Since 1839, the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms had set out to restore past Ottoman grandeur using modern European models. Until the early 1860s, however, the Sublime Porte had primarily focused reform efforts on the center of the empire rather than the periphery. Significantly, it was Ottoman minority populations, as much as “outside enemies” that provoked the shift in the focus of Ottoman reform to the Danube region. As such, the so-called Tuna Vilayeti (Danube Province) was created in 1864 as a “pilot region,” with Ruse as its capital. Under the new provincial administration, a number of reforms were enacted with the goal of bringing stability to the region and better integrating different ethnic and religious groups, in particular Slavic-speaking Christians, into the Ottoman political system. As the provincial capital, Ruse and its hinterland became a central focus for experimental reforms, which brought many new institutions, and large-scale economic investments to the city and its environs. At the same time, Ruse’s economy had progressively developed with the new transportation and communication network, financial institutions, and commerce. The city itself went through urban reconstruction with wider streets and European architecture. It became, in a sense, a model city of the Tanzimat in the Balkans. Ruse flourished as an international port city where foreign merchants and residents engaged in commerce at local, regional and international levels. This paper examines the urban transformation of Ruse during the Ottoman provincial reforms, which ended with the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78.

By the First World War, three decades and a half after the end of Ottoman rule, Sofia had largely received its physiognomy as the modern capital of a European nation-state. The combined efforts of foreign engineers and architects and, by the turn of the century, a young cohort of Bulgarian professionals with Western education, under the strict control and guidance of the central state authorities, had resulted in a new city plan combining the radial and the grid systems, and an architectural profile in line with contemporary European models. Against this background, national historiography has interpreted Ottoman rule as a destructive regime imposed by a conqueror who carried a backward, if any, understanding of urbanism. The five centuries of foreign yoke were a period of stagnancy for the city and its infrastructures, a time when the urban substance degraded and succumbed to an elementary mode of living and mediocre building practices. This paper problematizes the dominance of the grand narratives of rapid modernization and de-Ottomanization elaborated in the Ottoman successor states as the legitimate framework for the study of modernity. Focusing on Sofia as one of the stereotypical examples of rapid de-Ottomanization, my research addresses the city’s transformation from an Ottoman provincial center to the modern capital of a nation state in the aftermath of empire. While the level of reconfiguration of urban space in Sofia in the decades following the Russo-Turkish war of 1878-79 was indeed exceptional, some of the main directions in the transformation of the urban fabric had already been charted in the Ottoman period. One example is the regularization of the street network and the efforts taken towards straightening and widening of the main streets, a process initiated by the Ottoman authorities already in the 1860s. My research, furthermore, points at a remarkable degree of continuity in the use and management of the city’s water supply network, an area that was otherwise at the forefront of the modernization project. Tracing the roots of urban transformation in the Balkans to the Ottoman period, and stressing the porous nature of the boundary between empire and nation-state, my analysis ultimately seeks to re-focus the modernity discourse on a three-dimensional system with Western, Ottoman, and Bulgarian actors.

The Topkapı Palace, the main seat of the Ottoman Empire for more than four centuries was officially declared a museum on April 3, 1924 with the direct order of Mustafa Kemal. Thus, within one year following the declaration of the Republic, the ultimate symbol of the ancien régime–the historic Ottoman palace–was given back to the people as a state museum. This museumification, emphasizing the distinction between the Ottoman and post-Ottoman eras, also declared the modern face of the young Turkish Republic in opposition to the non-modern Ottoman Empire that remained in the past. However, the museumification of the Topkapı Palace started much earlier, during the late Ottoman era. During the course of the 19th century, the palace opened its doors first to the diplomatic envoys, later to distinguished guests, and to European visitors and especially following the Second Constitution the Topkapı Palace became a destination for mass tourism. The palace grounds housing the Archaeological Museum, the Janissary Museum, the Military Museum, and the Imperial Treasury became a major tourist attraction during the late Ottoman era. The museumification of the palace was a manifestation of the modernization and Westernization of the empire. However, the well-choreographed tour of the palace for the Western gaze was a reflection of Ottoman "self-orientalism", which would later be replaced by "self-exoticism" during the Republican era. Following the move of the Ottoman rulers to new and modern palaces on the shores of the Bosphorus, both the abandoned Topkapı Palace and the "Historic Peninsula" was associated with the non-modern and positioned as a representation of the past. During the late-Ottoman and post-Ottoman eras, the divide between the old and the new parts of the city became evident. This paper focuses on the late-Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts and presents how the Topkapı Palace itself, its palatial institutions, and the city have been transformed in response to ideological shifts that took place in all aspects of social, political, and urban life of Istanbul during the 19th and 20th centuries. This paper aims at reading Ottoman and Turkish modernization through the Topkapı Palace and also interpreting the physical and symbolic transformation and museumification of the palace as a statement of modernity. It also deals with the question of different modernities and scrutinizes the distinctions and similarities between Ottoman and post-Ottoman ways of representing and displaying the past.

How does Ottoman history figure in the formation of urban space in relation to modern categorizations of identity and national citizenship in contemporary Turkey? In this paper, I engage with this question by focusing on a specific instance of urban place making, one that draws our attention to the temporal horizons of religious and national belonging. In particular, I examine how the urban space of Turkey’s border town of Antakya aligns multiple temporalities and ideologies of governance in the present, and projects the future-oriented imagination of a multi-religious Ottoman past onto the city’s physical, social, and political space. Located at the northeast corner of the Fertile Crescent, Antakya has historically been home to bilingual (Arabic-Turkish) Jewish, Orthodox Christian, and Alawi groups as well as Alevi and Sunni Turks, Armenians, and Kurds. The spatial governance of this demographic diversity has produced a multilayered urban landscape that reflects the uneasy coexistence of architectural styles and urban planning from the late Ottoman, French Mandate, and Turkish Republican periods. In this paper, through an examination of visual, archival, and ethnographic data, I trace the socio-economic and political underpinnings of the urban transformations and fragmentations that Antakya’s old quarter and historical marketplace have gone through since the 19th century. These transformations and fragmentations point to the concrete sites of intermingling between imperial, colonial, and national modes of governing diversity as part of urban place making with significant implications on the identity formation of the city residents. Unsettling the essential divide between Europe and the Middle East, my analysis also demonstrates how the legacy of Ottoman urban planning has been integral to the contemporary experiences of modernity in the region rather than as derivatives, exceptions, or alternative to European frameworks of modernity.

In both Arab and European scholarship, historical narratives first identified an overall homogenous process of modernisation taking place in the Arab Middle East, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Modernity, it was argued, was the result of an encounter between European influences and the Nahda (Arabic cultural revival). In this perspective, the notion of modernity was reduced to its Western and Arab national expressions. However, for the last fifteen years, in an attempt to provincialize Europe, scholars have given more attention to the Ottoman roots of modernity in the Arab Middle East – but also to the nature of its colonialism and orientalism. The strong impact of Ottoman expressions of modernity on Arab societies, it was shown, was a natural outcome of the complex process of re-Ottomanisation of the structures of power that took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After the Turkish victory over the Mamluks at the beginning of the 19th century, Iraqi provinces were particularly affected by re-Ottomanisation. Its impact on Iraqi society was significant and long-lasting. Until the outburst of World War I, Iraqi provinces were known as “Turkish Arabia” in the British administration. Education was provided in Turkish for a long time, and Arab nationalist figures still mastered Turkish better than Arabic, long after the establishment of the Hashemite kingdom in 1921 and the introduction of Arabic as an official language. The Syrian ideologue of Pan-Arabism Sati‘ al-Husri was invited by King Faisal of Iraq to Baghdad, where he became Director-General of the Ministry of Education. His task was to “arabize” (ta‘rib) the structures of power and implement Arab consciousness (al-wa‘y al-qawmi) among its citizens. By examining writings produced by and about leading actors of the Iraqi Arab national movements, this contribution seeks to redefine modernity by taking into account its hybrid influences; Ottoman, Western and transregional.