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The article presents the discussion on thematic section juxtaposing and interlacing Istanbul's multilayered history and memory by engaging in interdisciplinary methodologies. Topics include Ottoman poetry in Bosnia, cavalry rebellions, the ransoming of captives in Galata in the seventeenth century; and presenting the workshop papers of the first four webinars with the goal of promoting the work of junior colleagues.

This article investigates processes and representations of placemaking in Beyoğlu in the thirty years following the 1950s. Through an analysis of two case studies, the Galatasaray High School and the Germanophone Teutonia club, it helps to deconstruct the representation of Istanbul’s central historical district Beyoğlu as a district in decay. This representation frames the district as subversive on the one hand and marked by trauma or loss of cosmopolitanisms on the other. The paper argues that processes of placemaking during this period made the district part and parcel of identity formation for a variety of communities in the city. While considering notions of Beyoğlu as a place of decay and vulgarity are important to comprehend broader historical representations of the area, these representations are contradicted or nuanced by both economic and demographic statistics and qualitative examples. This article shows that for the Galatasaraylı community and a part of the German-speaking community in Istanbul, this district has been of crucial significance as a place of social gathering. The article argues that these cases are symptomatic for broader trends in Beyoğlu as a place of social gathering, commerce and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how layers of history can be parsed in a neighborhood through narrative analysis, using Balat, an old quarter of Istanbul, as a case study. The study tests the relevance of several methodologies and concepts, including palimpsest, chronotope and heterotopia, to see whether local, Constantinopolitan iterations of these ways of reading can be marshalled instead. To that end, it has recourse to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s extensive writing on Istanbul to expand on concepts such as terkip, macera and buhran. These concepts are traced backwards and forwards in time to see how they apply to different writers’ work on Istanbul/Constantinople through the ages, such as Odo of Deuil, Evliya Çelebi, John Ash and Orhan Pamuk. This comparative exercise reveals an affective bond between the writers, one that favors imperial melancholia and nostalgia. The contemporary nostalgia/melancholia affect is then shown to be either savored or shunned by Istanbulites and visitors, as they make use of this poetics of the past as cultural capital, they may invest in for use on social media today [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adnan Bey and Halide Edib Hanım returned to Istanbul in December 1922 as two leading figures of the national struggle centered in Ankara. Drastic changes had taken place in Istanbul and the country at large since their escape from the city about three years prior. This article examines the couple's return to Istanbul in order to shed new light on what was essentially a moment of uncertainty for the Ankara government despite its victories on the battleground. With a focus on portrayals of the couple's return in the press, the article highlights the ongoing construction of an attachment/bond (merbutiyet) between the Ankara government and Istanbul in late 1922. Zooming in on this historical moment facilitates critical engagement with reductionist portrayals of the early 1920s in much of the officially sanctioned narratives on modern Turkey. This critical engagement fosters more nuanced interpretation of the events, figures, and processes which shaped the construction of new regimes in former Ottoman domains in the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues on the influence of land distribution policies for royal gardens, endowment practices and dynamics of landholding in the formation of the Beylerbeyi neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul in the 1780s. Topics discussed are complexity of land acquisition in the Istavros-Beylerbeyi neighborhood, role of the Ottoman sultan and members of his bureaucracy in landowners' abandonment of their property rights, and socio-political dynamics behind the urbanization of the Bosporus shoreline.

This article examines the networks formed by ransom intermediaries in Galata and Istanbul during the second half of the seventeenth century. Through a close reading of legal records from the court of Galata, it evaluates the formation, organization, and functioning of these ransoming networks and analyzes the relevance of their local foundations to the redemption of Ottoman captives in the Mediterranean. In the face of increasing piracy and corsair activities, thousands of Ottoman subjects traversing the Mediterranean were captured during this period. Since the direct intervention of the state was usually reserved for elite captives, many Ottoman captives had to be ransomed by other means. As the main commercial and diplomatic district of Istanbul and its doorway to the Mediterranean, Galata became a solution zone for the emancipation of these captives, whose relatives and friends appealed to the ransoming services of intermediaries in the district, most of whom were European. This article suggests that the local organization and functioning of ransoming networks on Ottoman soil were as important for the successful ransoming of captives as the connections maintained by intermediaries throughout the broader Mediterranean. As such, these local networks assisted non-state actors as they negotiated freedom and captivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liji, as I have come to know her, told me she is content with her life. Anything she dreamt of achieving was always within her reach. Her silences told me otherwise. Her life story is one that both complements and contradicts the master narrative of the Turkish nation. In this essay, I explore her life story as she shared it with me one afternoon sitting in her summer flat on Büyükada. I have added quotes from her memoirs and used unique archival material to fill in some of the gaps, but I have left her silences be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers, including historians and anthropologists, have studied Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood. Often they organize historical narratives of this neighborhood around ruptural turns involving large-scale projects. The most recent of these is Taksim 360, an urban transformation project in Tarlabaşı that has been under construction since 2010. In this article, I offer an alternative historical narrative, building on ethnographic fieldwork, that centers the meanings and reinscriptions that Tarlabaşı residents themselves produce rather than focusing on the state or policymakers as the authors of history. I show that rumors serve as an archive through which residents index the valence and importance of Tarlabaşı, defying dominant historical narratives’ static portrayals of the neighborhood as a relic of the past. Through a story of finding a wondrous artifact at Taksim 360’s construction site, I argue that residents produce emergent histories through rumors, presenting alternatives to the neat compartmentalization of the past, present, and future through lacunae within history-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together scholarly discussions on heritage and state violence, this article analyzes the multilayered structure of dispossession in contemporary Turkey. Through a combination of archival and ethnographic material, it documents the journey of the Fabiato Mansion situated in Büyükada, Istanbul becoming first a ruin, then a state property, later a culture house run by the Touring Automobile Company, and now the local courthouse. It argues that, although heritage and waste have been conceptualized in opposition to one another, the case of the Fabiato Mansion reveals that ruins and heritage sites are deeply connected through practices of dispossession. Conceptualizing the layered modalities of dispossession that led to the transformation of the Fabiato Mansion into the Büyükada Culture House, it illustrates the experience of the dispossession of sense of belonging through the life story of Aurora Fabiato. Then, it analyzes the abandonment of the mansion as part of the process of elimination of possible inheritors and it illustrates how the Mansion’s dilapidation was operationalized in the politics of redistribution. Focusing on Touring Company’s practices of preservation and repurposing it puts forward that by obscuring property relationships, the Büyükada Culture House generates a nostalgic political ideology that operates as way to avoid reckoning the violent past. While civilizational discourses on culture facilitated justifications of contested regimes of inheritance, they could not successfully end the mansion’s agonizing presence between heritagization and disinvestment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]