At the height of the controversy over the Cologne Mosque, the architects and their clients appeased the local authorities by agreeing to build “more abstract and less traditional minarets” than originally planned. The resulting towers bear a certain resemblance to smoke-stacks [Fig 8]. In the meantime, the “strictly classical” minaret of Yenidze has become a vestigial beacon for a site of commerce and entertainment, as unabashedly Orientalist as ever. The modernists would be appalled, but the postmodern tourist will find plenty to ponder in this tale of form fighting against function.

BENJAMIN ANDERSON is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

LUPFER, Gilbert, Bernhard Sterra and Martin Wörner, eds., Architekturführer Dresden. Berlin: Reimer, 1997 (For Yenidze, see: 92-93).

RICHTER, Tilo. Industriearchitektur in Dresden. Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1997 (For Yenidze, see: 64-65).

Citation: "'A Piece of the Orient on the Elbe," Benjamin Anderson, Stambouline (July 17, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/07/a-piece-of-orient-on-elbe.html

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guest contribution by Michael Połczyński

[1] Kruszyniany’s 18th-century wooden mosque, with its characteristic square towers.
Kruszyniany, Poland. Photograph by the author.

[2] Bohoniki’s mosque, built in the mid-19th century.
Bohoniki, Poland. Photo by author.

Tucked in among the bison-infested forests, rolling fields of wheat and neatly ordered bowers of North East Poland are two tidy, little wooden mosques. [Figs 1 & 2] While the expansive skyline of this region (known as Podlasie) is broken mainly by storks’ nests and the onion domes of churches, these unassuming mosques in the small villages of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany are nevertheless well known throughout Poland and continue to serve a Muslim population that has existed in the region since the 13th century—the so-called Lipka Tatars. The relative religious tolerance of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which joined under the same monarch in 1386, kept its large Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant communities from engaging in the religious wars that engulfed neighboring lands and led to the settlement of the largest Jewish population in early modern Europe. A lesser-known fact is that Poland and Lithuania was also home to one of the largest integrated, legally protected Muslim communities in Christian Europe following the “reconquista” of the Iberian Peninsula. Today, Bohoniki and Kruszyniany are host to the last surviving historical mosques in Poland, the rest of which were destroyed during the 19th and 20th centuries, or are now located in Belarus or Lithuania as a result of border changes following World War II. [Fig 3]

[3] Mosque in Novogrodek, Belarus. The lantern is a common feature
in Lipka Tatar mosques. Photo by Holly Robertson.

[4] A Tatar. Part of a series on horsemen by
Flemish engraver Abraham de Bruyn, 1575.

The word “Lipka” appeared first in Arabic and Ottoman texts, and is thought to be derived from the name “Litva”, or Lithuania. Over time, the Muslims of Poland-Lithuania gradually ceased to speak their native Turkic dailect and adopted the local Slavic idiom. It is unclear why the Ottoman-Arabic term “Lipka” came into popular use during the 17th century, after this shift in language was largely complete. Alternatively, Ottoman documents also refer to the Muslims of Poland-Lithuania as Leh Tatarları, or Polish Tatars (“Leh” meant “Pole”, as “Lehistan” was the Ottoman and Persian name for all of Poland-Lithuania). [Fig 4] Muslim settlement in the lands of Poland and Lithuania began as early as the 13th century during events connected to the Mongol-led invasions of Rus’, Poland, and Hungary. Furthermore, internal strife within the neighboring lands of the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, and the Ottoman Empire caused the flight and resettlement of Muslim exiles to Lithuania and Poland for centuries. Most were settled in contested borderlands as light cavalry and frontiersmen in the official service of the then-pagan Lithuanian Dukes. In the 15th century, Lithuanian patronage of Muslim refugees who fled the Golden Horde during wars of succession was instrumental to the rise of the Giray Khans of the Crimean Khanate. Hacı Giray Khan, the progenitor of the Chinggisid clan that ruled the Crimean Khanate until the end of the 18th century, was born in Trakai near the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, and may therefore be considered, in a sense, a Lipka Tatar. Units of Lipka Tatar soldiers were a constant presence in Polish armies until the Second World War.

[5] Mosque from Slonim, Belarus, pre-WWII.
Its triple towers resemble those of
local orthodox wooden churches.
Photo courtesy of Holly Robertson.

The result of centuries of settlement by notable Muslim renegades, exiles and prisoners of war was a sizable, legally protected Muslim population that resided mainly in the Lithuanian portion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the end of the 17th century. In 1679, King Jan III Sobieski (famous for defeating Kara Mustafa at the second siege of Vienna, in the process acquiring many Ottoman tents) awarded a number of his Muslim troops with land in Crown Polish territory, including the villages of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany. Today’s Lipka Tatar communities, whose roots can be found in the unique socio-political structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, are spread throughout Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania. Most found themselves in Lithuania and Belarus following World War II, though thousands of families have since emigrated to Poland. Several other mosques like those in Bohoniki and Kruszyniany can therefore still be found in rural communities in Belarus and Lithuania. Like those in Poland, many were destroyed in the conflagrations of the 19th and 20th centuries. [Fig 5] Some of these have been rebuilt in brick and concrete, preserving only the lanterns that surmounted the roofs of the original structures. [Fig 6]

[6] The mosque of Slonim today. The original structure was burned down during WWII. Photo by Holly Robertson.

There are over 30,000 Muslims living in Poland today. Many, however, are the descendants of recent non-Tatar émigrés. Lipka Tatars in Poland tend to self-identify as being ethnically Tatar, Polish nationals, and confessionally Muslim. Over the centuries, numerous Lipka Tatar families converted to Christianity (both Orthodox and Catholic) and some of these now-Christian families maintain a sense of their ethnic Tatar past. Establishing reliable population figures for Lipka Tatars is therefore difficult. Famous non-Muslims that have claimed Lipka ancestry include 19th century Polish novelist Henryk Siekiewicz, Poland’s current president Bronisław Komorowski, and American actor Charles Bronson. Today the villages of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany each have only a handful of Lipka Tatar families left. The mosque in Kruszyniany functions as a museum as well as a prayer space and lacks an imam, though the mosque and its grounds are often put to use by local Muslims. The imam of Bohoniki, Aleksander “Ali” Bazarewicz serves some 600 Lipka Tatars that are spread throughout the rural areas of North East Poland.

[7] The mosque at Kruszyniany as it appeared
in the interwar period (1929).

The unique historical religious practices of the Lipka Tatar community are reflected in the design of both of these mosques, which, though originally built in the 18th and 19th centuries, preserve characteristics of 16th- and 17th-century mosque construction in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Like the ubiquitous wooden churches that have served the rural Christian population of Podlasie for centuries, both mosques are of a modest, all-wooden construction. If it were not for the crescents surmounting the onion domes, the mosque's lanterns and steeple-like towers may otherwise cause them to be easily confused with local Christian religious structures. Recent renovations have replaced the wooden siding of their exteriors and altered some of the framing and woodwork. [Compare Fig 1 and Fig 7] However, the 18th- and 19th-century aesthetics of the structures have seemingly been preserved. By the early 20th century, both structures were painted a lurid green common to Lipka Tatar mosques throughout the region, though Bohoniki’s mosque has recently been stripped of its paint to reveal the natural wood of its construction. [See Fig 2]

[8] Kruszyniany mosque's mihrab and minbar. The decorations and fixtures are mostly modern, though original woodwork and panels of 19th century decoration are preserved.
Photo by the author.

The interiors of both mosques continue to display original mortise and tenon joint construction and a few wooden panels decorated with symbolic designs that are partly rooted in the shamanistic traditions that the local community brought with them from the Crimean Khanate and the Hordes. Each structure has two rooms with high ceilings and a gallery in the main prayer space facing the mihrab, which takes the form of a low wooden niche protruding from the main structure. [Fig 8] A solid wall with a high bank of windows separates the men’s and women’s prayer rooms. A single entrance with a hall running down one side of Bohoniki’s mosque gives access to both men’s and women’s prayer spaces. Kruszyniany has two separate external entrances separating the sexes. The minbars of both mosques are of an austere design and resemble cathedrae that appear in local Catholic sacral structures. Polish-Lithuanian cadastral records (lustracjas) document the presence of a mosque in Bohoniki as early as 1717, though the current structure, with its square footprint and high copula, dates to the 19th century. Kruszyniany’s mosque, which was likely built at the end of the 18th century and was refurbished in 1846, is rectangular in shape with two towers on the north end that resemble the bell towers of baroque Catholic churches. Both buildings lack minarets, as Lipka Tatars traditionally did not perform the ezan from high structures, most likely due to legal constraints dictated by the majority Christian Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

[9] Title page of the Risâle-i Tatar-i Leh,
reprinted by Polish orientalist Antoni
Muchlinski in 1858.

A unique Ottoman document called the Risâle-i Tatar-i Leh (“Polish Tatar Account”) [Fig 9], composed in 1558 in the court of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent by three Muslims on hajj from Poland-Lithuania gives some insight into the form of these structures:

For one who has had the good fortune to see the magnificent temples of the Sublime Porte, it is a sad task to describe our sanctuaries of prayer… Instead of those magnificent mosques, whose vaults reach the heavens, minarets lost in the azure heavenly spheres, whose pillars, like burnished mirrors, reflect the most beautiful objects, whose cloisters and courtyards are orchards, their lawns painted with the most sumptuous patterns— Here our mosques are poor and lowly, built of wood, similar in form to some mosques in the villages of Rumelia, without minarets or imarets, though in every large city (in our land) there are mosques… Ezan is called in front of the mosque. In some places, strange in this regard, one of our community walks through the streets calling out that it is time for prayer… In these mosques there is a special place in the form of a chamber [reserved] for women, which is separated from the men, and where [the men] are not allowed to enter, so as not to violate the law that prohibits [men] from praying together with women… The creation of grander mosques is quite difficult here, for it is illegal to build new [mosques] without the approval of the government.

[10] An older section of the cemetery in Kruszyniany. The graves are simple, local unshaped granite with deeply carved inscriptions in various scripts. Photo by the author.

An expansive cemetery can be found behind the mosque in Kruszyniany, indicating that a prayer space likely existed in the village long before the current 19th-century mosque. [Fig 10] The oldest grave dates to 1699, and belongs to Samuel Mirza Krzeczowski, a commander of the Lipka Tatar cavalry unit that was originally settled there by Jan III Sobieski in 1679. The 16th-century authors of the Risâle-i Tatar-i Leh tell us that,

We have our graves before our mosques, just as it is in Istanbul, though our headstones do not boast such beautiful writing recalling the dead and attesting to the transience of this world. However, in these cemeteries wives and their relatives who are of different faiths are not buried together with Muslims, in accordance with our laws.

As time passed, the headstones of this community did become more ornate. The mixture of scripts and languages points to the complex political history of the region. Just as in the historical literature of the Lipka Tatars, many early inscriptions are written in Polish and Belorussian using Arabic script. Later periods saw the introduction of Russian following the partitioning and dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, alongside more defiant grave markers from the same period that continued to display Polish and Belorussian, which were forbidden at the time. Today the historical cemeteries of both mosques continue to grow, as Lipka Tatars throughout Poland seek burial in their ancestral land.

[11] This Brooklyn mosque was, until recently, the site
of the “The Islamic Center of Polish Tatars”.
Photo by Caitlin Kalinoski.

Despite a rocky period during the 17th century that saw the large-scale defection of Muslim soldiers from Poland-Lithuania to the Ottoman Empire, Lipka Tatars participated in nearly every major conflict against external forces since the turn of the 14th century, most recently against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The continued existence of the Lipka Tatar community has therefore become an important element within Polish national consciousness. As a result, the mosques of Bohoniki and Kruszyniany have both been awarded the official status of “pomnik historii” (historical monument) and are legally protected by the Polish government. A detailed study of the historical relationship between Polish-Lithuanian Muslim communities and the Ottoman Empire has yet to be undertaken. During periods of intense emigration of Poles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lipka Tatars resettled with their countrymen all over the world, founding in one instance what in 1937 Time Magazine lauded as the “only full-fledged Moslem Mosque in the U.S… Its swart, thick-accented Imam, Sam Rafilowich, son of an Imam in a Polish village, is a Polish Tartar, who arrived in the U. S. 29 years ago. Most of his habitual worshippers are also Tartars, descendants of Tamerlane's hordes…” The mosque can still be found in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and boasts a lovely lantern on the peak of its roof reminiscent of those found in Bohoniki and Kruszyniany. [Fig 11]

The influence of Ottoman religious practice, especially through the mediation of the Crimean Khanate no doubt had influence on the religious practice of Lipka Tatars, as well as in the construction and decoration of their mosques. Polish scholars have been aware of the tantalizing historical relationship between the Polish-Lithuanian Muslim community with the most proximate and powerful Muslim polity, the Ottoman Empire, since the 19th century. Evident architectural connections between Lipka Tatar mosques and those constructed in Crimea and by Balkan Muslim populations have yet to be explored. The close resemblance that these Lipka Tatar mosques to local Christian churches indicates a unity of sacral architectural traditions that make the mosques of the former Polish-Lithuanian lands a stylistically cohesive and fascinating group of structures.

MICHAEL POLCZYNSKI is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University.

“ALLAH Akbar… God is Great…” Time Magazine 30/20 (Monday, Nov. 15, 1937).
BORAWSKI, Piotr. “Z Dziejów Kolonizacji Tatarskiej w Wielkim Księstwei Litewskim I w Polsce (XIV-XVII w.).” Przegląd Orientalistyczny 104/4 (1977): 291-304.
DANECKI, Janusz. “Literature of the Polish Tatars” in Muslims in Poland and East Europe: widening the European discourse on Islam, ed. Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska. Warsaw: Zakład Graficzny Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2001: 40-52.
KOPANSKI, Ataullah Bogdan. “Muslim Communities of the European North-Eastern Frontiers: Islam in they Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” in The Islamic World and the West: Managing Religious and Cultural Identities: 95.
---. “Znajomość Państwa Tureckiego i Jego Mieszkańców w Renesansowy Polsce.” Przegląd Orientalistyczny 103/3 (1977): 221-229.
MUCHLINSKI, Antoni. Zdanie Sprawy o Tatarach Litewskich przez Jednego z Tych Tataròw Złożone Sułtanow Sulejmanowi w Roku 1558. Vilnius: Teka Wileńska, 1858.
SZAPSZAL, Hadżi Saraja. “O zatraceniu języka ojczystego przez Tatarów w Polsce” in Rocznik Tatarski : czasopismo naukowe, literackie i społeczne, poświęcone historii, kulturze i życiu Tatarów w Polsce. Vilnius: 1932: Volume 1, 34-48.

Citation: "Little Mosques on the Prairie," Michael Połczyński, Stambouline (July 27, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/07/little-mosques-on-prairie.html
Bohoniki Mosque: 53°23'26.22"N 23°35'29.40"E
Kruszyniany Mosque: 53°10'40.03"N 23°48'49.56"E
Brooklyn Lipka Tatar Mosque: 40°42'42.83"N 73°56'47.86"W

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The Sursocks at Sofar and the Making of Modern Lebanon
guest contribution by Chris Gratien and Graham Pitts

[1] Donna Maria Sursock Residence, 1909. Sofar, Lebanon. Photo by Chris Gratien, 2014.

[2] Photograph of Sofar, c. 1900. To the left is the
Sofar railway station, and to the right the Sofar
Grand Hotel. Source: discoverlebanon.com

Among the verdant hills overlooking the sprawl of Beirut sits a breezy mountain retreat, the vestige of a brief and former efflorescence. [Fig 1] Sofar, now a small town of a few thousand inhabitants on the Beirut-Damascus road, was once the premier summer getaway for the region’s elite. The rail line between Beirut and Damascus made Sofar an accessible destination for summer tourists looking to beat the heat and humidity of the Mediterranean lowlands. [Fig 2] As it did in so many other places at the time, rail transport suddenly allowed well-to-do city folk the opportunity of leisurely excursions into the countryside. [Figs 3 & 4] The longstanding practice of seasonal migration in the Mediterranean littoral was becoming established in a modern, fin de siècle iteration. The Sofar Grand Hotel (built in 1890), fully equipped with one of Lebanon's first casinos, had once been a meeting place for aristocrats, diplomats, businessmen and the political elite of the Ottoman Levant. Today, the hotel as well as a nearby villa owned by its original proprietors, the Sursock family, lie dormant. The two buildings' Beaux-Arts facades stand as a testament to the rapid rise of a bourgeois social class during the late Ottoman period that continued unimpeded into the French Mandate and beyond, playing a critical role in the making of modern Lebanon. Yet, when the Civil War moved into Mount Lebanon during the 1970s, the hotel and villa became sites of military occupation, bearing witness to decades of violence that tore down much of what had been built by over a century of capitalist activity.

[3] Visitors arriving at Ain Sofar station, c. 1909. Source: Atatürk Kitaplığı, İstanbul.

[4] Muleteer with suitcases in Sofar, c. 1909. Source: Atatürk Kitaplığı, İstanbul.

[5] Entrance to Sofar villa.
Photo by Chris Gratien, 2014.

The Sursock villa in Sofar, constructed in the early twentieth century by Alfred Sursock for his wife Donna Maria Theresa Serra di Cassano, the daughter of an Italian duke, is no longer in use, although the grounds are available for weddings and formal occasions. [Fig 5] The archway leading to the grounds, however, still bears original foundation inscriptions that proclaim the wealth of these merchants turned aristocrats, who, through lucrative business ventures, savvy political maneuvering, and strategic marriages, embarked on what Leila Fawaz has called “the most spectacular social climb in the nineteenth century.” [Fig 6] The entrance inscription records the names of three brothers, Alfred, Musa, and Dimitri, the heirs of Musa Sursock, a wealthy landowner who held lands stretching along the Mediterranean coast form Palestine in the south to Mersin and the Çukurova plain in Southern Anatolia. Though this Greek Orthodox family of dragomans and foreign proteges often adopted the style and manners of French and European aristocracy, the Arabic inscription bears neither cross nor family seal but in fact a star and crescent, one of the few visible traces of an Ottoman lineage to be found in this peaceful mountain town. On the reverse side of the entrance, we find two lines of classical Arabic poetry attributed to Abu'l-fath, a statesman from a line of viziers to the Buyid dynasty, reading: “People inhabited this world before us / They departed from it and left it to us / And we descended upon it just as they had descended / And we leave it to a people after us”.

[6] From right to left: Exterior inscription of villa entrance / detail of gate interior / interior poetic inscription. Photos by Chris Gratien, 2014.

The means by which this Ottoman family came into possession of such palatial real estate were multiple. As a long line of tax farmers, the Sursocks were able to mobilize their finances and capital using connections to American, Russian, German and French consuls over the decades to achieve economic and political connections. As Fawaz notes, their financial successes in Egypt illustrate “how successful entrepreneurs secured the support of local rulers as well as European protection” in the Ottoman Mediterranean. The Sursocks are also known for having held vast stretches of property, which they acquired at bargain prices with generous tax exemptions from the Ottoman government on account of the land being considered “vacant” or mevat areas of lowland swamps. Some of these properties would eventually be sold to become sites of early Zionist settlement in Palestine.

[7] Rear corner of Sofar villa.
Photo by Chris Gratien, 2014.

Alfred Sursock had married Donna Maria while serving as a secretary in the Ottoman Embassy in Paris during the early twentieth century. He built the villa near the Sofar Grand Hotel owned by his uncle Ibrahim as a summer palace for the family in 1909. Its structure reflects a nineteenth-century interpretation of neo-Classical styles. Built in emulation of Italian villas, its numerous arches and cast cement elements are designed to exhibit an acquaintance with aristocratic tastes of the period. [Fig 7] In a time as rising commerce, the new elite of Ottoman port cities such as Salonica, Izmir, Beirut, and Alexandria built many such country getaways. Tucked away from the road and surrounded by a perimeter wall, the back of the villa commands a complete view of the Hammana Valley. During the year’s hottest months, Sofar became a base of operations for the Sursocks. There, politicians and foreign diplomats joined in the emerging fashion of bourgeois summer repose. The villa continued to be used by the family until 1975, when the fighting rendered Sofar no longer safe for Beirut aristocrats.

Decades before the Lebanese Civil War, however, Sofar had also played an important role in another conflict: the First World War. Its strategic position and favorable summer climate made Sofar an important position for Ottoman military commanders and administrators. Enver Pasha and Cemal Pasha, along with German and Austrian military attaches, had been hosted at a spectacular ceremony in Sofar by Ali Munif Bey—the first Muslim governor of Mount Lebanon since 1861. At times, Cemal Pasha used Sofar as a base of operation during the war and a site for storing critical wheat supplies. Sofar and the Sursocks were therefore far removed from the misery and starvation occurring elsewhere in the mountain, where the conditions of the conflict had sliced the once prosperous region’s connections to critical imports of grain. The Sursocks thus maintained their level of comfort, and in fact prospered through their close ties to Cemal Pasha, who tasked them with handling the wheat imports to Mount Lebanon and Beirut. During the height of the famine, the Sursocks were able to find money to construct Qasr es-Snobar—the Pine Residence—a handsome mansion in the Beirut forest. It was here that, after the colonial government had acquired the residence, the French Mandate of Lebanon was declared in September 1920. [Fig 8]

[8] Proclamation of the French Mandate at Qasr es-Snobar, Sep 1920. Source: wikipedia.

Today, the Sursock villa in Sofar still bears all the marks of damage and looting that occurred during the Civil War. Shattered tiles and faded murals are all that remain of the once glorious interior of Donna Maria’s summer home. [Fig 9] Some of the Sursock properties in Beirut have been restored or transformed into museums. Alfred and Donna Maria’s daughter Lady Cochrane still resides in one of these homes, and as living matriarch of the Sursock family presides over numerous properties in downtown Beirut, in addition to various philanthropic activities supporting the arts and the restoration of Lebanon’s architectural heritage. She has set her sights on the villa in Sofar for restoration; while the exterior has been evidently cleaned up, the war’s impacts remain readily visible on the inside of the building.

[9] From left to right: detail of interior arch / villa interior / broken tiles of villa floor (photographs by Chris Gratien)

Although the Sursocks have shaped Lebanon’s history from the late Ottoman period to present, their names have seldom featured prominently in the historiography of the region. The financial families that prevailed in one of the most commercialized regions of the Ottoman Empire have been lost among the names of Ottoman officials, prominent clergy, and Arab politicians. As Jens Hanssen has shown, the Sursocks and other prominent families of Beirut played a quiet but important role in shaping the emergence of the province by lobbying to foreign and Ottoman officials and serving on the local governing councils. Indeed, the choice of Beirut as a provincial capital was in no small part the result of their entreaties to the Porte. For these reasons, the family papers of the Sursocks, which have recently been deposited at an emerging research center at Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik (USEK) in Jounieh, may be as critical as any state archives for understanding Lebanon’s transition from Ottoman province to French colony to nation-state. (Click here to listen to an interview with the staff at USEK)

CHRIS GRATIEN and GRAHAM PITTS are both Ph.D. candidates at Georgetown University.

FAWAZ, Leila Terazi.Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983.
HANSSEN, Jens.Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

Citation: "Ghosts of Lebanese Summers Past," Chris Gratien and Graham Pitts, Stambouline (August 11, 2014). http://www.stambouline.com/2014/08/ghosts-of-lebanese-summers-past.html

The Competition to Design Atatürk's Mausoleum

guest contribution by James Ryan

The winning submission for Anıtkabir from Turkish architects Emin Onat and Orhan Arda. From Arkitekt magazine (1943): “This project is a composition that pleased everyone. It is a plan for a mausoleum inspired by the idea of a rectangular temple and is framed by a sophisticated colonnade. The hall of honor is composed with a monumental volume in order to reach a height appropriate for a common view. The base is plain and drawn in ink, underneath this part more elaborate bas reliefs will be made.”

Anıtkabir Today. Photo by Emily Neumeier, 2013.

W
When attempting to explain to Americans the significance of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his legacy in Turkey, I often use the analogy that he is like every US founding father rolled into one. Likewise, Anıtkabir--the mausoleum that houses Atatürk’s coffin, and so much more--is a bit like the Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington monuments put together. This comparison is one I’ve always found helpful, in part because the two sets of monuments roughly share the same architectural flavor, despite Anıtkabir’s vast size.

Whether as a tourist, tour guide, or historian, I have always found Anıtkabir fascinating, because it is a tremendous example of nationalist myth-making. While the architecture itself can be charitably described as grandiose, it is really the museum, which features exhibitions of Atatürk’s possessions (including a rowing machine and cane-rifle), the war for independence (complete with life-sized diorama of the Sakarya Pitch battle) and era of reforms, that does much of the work of hagiography.

Recently, I have begun investigating how this museum and monument came about, which has resulted in an interesting thought experiment regarding what Anıtkabir could have looked like if the memorial's design committee (formed in the early 1940s) had decided to go in a different direction. Along the way I have also learned that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the competition was subject to the geopolitics of the early years of World War II, as many of the nearly fifty submissions were not only from Turkish architects but also from Germany and Italy. Many of the European submissions came from architects who had already been tapped to build many of the major buildings of the new Turkish capital throughout the 1930s.

The history of this competition has been preserved in the pages of the Turkish journal Arkitekt, which ran a series of articles in 1943 highlighting many of the entries, complete with scale renderings and plans. Below I’ve excerpted some of this journal’s comments on the various entries. The views of Arkitekt’s editors seem to have been independent from the evaluations of the competition committee (for an an in-depth analysis of the politics behind this committee, see Christopher Wilson’s recent monograph, Beyond Anıtkabir, cited below). On the whole, Arkitekt's commentators tended to prefer modernist-nationalist designs across the board, and often took issue with some designs that they felt to be over-orientalizing.

We have compiled here a gallery of nine of the more striking submissions to this competition, taken from the pages of Arkitekt, with short descriptions and reflections. Afterwards is a translation of some the most pertinent competition rules, as published in the magazine:

[1] This entry from German architect Yohannas Krüger features a tiling pattern on the façade that is reminiscent of Persian and Central Asian motifs. Krüger’s submission is markedly more understated than some of his Italian and German counterparts. From Arkitekt: “Architect Y. Krüger’s project is a strong piece of work. While the external architecture is a bit brutal in its effect; the interior is rich.In the architect’s project, the memorial dominates the concept and the hall in which the tomb is placed forms the basis of the mass; the other components such as the [architectural] details remain secondary.”

[2] The first Italian proposal featured in Arkitekt comes from Arnoldo Foschini, who won second prize in the competition. According to Wilson, the Italian Minister of Education praised the entry in a letter to Foschini writing, “Italian architecture, through your appreciated work, has obtained another solemn acknowledgement on foreign soil and in

competition with artists of other nations.” From Arkitekt:“The external design has a similarly relative volume; the façades are filled with superfluous bas-reliefs. Entering the interior space conjures the spirit of a church; the composition of the hall of honor constitutes a contrast between Turkish and Islamic spiritualism.”

[3] This building is a collaboration by three young Turkish architects, H. Kemalî Söylemezoğlu, Kemal Ahmet Aru and Recal Akçay. The combination of European and Islamic monumental traditions was a favorite of the editors of Arkitekt, who praised it by saying, “We think this project is the closest work to the character of Turkish architecture in the competition.” They went on to criticize the exterior’s relative plainness, and somewhat incorrect proportions, but praised the interior, which “...has an effect on our national feelings. Although it comprises a small tomb, together with the designs on the ceiling and side walls and colonnades, it creates a national atmosphere."

[4] The next entry comes from a Swiss architect named Ronald Rohn, and was, according toWilson, meant to evoke the ancient Egyptian funerary complexes at Deir el-Bahari, located on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor. Arkitekt, in agreement with the competition committee, was somewhat dismissive of this entry (Arkitekt even fails to mention Rohn’s name), citing the lack of monumentality, and overall “humbleness” of the design.

[5] Another design from a European, this time the Italian architect Giovanni Muzio, again evokes the monumental architecture of ancient Egypt. Arkitekt enjoyed the way this entry called back to ancient styles of tombs and graves, but thought that the plethora of windows, coupled with the all-concrete hexagonal pyramid could result in a very difficult system of construction.

[6] This entry, also from Italy, comes by way of the architect pair Giuseppe Vaccaro and Gino Franzin. It’s a personal favorite of mine, since the design presents a very bold mid-century modernist outlook and might not have been out of place memorializing any of the prominent authoritarian leaders of that period. Vaccaro himself had just designed a smaller funerary chapel for an industrialist family in Bologna (La Capella Goldoni), which also evoked an oversized sarcophagus. It didn’t impress Arkitekt, however, who’s one-sentence description expressed utter dissatisfaction: “We do not really care for the severity of this project’s classical influence, rather decorative internal design and needlessly difficult construction plan.”

[7] This entry was submitted by noted Turkish architect Sedat Hakkı Eldem, and is a nod to Anatolian and Persian traditions of kümbet mausoleum architecture with its vaulted dome that is meant to remind one of Seljukid tents. Eldem, according to Wilson, was one of the pioneers of the canonical “Second National Style” in Turkish architecture that represented an attempt to reconcile historical, local, modernist and national forms in a single coherent whole. Arkitekt’s editors were clearly on board with this style, citing that Eldem’s efforts were “...completely Turkish in their influence and inspiration.”

[8] This entry is courtesy of the German architect Clemens Holzmeister, who designed several government buildings in Ankara, including the current Parliament building. The proposed conical pyramid, surprisingly, differs drastically from the more cubic style of Holzmeister’s other buildings, through which he had endeared himself to many in the Turkish government, including the competition committee. The editors of Arkitekt, however, took him to task, asserting that “it is impossible to discern where the external architectural details and descriptions of a monumentality can be found and it does not follow any of the principles of classical works. This personality has been shown to be at work in Holzmeister’s other works.”

[9] Finally we have an proposal that is perhaps the most palatial, evoking both classical monuments and ancient monuments such as the Tower of Babel or Trajan’s Column. It comes from Italian architect Paolo Vietti, who had previously designed Ankara’s Hippodrome and Istanbul’s İnönü Stadium (home to the football club Beşiktaş). Both Arkitekt and the competition committee dismissed this effort because of the awkward mix of styles, and overall lack of clarity.

Competition Rules:

I. The Character of the Monument

1. Atatürk established the new Turkey in the heart of the greater Turkish nation. On October 11, 1938, on the face of Atatürk’s coffin, who shook off his mortal coil and migrated into eternity, the greatest influence and gratitude of the Turkish nation was wrought. To express the greatness and power of the connection of the Turkish heart, in which lives this great man, his works and possessions, a Great Monument will be erected according to these principles.

2. The monument will be a place of pilgrimage. This pilgrimage will commence through a large hall of honor and many hundreds of thousands of Turks will be able to repeatedly pass in front of their ATA, while paying their respects, bowing, and feeling their compensation and connection with him.

3. This monument is ATA’s; Soldier Mustafa Kemal, State President Gazi M. Kemal, great politician and scientist, great thinker, and finally a constructive and creative genius, it’s qualifications will be the epitome of power and ability. And we will find the monument to be commensurate with his personality.

4. It is necessary that Anıt Kabir’s façade be visible from a great distance. Accordingly it should be provided with a powerful silhouette. At the same time, although it is necessary that the monument’s architectural motifs be visible from afar, we do not want the greatness and power displayed through small details to be lost in favor of the larger elements. The monument must give the impression of being the most dominant in the land.

5. The Turkish Nation is symbolized by Atatürk’s name and personality. Those who want to pay reverence to the Turkish nation by bowing in front of his catafalque should be allowed to do so. Accordingly, it will be the duty of every visitor to Ankara to go directly to Atatürk’s grave.

6. For the cost of Anıt Kabir’s service and outbuildings, as well as the arrangement of gardens and parks, their maintenance, internal paths, surrounding walls, three million lira will be allocated, of which two million is intended for the construction of Anıt Kabir. .......

III. The Hall of Honor

14. The hall of honor, containing the great Ata’s sarcophagus, necessarily constitutes the most fundamental part of the spirit of this monument. At the head of this hall the whole Turkish nation should be able to pay their respects along with foreign state visitors. This hall should be able to contain at least 250 visitors. This hall should give the impression of greatness, glory and power to visitors as they leave, and no one should be able to deny its shape, size and elevation.

15. The place of Atatürk’s coffin constitutes the spirit of this hall. However, the place which the catafalque will occupy is left up to the competition.

16. Aside from this, the six principles accorded to the Republican People’s Party by Atatürk which are the program and symbol of the contemporary, modern Turkey and are represented by the six arrows of the party’s flag consists of these:

We are Republicans
We are Nationalists
We are Populists
We are Revolutionaries
We are Statists
We are Laicists

It is necessary that competitors display and represent these six principles in the vicinity of Atatürk’s sarcophagus either on its side or in some appropriately visible area.

17. Other that these, there should be an accessible, golden book for our dignitaries and distinguished foreign guests who are paying their respects to sign. The space for this book and the signing space is to be determined by the competitors. [This book, the Anıtkabir Özel Defterleri (1953-1999), has now been published in a 23-volume set!]

**Text cited in this post from Arkitekt magazine, numbers 1, 2 and 4 (1943). All translations by James Ryan.

JAMES RYAN is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.

BOZDOĞAN, Sibel. Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.

ÖZTÜRK, Dilek. "Anıtkabir'in Mimari Gerçekleri,"Arkitera.com (11 November 2009).
WILSON, Christopher. Beyond Anıtkabir: The Funerary Architecture of Atatürk: The Construction and Maintenance of National Memory. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013: 65-99.

Citation: "The Anıtkabirs That Weren't," James Ryan, Stambouline (October 5, 2014).
http://www.stambouline.com/2014/10/the-antkabirs-that-werent.html

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Tracking Down a Black Sea Fortress at the Topkapı Palace
contribution by Emily Neumeier

[1] Sultan Abdülhamid's monument (1294 H/1877-78 CE) to Sohum in the second courtyard of the Topkapı Palace, with the chambers of the imperial council (Divan-ı Hümayun) and Tower of Justice in the background. Unless otherwise noted, photos by Emily Neumeier, 2014.

[2] Ali Pasha of Çürüksu (front row,
middle) and Ottoman Georgians
during the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–
78). Wikipedia, in Public Domain.

Every day, the thousands of tourists who visit the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul stream past a stately stone monument. [Fig. 1] Despite the monument's grand scale (more than 3 meters in height) and prominent location in the second courtyard of the palace, most visitors barely give it a second glance. And who can really blame them, with the nearby Tower of Justice, or the rococo Gate of Felicity (Bab-ı Saadet), as competition for their attention? Yet a careful reading of this monument's inscriptions reveals its unusual function--a piece of war propaganda for a new sultan in the midst of a crushing military defeat. More specifically, this is a military memorial from the early years of Sultan Abdülhamid II's reign, when fighting erupted in both the Balkans and the Caucusus during the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-78. [Fig. 2] The purpose of the Topkapı monument is to present and frame an Ottoman inscription that had been rescued from the Black Sea fortress of Sohum, a city that was only briefly held by the Ottomans and then once again fell into Russian hands.

[3] The monument's upper inscription and tuğra of Sultan Abdülhamid II.

[4] The early 18th-century foundation
inscription rescued from the fortress at
Sohum, now preserved in the Hamidian-era
memorial at the Topkapı Palace.

The inscription that is located at the top of the monument, incised on a single block of marble, is itself undated but has been paired with the tuğra of Sultan Abdülhamid II above, which gives the year 1294 H/ 1877-78 CE. [Fig. 3] The text declares that more than a century and a half earlier, during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703-30), a fortress was constructed in Sohum, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. The inscription further explains that this fortress was later occupied by Russian forces ("Mosḳof eline geçmiş iken"), but it was finally reclaimed again by Sultan Abdülhamid and "the time of the gazi sovereign returned" ("gerüye şah-ı gāzi-i zamān geldi"). It was then that, by imperial order, the 18th-century foundation inscription from the fortress was removed from the Black Sea site and brought to Istanbul for the memorial at the Topkapı. Thus, the two plaques featuring Ottoman epigraphy that appear on this monument serve very different functions. Although the text of the 18th-century inscription from Sohum, if taken on its own as a historical document, does offer valuable information about a little-known Black Sea fortress, within the context of the Hamidian memorial, this plaque is presented as a kind of relic--a tangible fragment, or object, imbued with the aura of past military victory and success. The late 19th-century inscription in the upper register of the monument acts as an illustrative text, both literally and figuratively framing the central plaque.

Because the Hamidian craftsmen responsible for the construction of this monument treated all three inscriptions (tuğra, upper inscription, central plaque) to the same paint job of gold lettering on a dark-green ground, at first glance a visitor might be led to assume that these inscriptions were all produced at the same time. However, even if a visitor were not able to read the text, there are subtle stylistic differences in the calligraphy that make it clear that these inscriptions are not from the same workshop or time period. [Compare figs. 3, 4 and 5] First, although the upper and central inscriptions are both written in the so-called ta'lik script--very popular for public texts in the Ottoman period--they were clearly designed by two different calligraphers. The ta'lik script in the central plaque is more Persianized in style in that it tends to flow more at an angle, while the later text in the upper panel follows is a bit more flat, sitting on a straight (imaginary) baseline. Additionally, while the text in the upper panel remains contained within eight cartouches, the 18th-century calligraphy in the central plaque is more free and lively, spilling over the lines of the text boxes. [Fig. 5]

[5] Detail from the 18th-century central inscription showing the ta'lik script.

[6] "Sukhumi Fortress", 1830s, Jacques François
Gamba. Wikipedia, in Public Domain.

Besides being an interesting example of 18th-century calligraphy, the central plaque taken from the Sohum fortress provides insight into the construction of the fortification built by Ahmed III. [Fig. 6] Presently the site is difficult to access for any non-Russian citizens, as Sohum (Sukhumi, Sokhumi, Aqwa) is presently at the center of a complex political conflict, being the capital of Abzhakia, a disputed region in Georgia on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Sohum came under Ottoman control in the 1570s, and at this point the town was presumably re-fortified, adapting even earlier military works dating as early as the Roman period. [Fig. 7]

[7] Selection of late-antique and medieval-era pot sherds found in the 1985 Russian excavations of the Sohum fortress, evidence for the continuous use of the site as a settlement. Hrushkova and Gunba, "Raskopki Suhumskoi kreposti," p. 40.

We know, of course, from the foundation inscription now at the Topkapı that a new fortress was erected (or rather extensively rebuilt and enhanced) in the early eighteenth century in the reign of Sultan Ahmed III. The central plaque's text can be translated thus:

The king among kings of the world, the majestic Sultan Ahmed Gazi, whose imperial gate is the refuge of İskender and Dara. He is the exalted ruler of prosperity, whose imperial person is the ornament of the world with his exalted position of justice and perfect attainment of honor. The Grand Vizier, Damad Ibrahim Pasha, abundant in influence, is the distinguished ruler’s imperial relation. He rendered secure every corner of the world from enemies because he ordered that this region be protected. This esteemed, strong fortress was erected with such majesty that you would imagine it to be the Phoenix at the top of Mount Kaf. The justice of the sultan increases the prosperity of the world such that the most holy one is a fortune for the world’s repose. As for the most exalted vezir he always acts such that the wise sadrazam is in this way the agent of security and peace.

Unfortunately, this (very flowery) inscription is undated, but the text itself declares that the Sohum fortress was built under the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha, which further narrows the window of time in which the construction could have taken place to 1718-1730, the term of Ibrahim Pasha's service. The conclusion to this question of dating the fortress can actually be found, not in Ottoman sources, but in a map of western Georgia (Imereti) produced in the first half of the 18th century. [Fig. 8]

[8] Detail of Sohum Fortress (central square enclosure). French copy of the 1738 Georgian manuscript map, Bibliothèque Hydrographique de la Marine, Paris. W.E.D. Allen, "Two Georgian Maps," p. 106.

[9] Sohum Castle as it survives today, along
the water front of the city. Taken from
Google Earth, 15 March 2015.

This rationalized plan of the fortress depicts the construction as situated between two streams emptying into the Black Sea, a rectangular enclosure with a square bastion on each corner and an entrance with towers to both the north and south. The foundation inscription was most likely fixed above one of these entrances. It is perhaps a bit strange that the foundation inscription compares this structure, which is so evidently placed on the edge of the sea at the mouth of the port, to the "Phoenix at the top of Mount Kaf," but this just proves that sometimes the composers of these texts took some liberties with their metaphors and the actual topographic situation of a site (this discrepancy also might indicate that the author commissioned for this text was in Istanbul, and never visited Sohum personally). The description of the fortress on the Georgian map states that the fortification was "built by the Turks in 1723" and governed by a pasha "of two tails" with 100 soldiers (janissaries) operating 60 cannons. This map, therefore, confirms an exact date (1723 CE) for the inscription now found at the Topkapı Palace. The rendering in the 1738 map can be compared with what survives today on the ground in Sohum. [Figs. 9, 10] Even though we can safely assume that the fortress underwent even further restorations after its initial construction in the early eighteenth century, the original design is essentially intact, being a rectangular plan with the traces of projecting bastions, or towers, on each corner.

[10] View of Sohum, 1912. Early color photo by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii.
Wikipedia, in Public Domain.

The question remains, however, why did Abdülhamid's troops decide to remove the foundation inscription from the fortress at Sohum, and bring it to the imperial capital? As the Hamidian inscription states, the fortress at Sohum had for a long time been in Russian hands, and when the Ottomans briefly won back the castle in 1877, they must have known that their occupation there would only be short-lived. There is a long and proud tradition in the early modern period of military victors displaying the regalia of the losing side, and the Ottomans perhaps feared that once the Russians took back control of the fortress in Sohum that they might deface or destroy the foundation inscription as a symbolic gesture. So, while the sultan's troops in the end could not prevent the ultimate surrender of the castle itself, their one consolation prize was Ahmet III's inscription, which served as a precious testament to more triumphant days on the battlefield. Indeed, in the memorial now at the Topkapı Palace, Abdülhamid II, who was facing what by all accounts was a disastrous military loss, endeavored to make an explicit connection between himself and Ahmed III, who, along with his grand vizier Damat Ibrahim Pasha, was celebrated for his many victories against the Russians. It was hoped that this 18th-century inscription, which lauded viziers who "rendered secure every corner of the world" with fortresses that compared to the "Phoenix at the top of Mount Kaf," might confer some of that triumphal fanfare to the new sultan, who framed his ambitions for the future with a nostalgic monument to the past.

**Many thanks to Olga Greco for her assistance in locating the Russian archaeological reports for the Sohum fortress; to Nilay Özlü for her advice on bibliography; and to the 2014 Ottoman Epigraphy Course at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University, where this essay began.

**Transcription of the Central Plaque recording the 18th-century foundation of the fortress (both translation above and transcription by the author, also see transcription by Necdet Sakaoğlu):

(1)[Ş]ehinşāh-i cihān şevketlu Sulṭān Ahmed gāzi ‖ ki bāb-i devleti İskender ü Dārāya me’vādır
(2)[O] ḫāḳān-ı bülend-i iḳbāl kim ẕāt-ı hümāyūni ‖ kemāl-i ‘izz ü cāh-ı ma’deletle ‘ālemârādır
(3)[O] ḫāḳān-ı güziniñ ṣıhr-ı ḫāṣı ṣadr-ı ‘ālisi ‖ Vezir-i pür-himem Dāmād İbrāhim Pāşādır
(4)Cihānıñ eyleyüb her kūşesin te’min a’dādan ‖ bu semtiñ daḥi oldu çünki emri ḥıfẓına ṣādır
(5)[ya]pıldı himmetiyle bu mu’aẓzam ḳal'a-i muḥkem ‖ ki heybetli sanursenkim ser-i Ḳāf üzre ‘Anḳādır
(6)ḳıla ḥaḳ-ı şehriyār ‘ālemiñ iḳbālini efzūn ‖ ki ẕāt-ı aḳdesi sermāye-i ârām-ı düny[a]dır
(7)[…] vezir-i a’ẓamın daḫi ḳıla dā’im ‖ ki bā’iŝ böyle emn ü rāḥata ol ṣadr-ı dānādır

EMILY NEUMEIER is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the art and architecture of the Ottoman world and Modern Turkey.

ALLEN, W.E.D. "Two Georgian Maps of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century." Imago Mundi 10 (1953): pp. 99-121.
BALCI, Ramazan. Sarayın Sırları: Bilinmeyen Yönleriyle Osmanlı Sarayı ve Harem Hayatı. Istanbul: Elit, 2000. pp. 58-59.
FORTNA, Benjamin. "The Reign of Abdülhamid II," in The Cambridge History of Turkey Volume 4: Turkey in the Modern World, Ed. Reşat Kasaba. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2008.
GUNBA, M. M. and Hrushkova L. G. "Raskopki Suhumskoi kreposti."Arheologicheskie otkrytiia v Abhazii 1985. Tbilisi: Mecniereba, 1990.
SAKAOĞLU, Necdet. The Imperial Palace with its History, Locations, Inscriptions and Memoirs (Topkapı Palace). Istanbul: Denizbank, 2002. p. 89.
SHAMBA, G. K. Drevnii Suhum. Sukhumi: Alashara, 2005.

Citation: "Framing Ottoman Epigraphy," Emily Neumeier, Stambouline (March 15, 2015). http://www.stambouline.com/2015/03/framing-ottoman-epigraphy.html

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