Starting in the early 1870s, public gardens (or parks) designed after Haussmann’s Parisian promenades started appearing in cities across the Ottoman Empire, from Istanbul to Thessaloniki to Cairo. These new European style recreation spaces were seen as signifiers of urban reform, which was equated with economic and social progress. Certain Ottoman elites believed that these new recreation spaces could serve an edifying function, that they could "civilize" urban residents and contribute to their moral instruction. This mode of thinking paralleled the way in which urban public parks were established to serve as a moralizing landscape for the working classes of industrializing European cities. There was another segment of the Ottoman population, however, that viewed the new public gardens as undesirable traits of excessive Westernization, and associated these spaces with moral decrepitude and extravagant consumerism. Ottoman writer Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem's novel Araba Sevdası (A Love of Carriages) written in 1898, lends expression to these conflicting viewpoints in his detailed description of the Çamlıca public garden, one of the first European style parks that opened in Istanbul in the summer of 1870. Set within the first weeks of the garden’s opening, Ekrem’s novel describes a teeming cosmopolitan crowd that engages in bold rituals of courtship, lavish displays of personal wealth, and partakes in a globalized entertainment culture of Ottoman and Parisian musical offerings. Ekrem also provides character sketches of independent minded Ottoman Muslim women who derive a great deal of pleasure from their ability to access and navigate these sites of entertainment and recreation. The novel, however, neglects to reveal that this bustling scene inside the Çamlıca garden was brought to an end shortly after it opened to the public. What was viewed as a site of debauchery necessitated new sets of rules for the types of recreation and entertainment activities that would be permissible in these public gardens, especially those located in Muslim-majority neighborhoods. This paper looks at a range of documents dating from the 1870s to the 1890s, including government correspondence, newspaper articles and Ottoman literature, to examine the debates surrounding the benefits and vices of Istanbul’s outdoor recreation spaces of the late nineteenth century, specifically its new public gardens. It discusses how these debates helped shape the design, function, use of public recreational spaces and their various entertainment offerings at this time.

Giovanni Pacini's three-act opera Saffo, based on a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano after Pietro Beltrame's play, premiered in Naples, Italy on November 29, 1840. Six years later, in April 1846, it was staged in Sultan Abdulmecit's Istanbul, in the palace-sponsored public opera house, the Naum Theatre. In 1847, it was performed in Boston, Massachusetts at the Howard Athenaeum. Spectators in Istanbul, however, would be holding a different kind of libretto than their fellow spectators in Naples or Boston. The thirty-two page original Italian libretto was printed and published by Dalla Topografia Flautina in Naples a publishing house which specialized in music printing. As for the 1847 Boston libretto, it was published by the Boston-based company Oliver Ditson & Co. with select musical sections, the list of the singers, an argument section, a bilingual libretto and even ads. Compared to these libretti, he only existing Ottoman libretto of Saffo is rather different. It is a twelve-page, handwritten and bound summary (currently in the Turkish Presidency State Archives in Istanbul), made to be sold to the Turkish speaking spectators who were as new a phenomenon as the public operas in Istanbul. This Ottoman libretto has missing acts and a rather subjective selection of the plot line. Unlike the Naples and Boston libretti, it is not a word for word translation of a master copy, but a summary based on a rehearsal or performance. The lack of musical details indicate that the Ottoman libretto was not designed for the musically literate polyglots but those who needed to be acquainted with the plot. In this presentation, I will examine archival documents from the Turkish Presidency Archives in Istanbul, and discuss how the early Ottoman libretti called tercüme-i hülasa, emerged at the intersection of cosmopolitanism, print technologies, and westernization efforts in the Empire. In the first part of the presentation, I will look into the calligraphic and lithographic traditions and technologies in Abdülmecit I's Istanbul (1839-61) and music printing in the Ottoman Empire. In the second part, I will be discussing how the content of hülasa differ from both western libretti of the 1840s and the Hamidian era libretti, with a focus on content appropriations such as religious terms, portrayal of ancient Greece, and the censorship of opera texts in late Ottoman Empire.

In the Corners of Salons (Salon Köşelerinde, 1988) of Safveti Ziya, a prominent member of the famous New Literature Group, tells the romance of Sekip, the Europeanized Ottoman man and an English woman named Lydia. The novel takes place in the culturally and socially European district Beyoglu’s ballrooms, cafés, restaurants, and salons which are presented as venues where Ottomans were outnumbered by Europeans and where they struggled to prove themselves as civilised as any European. Eager to fight back against misconceptions about Turks, Sekip tries to woo Lydia by his knowledge of etiquette and sense of decorum, but more than anything else by his ability to waltz as they dance in the grand and petit salons of Beyoglu. This paper explores the role of dancing and waltz in the late 19th century Ottoman social life as an expression of national identity and patriotism. It also addresses the question how waltz, the classic dance of romance in 19th century novels, transforms dance salons of this Ottoman novel into contested zones of nationalism and the seeming story of romance into a political narrative.