Çiğdem Kafescioğlu:
Hagia Sophia to Theotokos Mouchliotissa: structures and narratives of memory and erasure in early modern Istanbul

Foregrounding the afterlives of two Byzantine monuments of different scale and significance and of comparable longevity, this talk will address the presence and absence of the Roman and Byzantine past in early modern Istanbul through considerations of structures of the longue durée, acts of translation, and notions of antiquarianism. I will consider historical imaginaries as reflected in Ottoman textual traditions, architectural imagination pertaining to Byzantium as reflected in Ottoman design, material sensibilities as reflected in continuities and revivalist ventures, and community- and confession-based understandings of a historically layered material environment in a multi-communal urban environment. Through these interrelated foci, I seek to highlight the multiple ways in which Byzantium was present in and bore on the lives and imaginations of early modern Istanbulites of different standing and communal belonging, and the time and context bound ways in which Byzantine legacy was silenced, and erased in the post-Byzantine city. The fraught historiography of Byzantium/Eastern Rome in relation to the Ottoman past and to modern historical understandings of place and identity is at the backdrop of what I discuss, although my focus is primarily on early modern views of ancient and medieval past.

Çiğdem Kafescioğlu is professor at the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She works on aspects of early modern Ottoman urban, architectural, and visual culture, with particular interests in spatiality and urban imagination, urban environmental history and Mediterranean cartography. She is the author of Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (2010); and co-editor of A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul (with Shirine Hamadeh, 2021), co-curator and co-editor of the exhibition and book On the Spot. Panoramic Gaze on Istanbul: A History (with K. Mehmet Kentel and M. Baha Tanman, 2024), and the forthcoming Green, Earth, and Water of Istanbul: Historical and contemporary perspectives on environment (in Turkish, with Cemal Kafadar, Suna Kafadar, Ayfer Bartu Candan).