As European and Ottoman archaeological research emerged and institutions and laws regarding the protection of antiquities developed in the nineteenth century, public interest in the past increased in Ottoman society. This paper explores the development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the conceptions of cultural heritage amongst the diverse Ottoman peoples around the empire and their interactions with antiquities and historical sites. There is an emergent historiography of non-European/indigenous ways of interacting with and appreciating the material remains of the past. In some cases, this has a religious aspect, like protecting old religious manuscripts and visiting old churches, perhaps as a part of a pilgrimage. In others, the appreciation comes through European practices that pave the way to financial gain (both via tourism and trafficking). European collecting practices, both legal or illegal, also affected the Ottoman public’s perceptions of cultural heritage, especially late nineteenth century onwards. The Ottoman capital produced a lot of text and images of antiquities and ruins through popular journals like Servet-i Fünun and Şehbal, which discussed the issues of civilization and progress. Istanbul periodicals emphasize the importance of protecting the antiquities, including Islamic ones, and bemoan ongoing destruction and looting. However, we know much less about opinions on these topics by Ottoman peoples outside the capital. This paper focuses on non-state sources and provincial sources. It looks at the experiences of Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs, mostly those who reside outside of the capital, and their interactions with Byzantine, ancient Armenian, and Mesopotamian antiquities as well as Classical and Biblical sites. This paper uses sources like the Arabic language journal Al-Muqtaṭaf which was published in Beirut and Cairo, an Armenian guestbook of the museum in Ani, and books in Greek published about the antiquities collections of Izmir and Tekirdağ. The paper asks what different approaches and ideas were produced about the empire’s antiquities and how different peoples positioned themselves vis-a-vis those antiquities. This paper therefore aims to contribute to the growing literature on Ottoman cultural heritage and indigenous ways in which to interact with the past. Using diverse sources from the different corners of the empire, it will also expand our knowledge about Ottoman perceptions of the past beyond those of elites in the capital city.

This paper engages with the changing Ottoman attitude towards pre-Ottoman edifices by focusing on the use, reuse, appropriation, documentation, and museumification of Byzantine remains in and around Topkapı Palace. Ottoman relationship with the Byzantine pasts of Istanbul had been ambiguous and went through different phases from the 15th to the 20th century. The palatial complex was built over the Byzantine acropolis by Mehmed II and numerous Byzantine remains scattered around the palace were spoliated and reused for decorative or merely functional purposes. Yet, with the increasing awareness of the past during the early modern and modern eras these “antiquities” started being documented, displayed, and museumified. For instance, the Byzantine church of St. Irene, remaining in the first courtyard of Topkapı Palace, was not converted into a mosque, but used as an armory after the conquest until its conversion into a proto-museum of antiquities in the mid-19th century. Numerous other objects in the palace that were previously spoliated or functionally utilized, were transformed into antiquities to be observed, displayed, and documented. One such case was the baptistery, which was used as a storage for gold and silver coins in the basement of the Ottoman Imperial Treasury for many centuries. The marble basin was later removed and placed in the fourth garden of the palatial complex. Documentation of Byzantine heritage also became important. For instance, Byzantine sarcophagi found in the second court of the palace were documented as early as the 18th century and another later discovery was marked by inscriptions carved on marble columns of the portico. These imperial tombs were eventually unearthed and transferred to the Ottoman Imperial Museum, which was established in the palace grounds during the late 19th century. By the early 20th century, accidental discovery of Byzantine architectural remains during the making of the Gulhane Park, became a public incident to be advertised and celebrated by the mayor of Istanbul. Drawing upon first-hand on-site documentation, as well as unpublished archival material, architectural surveys, archeological reports, official correspondences, photographs, engravings and memoirs, the study will present the ambiguous engagement of Ottomans with the Byzantine past in and around the Topkapı Palace. This study focusing particularly on Topkapı Palace will shed light on the larger phenomenon of Ottomans’ perception of and engagement with the Byzantine heritage and discuss their changing responses towards the pre-Ottoman pasts of the empire from the foundational era to the dissolution of the empire.

In 1910, Mehmed Ziya, an Ottoman Muslim educator and an intellectual active on a number of heritage-related initiatives of his time, published an illustrated book on the Kariye mosque (Chora monastery) in Istanbul. This 70-page long publication is largely an art historical account, and provides useful documentation (also by means of photography) on the state of this Byzantine monument at that time. More than a purely art historical treatise, however, “Kaʻriye Cami-i Şerifi” is a testimony to an Ottoman Muslim interest in safeguarding the Byzantine heritage of the Ottoman capital. In this book, one finds information on what galvanised Mehmed Ziya to study this monument, and on his efforts to raise awareness, inter alia, among his students by organising a group school visit to it. Also, uncomfortable at the thought of Ottoman destruction of Byzantine monuments at the time of the conquest of Constantinople (1453), he shares his own understanding on that matter. At the end of the book, Mehmed Ziya has added copies of (a) his letter on the Chora monastery to Halil Bey, Director of the Imperial Museum, and (b) a letter by his students requesting the protection of this monument. Overall, Mehmet Ziya’s “Kaʻriye Cami-i Şerifi” is a window into the Ottoman Muslim reception of Byzantine heritage in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. Studied in conjunction with other material, such as the views of other Ottoman Muslim intellectuals on the material remains of the Byzantine past in the Ottoman capital, it allows for an in-depth discussion of the ideology that supported such an interest, as well as the demands that accompanied it. Given that “Kaʻriye Cami-i Şerifi” remains to this day seriously understudied, a contextualized critical analysis of its content shall much enrich our understanding of Ottoman Muslim elite concerns on the Byzantine heritage of Istanbul. Besides that, at a time when emblematic Byzantine churches in Turkey are being (re)converted into mosques (largely in the name of Ottoman history), Mehmed Ziya’s book on Chora monastery/Kariye mosque may also be read as an alternative approach to Byzantine heritage from Ottoman times themselves.

This paper focuses on the transformation of the research on the Byzantine layer of Istanbul by the Greek Orthodox intellectuals such as Alexander Paspates throughout the long nineteenth century. Spanning from an antiquarian interest in the historical texture of the city in the early decades of the nineteenth century, this paper traces this transformation into the emergence of a new, proto-(urban) archaeological research effort accompanied by institutionalization materialized by the Greek Literary Society in the second half of the nineteenth century. As widely known, the historiography of the Byzantine Empire and its material residue is extremely pertinent to the formation of Modern Greek identity from the eighteenth century onwards. However, an exclusivist focus on the research conducted by the Greek Orthodox intellectuals on the Byzantine texture of İstanbul bears the risk of falling into the traps of “nationalism,” even more so “nationism” in Cemal Kafadar’s terms. According to Kafadar, despite their alertness to the pitfalls of nationalism or their open dismissal of its ideology, many scholars continue to base their analysis in national terms, with the result that ethnic-national identities and cultures still dominate the scholarship. For all their value, such identity-driven studies tend to underestimate the multifarious structure of the broader Ottoman society ignores the significant extra- and supra-communal impact of these intellectuals, their works, and institutions. In this light, this paper follows the Latourian terminology in employing the historical material texture of Constantinople as a ‘non-human actant’ in the form of an ‘object of knowledge’ which enables the ‘formation of a new social.’ Such an approach has the potential to allow this study to go beyond the established categories within Ottoman historiography, and convey a far more complex picture, especially when it comes to ethnoreligious communities such as the Greek-Orthodox. Accordingly, in this paper, the Byzantine texture of Istanbul is an object of knowledge that creates links between various actors that were, in one way or another, engaged with that object. The representation of this object is formed through the accumulation of knowledge on the historical urban material context and its emergence in different solid forms, such as books, journals, maps, illustrations, and the like. Through close scrutiny of examples of these representations and the network that surrounds them, the paper investigates the transformation of knowledge on the historical material context of Istanbul, that is, the Byzantine heritage, from ‘urban antiquarianism’ to ‘urban archaeology’ throughout the nineteenth century.