Canal-U

The Rise (and Return) of Ottoman Nostalgia: On the Use and Abuse of Architecture as History

Ahmet Ersoy is Associate Professor at the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His research involves the cultural history of the Late Ottoman Empire with a special focus on visuality and its links with rising discourses of locality and authenticity during a period of westernizing change. His recent work involves a study of photography and other means of mechanical image-reproduction in the late Ottoman world. He aims to understand the broader impact of this new media regime in the context of Ottoman culture. Ahmet Ersoy is the author of Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (2015), and the co-editor, with Vangelis Kechriotis and Maciej Gorny, of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1775-1945), vol. III (2010).

The lecture investigates the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they maneuvered through the nineteenth-century’s vast inventory of available styles and embarked on a revivalist/Orientalist program they identified as the “Ottoman Renaissance.” It reveals how Orientalism was embraced by the Ottomans as a nostalgic pursuit, and as a universally recognizable marker of authenticity. While exploring the historical context of the late Ottoman invention of Ottoman nostalgia, it also touches upon the recent implications of the phenomenon in the official and popular culture of contemporary Turkey.