Ottoman History Podcast - The Hamidian Quest for Tribal Origins

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

Episode 379 with Ahmet Ersoy & Deniz Türker hosted by Matthew Ghazarian and Zeinab Azarbadegan Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How did the Ottomans come to visually represent their mythical origins? And to what ends? In this episode we speak with Ahmet Ersoy and Deniz Türker about the formation, development, and visualization of Ertuğrul sancak, the mythical birthplace of the Ottoman dynasty. In 1886, Sultan Abdülhamid II commissioned an expedition of military photographers, painters, and cartographers to record the region, its architecture, and its nomadic tribes. Ersoy and Türker talk to us this mission and its economic and diplomatic ramifications, drawing on their recent exhibition, Ottoman Arcadia, at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul. Our discussion touches on the proliferation and dissemination of visual materials during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), as well as his massive collection of visual materials held today as part of the Yıldız Palace Library. « Click for More »

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Kazarian. And I'm Zeynep Azarbadagan. And we're here today speaking with Ahmed Ersoy and Deniz Türker. Welcome to the podcast. Hi. Hi. Thank you for having us. Ahmed Ersoy is a previous OHP guest and a professor of history at Bosphorus University, where he teaches and works on late Ottoman cultural history, theory, and history of visual culture, and the historiography of art history in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. Deniz Türker, also a podcast veteran, is a CIS Research and Outreach Associate and Affiliated Lecturer in the History of Art and in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Departments at the University of Cambridge, Pembroke College.

She focuses on 19th century Ottoman material culture, including art, architecture, and landscape transformations. Today we'll be talking about their exhibition, Ottoman Arcadia, the Hamidian expedition to the land of tribal roots at the Koch Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul. They curated the exhibition with Bahattin Öz Tuncay and a large team as well, none of whom could join us today. Ottoman Arcadia shows the photo albums of Sultan Abdulhamid II, who in 1886 commissioned a team of prominent photographers and painters to document early Ottoman settlements in the South Marmara region, said to be the birthplace of the Ottomans as a dynasty. The mission covered areas of the South Marmara region,

including the cities of Bursa, the empire's first capital, along with Yenishihir, Iznik, Söğüt, and Bözyük. The team produced a large collection of matted photographs, handwritten notes, descriptions of the region's settlements, its landscapes, its architecture, along with documentation on the region's semi-nomadic tribes. on the region's semi-nomadic tribes. First, we'll ask Deniz and Ahmed for some historical background of the expedition itself, what conditions encouraged such an expedition, where did it take place, what did they do, and why Sultan Abdulhamid II ordered the expedition in the first place.

Then we'll shift topics to talk about photography, visual representation, and the Yıldız Palace visual archive. So the exhibition Ottoman Arcadia focuses on an Ottoman expedition visual representation and the Yolda's Palace visual archive. So the exhibition Ottoman Arcadia focuses on an Ottoman expedition to South Marmara region in 1886. Can you tell us more about the expedition? Who were the people involved? What was their actual mission and how did they carry it out? In 1885 Abdulhamid decides to create a new sub-province within the Huda Vendigar province. And he calls it very aptly the Ertuğrul sub-province. Huda Vendigar, that's Bursa, right?

Not really. So Bursa is actually the capital or the center of the Hudaavendigar vilayet, which is a much larger administrative region. And Bursa, again, is the capital or the center of that vilayet. And so within this Hüdavendigar province, they establish a new sub-province called Ertuğrul. And the center of Ertuğrul sub-province becomes Bilecik, the city of Bilecik. And he, I think soon thereafter, sends out a group of artists and a leader of this commission out to document this new vilayet,

or to document this new sub-province. And within this group, we have individuals who would later become very prominent artists like Hoca Ali Rıiza Efendi and Sururiyle Ahmet Emin and Ahmet Shekur. It's a team of 10 individuals led by a head chamberlain, one of Abdulhamid's closest aides called Mehmet Emin, who is an interesting character in himself. He, in the 1870s, actually takes a long travel to Central Asia and even over to India and leaves a travel account which is published in an Ottoman periodical at the time, which catches the attention of the palace. And he's appointed the librarian of Wilda's palace. And he eventually sort of translates French novels and reads them to Abdulhamid

and they, I think, sort of strike up an intimate friendship. But he's a man who loves to travel. He's very articulate as a travel narrator and also he has an eye, sort of an artistic eye of vistas, of geographies, of landscapes, and of peoples. And we also found that through sort of digging into who he really is, we find that he's interested in zoology, he's interested in ethnography, and he publishes books on these

burgeoning topics. These are new sort of late 19th century disciplines that are emerging. These are new sort of late 19th century disciplines that are emerging. So it's very obvious why he's chosen to lead this exhibition. It becomes very clear that because of his interests, Abdulhamid selects him to head this team. So Abdulhamid II. So they had this new sanjak, this new sub-province called Ertugrul. And he has this intimate relationship with this Mehmed Amin that

started because he was impressed by his travelogue work and then he says I'm gonna pick you you're gonna lead this team of people and you're gonna go you know go strut your stuff in Ertugrul province like shows what you've got for the Ottomans you've done Central Asia you've done India now I want you to do it for where the dynasty is from why does Abdulhamid get interested in this Sanjak at this moment? Well, there are several reasons, I think. One of them is very straightforward. I mean, the expedition is a knowledge-gathering mission.

It's more or less an archival mission of fact-gathering. So what we have at this period, in terms of very practical infrastructural terms, is the project for establishing a new railway line, an Anatolian railway line, because the European railways come to Istanbul and it goes as far as Izmit at this point. And by 1885, 1886, they're considering building a new,

quite extensive railway line that extends to Ankara and then to Konya, Ankara, Eskisehir, Konya. And that would pass through Ertuğrul? That the sub-province would be the heart and core of the itinerary of the railway. So that's one reason. And what we were able to find is that we got hold of, through the Prime Ministry Ottoman archives, we got hold of the expedition memorandum, which is an extremely detailed account of the agenda of the expedition and the kind of data

that they were gathering. So there's a lot of interest in gathering factual statistical data about the sub-province, its demography, its agriculture, and so on and so forth. So there is this aspect of interest in the sub-province. But also, on the other hand, actually from the early 1860s onwards, what we see is that probably in close connection to what was going on in Europe in terms of nationalistic currents, the Ottomans developed a new, renewed interest in their dynastic origins, which was always there. Of course, from the 15th century onwards, you have layers and layers of memory and historical narratives dealing with the early Ottoman past, which is something very important. You have the myth of onwards, you have layers and layers of memory and historical narratives dealing

with the early Ottoman past, which is something very important. You have the myth of creating this empire from a little clan, but nevertheless in the 19th century you have this renewed interest that has more proto- nationalistic overtones to it. So there is an effort to go back to the very roots of the Ottoman dynasty to find the essential constitutive components of Ottoman identity. Quite a modern interest in digging up the roots and understanding what they are. So I think, I mean, the expedition, we call it the expedition or the, you know, Ertuğrul Sanjak expedition definitely has this agenda of basically gathering knowledge about the Ottoman early Ottoman heritage and early Ottoman history

that's the main second component of the agenda so how do they gather this knowledge because that's a very important component of the exhibition what do they actually do once they get there very important component of the exhibition. What do they actually do once they get there? Well, I think as Ahmet said, this memorandum told us a lot about the very physical aspects of how this information was gathered. We actually can trace through this memorandum the exact route they take to get to all the different sites. It takes about two weeks to gather this information. And as Ahmet also suggested, there are no railway lines at this point. So there are actually 10 of them or maybe 12 of them on various different sort of animals or on foot gathering information going from town to city.

And it seems to us that Bursa and Bilecik are these, Bursa, Bilecik and Eskişehir actually, three cities are their hubs. They rest there, they reside there and they go out on sort of on day quests to these towns where they survey. Because these artists, as I said, become sort of very sort of celebrated Ottoman artists are at this point military school teachers and school of engineering teachers. And they're experts in surveying and land surveying. So they're doing that. They are taking photographs. They're taking incredible photographs. In fact, there are a lot of incredible panoramas inside these albums. And I think we haven't yet said, but accompanying the memorandum that gives us a sense of what this expedition looks like, we also have captions, occasionally quite expansive captions underneath photographs that are informative,

like in the memorandum, informative in demographics, in the economic structures, in the infrastructural conditions of these areas that they visit. But also, occasionally they become very personal you get a sense of them experiencing difficulties as they're crossing through rivers or mountain passages but also occasionally there is historical information so we'll be looking at a panorama a very breathtaking panorama of an otherwise underpopulated mountainscape. And then the caption writer, which we assume is Mehmet Emin, is telling us of an early Ottoman battle scene or a love story or Osman Gazi meeting Sheikh Edebali.

And so the expedition itself is not done for one specific purpose, that is to survey this new sub-province. The people involved in gathering this information know that the information will be used for multiple different purposes. I think that's one of the most interesting aspects of this exhibition is precisely that the individuals involved in this project know that what they produce will be used for different purposes. They're aware of that because I think that that is...

A thing about Abdulhamid as a patron is that he values information's potential to be repurposed. Just to add to that, the photographs were not the only product of the expedition. So, you know, we did some archival tracing for the expedition and we were able to find, for instance, oil paintings that were based on photographs, which were also considered to be one mode of knowledge gathering at that point. They also produced maps, which we couldn't get a hold of, but we also found some charcoal drawings of ancient remains, for instance, that were done by the painters in the team.

So along with the memorandum itself, we have a multimedial done by the painters in the team. So it's, along with the memorandum itself, we have a multimedia mode of production based on the expedition. So we have this team led by Mehmet Emin. They are producing panoramas, all sorts of other photography, but as you said, also charcoal drawings, survey data, the information going into all the captions for all of this statistics whatever as you said there's kind of two faces at least two faces to this project one is very practical we need to send our instructors from the military school to survey this land for an infrastructure investment but then on the other hand we're interested in this

place because it's the seat of our historical mythical origins. Abdulhamid II gifts three albums from the photographs produced on this survey to the German Chancellor Bismarck. Why does he give these albums to him and how does this relate to the broader kind of Ottoman-German diplomacy that's going on here? Because I think it's interesting. It can tell us something about Ottoman-German relations, but also something about the role of photography in diplomacy at this time. So at this point in time,

the Ottomans are trying to really court the Germans to help them out with the railway project, basically to finance and to help build the Anatolian railway lines. We also very quickly realized that Mehmet Emin, through archival documents, that Mehmet Emin is involved in this courtship, in this sort of diplomatic economic courtship to get the Germans to come over and help lay the rails. So the photograph albums are in some ways a byproduct, sort of a cultural byproduct of this economic courtship. And really in 1889, they do start building these the railway lines that they symbolically graphed

in the photograph albums so in some ways when when and if Bismarck turned the pages of these albums Ottomans hoped that Bismarck would be able to see the root of this potential railway line and then

also that we do know quite a lot. There's a lot of scholarship on Abdulhamid II's friendship with Wilhelm II. We see them side by side. We have buildings built for Wilhelm within Yildiz Palace and beyond. So that relationship is clearer to us historically.

But the earlier dynamics of the Ottoman-German relationship wasn't. And so this actually gave us a kind of a glimmer of what early on this sort of newly emerging German empire's relationship with the Ottomans looked like. But the question of whether Bismarck actually sat down and looked at these albums and said something about them is very unlikely is is is is not there and it's it's very unlikely and and occasionally when we um present uh this exhibition to viewers they this is one of the first questions that they ask is is what did he think of these albums well we you know we don't know but all we know is that that at least his retinue liked it enough to um and think thought it was a good investment to um to join in with the um the the railway project so the the important thing for us was that you know these three albums were

acquired for the coach collection and then doingival research, we realized that there were at least nine more similar albums, products of the expedition that were placed in the Istanbul University's rare collections, which is basically the Yıldız Palace collection. So we realized that the expedition yielded this, you know, range of albums with similar recurrent photographs grouped in different ways. And then apparently from among these 12 albums, they picked three up as representative samples of the expedition and sent them. So the expedition and the albums were not prepared with the aim of you know gifting to the german chancellor but that was kind of a by-product that came in handy at this point in time uh why were the germans specifically at this point chosen was there a specific reason for like for if this is a sort of

the precursor to the relationship that abdul hamid has with Wilhelm II? Why were the Germans chosen at this specific point in sort of 1886? In the exhibition, you talk about sort of how Bismarck became an important figure after the Berlin Treaty in 1708. It's a great question. I will try to answer it. I don't think this will sort of cover all of why the Ottomans are seeking a sort of diplomatic alliance or an economic alliance with Germany. But I do think that after 1877-78 Ottoman-Russian war, the only reasonable alliance they can think of in Europe is one with Germany. I think that France is out and certainly France is out, then England is also out because they really hold the sort of imperial sort of power base and balance in Europe. And they're competitors, they're the prime competitors. And so really, I think that the Ottomans are left with

a newly formed German empire that is wealthy, wealthy enough to actually come in and sponsor a grand industrial project such as railway lines. And I think that, and we do know from, you know, the Ottoman Arcadia exhibition has a book and there's a great short but great article by Sinan Kunera up there that talks about Bismarck's opinions about the Ottoman Empire. They're not necessarily bright and shiny. I mean, he's not a huge fan of fully investing diplomatically and economically with the Ottomans. and economically with the Ottomans. But I think that Wilhelm II coming in as the Kaiser at this point in time and really sort of becoming the real decision maker in the German Empire really shifts the balance and tips the balance over to coming in

and building this thing. I mean, it seems that an Ottoman-German alliance would kind of constitute an alternative to Western European hegemony at this point. And that, I mean, I don't want to sound teleological, but this is the way that leads to the Wilhelm friendship and then to the First World War and so on and so forth. Thanks very much. We will continue shortly after a music break. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Kazarian, here with Zeynep Azerbatygan, interviewing Ahmet Ersoy and Deniz Türker about the 1886 Ottoman expedition to Ertuğrul province

in the South Marmara region. So to shift gears a little back to the content of the materials they produced, the photographs and the drawings, etc. One thing I was struck by in the exhibition at Anamed was the presence of Native American pictures. And I was struck by how the sort of similarity, after seeing all these pictures of tribes in the Sowet region, how when you put them next to these pictures of Native Americans, ethnographic pictures from the U.S., that, you know, the similarity is kind of striking.

Could you talk a little bit about tribal or ethnographic photography during this period? Okay, well, let me start by pointing out the types of photographs that we encounter taken at the expedition. So you have landscapes, very dramatic landscapes, cityscapes, architecture, monuments, basically photographs of monuments. And then the fourth and I think the most original and striking component is the ethnographic photographs of natives to the region, mostly Turkmen semi-nomadic

populations inhabiting the province and the sub-province. So these ethnographic photographs tell us that the Ottoman photographers had a very deep understanding of the scientific norms of anthropological photography at this period. This is confirmed by what we find in the Hamidian archives, the visual archives that is, where you have a series of albums, ethnographic albums that were taken by Russians, by you know ethnographers in the British Raj, by the American Ethnographic Bureau. So you have all of these basically collected in the Hamidian archive, and the photographers and the clerks had access to this archive. It was a working mobile archive. So the very format of the photographs of the region's Turkmens actually conforms squarely to the norms of ethnographic photography at this period. So there is a very strong claim for scientific legitimacy.

These were producing scientific data. data. So you would have this, for instance, genre of types, ethnographic types, where you either have groups of two or three that are posed against a blank wall, or you have larger groups in their natural habitats, natural settings. These are the two major, basically, components of the types genre that we know from ethnographic photography at this period. So there's a very strong effort to record the native tribal existence in the region by means of the empirical claims of this new technology, photography. of this new technology, photography. And what we know, I mean, this is a detail that just as the team departed,

the expedition team departed in April of 1886, these cases of photographs and books arrived from the U.S. president as gifts to Sultan Abdulhamid. And for months or maybe even years, he was pleading the president to send him photographs of Native Americans. This is what he explicitly demanded. This we know through the memoirs of the American consul in Istanbul. And then Samuel Cox talks about the very moment that the boxes were opened and Abdulhamid just opens these albums and he is thrilled. He spends these hours scrutinizing these photographs and stereographs of Native Americans

and Samuel Cox is basically wondering why this intense interest in the natives and he's semi orientalist maybe he's saying well maybe he sees some affinity with his own Tartaric roots as he's you know so much interested in these natives. So why is there an interest in ethnographically sort of recording these tribes specifically? So normally what we have in documents, archival documents, is a disparaging and condescending view of nomads, peasants, natives. But in this case, when we're talking about these particular groups,

it seems that Abdulhamid and other members of Ottoman intelligentsia at this point saw a genealogical connection between these people and the early Ottomans. And again, in an Orientalistic sense, they felt that these people were the unsullied remnants of a distant lost medieval past. So this expedition in a way was a spatial journey as well as a temporal journey for the expedition members because they thought they were going to this frozen unchanged medieval past. And you can see that from the memorandum, from the captions, you can see that they were fascinated to find these narratives, oral narratives that were circulating among the natives, their lifestyles and their clothing, very palpable links with the distant early Ottoman past. So on the level of the ruling elite,

I think for Abdulhamid, it was very important to find the genealogical link with his own dynastic origins, with these people. When we also know that he assigned his head librarian, Süleyman Hasbi, to do research on major dynastic families in Anatolia and these tribal groups to find traces of connection to the early Ottoman family. And on a broader, again, more proto-nationalistic level, you can say that there's an interest

in these people because there's a rising interest in the early stages of the Ottoman dynasty, the Ottoman state, and they wanted to know how these late medieval warriors lived. And the encounter with the natives was a moment of first contact almost where they became more aware of the realities of the lost medieval past. And I just want to add to that, the sort of intellectual component to this imperial quest starts around the 1860s, where with individuals like Ahmed Vefik Pasha, who at some point is the governor of Bursa, these are sort of solid Tanzimat figures who are employed in 1850s, 1860s to sort of rewriting this dynastic history,

they become deeply interested in the constituent languages of the early Ottomans, and they land on Turkish and the Çağatay languages. And so I think underneath this, what would become an imperial quest is a linguistic interest that also sort of then gets conjoined with an ethnographic interest. And we do know, for instance, that Mehmet Emin is mentored at some point by Ahmet Vifik. And when you do, in fact, read Mehmet Emin's own travel log to Central Asia, you very clearly from the get-go see his interest in the Turkmens, the tribal sort of nomads of Central Asia, writes about their manners and customs, and also includes nifty glossaries of the way they speak, of certain phrases, the way they look. And so what I want to say is that really the origins of this quest are with the rewriting of Ottoman history post-Tanzimat, I would say.

If I may add to that, it's also, you have to consider that we're talking about a seriously shrinking empire that's losing its European territories. So from, especially from the 1870s and 80s onwards, we're talking about the realization of the empire becoming more Muslim and more Turkish. So many scholars talk about this, including Selim Derengil and Kemal Karpat, that from the 1870s and 80s onwards, many Ottoman bureaucrats start talking about the Turkish ethnic element within the empire as a leading force that has the right and the capacity to lead the empire's other ethnic groups. So there's a rising awareness, both on the intellectual, academic, and political level about the roots of Ottoman identity and about the very proto-nationalistic interest

in the very Turkishness, Turkish ethnic element that's embedded there. And I think that what the photograph albums, especially the ethnographic imagery, show us is that Abdülhamid II's period is often known as the sort of the pan-Islamic turn, but in fact what the exhibition really tries to show is in fact that it's also a pan-Turkic turn. So, you know, what we deeply associate with the young Turk appeal to Turkishness or desire to convey the Turkish identity actually I think has origins in this period. One of our aims is to seriously interrogate this very

simplistic linear scheme of politics of identity that starts with the Tanzimat, you have a more cosmopolitan inclusive Ottomanist. And now with Abdulhamid comes pan-Islamism as an international and domestic strategy. And then with the Young Turks, it's, you know, the Turkish nationalism kicks in. Well, apparently, we have a much more complex, layered, laminated form of politics of identity going on where, yes, pan-islamism was there as a broader strategy but it was interwoven with this early interest in proto-nationalistic interest in Turkishness as well. So following on sort of ethnographic photography the last section of the exhibition talks about the silences in the photography and how non-Muslims many Greeks and Armenians living in this region,

they are absent from the photos. Can you talk about these absences and also another absence that we realize when we're looking that there are very few women actually portrayed in these photographs? There had been several calamities in the second half of the 19th century. You have a major earthquake in 1855 that devastates the entire province. And then especially after the 1877-78 war, you have refugees, you have immigrants coming in from the Balkans as well as from the Caucasus.

coming in from the Balkans as well as from the Caucasus. So you have a lot of tensions built up in the region. You have several ethnic groups, Muslim and non-Muslim ethnic groups. You have tensions between these people as well as contacts, of course. You have tensions between the settled and the nomad. of course. You have tensions between the settled and the nomad. And through the 19th century, of course, a lot of nomadic groups were settled by the state, especially during the time of Ahmed Veshti Fikpasha when he was the governor. And then you have tensions building up between the new immigrants, the new migrants and the settled population, the inhabitants of the region. So there's a lot of this going on, which we can trace from the documents, even from the memorandum,

you know, you see signs of this. And this is nowhere to be found in the albums, in the photographic albums. So I think that the albums are giving, what the albums are providing us is the hegemonic truth of the Hamidian era. It's Abdulhamid's alternative reality where the entire region, especially the sub-province, with the aim of turning the sub-province into a heritage site, an Ottoman heritage site.

I think they're trying to portray it as the ultimate Turkmen kind of homeland. And this is exactly what you see in the photographs. You don't even see many urban inhabitants. The majority of ethnographic photographs are from the semi-nomadic populations of the region. Some women are involved, mostly children, but I think according to the norms of Ottoman conformism at this point, to a large extent extent women were not included in the photographs. But to add to that, again to move away from the imperial sort of cleansing act of turning this province into a largely Turkmen, Turkic space, is when you read, again, Mehmet Emin's travelogue to Central Asia,

he's a romantic writer, first and foremost, and I think that anyone who's interested in this sort of beautiful, sort of romantic travelogue traditions, they should pick this volume up. But in it, he talks a lot about Türkoman women, a lot on tribal Türkoman women, and paints them in really glorious light as women who are equal to men, who have characteristics that are bold, they are virtuous, they are beautiful, they are warrior-like. And so in as much as in the imperial photograph albums you don't necessarily see much of these women, at least that members of the expedition,

including Mehmet Emin, I think, approached them in the way that I think we would, as historians, like for them to approach them. And you talked about also establishing this site as a heritage site uh there were also photos of like reviving the pilgrimage to Ertugrul's tomb can you talk more about that and like how that actually came about and why they did that right so the tomb of Ertugrul who was the progenitor of the dynasty, the father of Osman Gazi, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, his tomb was perhaps, when we consider the sub-province, the most sacred site, the most revered site among different communities in the region.

We know that it was not only the Turkmen nomadic groups, but also the Greek and Armenian communities in the region. We know that it was not only the Turkmen nomadic groups, but also the Greek and Armenian communities in the region that regularly visited the site. So it was a ceremonial, sacred ceremonial center of pilgrimage almost. And then what happens is that during the expedition, the expedition members experienced this first contact moment where they see a particular tribe, the Bozoyuk Turkmens that belong to the broader Karakeçili tribe, present themselves as inheritors of the Arturo legacy. They say that they use the same summer and winter pastures that the early Ottomans used.

They say that they are connected to the prestigious Kayı branch of the Oghuz nation, which fits in perfectly to the myth of early Ottoman origins. So these people, although most of these nomads that we know, the Karakeçili people, let us say, to promote these people as the authentic remnants of the early Ottoman past. So what happens in the 1890s as the new Anatolian railway line is approaching this region is that Abdülhamid orders the institution of a new ceremony around the Ertuğrul tomb that was to be enacted by this particular tribe, the Karakeçili clan. So in 1895, we have the first traditional ceremonial visit paid by the Karakeçili clan to the tomb of Ertuğrul.

by the Karakeçili clan to the tomb of Ertuğrul. And immediately as it is enacted, the ceremony becomes a media event because Abdülhamid sends his official photographer there. All different stages of the ceremony are photographed. Of course, it's a revived tradition, a revived ceremony that has become very formal and Sunni-oriented, state-oriented. And the photographs then are turned into an album that is now housed in the Yildiz collections and then also served to the journal, illustrated journal Malumat, which was the mouthpiece of the regime at this time,

with a very long series of texts that detail the ceremony. And then it becomes, I think, one of the longest surviving official ceremonies that is still being maintained. Every fall, the Turkish prime minister goes to the tomb of Ertuğrul, joins the Karaköy Kıçlı clan, and they enact the same kind of ceremony. So what we're doing in the exhibition is that we portray different aspects of this original media event from the time of Abdülhamid, and we juxtapose these with stages from the 1970s 80s of how this ceremony unfolded in time so the album that they create out of the the ceremony in the pomp and circumstance that goes with this visit to Ertugrul's tomb along with all the other albums that they create, are all housed in this Yildiz Palace collection. In the exhibition, it was mentioned on one of the placards that an Ottoman subject

at the time, Ismail Mushtaq, called the Yildiz photography collection a network of curiosity. His words were, Merak Sebekese. So I was wondering if I could ask you to talk a little bit about this Yildiz Palace collection. How did this photographic archive, this visual archive come to be? How did it come to be and what does it include? What we call the Yildiz visual archive is not just a photography collection. When you visit the Istanbul University Rare Works collection today, a kernel of which is precisely the Yıldız archives, post-1909 deposition of Abdulhamid, you actually see even in bound photograph albums, lithographs, you see plans, you see sketches of architecture of buildings and newspaper clippings. So it's in fact, the bulk of it, yes,

is composed of photography, but in fact, it is a sort of a multimedia archive and it's often when you go and i'll try to sort of describe this with an example often when you go to the prime minister's archives and if you're especially scavenging for architectural information you will often have encountered a text that will describe the the construction of a building and it will refer to, it will often have this term resim, you know, see, bakanas resim, you know, see, refer to picture one, picture two, picture three, and those would never actually be a part of that file. A frustrating experience.

And then if you do go to the Rare Works collection, you will in fact very often find the visual equivalent of what what's described in um in in the prime minister's archives documents and so we we realized also through this exhibition that um that very judiciously images visual material was archived in hopes of potentially reusing whatever that representation was from you know in the first place what is very clear to us now is that the Hamidian visual archive was a very dynamic space where when and if a member of the court or Abdulhamid needed to use an image he would he would be able to go in and and quickly find this thing for another project for another commission yeah so we're through the exhibition we were trying to work through the texture and logic of the archive itself.

So part of our mission was to try to better understand how the archive worked. I think when we talk about the Hamidian visual archives, people tend to first think about the gift albums that were sent by Abdulhamid to the Library of Congress and the British Library. These were, yes, part and parcel of the archive, but this is like a minuscule fragment of the inchoate mass of visual material that we're talking about that constitutes the Hamidian archives. The gift albums were studied much better, and we know much less about how the broader archive worked. What we're trying to underline here is the very condition of mobility and mutability that

defines the Hamidian archive. You have a lot of material coming in from the market, you know, photographs that were taken by commercial photographers, newspaper clippings, as Deniz was saying, illustrated journals that are basically flowing into the palace. These are compiled, sometimes sorted with other sorts of data, like informers reports. And then you have catalogs, furniture catalogs, I don't know, like prefabricated building catalogs and so on and so forth. A lot of hodgepodge mix of materials coming together. And then, you know, what we observe is that also it's not, this is not a kind of an archive that is there for the panoptic pleasures of the sultan.

It is constantly used and recirculated and remediated by the archival clerks. We see that a lot of the material seeps out of the archive. It is serviced to the press, and we see this a lot with the expedition photographs, for instance, when you have certain instances where you need some publicity, you send these images to newspapers and to the journals, along with some texts involved. So you have a lot of material flowing in, streaming into the archive, and a lot of material seeping out of the archive. So there's this constant circulation and remediation of material, which I think changes our notion and understanding of how photography operates.

We're not talking about a singular photograph that could be placed in context and deciphered according to its visual content. We're talking about these images that are constantly repurposed, reprinted, recirculated, and then you have to look at each and every particular media situation in which the image is embedded to get a better sense of how it works, how it appeals to people, how it is perceived. Yeah, so you discussed sort of the circulation of these visual materials. They are coming from the market into, some of them are coming from the market into the

palace, some of them are produced by Abdulhamid's officials. Commissioned, yes. And are commissioned, and there are some gifted by different countries and people so what can the Yildiz archive tell us about circulation of visual knowledge in an information both within the Empire and the larger sort of globe because you have all of these stuff also coming from different countries into the archive it tells us think, about the very characteristics of modern mode of knowledge gathering, where it's this intention of creating a comprehensive knowledge database and the very

impossibility of it. You know, you have these fragments of circulating knowledge, visual or non-visual knowledge, and the intention is to bring them all together to get a panoptic sense of the empire and the world. But then there are huge practical logistic financial challenges that define the real politic of bureaucratic knowledge management. So we're not claiming that there's this amazing project of documenting everything in perfect order that's happening in the empire. It has a lot of gaps, but it's this very, I think, movement, mobility, mutability, gaps that define a modern archive.

There's a lot of data trash involved a lot of the material gets remains unused it just sits there you know in the um in the archive sometimes you know when there's an occasion they might be revived so it's this very protean and messy nature of the archive that we're trying to explore. And I think we're only scratching the surface here. I mean, also, maybe to add to that in terms of a physical space, there is not one single archive in Ilda's palace where they went in and grabbed the nifty folder on whatever subject they, at that point in time, needed.

Although I think the library, again, we're really barely scratching the surface of this entity as a space and in terms of content, but there was not one single space, although the library, I think, housed much of the material. There was a bookbinding atelier. There were multiple other libraries within the palace, not just one that sat sort of outside, close to the administrative quarters. So when, in 1909, special commissions went in to Yildiz after Abdulhamid is made to leave to really figure out the contents of this city-like space, you immediately encounter the lowly bureaucrats' frustration with

how are we going to manage the amount of information that's coming and that's flowing out of cabinets of repositories? How are we going to sort of gather up all of what we need in order to really cleanse Ottoman history from the wrath of the despotic wrath of Abdulhamid II? It's precisely the messiness and the largeness of this archive that they show their initial frustrations on. that they show their initial frustrations on. And so when we talk about visual information circulating in the empire, we're talking about Abdulhamid II is taking all sorts of visual material coming from, as you said, a hodgepodge,

coming from commissioned photographs or expeditions like the one that the exhibition describes or clippings from newspapers, a picture that looked nice in an illustrated magazine, whatever. All of this information is coming in. But you also mentioned it goes out in particular ways. You said almost like a press kit that they say, you know, you want to write about this, newspapers,

here are some pictures for you that you can use. Here are the images that are sanctioned by us that will make sense for you. Is this the sort of circulation that we're talking about when we say it comes in, it goes out, it may even come back in again? Definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like one way that it happens is some photographs are chosen. If we take the expedition photographs, for instance, these are taken by official photographers, so they're not signed. They're never signed up until Ali Saami, I think.

And then if the palace or the administrators of the archive see some value to some of these photographs, they would give them to important commercial photographers like the Abdullah Frer. They would take these photographs, sometimes enlarge and reframe them and insert them in their own albums and collections. These would either be gifted as imperial albums by the Sultan, or sometimes they end up being commercial albums, which are then later bought by the archive and re-included in the archive. So remediated,

repurposed material circulates in the market and comes back to the archive and re-included in the archive. So remediated, repurposed material circulates in the market and comes back to the archive as well. But sometimes it's the sultan himself who sees an image in a piece of news in the penny press, illustrated police news, for instance, which he was a fan, and then he services it to the press and you have to publish it. These are usually images that relate to the quote unquote hypocrisy of the West. So when, for instance, the Armenians are being massacred in the East, he services this image of a black man being lynched in the US in order to retaliate and say that, you know, see what you're doing. in order to retaliate and say that you know see what you're doing so it happens in many ways it's also sometimes the government employees and clerks who had access to the material who service it to the press and or use it in different ways so it happens in many ways so it's it's i think we have to dispel this image of the sultan as the architect mastermind who has full control of this material and who uses it

for his own informative purposes. It's much messier and more layered than this. Well, Drs. Erzoy and Türker, I'd like to thank you very much for joining our conversation today. Thank you very much for having us. I think at this point we should add that the process of making this exhibition was a collaborative process. We had an incredible team at Anamed, members of whom helped magically turn this sort of

disparate archival bits and three albums into a coherent narrative in six, seven short months. So a shout out to all of our wonderful collaborators. And we're not just saying this out of courtesy. Exactly. It was a working team effort. Very pleasurable experience. Also, I mean, you know, we matched the 10 person expedition team of 1886 and we had a similar type of experience. Go buy the book.

For those of you who would like to find out more, we encourage you to come see the exhibition for yourself, Autumn in Arcadia, the Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots, at ANAMED, the Koch Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. We do also encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. It's an edited volume of the same title published by onamed and it includes works by our two guests today as well as selim derengel berin golunu rashad kasaba sinan küneralp tg otte and beatrice san laurant

to stay abreast with podcast updates and new episodes, you can follow us online at ottomanhistorypodcast.com and also join our Facebook community of over 30,000 listeners. Thanks for listening, and until next time, take care.