Musealisation as a strategy for the reconstruction of an idealised Ottoman past: Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district as a ‘museum-quarter’

ABSTRACT

With culture-led urban regeneration becoming a leading policy for the transformation of historic cities, museums and heritage sites have become a key aspect of this transformation. Given the increasing demands of cultural tourism, the museum concept is expanded to incorporate the rest of the city and historic cities are presented as staged artefacts directed towards tourists, in a process known as musealisation. After the launch of the Istanbul Museum-City Project in 2004, musealisation was adopted as a common strategy for the regeneration of Istanbul’s historic peninsula. Within the scope of the project, the Sultanahmet district would be converted into a museum-quarter. However, recent transformations reveal an underlying motive of glorifying the district’s Ottoman past, in accordance with neo-Ottoman urban policies. This paper discusses the effects of musealisation on the transformation of the Sultanahmet district, by evaluating the policies and their implementation by concentrating on Topkapı Palace Complex, Hagia Sophia, the Great Palace Complex and Hagia Euphemia Martyrion. While the notion of built heritage always involves selection, the musealisation adopted for the Sultanahmet district is rather politically motivated, adding another level of selection through the signification of the Ottoman heritage and intentional neglect of the late-Roman and Byzantine heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Musealisation
• Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula
• neo-Ottomanism
• Sultanahmet District
• heritage politics

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on my doctoral thesis at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning. I would like to thank Murray Fraser, my primary supervisor, and Sophia Psarra, my secondary supervisor for their immense contribution and generous help at every stage of my thesis. I was fortunate to be given a Junior Fellowship at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations and to receive a writing-up grant from the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, and so am very grateful to them as well.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This paper identifies the Sultanahmet district as the entire neighbourhoods of Alemdar, Hocapaşa, Sultanahmet, Cankurtaran, Binbirdirek and Küçükayasofya.

2. According to Bozdoğan, the Turkic genealogy linked Ottoman architecture to a broader geography and history of Central Asia for strengthening the Turkish national identity (Bozdoğan 2007, 202).

3. While the conservation masterplan was cancelled by a court decision in 2007, a new conservation masterplan was approved in 2011, adopting a similar vision.

4. The Sultanahmet archaeological park, Süleymaniye and Zeyrek neighbourhoods, and the land walls of Constantinople were declared as World Heritage Sites in 1985.

5. Supreme Council’s principle decision (date.15.04.2005, no. 702) titled ‘Urban Archaeological Sites, Conservation and Terms of Use’ permits the reconstruction of demolished buildings in urban archaeological sites, including the Sultanahmet district (designated in 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pınar Aykaç

Pinar Aykac is a conservation architect with a MSc in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage from the Middle East Technical University. She holds a PhD from UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning. She was involved in various conservation projects in Turkey including the Presidential Ataturk Museum Pavilion Conservation Project and Commagene-Nemrut Conservation and Development Programme. Her research interests are museums’ role in urban regeneration and heritage politics. She is currently an Italian Academy Fellow at Columbia University. She was a Weinberg Fellow at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America during the fall semester of 2017-2018.