Afterlives of Hagia Sophia: the change in the official attitudes towards preserving antiquities in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Periods

Download

index.pdf

Date

2011

Author

Keskin, Ümran

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

322
views

326
downloads

The history and ideology of preservation increasingly arouse interest in parallel with the rising importance of the cultural heritage and preserving it. Hagia Sophia is one of the monuments that comes to mind immediately when the cultural heritage of Turkey is mentioned. Both as a Byzantine and an Ottoman ecclesiastical and imperial monument, Hagia Sophia bears political and religious importance besides its artistic and architectural uniqueness, 1500 years after its construction. This study aims to expose the change in the official attitudes towards preserving antiquities in the transition period from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, through examining the ideological and physical approaches to Hagia Sophia. In the Late Ottoman Period important leaps about two important components of cultural life, museology and archeology, were realized in terms of both preservation and exposition of the antiquities, besides the political, economical and judicial changes. Thus, the emergence of museological and archeological studies and related legislations in the Late Ottoman Empire Period and their development in the Early Republican Period are examined chronologically in this study. The reasons behind the changes in the usage of Hagia Sophia, from a church to a mosque and then to a museum, are researched in order to understand the ideology of the adaptive re-use and its results while evaluating the impact and meaning of the afterlives. The selected time period is very critical because the changes occurring in the social and political life of the country, together with the change of the ruling power, paved the way for the present situation in Turkey.

Subject Keywords

Historical museums

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613798/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/21075

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Displaying cultural heritage, defining collective identity: museums from the late Ottoman Empire to the early Turkish Republic Gürol Öngören, Pelin; Altan, Tomris Elvan; Department of History (2012) As the powerful visual instruments of modernity, museums have been formulated in multiple narratives under the impact of political ideologies in the modern world. The study aims to analyze the museums of different socio-political contexts of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic comparatively by examining to what extent their buildings, collections, and displaying methods were utilized in the formation of collective identities as part of contemporary imperialist, nationalist, and modernist ...
New building in historical settlement as an urban conservation problem : a case study in Tarsus Bilgiç, Umut; Madran, Emre; Restoration in Department of Architecture (2004) This thesis develops around the theme of new building problem in historical settlements. Rapid and uncontrollable urbanization due to industrialization and over dense population is resulting in the demolishment of the existing historical settlements in our country. Despite this change, as the main goal of conservation is to provide historical continuity, the existence of the new buildings in historical settings as the products of this process come out to be an urban conservation problem. The current regulat...
From houses to house museums: architectural representation of different narrations Günhan, Aslıhan; Savaş Sargın, Ayşen; Department of Architecture (2011) The transformation of historic houses into house museums is not only a current issue within the field of museology, but also a new phenomenon for architecture. The deconstruction of the term “house museum” into “house” and “museum” and the meaning these terms acquire, have the potential to generate a new discussion in architecture. Besides being a physical dwelling unit, “house” will be interpreted as a domestic space where the inhabitants are able to personalize. A museum, on the other hand, will be approa...
Socio-economic and socio-political developments in Palestine under the British mandate : 1917-1939 Karaş, Esin; Şeker, Nesim; Department of Middle East Studies (2009) This thesis analyzes the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict and the historical evolvement of the Palestinian issue by focusing on the practices during the British mandate period. First and foremost, the factors which transformed the Jewish question into the Palestinian question are elaborated. In this context, the emergence of modern political Zionism is presented as the landmark incident in arousing the interest of the Jews dispersed all around the world in the colonization of their promised lands. Althou...
Historical Sociology and International Relations: Geopolitics, Capitalism and State System Yalvaç, Faruk (2013-06-01) This article attempts to critically adress the development of the relation between historical sociology and international relations theory. It evaluates the main stages of the historical sociological approaches in IR and the main issues of contention. Historical sociological approaches to IR have evolved from a Weberian stage in 1970s and 80s to a point where it is heavily dominated by historical materialist approaches today. The focus of these debates is to develop a historical materialist undersanding of ...

Citation Formats

Ü. Keskin, “ Afterlives of Hagia Sophia: the change in the official attitudes towards preserving antiquities in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Periods,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2011.