IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

The Ottoman Empire reused many classical ruins and built them into new structures to physically exercise their claim to be inheritors of ancient civilization. Ottoman reused heritage spaces inspired striking visual representations in western European travelogues from the long nineteenth century. These images are useful lenses through which to glimpse how they saw the Ottoman Aegean, or rather, how they wanted to see it. Despite these visual sources’ high potential, scholars have not studied them in great detail, and limit their focus to Athens. This paper offers in-depth visual analysis of the travelogue illustrations to identify and categorise different techniques to marginalise Ottoman claims to the heritage of the Olympieion and the Athenian Acropolis. These techniques created a visual vocabulary of de-Ottomanisation, an artificial rift between past and present at sites that blurred the ancient and the modern. They stretched reality to depict Ottomans as shadowed, lowly, and isolated in contrast to an elevated and gleaming classical past. They obscured or removed Ottoman buildings in classical sites and depicted Ottoman urban spaces regulated within classical frames or barely perceptible, blended into the natural hillside. These images are considered in situ with their accompanying text to prove they were intentional efforts to de-Ottomanise classical heritage sites. Next, this paper broadens the geographic focus beyond Athens, using the typology of de-Ottomanising techniques established in Athens to identify the same techniques in use across the Ottoman Aegean, from Corinth to Samos. Finally, this paper argues that the authors used their visual vocabulary of de-Ottomanisation to justify physically claiming heritage spaces and their artifacts, exported back to western Europe. These images were weapons in an imperial conflict over the heritage of the classical past, in which the spoils from the battlefield were the antiquities themselves.