Ottoman History Podcast - Visual Sources in Late Ottoman History

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

Episode 327 with contributions by Zeynep Çelik, Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular, Özde Çeliktemel-Thomen, Mehmet Kentel, Michael Talbot, Murat Yıldız, Burçak Özlüdil Altın, Seçil Yılmaz, Burçin Çakır, Zeinab Azerbadegan, Dotan Halevy, Chris Gratien, and Michael Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Visual sources such as photographs, maps, and miniatures often serve as accompaniment or adornment within works of Ottoman history. In this episode, we feature new work that interrogates methods of analyzing and employing visual sources for Ottoman history that go beyond the practice of "image as decoration." Following a conversation with the organizers of the "Visual Sources in Late Ottoman History" conference held at Columbia University in April 2017, we speak to conference participants about the visual sources they employ in their work and how these visual sources allow us to understand the history of the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman world in a new light. « Click for More »

Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. This episode is a special presentation based on the proceedings of the Visual Sources of Late Ottoman History Conference held at Columbia University in April 2017. When the organizers Zeynep Çelik, Leyla Amzi Erdoğduğlar, Zeynep El-Serhat Azerbadagan, and Dultan Halavi proposed the idea of making an episode related to the conference, I knew it would fit perfectly with our series on the visual past, curated by Emily Neumeier and Unver Rustem. You can find that series on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. This episode is comprised of an introductory conversation with the organizers, followed by short segments with the conference participants. In each segment,

the presenter will discuss the history and context of a particular visual source they employ in their research. Make sure to visit the post for this episode on our blog, again, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, to behold these fascinating visuals. The recordings for this podcast were conducted by the many Ottoman History Podcast team members who attended the conference. So special thanks to Michael Ferguson, as well as Seca Yilmaz, Michael Talbot, and Sam Dolby for making this episode possible. Now here's Michael Ferguson with Zeynep Çelik and Leyla Amzi Erdoğdular. Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. We're recording on location at the Visual Sources in Late Ottoman History Conference at Columbia University, organized by the Columbia University Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies. I'm Michael Ferguson. In

this collaboration, we'll be talking to the organizers of this conference at Columbia University about new approaches to visual sources for the history of the late Ottoman Empire. Zeynep Çelik is a distinguished professor of architecture and history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and adjunct professor in history at Columbia. She is known for her work on Ottoman and French colonial urban history. Zeynep, welcome. Hello, Michael. Zeynep is joined by Leila Amzi Erdogan, who received her PhD from Columbia University in 2013 and is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University as of September. Congratulations, Leila.

Our audience has heard her before on the podcast in an interview with Susie Ferguson, no relation to myself, about late Ottoman Bosnia and the imperial afterlife. Leila, welcome back. Hi. Tell us about the Visual Sources in Late Ottoman History conference, what you hope to accomplish by organizing this conference, and some of the most important themes and questions it addresses. In conceptualizing the conference, we were inspired by the current state of the literature on late Ottoman history.

This literature is vigorous, it's vibrant, it's diverse, and methodologically experimental. Our goal was to bring together a representative sample of recent scholarship by emerging scholars. We organized the conference around one overarching theme, the use of visual sources in the writing of political and social history. In focusing upon visual sources, we aim to address what we diagnosed as a problem. That is, the fact that visual materials are commonly considered by historians for decorative purposes. They are not taken seriously as documents in themselves. seriously as documents in themselves. Random images, ever growing in numbers, seem to serve as light diversions to the boring formats of old text publications. They're often tangentially connected to the topics studied, sometimes even showing contextual and chronological discrepancies.

sometimes even showing contextual and chronological discrepancies. The papers included in this conference take another approach. They use a wide range of visual materials as original documents of comparable value to textual documents. Without prioritizing them, our scholars enrich their arguments by bridging different forms of data and by triangulating their questions from multiple perspectives. This is in part enabled by the differences in the nature of the documents. This kind of interdisciplinary work is not easy, as the ground can quickly slip beneath one's feet. How do academic disciplines interact with each other and learn from each other? How is a good balance maintained in synthesizing seemingly incompatible kinds of sources?

What are the methodologies adopted? How elastic are they? How far can we force their elasticity? These are only some of the questions the papers will open up. Today, we are impressed with the wealth and range of sources brought up in these papers and presentations, including photographs, sketches, cartoons, films, architectural drawings and maps as primary sources for the study of late Ottoman history in an interdisciplinary perspective. Our aim at this workshop, as Zeynep explained, was to discuss mythological approaches to

using visual sources for the study of history and identify issues in use of such primary sources, primary materials. And some of those issues that come up today are, for instance, the variety of sites where the visual sources or documents containing them would be found, from state archives, which is the traditional go-to archive for Ottomanists, to private collections, albums, books, periodicals, Sufi shrines, and others. Something that we also discussed today is the extent, but also the limits, of using visual sources as primary sources, and to what degree they can interact with other sources, mainly textual sources, and overlap with other disciplines.

And finally, something that is an overarching theme here is the state of Ottoman studies in digital humanities and how our workshop today makes some relevant inroads into articulating a constructive way of doing this. So using these visual sources and combining them with new technologies and kind of talking about the state of Ottoman studies in digital humanities or digital humanities in Ottoman studies. All right. And thanks very much, Zeynep and Leyla. And now let's hear from some of the presenters.

The first contribution comes from Özde Çelik Temel Tolman from University College London. You've heard her before on the program. Her paper was entitled Filmic Evidence in the Writing of Ottoman Cinema History and in this segment she'll be talking about film clips featuring Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II. So Sultan Abdulhamid II became the subject of two films in 1905 and 1908.

In this way, even though he was secluded at the Yıldız Palace, cinema made him mobile. And after the 1905 assassination attempt of the Sultan, the first film captured his image during the Friday prayers. The first film captured his image during the salon look ceremony and other photographs included the evidence such as bombs and mines so another film that I use it film enlargement belongs to the Friday prayer at the Hamidiy Mosque, Hamidiye Camii in the Cuma Selamlı, shot in 1908, and it was found in Patefer catalog. This film depicted the sultan and the royal family in their carriages, along with the crowds gathering for prayer at the palace premises. The Patefer catalog lists the screening of this film in France

in September 1908 and most probably it was available in other European countries at the time. And we see here the Hamidiyye Mosque and the clock tower and people gathered waiting for Sultan under them under their umbrellas so the first day troops arrived and later on we'll see the Sultan waving at people and later on the carriages of the harem will be seen in the film so it was approximately 90 meters and I'd like to talk about the third film as well, that Sultan appeared. And it's the opening of the Ottoman Parliament. So we reached this information via Mustafa Özen's meticulously done research in daily newspapers. And in this film, which was shot by Sigmund Weinberg, the Sultan was not the center of attention unlike those two other films.

And the film was made after the constitutional revolution of the Young Turks against the Sultan in July 1908. And his appearance in this film during the ceremonies shows that his support for the parliamentary regime. Also, historians cited Özen indicates that these three films prove that the Sultan used moving pictures for political goals, especially during crisis and crucial moments, as I mentioned, the assassination and the Young Turk revolution. And the strict control of his image and portrays in the public space was used depending on specific goals and political agenda. And we can conclude that the power of cinema could convey certain messages and the Sultan was aware of this fact. So the film enlargement we have here from 1908 could be viewed in reference to the Young Turk Revolution

and his struggle to claim the sultanic and monarchic rule in collaboration with the new constitutional and liberal regime. The next guest is Mehmet Kentel from Koç University. His paper was entitled Caricaturizing Cosmopolitan Para, Play, Critique, and Absence in Yusuf Franco's Caricatures, 1884-1896. In this clip, he'll be analyzing one of those colorful late Ottoman caricatures. So the source I'm working on is an unpublished caricature album that is now in Ömer Koç collection. And the caricatures in the album were made by Yusuf Franco and Ottoman bureaucrats

between the years 1884 and 1896. And the particular image that I wanted to mention now is the last one of the album. It's called L'Expiation, the Expiation, which depicts the characters of Yusuf Franco participating in different ways, the public hanging of the caricatures, Yusuf Ranko himself, many of them pulling the ropes, family members are crying and diplomats of the para of the late 19th century para are observing the scene. And Istanbul skyline scene in the background of the image for the first time in the entire album. And the characters that are depicted in the image

were all taken from other images in the album, so they are drawn in the exact same way they were drawn in individual portraits that belonged to the album. And with these visual references to the rest of the album, Yusuf Franco puts the dramatic finishing touch of a multi-layered urban and social narrative that he continued over 120 drawings and for 13 years.

And the strings, the ropes that Yusuf are killed through actually connect Yusuf to his urban community. And even though Yusuf was, in this visual representation, was killed at the hands of his fellow community para community members, this image actually shows that the entire album was the doing of this urban community and then it made sense that the same community also ended this production. Yusuf's Karikatur album has been a social undertaking from the very start and informal commissioning by the para-society. But it still raises several questions, of course.

Was this connected to any real-life event, any threats felt by Yusuf that forced him to quit his artistic production? And if the answer is yes, did it come from the members of the para-society, as the painting suggests or more likely from a higher authority from the state bureaucracy at the time and the notorious censor regime of Abdulhamid was its peak that's something that we don't know but what we can do in the absence of such factual information is to treat the censor regime and the risk of being persecuted not only as limiting forces on the creative scene in the late 19th century para the, the Ottoman Istanbul, but rather as constitutive elements of how art or creative production is formed and circulated.

With the lack of established channels for publishing and circulating his artistic creation, Yusuf Ranko was motivated to turn his production into a social game, a game whose existence was ended, as I said, with the climax of the game, by the members of his community. And the fact that Yusuf Franco chooses the show of the landscape of Istanbul for the first time in this composition seems to be especially fitting when we appreciate the urban community as the central actor in this creation. But of course, and I try to expand on that in my work, this community was limited, both in numbers but also in its class formation.

Even though they were multilingual, multiethnic, multireligious, they were all members of the elite classes residing in or visiting the late Ottoman capital. Bureaucrats, diplomats, businessmen, the world famous artists. And the absence of others, the migrant, the displaced, the homeless, the worker, the servant, etc. are or the absence is a very critical feature of the album. And I argue that their exclusion from the album should give us a critical window to appreciate how exclusion was fundamental to the formation of elite spaces in late Ottoman Pera. to the formation of elite spaces in late Ottoman era. Next, we have a familiar voice for podcast listeners, Michael Talbot from University of Greenwich.

His paper was titled, And the Military Band Spread Joy Through Their Music, a photographic microhistory of a late Ottoman Jerusalemite crowd. In this clip, he zooms in on a high-resolution stereographic image of an Ottoman band in Jerusalem to humorous effect. So this image is a really interesting one. It's a stereograph, so it's not a normal photograph. It would be put into a special machine that would give the impression of it being 3D, so it's meant to be viewed.

And it's of the performance of the military band of the Ottoman garrison of Jerusalem in 1903. And what's interesting about this particular source is not so much the band themselves, but the people who have gathered there to watch them. And what I've tried to do in my presentation and in the paper is to take this kind of micro-reading of this particular source, zooming in as far as I physically can on the faces of the crowd to try and understand the experience of this particular

kind of performance. So much of what's written about the performance of being Ottoman in the late Ottoman Empire is from the state's perspective. So it's what the state wants to achieve and what it hopes to achieve. Whereas when we can start to look at the crowds in a photograph like this, we can maybe get a sense of how people actually responded to things like public performance. And one of the really interesting things about this image, perhaps our listeners and then readers can spot a few themselves, is the less than favourable reaction perhaps of some of the observers. So we have some people who look distinctly bored, some who are perhaps a bit more than bored and a bit annoyed at what they're listening to.

And my favourite in the right-hand side of the photograph is a little girl who's actually covered her ears because she's so disturbed by what's being played. And this sort of thing can tell us something quite interesting, that not all bands sounded great, not all performances were things that people wanted to attend, and that in this sort of space we can really get a sense of a popular reaction to something that the state perhaps imposes in public space.

Now for another celebration of sorts, Murat Yildiz from Skidmore College, analyzing an image from the Galatasaray Museum of a Cicek Bayramı or Flower Holiday, which was featured in his paper, reconstructing the Mecca for Sportsmen, the Union Club in late Ottoman Istanbul. So this photograph is part of a broader photograph album that was collected, organized, and stored at the Galatasaray Physical Training Club in Istanbul. And the photograph is of an event that was organized in 1914, Çiçek Bayramı, or Flower Holiday. I'm using this photograph and also the other photographs that make up this unpublished album in two ways. One as an illustration

of a past event or a series of past events. And so what I'm trying to do is to kind of reconstruct the type of events that Istanbulites organized and gathered to watch at this space of Union Club. And this is, the album is by large, narrating a series of different athletic and sporting events that were organized at Union Club from 1913 to 1914. The other way that I'm trying to read this photograph, but this larger album, as a set of social objects. And so what I'm doing is trying to think about how these albums contributed to a distinct identity of the space of the Union Club and also the space of Galatasaray Physical Training Club, a predominantly Muslim sports club that was established in the early 20th century in Istanbul. in the early 20th century in Istanbul. Next up is Burçak Özlüdil Altın from New Jersey Institute of Technology

discussing an image of the female section of the Toptaşı Asylum, which was part of her paper entitled Psychiatry, Space and Time, The Case of an Ottoman Asylum. So this image that you're looking at is a byproduct of my dissertation, Madness and Empire, the Ottoman Asylum 1830 to 1930,

in which I analyze the medicalization of insanity and the modernization of psychiatric spaces. Space is crucial, as in the 19th century, psychiatric practice was closely ingrained in the spaces of the asylums. In the Ottoman Empire, in the 19th century, psychiatric practice was closely ingrained in the spaces of the asylums. In the Ottoman Empire, in the absence of purpose-built ideal asylums, the modernization and medicalization took place in repurposed or royal complexes. And I argue that it's precisely through the modifications of the buildings that one can

demonstrate the change of Ottoman psychiatry during this period. So in my work by creatively combining visual and textual sources, I reconstruct the life of and life in the Ottoman asylums. And this combined image depicts Toptaş Asylum that was used as the sole state mental hospital between 1873 and 1924. And this particular block which was original the Dar-e-Shifa or Imperial Hospital of the Atik-Vali-de-Royal complex is the female section of the asylum. And the upper left image is the state when female inmates first transferred here. And a little note here is that this image is created in a platform that provides scholars

with a tool for temporal spatial analysis, that is, how a space has changed over time or how a space is used by incorporating time in the visualization of their research as well as a way of sharing the scholarship. So what follows, so the second one, is the drawing that shows the second floor addition to this section. With this floor, four words were added, theoretically leaving the ground floor to shared services such as dining, cleaning, and airing in the courtyard. The fourth image combines the model of the section after 1895 with actual photographs. Photographs of the female section are quite rare compared to those of male sections. And it is a very interesting photograph

as it's probably one of the least staged or posed of all the images I've seen so far of mental patients. Typically, asylum photographs are carefully arranged and are almost always staged to convey a certain message. Patients are gathered in lines in their identical clothing. They either sit or stand in front of a selected background at a desirable part of the asylum. But in contrast, this photograph showing women patients in the courtyard is far from being neat. Everyone seems to be doing something else, looking to a different direction, not in lines,

in varying outfits, and even some look to be having some sort of episode and others helping them, some sitting in the upstairs corridor, some looking downstairs holding the iron bars that probably aim to prevent suicide attempts, and others simply strolling around. It also shows that patients could walk freely at least during a lot of times

between the wards on the second floor and the services on the first floor. Staying with the theme of medicine, here's Sachi Lilmaz from Cornell University discussing an image of an Ottoman museum from her paper depicting the body in the late Ottoman Empire, a medical perspective for visual sources. I work on history of medicine, sexuality, and gender in the late Ottoman Empire, and this particular paper out from as a derivative of my dissertation project and I'm really interested in how the depiction of human body evolved in the medical books and pamphlets and how these new understanding of modern medicine has been used as a tool for public health education and public health propaganda and one amazing example of this

actually emerged in the time of world war one and a public health museum that was opened in divan yolu in istanbul as we know today and doctors who were also artists worked together and then they basically produced mulaj the models and some pictures and also some charts that is accessible to general audience and they basically placed them in the museum space it's basically a culmination of an enlarger visual culture of medicine in the long 19th century as as we can talk about it. So one interesting thing is there's an vernacularization of imaging of the body. So when we look at some of the pictures which were published in Sıhhi Müze Atlası, Public Health Museum Almanac Atlas, we see they're also reflecting the social family life in those pictures.

And there's one image that we're going to upload on the website of the Ottoman History Podcast that one can see how a family life and also life in a medical clinic has been depicted. So I think in general, this is very interesting for us to be able to see how communicating to be healthy, communicating public health and teaching about public health and preventive medicine was not necessarily a discourse that has been confined among professionals,

but actually those professionals, those doctors were actively engaged with propaganda to be able to reach a general audience by using museum space through these artistic artifacts. We've got three presenters left in our queue. First up is Burcin Chakr from Glasgow Caledonian University, discussing an image from her paper about visual war propaganda and religion expressed in the War Journal or Harp Mecmuasa of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The image I have chosen is from the war journal which was published for 27 issues for the

duration of three years and it holds a significant body of visual material waiting to be interpreted and in this image among the peasants of Anatolia as we know the visual use of religion particularly around the rhetoric of jihad was a necessity as Islamic themes and symbols they all constitute a common language with the Ottoman state could draw on a simple and short visual references to religion certainly assisted to mobilize and motivate Ottoman society's emotions at the highest level. The following photograph, the visual that I have chosen, is a kind of collective example of such material. It underlines the idea of the preserving of Islamic faith in victory no matter what the conditions were and would be. In the photograph, as we see, we see Ottoman soldiers building an ideal condition for their religious performances, their religious duties, even during

the times of despair and scarcity of sources. The pulpit, minbar, for the sermon, hutba, is constructed by empty ammunition chests and the necessary sanitary for religious performance was sustained by a carpet which shows the respect of the soldiers to their religion no matter the conditions that the trenches were on the pages of several issues of the journal photos of strong this proud and well-dressed ottoman soldiers performing their religious duty religious duties were promoted these in a way paused stage photographs almost always were followed by a short and striking line with highly religious connotations, mostly

from the Quran. The readers were assured that the loyal soldiers of the Ottoman army were faithful to their religion and were fully aware that they were fighting for Darul-Hilafi ve Saltanat Kaplarını Muhafaza, translated as to fight for the defense of the gates of the caliphate and the sultanate. And in this sense, Ottomanist and Islamist dreams combined together were always kept alive. The war at all fronts were nostalgically

depicted as a defense to invasion that would unite the Ottoman and Islamic world together. However, as we all know, the vividness and repetition of the same religious visuals created a powerful and persistent memory only on the minds of the Anatolian populations and these visuals in various forms unified the literate and illiterate populations of Anatolia and led to a collectively experienced visual culture of war which sustained the liberation movement at the heart of Anatolia later on. So I suggest that the ways in which we understand the visual sources of the Ottoman war propaganda can in a way enhance the study of history of First World

War in the Middle East by posing new questions, suggesting new answers to unrevealed dimensions of this kind of research with material unavailable elsewhere. In reading these images closely, in conjunction with other written and visual accounts, the World War I experience of Ottomans can be placed in transnational context of war and propaganda. This is the value of war visuals in which I will argue that Ottoman states' scheme and public reception of it can be interpreted in depth. Finally, we'll conclude with two Columbia University graduate students who are instrumental in organizing the conference and this podcast. Here's Zainab El-Sadat Azerbaidagan offering Iranian perspectives on Ottoman Iraq from her paper, Imagine Geography's Reinvented Histories,

Ottoman Iraq in Iranian Textual and Visual Sources. I'm going to talk about the paper and sort of the main thesis of the paper, which is about how Ottoman Iraq was imagined as historically as part of Iran, specifically by the Qajars. It has a longer history. But what is interesting about what the Qajars are doing is that they are using photography, like the photo that you can see now, as well as some sort of production of archaeological knowledge

about ancient sites to claim this sort of historical connection between Iran and Iraq, Ottoman Iraq. The image that you see is an image of sort of historic sites, which is identified by the Qajars as Sassanian, which you see on the left, which is the two vaulted arches, and they have reliefs like dug into sort of the mountain. And on the right, you see basically a Qajar building in the same style. And to me, this is basically something which,

going with the theme of the conference and focusing on visual sources, is something that you would never get from a textual source. The power of this image and sort of visually stating and connecting these two histories of kingship like connecting the Sasanians to the

Qajars is visually stated which is actually much more accessible to everybody because most people were illiterate and couldn't read but this is visually stated, which is actually much more accessible to everybody, because most people were illiterate and couldn't read, but this is visually stated. And the Ghadjar building is actually also massive, like the scale, we don't have a sense of a scale in this photo, but the building is quite big, and the arches are built in the same style, so it's a very clear sort of visual statement. And the reason this is important is not just about sort

of the way that sort of the talk about this in their textual production, but also how they connect it to Sasanian sites, what they identify as Sasanian sites in Ottoman Iraq. And the main site that they connect this to is Taqa Qasra, which is south of Iraq in the middle of the desert. And it also has this characteristic sort of arch, which is not a pointed arch. And they basically tell, connect their kingship, the Qajar kingship, to the this the connector kingship the larger kingship

to the Sasanian kingship through telling the history of these sites and connecting them their power to these sort of sites but also producing knowledge about these sites Last up, Dottan Halavi, taking us beyond the Ottoman period to talk about ruins and banknotes in the British Mandate in Palestine. From his paper, Capturing Ottoman Ruins, Contending Visions of Continuity and Rupture in Preserving the Tower of Ramle. and rupture in preserving the Tower of Ramleh. So my paper focuses on the weird relations that the British in Palestine had with the historical ruins through the case of the Tower of Ramleh.

So you're looking at a picture of a bill of the Palestine Pound, which features the Tower of Ramleh, but in a very specific form. This is the tower as a ruin. This is how the tower looked like when the British took over Palestine during the First World War. during the First World War. But by 1925, the tower was facelifted, renovated by the British Department of Antiquities. The British saw the building as a crusader's relic, and therefore they pushed to preserve it pretty fast. The interesting thing that they did with the Palestine Pound

is that even though the building was by then already preserved, they chose the image of the building as a ruin. Why they chose to do that? In my paper, I argued that during the process of preservation, Peripera argued that during the process of preservation, as the building turned from a ruin into basically a normal building, its allure gradually perished. The British, in fact, were attracted to the building because its vision as an ancient ruin that can be redeemed and salvage from the hands

of the Ottomans and when it turned to be a normal building they lost interest in it and therefore for its widely distributed image as a bill they prioritized the 19th century figure of the building as a ruin. Thank you for listening to this special edition of Ottoman History Podcast. Thanks once again to the members of our production team, Michael Ferguson, Satcha Yilmaz, Michael Talbot, and Sam Dolby, as well as Zeynep El-Sadat Azarbadigan and the rest of the crew at Columbia. To access all the images for this episode and other material pertaining to the conference and this topic, visit our post on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. You'll find this installment under the Episodes tab or under the Series tab within the listings for The Visual Past.

On the website, you can revisit individual clips of our dear presenters, all of which I've uploaded to our SoundCloud account. Once again, I'm Chris Grayton. That's all for this episode. Please join us next time in another installment of Ottoman History Podcast. Thank you.