The Ottoman (re)discovery of Byzantium

Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955 Olivier Delouis and Brigitte Pitarakis, editors Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul: Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955 Olivier Delouis and Brigitte Pitarakis Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul: Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955 Olivier Delouis and Brigitte Pitarakis Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955 Editors Olivier Delouis and Brigitte Pitarakis Istanbul Research Institute Publications 48 Symposium Series 3 Istanbul, August 2022 ISBN: 978-605-71205-3-3 Copyediting: Robin O. Surratt Publishing coordination: Gülru Tanman Book design: Timuçin Unan Cover design: Volkan Şenozan Color Separation and Printing: A4 Ofset Matbaacılık San. ve Tic. A.Ş. Yeşilce Mah., Donanma Sok., No.16, Kağıthane – İstanbul Tel: 0212 281 64 48 Certificate No. 44739 This volume brings together presentations from the symposium Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul: Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955, held at the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum between 16–18 November 2017. © Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Istanbul Research Institute Meşrutiyet Caddesi, No. 47, 34430 Tepebaşı-Beyoğlu, Istanbul www.iae.org.tr All rights reserved. No part of this book may be published, printed, reproduced, or utilized in any form or by any means, mechanical, optical, or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Olivier Delouis and Brigitte Pitarakis Editors’ Preface 8 12. Ayşe Ercan Kydonakis Archaeology between Imperial Imagination and Territorial Sovereignty: The French Occupation Army and the Mangana Excavations in Sarayburnu/Gülhane, 1920–23 302 13. Brigitte Pitarakis Objects of Desire: Collectors, Scholars, and Istanbul’s Byzantine Art Market, 1850s–1950s 330 18 2. Şule Kılıç Yıldız Ottoman Scholars and the Byzantine Architectural Legacy of Istanbul 38 3. Zeynep Kızıltan and Turgut Saner Byzantine Archaeology in Istanbul: Glimpses from the Istanbul Archaeological Museums Archive, 1923–55 66 14. Peter Schreiner Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and Karl Krumbacher 364 4. Engin Akyürek The Study of Byzantine Art History in Turkey up to 1955 84 376 5. George Vassiadis Monuments, Manuscripts, and Memories: The Greek Philological Syllogos of Constantinople and the Emergence of Byzantine Studies in Istanbul 98 15. Jesko Fildhuth The Study of Byzantium in Istanbul: Theodor Wiegand, Alfons Maria Schneider, and the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute 6. Dimitris Stamatopoulos “Constantinople Is the Tower of Babel”: Escaping from Time to Space in the Historical Representations of Nineteenth-Century Istanbul 128 7. Pınar Üre Russian Archaeologists in Istanbul and International Scholarly Collaboration in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 146 8. Lora Gerd The Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople and the Politics of Research 162 9. Holger A. Klein From Robert College to the Byzantine Institute: The American Contribution to the Rediscovery, Study, and Preservation of Byzantine Monuments in Istanbul, ca. 1830–1950 186 10. Lenia Kouneni “By Scottish Munificence”: The Walker Trust Excavations of the Great Palace in Istanbul, 1935–55 236 11. Anna Kelley, with Leslie Brubaker and Daniel Reynolds Byzantium from Below: The Archive of David Talbot Rice and the Unearthing of Constantinople 276 Contents 1. Edhem Eldem The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium Keynote Lecture The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium Edhem Eldem Nicolae Iorga’s Bizanţ după Bizanţ (Byzance après Byzance, or Byzantium after Byzantium), published in 1935, claimed to analyze the capacity of the Byzantine Empire to survive after the conquest of Constantinople and its ultimate submission to the Ottoman Turks. He went on to prove his point by stressing the continuities between the Byzantine imperial system and the nascent Ottoman Empire, such as the survival of some major institutions, revival of the patriarchate, use of the Greek language, co-opting of former elites, and formation of a new class of renegades of prestigious ancestry. According to Iorga, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Greeks “were conscious that the Empire was becoming theirs again.”1 Iorga’s story came with a twist—a Romanian twist. For Iorga, when the Byzantine elements of the Ottoman Empire fell from prominence, sometime at the turn of the seventeenth century, it was the combined influence of the Phanar, in Constantinople, and of the Moldavo-Wallachian principalities, the future Romania, which took up the Byzantine torch to rekindle the fire of a Greek renaissance. For two centuries, this alliance embodied what remained of the Byzantine Empire until it, too, fell prey to the destructive force of modernity embodied in the French Revolution and its derivatives, most notably the Greek Revolution, from 1821 on. Of course, there was also a Turkish take on the issue, one predictably less Hellenophile than Iorga’s. In Some Observations on the Influence of Byzantine Institutions on Ottoman Institutions / Bizans Müesseselerinin Osmanlı Müesseselerine Te’siri Hakkında Bâzı Mülâhazalar, published in 1931, Fuad Köprülü * This paper is the keynote lecture at the conference “Discovering Byzantium in Istanbul: Scholars, Institutions, and Challenges, 1800–1955,” Pera Museum, November 16–18, 2017. 1 “Ils sentaient bien que cet Empire redevenait le leur.” N. Iorga, Byzance après Byzance (Bucharest, 1935), 60. 20 21 rebutted the numerous works that well before Iorga had suggested a marked continuity between the two empires. In fact, however, Köprülü’s was not a comprehensive rebuttal, but a critical reappraisal, stressing that rather than being influenced by Byzantium, the Ottomans had inherited many Byzantine institutions through the mediation of previous Islamic states, especially the Umayyad and Abbasid Empires, and from the early Turkic presence in Anatolia. At a much more modest scale than Iorga’s understanding of Byzantine continuity as embodied in the Phanariot elite, the survival of a sizeable and thriving Greek Orthodox population was proof enough of the resilience of some of the most basic aspects of pre-Ottoman culture and identity. In that respect, it can be difficult to understand the use of the term “post-Byzantine” in art history circles to describe Orthodox artworks produced in the Ottoman lands after 1453. What is there that allows one to draw such a line to define an icon produced, say, in 1454, in 1600, or in 1700? What of an object crafted before 1453, but in a region already under Ottoman rule? Is it really so improbable and oxymoronic to speak of Ottoman Orthodox or Orthodox Ottoman art?2 Yet the concern here is not really with the questions and issues raised to this point. Rather, what warrants analysis under the rubric of (re)discovery is the way in which the Ottomans, meaning the Muslim ruling elite, historically and consciously began to take into account the prior existence of the Byzantine Empire and its culture. Legends and lore, surviving traditions among the Greek population of the empire, traces of a bygone past seeping through 2 I am particularly fond of the irony expressed by my friend and colleague Emmanuel Moutafov about a “corollary” of this taxonomy: “According to the majority of Greek researchers, the so-called post-Byzantine period in art ends with the Greek Wars for Independence in 1830, but it is perhaps easy to intuit why the art of post-secession Greece is not referred to as Post-Ottoman but Modern Greek.” E. Moutafov and I. Toth, “Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art: Crossing Borders, Exploring Boundaries,” in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art: Crossing Borders, ed. E. Moutafov and I. Toth (Sofia, 2018), 28. Fig. 1 Haydarpaşa railroad station, Istanbul. the multilayered texture of Istanbul are one thing, calling a spade a spade is another. On a personal note, once when crossing from Istanbul to Kadıköy, I heard my neighbor on the deck of the ferry reflecting on the architectural nature of the Haydarpaşa railway station. Puzzled by the look of this monumental Bahnhof, built by the Germans during 1906–9, she remarked, “This doesn’t look Turkish. It’s probably Byzantine” (Fig. 1). It is rather ironic that the phenomenon analyzed here—the discovery of Byzantium by the “Turks”—seems to start more or less at the point where Iorga saw the demise of Byzantium after Byzantium. There is a simple explanation for that: It was with modernity, in particular its Westernizing dimension, that the Ottomans began espousing a more critical attitude toward history in general and the Byzantine past in particular. An additional factor in this respect was the development, throughout the nineteenth century, from antiquarianism to archaeology, of a growing interest in material evidence, from monuments to artefacts and manuscripts. It was this confrontation with Western historiography and archaeology that to a large extent forced the Ottomans to come to terms with Byzantium as a historical reality, and with that, a score of ideological and political implications. It would be unfair of course to claim that there had been no precedent for examining at least some aspects of the Byzantine past. Some post-conquest Ottoman chronicles had somewhat addressed the issue of Byzantine history and the origins of some monuments, starting with Hagia Sophia. They were characterized, however, by the notable dominance of myth and legend over history. Some progress was made in the seventeenth century, when Kâtib Çelebi wrote History of Constantinople and Its Caesars / Tarih-i Kostantiniyye ve Kayas- The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem The argument for continuity is particularly tempting when it comes to the cultural and artistic spheres. Who can deny the influence that Byzantine architecture has had on Ottoman architecture, not only in the obvious case of Hagia Sophia serving as a blueprint for imperial mosques, but much earlier, through the propagation of a rather syncretic style of religious architecture throughout Bithynia in the fourteenth century? In the specific case of Constantinople and Istanbul, as the capitals of the two empires, the interplay of architecture, religion, language, and lore resulted in a dense and complex layering in which the Byzantine melted into the Ottoman in an infinite number of ways. The popular legends pertaining to the monuments and talismans of the city—from Hagia Sophia to the Serpentine Column to the multitude of other remains of the times preceding the conquest—reflect the fluid way in which the history of the city blended into everyday life. 22 23 ire. Even more remarkable was Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi’s Universal History / Tenkihü’t-Tevarih, with a whole section dedicated to Byzantium and intended to counter previous narratives as put forward by Cumhur Bekâr in his master’s thesis.3 As if to confirm Iorga’s thesis, Hezarfen’s main informant was none other than the Phanariot dragoman Panaiotis Nicousios. During the following century, a number of mosque projects rather openly borrowed elements from Byzantine architecture. The late Yavuz Sezer, whose untimely loss to Covid-19 we all lament, demonstrated in his dissertation that some library structures of the same period were directly inspired by Byzantine churches, playfully remodeled to serve a scholarly purpose.4 Concrete examples exist that confirm this lack of interest for pre-Ottoman heritage. In 1799, a couple of years before developing a passionate interest in the Parthenon friezes, Lord Elgin, the British ambassador in Istanbul, had noticed a number of “porphyry stones,” evidently fragments of Byzantine imperial sarcophagi, at various locations in the Ottoman capital. He claimed that “porphyry is much appreciated in the State of England and that he had heard and observed that there were some columns and pieces of stones of porphyry abandoned in some places of the Abode of Felicity, and that they were abandoned and of no use.” Wanting some of the porphyry fragments for his collection, Elgin applied to the Sublime Porte for permission to take them with him to England. The Ottoman administration agreed, their only concern being that “because they have been lying abandoned in their locations for some time now, if they were to be taken from these places and carried to a pier and Fig. 2 Byzantine imperial sarcophagus in the atrium of Hagia Eirene. from there placed and loaded upon an English ship, this would be the cause of unnecessary gossip among the population of Istanbul.” Was this an indication that the city’s inhabitants—or maybe part of its Greek community—were not completely oblivious to some of its glorious vestiges? Perhaps, but at any rate, the government had a plan to overcome any such inconvenience: the stones would be loaded on local boats and dropped on the shore in Ayastefanos for loading onto a passing English vessel. The cherry on the cake was the reaction of Sultan Selim III: “Fine, let them ask for stones. What need is there to carry them from the mosque of Osman, when there is a fine piece of red porphyry inside the palace walls next to the Pearl Kiosk? Let them come and see for themselves; if they like it, it is most easy to transport” (Fig. 2).5 Did the Ottomans not know that these were Byzantine remains and therefore did not care, or did they know that these were Byzantine remains and therefore did not care? No one will ever know for sure, but it is clear that they had no interest whatsoever in the preservation of these objects. Extrapolating from this case suggests that the same Lord Elgin would have 5 3 4 C. Bekâr, “A New Perception of Rome, Byzantium and Constantinople in Hezarfen Huseyin’s Universal History” (MA thesis, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 2011). Y. Sezer, “The Architecture of Bibliophilia: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Libraries” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 2016). Quotes are from Ottoman State Archives, HAT 237/13169, AH 1214 (CE 1799– 1800). See E. Eldem, “From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869,” in Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, ed. Z. Bahrani, Z. Çelik, and E. Eldem (Istanbul, 2011), 289–91. The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem Yet, these examples are too rare and too sporadic to indicate a significant change in perception and understanding. On the contrary, well into the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the evidence points in the direction of a general ignorance of historiography beyond the usual mix of state chronicles and of a very superficial understanding of world history, heavily tainted by legend and undigested hearsay. In the history Şanizade Ataullah Efendi penned in the early 1820s, leaving aside a half-baked and utterly dishonest attempt at plagiarizing Voltaire, he proved incapable of distinguishing the Romans from the Greeks, using the term Rum to describe both. As to the question of material heritage, one should not be misled by the fact that some architects toyed with the idea of emulating Byzantine forms in their projects. Nowhere were these borrowings openly identified, and it seems highly unlikely that any single one of the half-million inhabitants of the city ever realized the existence of these timid hints at a bygone past. In all likelihood, the Serpentine Column continued to be viewed as a talisman guarding the capital from snakes, and even Hagia Sophia was probably thought to be one Istanbul’s oldest imperial mosques. After all, it really did look like an Ottoman mosque. 24 25 Bey, the celebrated director of the Ottoman Imperial Museum.6 Ten years later, the Ottoman author Sermed Muhtar Alus presented a variation on the same theme. This time, it was not Abdülmecid, but his grand master of the artillery, Ahmed Fethi Pasha, who had come across an ancient brick bearing a Byzantine emperor’s name; he had then explained its historic importance to his master, who immediately decreed that a museum be founded.7 These anecdotes were evidently elements in the creation of a foundational myth for Ottoman archaeology and museology that is still very much present in nationalist historiography, since it gives the Ottomans a form of consciousness and agency that Western sources tend to deny them. In actual fact, it appears that the so-called museum was a glorified warehouse of unidentified marbles, and Ahmed Fethi Pasha became linked to its creation simply because Hagia Eirene was an arsenal, and he just so happened to be the grand master of the artillery. had no difficulty obtaining similar permission for the Parthenon friezes, and even though the original firman allowing for this spoliation has still not been found, there are enough documents concerning the fate of the rest of Elgin’s Athenian booty to confirm the repetition of the same modus operandi applied to relief-bearing marbles. His Majesty examined everything with the greatest interest, particularly the mosaic vaults, which have been returned to their original splendor. Among the figures that have escaped from destruction, and which have drawn the Sultan’s attention, is one of the last Greek emperors. His Majesty has asked Mr. Fossati that they be covered with a coat of plaster, for purposes of preservation, so that they are not lost to history and art.8 Such ancient artefacts held no interest or use to the Ottomans, but were greatly appreciated by the Europeans, ergo, there was no concern about ceding them to the British. On a sad note, Elgin’s porphyry fragments were “recycled,” as it were, by one of his descendants, the ninth Earl of Elgin, as a slab to cover the reinvented Victorian (and appropriately kitsch) grave of the family’s fourteenth-century ancestor, King Robert the Bruce. This did not happen in Yalova, nor did it have anything to do with Ahmed Fethi Pasha or with the newly created museum. Rather, the newspaper was reporting on a visit by the sultan to the mosque of Ayasofya, formerly Hagia Sophia, the restoration of which had begun in 1847 under the supervision of the Italian architect Gaspare Fossati (Fig. 4). It took almost half a century from these early spoliations for the first steps to be taken toward openly recognizing the value of the Byzantine past. Not surprisingly, this novelty is generally associated with the creation in 1846 of a museum of antiquities, in the Byzantine church of Hagia Eirene, which at the time was being used as an armory (Fig. 3). As the story goes, during a visit to the baths of Yalova, Sultan Abdülmecid had come across some ancient stones lying on the ground that, he was told, bore the name of Emperor Constantine. Considering this to be an insult to the memory of such a great ruler, he commanded that they be brought to Istanbul, thus leading to the creation of the museum. Se non è vero, è ben trovato. This anecdote cannot be documented before it appeared in 1910 in an article by the German archaeologist Theodor Wiegand published as an obituary for his colleague Osman Hamdi This was a first step toward recognition of Hagia Sophia as more than just a mosque, but as a monument of historical importance as well. In fact, if one is to believe the article, the sultan had also “recommended that no effort be spared to revert to its original state, as much as possible, one of the greatest masterpieces of Byzantine art.” Wishful thinking on behalf of the newspaper and its predominantly Western and non-Muslim readers? Probably, given that the mosaics were to be plastered over, and that at the end of the day, the monument would reopen its gates as a mosque. Evidently, there 6 7 8 T. Wiegand, “Osman Hamdi Bejs Lebenswerk,” Osmanischer Lloyd 3, no. 52 (1910): 1. S. Muhtar [Alus], Topkapı Saray-ı Hümayunu Meydanında Müze-i Askeri-i Osmani Züvvarına Mahsus Rehber (Istanbul, 1336; repr. 1920), 28. “Nouvelles diverses,” Journal de Constantinople, 26 August 1847: 1. The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem Fig. 3 Hagia Eirene, first location of the Imperial Ottoman Museum (after D. Galanakis, “Ναὸς τῆς Ἁγίας Εἰρήνης—Ὁπλοθήκη καὶ Μουσεῖον,” in Βυζαντιναὶ μελέται, τοπογραφικαὶ καὶ ἱστορικαί, μετὰ πλείστων εἰκόνων, ed. A. G. Paspatis [Constantinople, 1877], 336–37). Courtesy of the Sakkoulidis Library, Sismanogleion Megaron, Consulate General of Greece, Istanbul. Yet it seems the anecdote is not a complete fiction. In line with the infallible methodological principle that there is no smoke without fire, it seems that the legend of Sultan Abdülmecid expressing respect for a Byzantine emperor was not entirely an invention. An excerpt from the Journal de Constantinople describes a scene that appears to have inspired the later versions of the story: 26 27 Fig. 6 Mosaic tughra of Sultan Abdülmecid, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, ca. 1848. was a limit to how open and explicit this recognition could be. Much of the operation was kept and presented within a very traditional and politically safe context. After all, what was being restored was an imperial mosque. As such, although the frescoes and mosaics of the church were revealed during the restoration, they were safely whitewashed and hidden from sight, not to be seen again until the early 1930s. There are a few details that point to this being done in full cognizance of the monument’s symbolic and historical reputation. The fact that it was entrusted to a foreign architect was unprecedented and echoed the architectural transformations that the capital was undergoing at that moment in time. Fossati had also been entrusted with the construction of the neoclassical university building next to Hagia Sophia, thus enabling him to style himself as “Gaspard Fossati, architecte de la restauration de Sainte-Sophie et de l’université impériale.” Fig. 4 An almost allegorical representation of Sultan Abdülmecid with the recently restored Hagia Sophia in the background (after “The Sultan Proceeding to Mosque at Constantinople,” Illustrated London News, 21 January 1854: 51). Courtesy of Gale-Cengage Learning. Also exceptional was that although the religious iconography of the church was whitewashed to satisfy Islamic principles, the mosaics and frescoes were carefully documented and published in 1854 by Wilhelm Salzenberg, echoing the sultan’s wish that they not be “lost to history and art.” Perhaps even more striking was the publication by Fossati himself of a lavishly illustrated album of the restored monument, partly sponsored by the sultan, who purchased twenty copies in advance for the considerable sum of 178 pounds. Abdülmecid’s pride in this project was also expressed in a medal commemorating the monument’s restoration (Fig. 5). Yet perhaps the mostsubtle tribute paid to the monument upon its restoration was the addition, in the narthex, of the sultan’s cipher—his tughra—in mosaic, as if to stress imperial continuity over more than thirteen centuries (Fig. 6). The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem Fig. 5 Medal of the Restoration of the Hagia Sophia, 1849, gold, 44 mm, 66.7 g, issued in 1851, tughra and calligraphy by Naif Efendi, engraving by James Robertson, Istanbul Archaeological Museums, Islamic coins and medals collection (after E. Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals, and Decorations [Istanbul, 2004], 155). 28 29 Of course, one should not go overboard and start imagining these events as some sort of epiphany whereby the Ottomans suddenly and finally came to terms with the Byzantine past. The main motivation was to pay lip service to Western norms and values, perceived and described as an all-encompassing model of civilization. There is no surprise in the synchronicity of this particular enterprise with some major projects of modernity, the museum being one, along with the projected imperial library and the university. These projects had something else in common, however: They were stillborn, or at the least, quite ephemeral. The library never opened; the university did not start classes before 1863, and then only for a year; and the museum fell into severe neglect for almost three decades. There is, of course, no real mystery behind the reasons that led to this change of heart. The Ottomans, apart from the drive of their self-civilizing mission, were discovering the past through the eyes of Westerners, whose interest in things Byzantine rarely went beyond the visible and “tangible” monuments scattered throughout Istanbul. A few scholarly studies by Otto Frick, Andreas David Mordtmann, and Philipp Anton Dethier concentrated on iconic structures, such as the Serpentine Column, which, come to think of it, is not even Byzantine. The fortifications of the city also attracted attention, especially from the Greek community and its intellectuals. In the late 1860s, conscious of the Ottomans’ soft spot, Alexandros Rizos Ranghavis, Hellenic minister in Constantinople, suggested to Yusuf Kâmil Pasha, president of the Council of State, that preserving the Byzantine walls would do much for the Ottomans’ image in Europe. The pasha enthusiastically agreed.9 By the 1870s, Byzantium may not have been included in the standard Ottoman history curriculum, but it certainly had become part of the official narrative as presented to the West. One of the less-known publications commissioned by the government on the occasion of the 1873 Vienna Exposition was a topographical and historical study of the Bosporus and Constantinople, by Dethier, with a very strong, almost exclusive, emphasis on the Byzantine past 9 Information kindly provided by Sinan Kuneralp from Rizos Ranghavis’ memoirs, to be published by ISIS Press. Fig. 7 Souvenir from Salonica: Hagia Sophia Mosque, postcard, Matarasso, Saragoussi & Rousso, Thessaloniki, ca. 1910. of Istanbul. The same Dethier can be credited with some obscure studies on the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans and, most of all, for bringing to light Kritoboulos’s now famous history of Sultan Mehmed II. Nevertheless, the Western component of the phenomenon came with a price. Western scholarship valued the historical dimension of Byzantium, but apart from some exceptional structures, among them the walls, palaces, and a few churches, Byzantine material culture was hardly considered to be of major significance compared to the higher, earlier, and more classical categories of art deemed worthy of preservation and study. In this hierarchy, Byzantine art stood at the bottom, far below Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and even Islamic art, just as the Middle Ages, with which it was generally associated, was considered to be a dark, corrupted, and unsophisticated period. Unsurprisingly, nascent Ottoman archaeology espoused this attitude to the fullest, relegating Byzantine objects to a secondary position in the Imperial Museum’s collections. If Byzantine art made somewhat of a comeback after the 1890s, it was because the Germans, especially Kaiser Wilhelm II, suddenly discovered the joys of so-called early Christian art. The “shopping list” the German emperor sent to his fellow autocrat Abdülhamid II in 1898 can be taken as the starting point for the legitimation of the Imperial Museum’s own Byzantine collections. It is certainly not a coincidence that in 1900 and 1905 the museum acquired two major ambos from the church of Saint George and from Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki and that the latter building underwent a major restoration in 1906 and 1907 (Fig. 7). The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem Nevertheless, there were some noteworthy signs of change in attitude toward the Byzantine heritage. Interestingly, the imperial sarcophagi once again offers some indication of shifting mentalities, as in 1847 a few of them were transferred to the so-called museum at Hagia Eirene, where they were exhibited together with fragments of the chain blocking the Golden Horn during the final siege of Constantinople. In addition, a column of the Topkapı Palace courtyard was engraved with an inscription reporting that two of the lids lay embedded some twenty feet from that point, as they could not be extracted from under an impressive plane tree. Clearly something had changed since the time these objects had been deemed expendable enough to be abandoned to the curiosity and greed of European antiquarians and diplomats. 30 31 Had this trend continued smoothly, Istanbul would probably have developed one of the first and richest collections, indeed, museums, of Byzantine art and culture, but this was not to be. The political events that followed the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 radically transformed the perception of history and heritage from a Eurocentric, universalist discourse to a local and increasingly nationalist one. Following a short-lived “springtime of Ottoman peoples,” the decade of uninterrupted conflict in the region, from the Balkan Wars to the Turkish War of Independence, left its indelible mark on historical constructs across national divides. On the Ottoman domain, the immediate impact of this ideological shift on the perception of Byzantium was irreversible: it was rapidly propelled from a marginalized position to the status of the absolute “other,” paralleling the rising feelings of enmity against Greeks inside and outside Ottoman lands. Fig. 8 “İstanbul’da Zafer Sabahı” (A morning of victory in Istanbul), İkdam, 29 May 1330 / 11 June 1914, front page, celebrating the anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople. Perhaps the best illustration of this transformation was the unprecedented emergence of the conquest of Constantinople as a national celebration, on 11 June 1914 (Fig. 8). The organizers miscalculated the date, but they established rituals that would endure for decades, becoming one of the most powerful invented traditions of Turco-Islamic nationalism. With Greece redefined as the eternal foe and Ottoman Greeks declared a fifth column, it became all too easy to condemn Byzantium not only as a former vanquished foe, but also as a revivalist project of the nation’s enemies. On 8 February 1919, when the French general Franchet d’Espèrey took control of the city in the name of the Entente Powers, his parading through the streets under Greek flags was soon interpreted as a conscious mimicry of Mehmed the Conqueror’s entrance into the conquered Byzantine capital (Fig. 9). The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem Fig. 9 Gen. Franchet d’Espèrey’s parade in Pera (after L’Illustration, 8 March 1919: 27). 32 33 Whatever damage the Turks may have done to Christian and classical monuments—and here let it be said that they were far less destructive than the Latin Crusaders—their Government have now earned the gratitude of all civilized men by the liberality of their policy.11 This act of redemption, as it were, brought little if any improvement to the fate of Byzantine art and studies in Turkey, however. The original plan had been to use Hagia Sophia as a Byzantine museum, but that was never accomplished. Instead, it became a self-standing monument until its reconversion into a mosque in 2020. It took all the authoritarian power of the Kemalist Republic to turn a deaf ear to these nationalist clichés to reshuffle the country’s alliances in a way to bring Byzantium back into the folds of historical legitimacy. Once again, the target was the most iconic of all Byzantine monuments, Hagia Sophia, which underwent a major overhaul involving the restoration of its mosaics by the American expert Thomas Whittemore. The operation caught the attention of the public, leading to much speculation about the government’s ultimate goal. The final decision came suddenly, practically unannounced, and on 24 November 1934 a decree transformed the mosque into a museum. The decree was justified in universalist terms: “[D]ue to the historic nature of the unique architectural monument of the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, its transformation into a museum will bring joy to the entire Orient and will provide mankind with a new institution of science.”10 This symbolic gesture was a slap in the face of conservative forces and a formidable message of secularist allegiance to the Western world, which the West received with a rather patronizing form of gratitude, as illustrated by an article in the London Times: 10 “Eşsiz bir mimarlık sanat abidesi olan İstanbuldaki Ayasofya cemiinin tarihi vaziyeti itibarile müzeye çevrilmesi bütün Şark alemini sevindireceği ve insanlığa yeni bir ilim müessesesi kazandıracağı cihetle.” State Archives of the Turkish Republic, Prime Ministry, Decrees, 30-18-1-2, 49-79-6, 24 November 1934. With Byzantium subsumed within this vision of the eternal national foe, it was practically impossible to liberate Byzantine studies from this political and ideological straitjacket. Perhaps nothing proves this better than the fact that in 1955 the Tenth International Congress of Byzantine Studies took place in Istanbul only days after the pogrom of 6–7 September targeting the Greek population of the city. A telling detail of this tragic event was the way in which the looters and hooligans resorted to a set of nationalist symbols: the Turkish flag, photographs of Atatürk, and, of course, portraits of Mehmed II (Fig. 10). For decades to come, Byzantium became a sort of unspoken taboo that could be broken only by second-rate novels exoticizing and eroticizing the life of Byzantine empresses and much later by tasteless comedies that under the guise of mocking Turkish stereotypes actually ended up paying lip service to a very insidious form of crypto-nationalism (Figs. 11–12). It took decades for things to reach some level of normalization, but it would be naïve to claim that the Byzantine past has gained full recognition as part of the country’s heritage. The simplistic and Manichaean divide between “us” and “them” is still very present in popular culture and political discourse, and the Hagia Sophia stands as one of the most visible symbols and targets of this attitude toward history. 11 “The Treasures of St. Sophia,” Times, 5 June 1935. The Ottoman (Re)discovery of Byzantium | Edhem Eldem Fig. 10 Group of hooligans posing with Turkish flags and portraits of Mehmed the Conqueror and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, 6–7 September 1955. The decision to turn Hagia Sophia into a museum was essentially political, and as such, its acceptance, like its rejection, has remained a function of political circumstances and equilibria. In a nutshell, arguments to return the structure to a mosque, stifled under the authoritarian rule of Atatürk and his successor, İsmet İnönü, began to be voiced after the passage to a multiparty system in 1950. Such voices arose throughout the 1950s under the combined effects of the Democrat Party’s flirtation with Islamist conservatism and the glorification of the conquest on the occasion of its fifth centennial, in 1953. The crystallization of this nationalist and Islamist irredentism was further enhanced by the mirror image of the Hagia Sophia built in Greece as a Greek church suffering under Turkish domination. 34 35 Bibliography Bekâr, Cumhur. “A New Perception of Rome, Byzantium and Constantinople in Hezarfen Huseyin’s Universal History.” PhD diss., Boğaziçi University, 2011. Eldem, Edhem. “Ayasofya: Kilise, Cami, Abide, Müze, Simge.” Toplumsal Tarih 254 (February 2015): 76–85. ———. “Cultural Heritage in Turkey: An Eminently Political Matter.” In Essays on Heritage, Tourism and Society in the MENA Region, edited by Dieter Haller, Achim Lichtenberger, and Meike Meerpohl, pp. 67–91. Paderborn, 2015. Fig. 11 Cover of Kerim Sam, İmparatoriçe İren (Empress Eirene) (Istanbul, 1946), (from Edhem Eldem, Consuming the Orient (Istanbul, 2007), 245. Courtesy of SALT Research. Fig. 12 Poster for Bizans Oyunları / Geym of Bizans (Games of Byzantium), directed by Gani Müjde, 2016. It should be remembered, however, that indifference is probably even worse than animosity. In that respect, one should probably lament that Istanbul, once Constantinople, once Byzantium, should not be able to boast a proper Byzantine museum, which would certainly stand out as the richest in the world. 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