Download PDF | Günay Uslu - Homer, Troy and the Turks_ Heritage and Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1870-1915-Amsterdam University Press (2017).
221 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgements
It was during an excursion to Istanbul and Troy with students of the University of Amsterdam’s Master Heritage Studies course in 2006 that the idea for this study arose. The purpose of the excursion was to investigate the function of heritage in Turkey and the contribution this heritage could make in the debate surrounding the negotiations for Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Although we expected to see many foreign tourists at the World Heritage Site of Troy, most of the visitors were Turkish. We were even more surprised when some of the Turkish visitors began informing us about the Trojan origins of the Turks and the heroic deeds of the Turks in the ‘Last Trojan War’ of 1915 (the Battle of Gallipoli). This suggested that Homer and Troy, the first lieux de mémoire of Ancient Greek civilization and a fundamental element in the collective identity of European nations, also formed part of Turkish cultural memory.
While Turks have been present in Europe since the Middle Ages, they are largely excluded from most European cultural histories, in which the Homeric epics occupy an exceptional place. Clearly, besides f iring the European imagination, Homeric heritage has also inspired Turkish cultural traditions. Our excursion to Troy awakened an interest in the role of Homer and Troy in Turkey, his reputed homeland and the location of Troy. In a series of invaluable sparring sessions with Professor Pim den Boer, my curiosity developed into a set of ambitious research questions directed towards re-examining the function of Homeric heritage, with particular reference to the perspective of the Ottoman Empire.
A Mosaic grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) provided the means to realize this project and enabled me to conduct research. I am extremely grateful to my supervisor, Professor den Boer, for his infectious enthusiasm, ground-breaking perspectives and incisive guidance. I wish to express my gratitude to my second supervisor, Professor Frank van Vree, who gave me new insights and has been generously helpful in the complicated final stage of this research project. Without the unceasing support of my supervisors this research could not have been realized.
The present study relies for a large part on Ottoman documents found in the Ottoman State Archives and the library and archives of the Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to librarian Havva Koç and museum director Zeynep Kızıltan for their support and assistance in finding and exploring these valuable documents. Deciphering Ottoman Turkish manuscripts and literature was a great challenge.
I am grateful to my instructor in Ottoman Turkish, Mustafa Küçük, for his remarkable patience and enthusiasm as I learned to read and interpret nineteenth-century Ottoman-Turkish texts. I am grateful too to librarian Selahattin Öztürk, of the ISAM (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi) Library, who helped me search Ottoman-Turkish publications and articles relating to Troy and Homer in periodicals and newspapers in various libraries in Istanbul, such as the Atatürk Library, the Beyazit State Library and the ISAM Library in Istanbul. I am grateful to Őmer Faruk Şerifoğlu for his invaluable support in finding precious sources, for connecting me with the right people and institutions in Turkey, and above all for cooperating in organizing a symposium, an exhibition and accompanying publications on the subject of this survey. From December 2012 to May 2013, the Archaeology Museum of the University of Amsterdam (Allard Pierson Museum) hosted an exhibition titled Troy: City, Homer and Turkey featuring exceptional loans from Turkish collections and accompanied by an eponymous catalogue. As senior editor of that publication and one of the exhibition curators, I gained considerable insight and experience in how to make the subject of this PhD study appealing to a broader public. I immersed myself in the topic even further as a member of the organizing committee of the ‘New Perspectives on Archaeology and Cultural Heritage in Turkey’ symposium at Allard Pierson Museum in 2013, and connected and worked with leading scholars of the heritage of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, including Edhem Eldem, Zeynep Çelik, Wendy M.K. Shaw and Murat Belge.
I would like to thank all those with whom I have had the pleasure of working on the symposium, the exhibition and the publications: Wim Hupperetz, Vladimir Stissi, Jorrit Kelder, Gert Jan van Wijngaarden, René van Beek, Floris van den Eijnde, Őmer Faruk Şerifoğlu, Paulien Retèl, Marian Schilder, Steph Scholten, Gökçe Ağaoğlu, Rüstem Aslan, Mithat Atabay, Cem Utkan, M. Hakan Cengiz, Enis Tataroğlu (then director of the Turkish Tourist Office in the Netherlands), Uğur Doğan (then Turkish ambassador in the Netherlands), and the secretary of state of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey at the time, Özgür Özaslan. I would like to thank the staff of Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens for granting me permission to explore the Schliemann Archive. I am most grateful to the staff of the Netherlands Institute Turkey (NIT) in Istanbul, who were helpful in various ways, in particular director Fokke Gerritsen. I also extend special thanks the Archive of the Heinrich Schliemann Museum in Ankershagen, in particular to Gerhard Pohlan, and Bijzondere Collecties of the University of Amsterdam.
Parts of this survey have been published previously. A version of the introduction appeared in ‘New Perspectives on Archaeology and Cultural Heritage in Turkey,’ a special edition of the Turkish art periodical ST: Sanat Tarihi Araştırmaları (2013). An adaption of Chapter 1 was included in Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie (2009) and in Troy: City, Homer and Turkey (2012), in which a version of Chapter 4 also appeared. Finally, many of the figures and captions in this survey also appeared in these publications and were incorporated in various exhibition materials and texts. I would like to thank Ans Bulles for the careful editing of the English text, Charlie Smid for her critical reading and great support in the final stage of this venture and Sam Herman for editing the current published version. Others to whom I am indebted include Mirjam Hoijtink, Alja Schmidt, Geert Snoeijer, Saffet Gözlükaya, Alexander Bessem, Pieter Hilhorst, Friso Hoeneveld, Kazim Ayvaz, Huriye Ayvaz, Zeynep Ayvaz, Leonie van den Heuvel, Atilay Uslu, Meral Uslu, Tuncay Uslu and my parents, Fadime and Ata Uslu. My greatest thanks go to my partner, Mehmet Ayvaz, and our children Rana and Kaan; thank you for your patience and encouragement.
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