IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

In 1934, the Jesuit archaeologist and aviator Antoine Poidebard published “La Trace de Rome dans le désert de Syrie”, an aerial photographic survey that claimed to reveal ancient Roman infrastructure buried beneath the Syrian steppe. Taken from a small aircraft, the photographs presented themselves as objective testimony: the camera elevated above a vast landscape, registering traces of the past invisible to the eye on the ground. The book was celebrated as a triumph of disinterested scientific discovery. However, I show that Poidebard’s aerial vision depended on deeply embodied expertise: a practiced knowledge of light, air, season, and desert topography that determined which traces would emerge from the landscape and which would not. The photographs surfaced Roman occupation while rendering other histories of the Syrian steppe invisible, a selective legibility that served the League of Nations’ mise-en-valeur imperatives justifying continued French presence in Mandate territories. Situating Poidebard’s survey within interwar liberal internationalism, the paper argues that the emergent category of international heritage, crystallised in the 1931 Athens Charter, depended on visual technologies like Poidebard’s to appear apolitical. Far from a neutral record, the aerial image actively constituted the non-European environment as international heritage while also concealing the imperial interests that process served.