In fourteenth-century Bithynia--what is, today, northwest Turkey-- power changed hands from the Byzantines to the Ottomans. In turn many scholars have viewed the Byzantine and Ottoman cultures as separate and, consequently, their architecture as belonging to distinct traditions. This paper suggests, instead, that a study of the built environment in Bithynia helps eliminate, or at least blur, the divisions imposed by political history. To begin with, the similarities between the Byzantine and Ottoman regional styles in architecture are so striking that they cry out to be studied together. Although the region was the center of the Byzantine government during the thirteenth century, by the third decade of the fourteenth century, its major centers had fallen to the Ottoman Turks, who established their capital at Bursa (Byzantine Prousa) in 1326. From a Byzantine perspective, the Late Byzantine architecture in Bithynia represents the end of regional tradition, while from the Ottoman viewpoint, the early Ottoman buildings appear incongruous to the canons of Classical Ottoman architecture. To consider buildings as cultural artifacts presents an alternative way of looking at the complexities of the period and moving beyond the limited textual record. The historian Colin Imber has called the fourteenth century a "black hole" in the formation of the Ottoman state because of the paucity of textual evidence on both sides, both the Byzantine and the Ottoman. Indeed, none of the recent studies of the early Ottoman state looks beyond the written evidence in constructing a history. In Bithynia architecture can provide what the texts cannot; with its many late Byzantine and early Ottoman buildings, the region embodied the complexities of the period, since its very urban landscape served as an agent of identity mixing and cultural exchange across the frontier line. Many Ottoman buildings in the region borrow from Byzantine construction techniques, sometimes simply for aesthetic reasons, sometimes to make a political statement emphasizing Ottoman hegemony, and in all cases suggesting an overlay between the Byzantines and Ottomans. Buildings thus function as a synecdoche for the heterogeneous cultural allegiance of their builders, while sustaining a public profile that all members of the society, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish alike, can appreciate from their own perspective.

In the late 19th century, urban governance became one of the main reform tools of the Ottoman Empire serving to project the imperial presence on far-flung provinces at the same time that it began producing "provincial" capitals. As one such capital, Beirut's relationship to the center was transformed by its twin definition as a center of surveillance and as a target of urban reform. Institutions such as the municipality and legal corpuses such as municipal and building laws transformed the relationship between the inhabitant and her city as one mediated by a municipal bureaucracy and steered by nested hierarchies of power tying the city to the imperial capital. The impact this had on the urban development of Beirut is well documented and researched, but much less attention has been paid to the changes in the idealized opposite of the public sphere, namely "the private sphere." This paper investigates the legal reconfiguration of domesticity in late Ottoman Beirut. Using the Hanafi court records and minutes of municipal council meetings, I show how certain areas of domestic life that had up to the late 19th century been overseen by the Hanafi court were transferred to the domain of the municipal council. Although there were no specific state reforms focusing on domestic space, under the press of urban reform and the changing commercial position of the city, the value of domestic space was increasingly mediated by a real estate market. In this context, I argue, legal categories in the Hanafi court - such as common law and spatial and visual relations - were replaced by a generalized understanding of the home as real estate property whose value was defined by its novelty and location. This shows that rather than bifurcate into a secular/public and religious/personal apparatuses, the late Ottoman legal system fundamentally redefined certain realms of privacy by removing them from the authority of the religious court and recasting them under a new mode of urban governance. In the absence of a comprehensive archive of the late Ottoman courts in Beirut (commercial, nizamiye, and mixed courts) evidence gleaned from the management of the built environment offers a new perspective on the reconfiguration of state power and its effect on everyday life in the city.

This paper is about the relationship between collective memory, historical consciousness and built environment in an ethnically and politically divided geography, Cyprus. It investigates the ways in which landscape and its formulations are manipulated and transformed for selective, competing constructions of collective remembering and national history, through the analysis of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) "where memory crystallizes and secrets itself" (Nora 1989:7). The paper is specifically concerned with the post-conflict treatment of symbolic sites, and with how built environment has been used for the separate nationalist projects of both Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities to shape the way the past "should" be remembered. Today Cyprus is geopolitically divided into two parts. The Republic of Cyprus is the internationally recognized government and controls approximately two-thirds of the island. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey, controls the northern third of the country and is inhabited primarily by Turks. Cyprus presents an opportunity to study ways in which collective memory and landscape contribute to the construction of the past, present and social identities in a divided country. Built environment and its formulations by the local people will provide evidences concerning the silent parts of history. The focus of this paper will be on patterns of physical and symbolic transformation of landscape as potential means of contestation over history. Among all types of symbolic sites, the paper will be specifically about the religious sites, including churches, mosques, chapels, tekkes, and cemeteries. Thus, the main research questions focus on politics of space, historical consciousness, and the spatial manifestation of power: How are the meanings of these symbolic sites conceptualized, negotiated, contested and transformed following violent ethnic conflict that leads to the partitioning of once-shared territories into ones dominated completely by only one groupo In what ways are such sites invoked to contribute to the process of history writing, selective remembrance and legitimization of certain power relations in new social and political circumstancesu The paper will be based on a multi-sited ethnographic study implemented in the Greek and Turkish parts of Cyprus in 2009-2010. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mimoire. Representations (2): 7-24.