Science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, Harun Küçük argues, was without leisure, a phenomenon spurred by the hyperinflation a century earlier when scientific texts all but ...disappeared from the college curriculum and inflation reduced the wages of professors to one-tenth of what they were in the sixteenth century. It was during this tumultuous period that philosophy and theory, the more leisurely aspects of naturalism-and the pursuit of "knowledge for knowledge's sake"-vanished altogether from the city. But rather than put an end to science in Istanbul, this economic crisis was transformative, turning science into a practical matter, into something one learned through apprenticeship and provided as a service. InScience without Leisure, Küçük reveals how Ottoman science, when measured against familiar narratives of the Scientific Revolution, was remarkably far less scholastic and philosophical and far more cosmopolitan and practical. His book explains why as practical naturalists deployed natural knowledge to lucrative ends without regard for scientific theories, science in the Ottoman Empire over the long term ultimately became the domain of physicians, bureaucrats, and engineers rather than of scholars and philosophers.
Gaining Freedoms reveals a new locus for global political change: everyday urban contestation. Cities are often assumed hotbeds of socio-economic division, but this assessment overlooks the ...importance of urban space and the everyday activities of urban life for empowerment, emancipation, and democratization. Through proximity, neighborhoods, streets, and squares can create unconventional power contestations over lifestyle and consumption. And through struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, competing claims across groups can become platforms to defend freedom and rights from government encroachments.Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork in three contested urban sites—a downtown neighborhood and a university campus in Istanbul, and a Turkish neighborhood in Berlin—Berna Turam shows how democratic contestation echoes through urban space. Countering common assumptions that Turkey is strongly polarized between Islamists and secularists, she illustrates how contested urban space encourages creative politics, the kind of politics that advance rights, expression, and representation shared between pious and secular groups. Exceptional moments of protest, like the recent Gezi protests which bookend this study, offer clear external signs of upheaval and disruption, but it is the everyday contestation and interaction that forge alliances and inspire change. Ultimately, Turam argues that the process of democratization is not the reduction of conflict, but rather the capacity to form new alliances out of conflict.
This book examines the interchange of architecture and ritual in the Middle and Late Byzantine churches of Constantinople (ninth to fifteenth centuries). It employs archaeological and archival data, ...hagiographic and historical sources, liturgical texts and commentaries, and monastic typika and testaments to integrate the architecture of the medieval churches of Constantinople with liturgical and extra-liturgical practices and their continuously evolving social and cultural context. The book argues against the approach that has dominated Byzantine studies: that of functional determinism, the view that architectural form always follows liturgical function. Instead, proceeding chapter by chapter through the spaces of the Byzantine church, it investigates how architecture responded to the exigencies of the rituals, and how church spaces eventually acquired new uses. The church building is described in the context of the culture and people whose needs it was continually adapted to serve. Rather than viewing churches as frozen in time (usually the time when the last brick was laid), this study argues that they were social constructs and so were never finished, but continually evolving.
Using a wealth of contemporary Ottoman sources, this book recreates the social history of Istanbul, a huge, cosmopolitan metropolis and imperial capital of the Ottoman Empire. Seat of the Sultan and ...an opulent international emporium, Istanbul was also a city of violence shaken regularly by natural disasters and by the turmoil of sultanic politics and violent revolt. Its inhabitants, entertained by imperial festivities and cared for by the great pious foundations which touched every aspect of their lives, also amused themselves in the numerous pleasure gardens and the many public baths of the city. While the book is focused on Istanbul, it presents a broad picture of Ottoman society, how it was structured and how it developed and transformed across four centuries. As such, the book offers an exciting alternative to the more traditional histories of the Ottoman Empire.
This volume investigates the »cool city« phenomenon with an empirical focus on Istanbul. The book approaches »cool Istanbul« not only as a consumable brand but also as a socially produced and ...politically performed phenomenon. The contributions draw attention to the significance of thinking production, consumption and performance of cities in relation to their imagination, and trigger critical questions beyond disciplinary academic boundaries.
Placing Islam Hammond, Timur
05/2023, Letnik:
4
eBook
Odprti dostop
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû ...Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond. “Timur Hammond’s reimagining of Eyüp is lively and erudite, bringing readers a fresh understanding of the spaces and tempos in Istanbul as a place of Islam. The result is thrilling: a story of Islam and placemaking that is at once intricately grounded and expansively illuminating.” — ANNA J. SECOR, Professor of Geography, Durham University “An impressive ethnographic and textual work. Hammond provides new insight into the inner workings of a sacred site and pilgrimage center, making this a valuable contribution to the literature on urban anthropology and lived Islam.” — M. BRETT WILSON, Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Central European University"
The Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia has been a source of wonder and fascination since its sixth-century construction. It was the premier monument of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, and ...remains one of the most recognisable symbols of modern Istanbul. Often seen as encapsulating Byzantine history and culture, the building has been the subject of much scholarly interest since the Renaissance. However, while almost all previous archaeological work has focussed on the church itself, the surrounding complex of ecclesiastical buildings has been largely neglected. The research project presented here (co-directed by the authors) is the first to focus on the archaeology of the immediate environs of the church in order to understand the complex as a whole. Previously unrecorded material includes parts of the Patriarchal complex, from which the Orthodox Church was governed for almost a millennium, what may be the ‘Great Baptistery’ north of the church, and what are perhaps the first fragments of the fourth-century phase of the cathedral yet identified. The discovery of an unrecognised porch, surviving to its full height within the standing building, changes the known plan of the famous sixth-century church. This new information provides fresh evidence about the appearance and function of the complex, illustrating its similarities to, and dissimilarities from, episcopal centres elsewhere in the Byzantine world. Combined with other archaeological sources, these discoveries enable us to place the sixth-century cathedral in its urban context and to reconsider what Hagia Sophia can tell us about the wider Byzantine world.
Istanbul Nora Fisher-Onar; Susan C. Pearce; E. Fuat Keyman ...
2018, 20180228, 2018-02-28
eBook
Istanbulexplores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the ...intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows.Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city's experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one's own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.
A new approach to late Ottoman visual culture and its place in the world With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul ...has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque —the first English-language book on the topic—Ünver Rüstem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire's capital.Rüstem reclaims the label "Ottoman Baroque" as a productive framework for exploring the connectedness of Istanbul's eighteenth-century buildings to other traditions of the period. Using a wealth of primary sources, he demonstrates that this architecture was in its own day lauded by Ottomans and foreigners alike for its fresh, cosmopolitan effect. Purposefully and creatively assimilated, the style's cross-cultural borrowings were combined with Byzantine references that asserted the Ottomans' entitlement to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Such aesthetic rebranding was part of a larger endeavor to reaffirm the empire's power at a time of intensified East- West contact, taking its boldest shape in a series of imperial mosques built across the city as landmarks of a state-sponsored idiom.Copiously illustrated and drawing on previously unpublished documents, Ottoman Baroque breaks new ground in our understanding of Islamic visual culture in the modern era and offers a persuasive counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of global art history.
