The third volume of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies, devoted to the memories and intellectual legacies of Dr. Yavuz Sezer (1979 – 2021) and Professor Doğan Kuban (1926 – 2021),includes five research articles on different periods of Istanbul, written from a variety of perspectives, using diverse methods. The Early Career Article Prize is awarded to Ezgi Dikici, whose erudite study of the properties of court eunuchs in early modern Istanbul brings a new perspective to how the members of the royal household engaged with their urban setting. Gavin Moulton’s article on the Şişli Mosque critically engages with the ways in which the mid-twentieth-century architectural practice reimagined and appropriated the stylistic vocabulary of Ottoman architecture; while Semra Horuz shows how Ottoman intellectuals traveling to Europe in the nineteenth century reimagined Istanbul and projected their ambitions for their capital to the European towns they visited. Gökçen Erkılıç brings the insights of a materialist methodology into the study of the transformation of Istanbul’s ports and coastal zones. Finally, Muhammed Tatlısu situates Karabet Keşişyan as a central figure in the Ottoman history of publishing and printing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the Meclis section, under the generous guidance and co-editorship of three members of our Advisory Board—Koray Durak, Cemal Kafadar, and Christine Philliou—we are excited to present the “Interventions to Istanbul Studies” series. Roland Betancourt proposes to write “an ethical history of Byzantium” by moving beyond the “magnanimity” prescribed to Hagia Sophia. Zavier Wingham, through the haunting/haunted figure of Arap Bacı, engages with the Blackness in the Ottoman society and its representations, or lack thereof, in scholarship. And Lerna Ekmekcioglu imagines the Turkish university doing otherwise to make Armenian Deaths Matter. In addition to the special dossier, this year’s Meclis includes M. Baha Tanman’s notes on the recent restoration of the Haseki Mosque. In Cabinet, Alison Terndrup analyzes a nineteenth-century engraving that depicts an eighteenth-century courtly procession from the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Collection. Zeynep Ahunbay and Zeynep Kuban commemorate the passing of architectural historian Doğan Kuban with two In Memoriam pieces. We publish four book and two exhibition reviews, with topics varying from the architectural practice and discourse in the last two decades in Turkey to the famous bronze horseman of Justinian. Our reviews section is followed, as always, by the most recent edition of the Istanbul Bibliography.
Istanbul Research Institute Publications 47
Periodicals 10
Istanbul, December 2021
ISSN: 2687-5012
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