Visualizing Europe in the Late Ottoman Capital: Photographs, Drawings, and Remediations

Semra Horuz

“Balon tabîr eyledikleri ecsâmın resmidir” (The object named balloon), in İngiltere Memalikiyle Londra Şehrine Seyahat (Travel to London and British Lands), undated, p. 61. Istanbul University Central Library, Rare Works Collection, Istanbul, public domain. — “*Balon tabîr eyledikleri ecsâmın resmidir*” (The object named balloon), in *İngiltere Memalikiyle Londra Şehrine Seyahat* (Travel to London and British Lands), undated, p. 61. Istanbul University Central Library, Rare Works Collection, Istanbul, public domain.

“*Balon tabîr eyledikleri ecsâmın resmidir*” (The object named balloon), in *İngiltere Memalikiyle Londra Şehrine Seyahat* (Travel to London and British Lands), undated, p. 61. Istanbul University Central Library, Rare Works Collection, Istanbul, public domain.

This project traces the architectural history of nineteenth-century Ottoman travelogues on Western Europe. Ottoman intellectuals published more than twenty travelogues in the late Ottoman capital, Istanbul between 1850 and 1910. Their response to specific urban and architectural elements embodies substantial transformations of late Ottoman society. Notable among these are the emergence of middle-class urbanites with new sensitivities, growing curiosity about empirical data and material know-how related to urban modernization, and a yearning for historical consciousness. The larger project explores the social and cultural dynamics in which the late Ottoman travel boom proliferated and displays how this travel regime reflected and became a performative aspect of late Ottoman modernization. It reveals that the global claims of modernity about historical heritage, public life, monument, and memory-making processes via architecture are intimately linked to a wider range of cultural codes and aspirations, which in turn defined the urban middle-class in the Ottoman cities.
The current part of the project aligns itself with “Images of Europe beyond Europe” by viewing illustrated Ottoman travelogues on Europe and Ottoman journals through a new lens and with a methodology geared to the creation of an online platform. This platform is devised to capture a snapshot of the people, objects, and ideas transiting between Europe and Istanbul. It utilizes digital humanities tools to map and overlay diverse data-sets: itineraries, destination points, and buildings that Ottoman travelers visited; visual and textual representation of European material culture; and travel guidebook content.
The literary depictions of Europe in late Ottoman travelogues were shaped by travelers’ efforts to convey empirical data of the ‘modern city’ whereas the images reproduced the historicist views of nineteenth century. An in-depth inspection of the visual side of this duality requires examination of the materiality/object-quality, the medium, and the content of the images. Equally relevant are the roles played by photographic views, postcards, and paintings that were created, copied, and remediated by the Ottoman travelers and publishers. Thus, this project situates the Ottoman itinerant narratives within the image economy of the nineteenth century, reflects on the performativity of image-making and traveling, and reconstructs the transnational visual networks that saturated cultural mobilities and the circulation of images. It puts an emphasis on Italian cities, particularly Rome, as a nineteenth-century guidebook city and an indispensable part of Ottoman journeys, which defined Italy as the frontier of modernity after crossing the Mediterranean Sea (especially before the 1870s.) The discourse that treated Italy as the seedbed of the western civilization, that undertook comparisons between Italian and Ottoman cities, and that presented the artworks of Italian painters as the source for late Ottoman educational institutions fed into the European image created by the late Ottoman intellectuals. This project explores the full breadth of visual connections linking Italy and the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century.