Download PDF | Paolo Girardelli_ Ezio Godoli - Italian Architects and Builders in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey _ Design Across Borders, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2018.
301 Pages
Introducticon
Recent scholarly developments in cultural, visual and historical studies have brought to the fore a variety of neglected connections between regions that appeared traditionally separate. For the Mediterranean, the necessity - and the advantage of exploring contacts, influences and encounters across political frontiers had been acknowledged already in 1949 by Fernad Braudel, with his groundbreaking study of the "fluid continent" during the 16th century. Braudel's work had little concern with artistic and architectural phenomena of encounter and hybridity; but it inspired, directly or otherwise, later generations of cultural historians working on other geographies and periods, who began to challenge in all fields, including the visual and the spatial field, longstanding academic practices of a nationally or religiously bounded approach to the past. Conventional notions of "Islamic" art and architecture are far more problematic and debated today than they used to be when these areas of inquiry emerged in academic scholarship.
Attempts to read the Italian and European Renaissance in a broader Mediterranean perspective, that includes the Ottoman or the Mamluk heritage (and beyond), are examples of the possibilities that a trans-national approach to art and architectural history may disclose'. In this context, one prominent scholar concluded that "the idea that the west is eternally opposed to the east, that the east stood still while the west progressed, should be relegated to the horse-and-buggy era as something once believed but no longer credible, like the flat earth, spontaneous generation, or the medical use of leeches". But the studies that emerged out of this "paradigm shift" have privileged the early modern world - a context when the imaginary (if not the political) boundaries between nations had not yet been established as firmly as they were to be in the 19th century. For later periods, for the 19th and early 20th century, scholarship on encounters and interaction has focused primarily on colonial situations and imperial dynamics, or on the broad scenarios of non-Western modernization.
The empirical outcome of this critical and theoretical stance is still in its way, and the present work may be seen also as part of this outcome. This collection of studies on the Italian presence in the urban and architectural histories of the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey is a selection of papers initially presented at an international conference on the same theme, in March 2013. This was the fourth meeting in the framework of a long-term research project on the Italian presence in the architecture and urbanism of the Mediterranean, following former editions held in Alexandria (2007), Tunis (2009) and Tirana (2011).
The essays included in this book constitute examples of productive cross-fertilization between different geographical and conceptual approaches to the study of historical environments and landmarks. Our aim was to explore an area of interactions that may be considered a-typical in many respects. The contribution of Italian architects, artisans and workers of the building sector to the renewal of Ottoman and Turkish cities from the late 18th to the 20th century, was not framed in the usual mechanism of colonial power that shaped the urban form of cities like modern Algiers, or the towns of Italian possessions in Africa and in the Dodecanese. Nor is it understandable as a form of cultural imperialism.
The Italian architects and builders whose experience is analyzed in this book, approached urban spaces remarkably different from the environment of their provenance without the backing or the authority of a colonial institution. They acted rather as consultants and participants, negotiating their place in a constantly redefined project of modernization. With all its peculiarities and idiosyncratic facets, their experience is also inspiring for other types of research on modern cultural encounters developed along "horizontal" lines, in the absence of compelling hierarchies and power structures. Organized in sections around four thematic/chronological cores, the book works as a general, if incomplete, survey of Italian imprints on the architecture and urbanism of the Ottoman and Turkish geography. It presents an assessment of paradigmatic cases, based largely on archival unpublished sources, and showing how much the research on this "shared heritage" has developed since the first, pioneering studies of the last four decades of the 20th century. The early studies of the 1960s and 1970s, mainly journal articles, were focussed on Raimondo D'Aronco and the Italian contribution to Art
Nouveau in Istanbul. Since the early 1980s began the rediscovery and a more systematic study through archival sources of the work of D'Aronco, with the exhibitions in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (1980) and in the Villa Manin of Passariano (1982), and especially with the international conference "Raimondo D'Aronco and his time", held in Udine in June 1981, which saw the participation of Turkish scholars as well. These initiatives were followed closely by the monographs of Manfredi Nicoletti (1982) and Vera Freni and Carla Varnier (1983), and by the publication of the architect's correspondence, a helpful source for a better understanding of his relations with other actors of the building sector in Istanbul". In 1992 and 1995, two conferences have played a crucial role in promoting a new phase of studies", not exclusively focused on the work of protagonists as D'Aronco or Gaspare Fossati (on which new works continued to be published"), but also providing a broader view of the activity of Italian architects, contractors and craftsmen in Turkey, during the Ottoman and Republican periods.
The contribution of younger Turkish scholars also began to emerge in this period". On this basis, the studies of the past fifteen years have examined the migration of Italian architects, contractors and master builders towards Turkey within a more general flow of migration to the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, managing to reconstruct routes and encounters in the decades of the slow process of demise of the Ottoman Empire. New findings came in particular from research carried out for the project "Shared heritage, knowledge and know- how applied to architectural and urban heritage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Mediterranean", supported by the European Commission with funds of the "Euromed Heritage II", and from the series of conferences opened in Alexandria in 200716 Archival collections formerly understudied from this perspective have also been used with increasingly significant results. Besides the diplomatic documents preserved in the State archives of pre- unitarian Italy (especially Turin, Naples and, for the late 18th century, Venice), and, for the post-1861 period, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome, also private collections, recently discovered archives of individual architects", insurance companies and building firms archives" provide an increasing wealth of documentation.
Catholic sources like the archives of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith (Propaganda Fide) in Rome, and the local parish archives of churches located in the "Latin" districts of Turkish and former Ottoman cities, also contain a variety of visual and textual materials. The discovery in Rome of the archives of Anmi (Italian Missionaries Rescuers National Association) has been particularly fruitful in this research perspective. This private association, established in 1886 on the initiative of the Egyptologist Emesto Schiaparelli, was initially financed by wealthy industrialists, catholic and nationalist figures committed to re-establishing a bridge between church and state after the breakup of the relationship following the choice of Rome as capital of Italy. From the time of its inception, Anmi applied to the Italian government for subsidies in establishing or consolidating Italian and Catholic presence in foreign countries.
Relying on Anmi as an effective means of political and commercial influence, the Italian state delegated to this association projects related to health care and education for the Italian communities abroad, subsidized with contributions provided through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Anmi often invested in real estate funds coming from the Italian government and private donations. Its building activity, initially focused on schools, hospitals, hostels for pilgrims and missionaries, grew to include universities, apartment buildings, large hotels and sports facilities.
Thereby, it became between 1890 and 1941 the most important Italian promoter of building activities in the Middle East and North Africa (excluding Libya). Anmi's penetration into Asia Minor started from Smyrna, where in 1899 the comerstone for the new nursery school was laid; the most significant building, however, was the girls school built in the city center according to the plan of the engineer Luigi Rossetti", radically reworked by Stefano Molli. In the same period, Anmi sponsored the construction of the Church of St. Anthony and the adjoining apartment houses on Grande Rue de Pera in Constantinople, designed by Giulio Mongeri and Edoardo De Nari. Several projects dating to the years of Atatürk's rule were never carried out, due to the new nationalist course of Kemalist politics, to the end of the Capitulations regime in 1914 (which implied also the end of foreign protection over churches), and to the challenges of French competition in controlling Catholic projects and institutions in Turkey and elswhere.
Despite these difficulties, Ammi has managed considerable real estate assets, and its archives are especially important because some architectural drawings date back to the period preceding the founding of the association: for example the pencil drawing of the facade of the Italian hospital by Giorgio D. and Ercole Stampa (1873). Outside Italy, besides the already mentioned parish archives, we should also mention diplomatic collections of the Staatarchiv in Vienna, institutions like the Società Operaia Italiana di Mutuo Soccorso in Costantinopoli", founded in 1863, and, of course, the Ottoman and Republican national archives of Turkey, which recently began to be explored especially by young Turkish scholars for research on the work of Levantine and foreign architects". Given the multifarious aspects of Italian cultural and national identity before and after the Unification of Italy in 1861, the authors of the chapters of this book envisaged a flexible definition of Italian- ness, including subjects from pre-Unitarian states like the Venetian Republic and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, expatriates for political reasons who took active part to the Risorgimento, Levantine-Italians with plural cultural affiliation, as well as citizens of unified Italy, for whom the Italian identity was a less complex question.
Even more diverse, of course, was the Ottoman or Turkish stage in which these characters acted, ranging from eastern Mediterranean port cities like Smyrna and Salonica, to the centre of imperial legacy in Istanbul, to the cities of the Ottoman Balkans, and finally to Ankara, the modern republican capital often perceived and represented as the urban antithesis of "cosmopolitan" Istanbul. In keeping with recent historiographic trends, the notion of an "Ottoman" and a "Turkish" space to which we refer is geographical but also cultural, political and historical: the former label refers to the imperial order existing before 1923 both in the capital and in the provinces, the latter indicates more precisely (but not exclusively) the Republican state and culture that emerged after the Kemalist revolution in present day Turkey. Design across borders offers a broad, yet focused selection of studies on a cross-cultural topic that is likely to attract the attention of architects, art/architectural historians, anthropologists, social scientists and caltural historians interested in euro-Mediterranean exchanges. It is the outcome of a variety of research itineraries that had developed along parallel lines over the past 20 years, for the first time united in a comprehensive collection in English.
The first section "Landmarks, spaces and politics", opened by a broad overview of the architecture of Italian diplomacy (and of the changing meanings of "classicism") in the Ottoman capital by Girardelli, includes other essays on projects and buildings with a peculiar political and strategic relevance. Agstner analyses the history of the Venetian embassy in Constantinople as it was used by the Habsburg representative, thus highlighting the life of a typically trans-national landmark. Using Ottoman archival sources, Akyürek focusses on the Ottoman agenda behind a crucial architectural project commissioned to the Swiss-Italian, neo-classical architect Gaspare Fossati: the Ottoman university or Dar-ul Fünun. Bugatti evaluates the contextual meanings of a practice of urban planning exemplified by the work of Storari in Izmir and Istanbul, a practice that was too often labeled simply as an example of imported modernity, showing how in fact it responds to the peculiar dynamics of change of a local "Levantine" urbanity.
The Ottoman geography most exposed to Italian intervention on space was probably that of the eastern Mediterranean port cities, but Tomi's essay, the last of this section, reminds us that a number of Balkan urban centers at the margins of the Ottoman world, including lassi, Bucarest and other cities of the Danubian principalities, were also largely affected by this cultural presence. In the second section, "Individual experiences in context", the complex phenomenology of cultural encounter implied by the main theme of the book is explored through five individual cases. Mangone traces the hitherto unknown activity of Nicola Carelli in Istanbul and other centres, arguing that in the 1830s he probably disseminated among Armenian-Ottoman practitioners the principles of Italian (and in particular Neapolitan) academic practices, through his private teaching activity. Ricci and D'Amia deal with little known aspects in the lives of two protagonists like Gaspare Fossati and Giulio Mongeri, focusing on their complex relation with Italy and Milan, during or after their involvement in the Ottoman-Turkish environment. Berkant bases his paper on a doctoral research on Italian architectural presence in Izmir, offering an original profile of the activity of Luigi Rossetti in this city, while Colonas evaluates, on the basis of new archival findings, the Italian architectural presence in Salonica. Albeit different from a state-sponsored, colonial enterprise, Italian architectural intervention in Turkey was often backed by a variety of public and private organizations. The third section, "Institutions and investments", is meant to highlight this aspect of the problematique. Kula Say and Cebeci base their analyses on archival documents related to their doctoral researches.
In the first case, the Italian connections and background of Alexandre or Alessandro Vallauri are uncovered and discussed, while the second case is about the strategy of investment in real estate pursued by prominent Italian-Levantine families in late 19th century Istanbul. Caltana and Krecic deal with the link between insurance companies and real estate, highlighting the involvement in this context of the Assicurazioni Generali, a firm that commissioned important architectural projects documented in its historical archives. Ottoman modernization created opportunities for a variety of foreign investors and local or foreign mediators: Fasoli analyses the roles in this context of a contractors firm and of two important protagonists, Giulio Mongeri and Edoardo De Nari, also dealt with in other sections of the book. "Late empire to Republic: a plural modernity", the last section, deals with Italian participation in the most dramatic cultural and political transformation in the region. Some of the projects analyzed in this section remained on paper, but all of them are important witnesses to attitudes toward modernity that emerged in the Italian-Turkish encounter. Uras opens the section with a study on a key figure in this context, the self- trained architect Edoardo De Nari, who was active mainly in Istanbul two decades before and three decades after the Kemalist revolution of 1923, and whose personal archive was recently discovered, producing substantial knowledge on a marginalized, neglected protagonist. Giacomelli's essay evaluates the Italian participation to the international competition for the design of Ataturk's mausoleum in Ankara (Anıtkabir), highlighting from different points of view the interesting debate about the three Italian projects included in the final selection. Ricco examines the activity of Paolo Vietti Violi for the design of a modern infrastructure such as a sports stadium in Ankara, as well as his role of consultancy for other projects in Istanbul.
Of course several absences will be noticed, but they usually regard protagonists and buildings (like D'Aronco, or the church of S. Antonio in Istanbul) on which much scholarship is already available, and was mentioned in the references. The aim of the book was to present new research based on unpublished materials, and little studied aspects of the Italian-Turkish encounter in architecture, rather than elaborating a comprehensive synthesis. It was also that of showing that architectural and urban history can be a major vehicle of cross-cultural understanding. In this more ambitious sense much remains to be done, but we hope that the modest examples and cases analysed here may inspire further research and studies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank institutions and individuals who contributed in many ways to this project. The conference on which this book is based was realized with substantial support from the Italian Institute of Culture in Istanbul and its acting Director Maria Luisa Scolari, as well as from Boğaziçi University. The same Institutions also contributed to the production of the present volume. The Faculty of Architecture of Istanbul Technical University, the Romanian Cultural Institute in Istanbul and its Director Silvana Rachieru, helped with financial and organizational support. Scholars and colleagues who took part to the conference but whose contributions could not be included in this volume should also be mentioned: Afife Batur, Cengiz Can, Ayşe Güngör, Ketty Migliaccio, Ulisse Tramonti. Emiliano Bugatti and Esra Ansel assisted in several stages of the book project. We apologize for others who may have been omitted by mistake.
In memoriam
One of the contributors to this volume is unfortunately no longer with us. Rudolf Agstner (1951-2016), was a prominent Austrian diplomat and scholar, who contributed tremendously to historical and archival research on the culture and space of international relations. We remember fondly his commitment to scholarship as well as to this particular project, and regret that our esteemed colleague and friend could not see the final outcome of our common efforts. This work is also dedicated to his memory.
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