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The activities of people navigating the changes during the last years of the Ottoman Empire (1878–1920) still register in our modern world. As political and socio-economic transformation overwhelmed the eastern Mediterranean, the manner in which people responded would turn many into heroic figures. Characterized as distinct from his or her peers, the retrospective nationalist hero proves valuable to historians in search of stories that provide cover for otherwise contradictory forces birthing their nations
April 1877 upon hearing of Austen Henry Layard’s appointment as Ambassador to Constantinople. The elevation of the adventurer-turned-politician to top diplomat worried Gladstone. He believed that Layard would do little to promote civil and legal reform in the Ottoman Empire, a cause that the former prime minister argued should comprise a centrepiece of British diplomacy. Gladstone personally had led the
In 1915 the Armenian writer Hovhannes Tumanyan arrived with his daughter Nvard in the town of Etchmiadzin, to assist with the relief of the thousands of Armenians who had arrived in the Russian imperial provinces of Transcaucasia, fleeing violence across the border in the Ottoman Empire. 1 He reflected that in ‘that hell called Turkish Armenia – three armies exist. The first army is the one in combat. The second – is the army of the abandoned women and children, the sick, the famished, the naked, the refugees, which is the largest army. Third – is the army of
While Freeman’s second major work of Oriental history, The Ottoman Power in Europe , was published twenty-one years after the first, he nevertheless wished the book ‘to be taken as in some sort a companion to my lately reprinted History and Conquests of the Saracens’. 1 Freeman felt that the Ottoman Power complemented the approach and subject matter of the earlier Saracens because ‘[n]either pretends to be an account of the whole branch of the subject’. 2 ‘In both’, he explained, I deal with Eastern and Mahometan affairs mainly in their reference
of new territories and the officially acknowledged status of the Ottoman Empire as one of the defeated powers gave Britain the opportunity – and to some extent the legitimacy – to extend its influence in an area already surrounded by British imperial possessions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had started to conclude exclusive treaties and agreements with the subsequently named Trucial States on the Persian Gulf shore as well as in Persia and Afghanistan. By the outbreak of the First World War, Cyprus, Aden and Egypt, which had been under
that qualifies some of the most astringent critiques of the film which ascribe it a Westernised Orientalist aesthetic complicit with foreign representations of Turkey. In her study of the decline and redevelopment of bathing culture in Istanbul, Nina Cichocki observes that, alongside foreign visitors, ‘modernizing Turks who have previously shunned these Ottoman institutions are also rediscovering hamams , but they do it as a result of what [Mary Louise] Pratt has called “auto-ethnography” and in a manner that can be called internal
Braving the Ottoman‘s ban on capturing any images of the persecuted Armenians, witnesses dodged censorship and photographed pictures that would later be branded as proofat the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–20. Despite the challenge of these images to representations of the Armenian genocide, they were soon forgotten after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne erased the Armenian Question, while time took care of destroying the corpses abandoned in the desert. This article will examine the image-disappearance dialectic through distinct temporalities of remembrance,and commemoration, each of which mobilises its own specific, iconographical semantics. In response to contemporary challenges, the repertoire of images has not remained sealed; over the last decade it has been reopened through depictions of bare landscapes and stretches of desert and bones,that suddenly pierce through the earth. The article will show how these images implicitly speak of the disappearance and seek meaning through emptiness.
Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493), better known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, pictures and describes world civilisations and illustrious individuals from Creation to 1493. Although its sources and circumstances of production have been extensively explored, the cultural significance of its many woodcut images has received far less attention. This preliminary study highlights relationships between images, audience and the humanist agenda of Schedel and his milieu by examining selected representations of cultural outsiders with reference to external illustrated genres that demonstrated the centrality of Others in German Christian culture. I argue that the Chronicle’s images of ‘foreign bodies’ harnessed their audience’s established fascination with monsters, wonders, witchcraft, Jews and the Ottoman Turks to advance the German humanist goal of elevating the position of Germania on the world historical stage and in so doing, contributed to the emerging idea of a German national identity.
Halit Refiğ had impact on debates around Turkish national cinema both as a thinker and as a practitioner. Instrumental in establishing the Turkish Film Institute under MSU along with his director colleagues like Metin Erksan and Lutfi Akad, Refiğ lectured for many years at the first cinema training department. This translation is from his 1971 collection of articles titled Ulusal Sinema Kavgasi (Fight For National Cinema). Here Refiğ elaborates on the concept of national cinema from cultural perspectives framing Turkey as a continuation of Ottoman Empire and its culture distinct and different from western ideas of capitalism, bourgeoisie art and Marxism. For Refiğ, Turkish cinema should be reflected as an extension of traditional Turkish arts. Refiğ explores the potential to form a national cinema through dialogue,and dialectic within Turkish traditional arts and against western cinematic traditions of representation.