발표초록:
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major targets of Europe’s desire to visit, discover, observe, describe, study and appropriate the remains of the civilizations it considered as its own historic antecedents. It took the Ottomans about half a century to begin to internalize this vision of the past as a prerequisite of modernity and civilization and to join the race for archaeological remains. On the eve of World War I, however, the need to invent a Muslim-Turkish nation triggered a shift from classical archaeology to “national” heritage, mostly in the form of early Ottoman and Islamic remains.
The talk will analyze and illustrate the major phases of this process of emulation and appropriation, and will conclude by linking it to the very problematic ways in which heritage has been and still is instrumentalized in Republican Turkey, from the 1930s to the present.