Nächste Veranstaltungen

The German botanist Carl Haussknecht (1838–1903) travelled in 1865 and again in 1866–68 in the Eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire and in Iran. His main aim was to collect different types of plants for Edmond Boissier’s six-volume encyclopaedia ‘Flora Orientalis’ (published between 1867 and 1888). However, his travel diaries (almost a thousand pages long) abound with all kinds of information. Apart from his main interest in botany, he recorded his observations on geology, agriculture, archaeology, architecture, foreign merchants and missionaries, local bureaucrats, social and economic conditions. Haussknecht’s diaries, which remained unpublished so far, are particularly rich in information on rural, particular mountainous, areas, as well as villages and small towns. Considering the period of his travels (the 1860s), his descriptions open a window into the Ottoman reform period (Tanzimat) and the reforms’ application in these remote rural areas. This paper focuses on his first journey and his descriptions of the northern and eastern parts of the Aleppo province, a region between the modern cities of Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraș and Șanlıurfa. It will focus on two aspects of the transition from the ancien régime to the ‘modern’ Tanzimat state: the assertion of state control against local self-administration, and economic relations between the towns and their rural hinterland, and analyze how the traveler Haussknecht perceived it.

Dr. Stefan Knost is working on the history of Ottoman Aleppo; he works as a researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He also acted as a visiting professor at the same university’s Oriental Institute, as an associate researcher at the Orient-Institut Beirut, and was a research fellow at the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library), Tokyo. His publications include Die Organisation des religiösen Raums in Aleppo. Die Rolle der islamischen religiösen Stiftungen (auqāf) in der Gesellschaft einer Provinzhauptstadt des Osmanischen Reiches an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2009).

The treasury of the Studenica Monastery in southern Serbia preserves the only known Ottoman textile attributed to the fourteenth century, a massive silk hanging woven for Sultan Bayezid I. It was donated to the monastery in the very early 1400s by Bayezid’s widow, Mileva Olivera Lazarević (Despina Hatun). The textile’s two inscriptions—al-Sultan al-^calim al-^cādil and Sultan Bayezid Khan ^cazza nasruhu—suggest it was commissioned for the Sultan himself. This talk argues, however, that the manner in which the inscriptions relate to the textile as a whole is at odds with their ostensible message. Rather than a custom design, this silk was probably a rush-job from a workshop accustomed to making goods for a commercial market. This talk introduces the textile, which has received little scholarly attention to date, putting its main features in context of its production as well as discussing its place at Studenica. It also argues for the importance of looking beyond text and evaluating evidence found in objects themselves.

Prof. Amanda Phillips earned her DPhil in 2011 from the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford.

She joined the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia in 2015, after finishing a Marie Curie-Gerda Henkel fellowship at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. Prior to that, she spent two years as a Max Planck-Kunsthistorisches Institut post-doctoral fellow at the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art.

Her research interests, and in turn her publications, focus on the economies of art and material culture in the early modern Islamic world. Amanda Phillips conducts research mainly on the decorative arts and most especially on silk textiles in Constantinople and the greater eastern Mediterranean. The topic itself encompasses Mediterranean trade, starting with the Renaissance aesthetic of the fifteenth century, and then stretches into the Indian Ocean while charting the fashion, taste, and materiality in the global eighteenth century. Among her publications are the monograph Everyday Luxuries: Art and Objects in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600-1800 in conjunction with the National Museums of Berlin (Berlin: National Museums and Verlag Kettler, 2016); “The Localisation of the Global: Ottoman Silk and Silk Weaving, 1600-1790,” in Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-modern World, eds Molà, Riello, and Schäfer, (Rochester, 2018).

Her second book Seachange: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, 1400-1800, is forthcoming with the University of California Press.

In Cooperation with the Hungarian Cultural Center in Istanbul / İstanbul Macar Kültür Merkezi:

András Riedlmayer

Documentation Center of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture,

Fine Arts Library, Harvard University

A European Islam in the Western Balkans: History, „Ethnic Cleansing“, and the Future of Coexistence

Wedneday, 16 October 2019

19:00

A Lecture in the Series Jewels of Knowledge / İlmin Cevherleri