Saint Pierre Han in Galata District: Urban and Social Identities of a Building from the Late Ottoman to the Early Republican Period

Date

2025-5

Author

Tezer, Gökberk

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

205
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This thesis aims to make a socio-spatial analysis of Saint Pierre Han, an eighteenth-century commercial building in Istanbul's Galata district, by examining its transformation in resident profile, function, and architecture from 1860s to 1950s. Galata's shifting urban identity draws a framework for this analysis, as the district transitioned from a rapidly developing commercial hub in the Ottoman rule to a designated port district in the early Republican period. The study employs a multifaceted methodology to trace the han's changing social and spatial identities by utilizing various archival sources that include rental contracts, letters, maps, and church records. The cross-examination of these sources highlights how Saint Pierre Han's changing functions and residents both reflected and responded to wider socio-economic and political transformations in Galata, particularly amid the contested urban contexts of the 19th-century developments and the following regime change in 1923. By focusing on the plural local contexts of the han that do not conform to conventional typologies, this thesis addresses a fragmented case overlooked in the literature. In doing so, it narrates an architectural microhistory that extends beyond conventional spatial analysis by situating Saint Pierre Han within a complex context of negotiations and interventions.

Subject Keywords

Galata, Saint Pierre Han, Levantine Architecture, Architecture and Identity, Microhistory

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114548

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis