Search results for ""koc university press""

Yusuf Franko Kusa Bey (1856–1933), a high-ranking bureaucrat in fin-de-siècle Ottoman imperial administration, was also a talented caricaturist. Because of his duties in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, and spending most of his life in Istanbul, he was both a member and an observer of high-society social circles in Pera [Beyoglu]. Ambassadors, ministers, diplomats, famous opera singers, painters, Pashas and Efendis, Madames and Monsieurs, were part of this social milieu, and most of them became eternally recorded through the ‘types and charges’ in Yusuf Franko’s caricature album. Including images of himself, he charged his subject materials, the people in his social network, with their particular qualities and transformed their portraits into witty caricatures that reflected contemporary scenes of social life and political debates in Pera. This book, which accompanies the facsimile of Yusuf Franko’s own caricature album, Youssouf, consists of three articles and an annotated appendix. While the articles analyze the majority of his caricatures from diverse perspectives (his family history and biography, the history of contemporary European caricature art and politics, and the social and spatial context in which he drew his caricatures), the appendix gives brief information about each caricature plate following the exact order in the facsimile. These extraordinary caricatures are published for the first time in their entirety since they were discovered in an antique rug dealer’s shop in Istanbul in 1957.

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Spatial Webs charts the cultural heritage and identity of Anatolia, focusing on projects that incorporate Geographic Information Systems and other analytical tools in spatially significant research into the past. An important new contribution to archaeology and cultural heritage research, the volume brings together multidisciplinary researchers engaged in creating and using spatialized data resources for interactive web-mapping applications. The topics explored include sociospatial differentiation in bostancibasi registers, identity mapping the Jewish communities of medieval Anatolia, and the Turkey Cultural Heritage Map of the Hrant Dink Foundation.

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A survey of the architecture and history of the Tao-Klarjeti region. This book, comprising the proceedings of a 2014 symposium at Koç University’s Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center, fills an important gap in the research surrounding the historical principality of Tao-Klarjeti. This political entity founded by the Georgian Bagrationis dynasty in the early ninth century covers the modern-day provinces of Artvin, Erzurum (partially), Ardahan in Turkey, and the provinces of Samtskhe-Javakheti and Ajara in Georgia. This volume explores the religious and secular buildings, decor programs, facade articulations, stone reliefs of monastic and Cathedral churches, mason builders, and donors of Tao-Klarjeti’s architecture. A particular focus is placed on recent archaeological discoveries in Şavşat Castle and the heritage of manuscripts produced in scriptoriums and literary centers of the region.

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Starting from Spring 2014, VEKAM has been organizing yearly international symposiums to introduce various cultures that lived in Anatolia and support research in these fields of study. The symposium proceeding volume titled Cultural Encounters in Anatolia in the Medieval Period : Ilkhanids in Anatolia which was held on may 21st-22nd May, 2015 at the premises of VEKAM in Ankara/ Turkey focuses on the fields such as; history, literature, mysticism, art, urban history and architecture during the Ilkhanid Period. In this respect we believe that the Ilkhanids in Anatolia symposium proceedings will fill an important gap and lead up new researches in this field.

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Sephardic Trajectories brings together scholars of Ottoman history and Jewish studies to discuss how family heirlooms, papers, and memorabilia help us conceptualize the complex process of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States. To consider the shared significance of family archives in both the United States and in Ottoman lands, the volume takes as starting point the formation of the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection at the University of Washington, a community-led archive and the world’s first major digital repository of archival documents and recordings related to the Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean world. Contributors reflect on the role of private collections and material objects in studying the Sephardi past, presenting case studies of Sephardic music and literature alongside discussions of the role of new media, digitization projects, investigative podcasts, and family memorabilia in preserving Ottoman Sephardic culture.

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The Tribe of the Esraris. is an acclaimed Turkish poet's heartfelt commentary on our times, an inquiring companion to the new millennium. In a series of fragmentary prose pieces on a wide range of topics, Ahmet Guntan offers new ways to break the proverbial silence of the poet and tackle the world head-on. He takes the floor as one of the Esraris, the eponymous tribe of uneasy souls, and builds the framework of a poetics of deeper engagement with the world around us. Reading in part like a philosophical diary, The Tribe of the Esraris. is a wake-up call to be heard, a poetic testimony written with olive trees, income inequality, and E.M. Cioran in mind.

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Ihsan Oktay Anar’s 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a skeleton key to the ever-inventive author’s fictional world set in the Ottoman times. Here are the wonderful histories of the triumphs and tribulations of three Ottoman inventors, “as reported by the narrators of events and relators of traditions.” By turns humorous and touching, these interlinked stories are nutshells of vividly imagined past. While we follow Yafes Chelebi and his two successors in their search for the secret of the perpetual motion, the crumbling empire undergoes drastic changes in the background and the city of their dreams, Istanbul, witnesses coup d’états, Westernizing reforms, and the advent of technological innovation. Written in a unique idiom that is both a tender mimicry and witty parody of the Ottoman bureaucratic prose, The Book of Devices is Anar at his imaginative best. One cannot help but wonder how a twenty-first-century author can dwell in the past with such ease and come back to the present, as in a Borgesian parable, with a cabinet of dreamy curiosities.

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Examines the first decade after the establishment of Ankara as the capital of Turkey, from the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 until 1933. With a particular focus on the recently developed Yeni Şehir (“new city”) district of Ankara, Ali Cengizkan and N. Müge Cengizkan chronicle the construction of a new city center in war-torn Turkey in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The authors fill critical gaps in the historiography of the city by sharing the ideas and experiences of its dwellers, exploring the social dynamics of the dissolution of the planned environment, and analyzing the causes and effects of modernization.

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Understanding the varied and dynamic interactions between environment and society in Anatolia. In recent decades, the influences of environmental and climatic conditions on past human societies have attracted significant attention from both the scientific community and the general public. Anatolia’s location at the conjunction of Asia, Europe, and Africa and at the intersection of three climatic systems makes it well suited for the study of such effects. In particular, Anatolia challenges many assumptions about how climatic factors affect the socio-political organization and historical evolution, highlighting the importance of close collaboration between archaeologists, historians, and climate scientists. Integrating high-resolution archaeological, textual, and environmental data with longer-term, low-resolution data on past climates, this volume of essays, drawn from the fifteenth International ANAMED Annual Symposium (IAAS) at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, showcases recent evidence for periods of climate change and human responses to it, exploring the causes underlying societal change across several millennia.

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An exploration of heritage practice in Turkey at the intersection of academia, policy, and practice. The papers published in this volume were among those presented at the 14th International ANAMED Annual Symposium (IAAS), held at Istanbul's Koc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in 2019. Bringing together archaeologists and heritage professionals from diverse backgrounds engaged in the conservation of archaeological and natural sites, the symposium focused on topics of heritage conservation and development in Turkey, with a particular focus on World Heritage Sites. The papers in this volume explore the conservation and future of archaeological and natural heritage, including but not limited to the World Heritage Convention and its application in Turkey, site conservation and financing of conservation work, community engagement during archaeological research, and public perceptions of archaeology. Providing reflection on and critical assessment of their own work, t

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This volume collects research presented at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) 2018 international annual symposium. It brings together researchers engaged in the study of the decoration and technology of glazed pottery, ranging from the early Byzantine era to the end of the Ottoman period. Topics explored include pottery production in Constantinople, glazed ceramic production and consumption in medieval Thebes, pottery imports in Algiers during the Turkish Regency, considerations of trading routes and their influences, the relationships between Italy and the Byzantine and Ottoman world through pottery, and more.

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Essays illuminate the lives of ordinary people who lived in the Ottoman era. Drawing from centuries-old court records, The Other Faces of Empire traces the lives of “outstage” people in vast empire lands. Each essay in the collection tells the story of an ordinary person navigating the Ottoman Empire. On this journey, we meet colorful and quite extraordinary figures: Deli Şaban, “naughty and haramzade” with his unsuccessful suicide attempts; Divane Hamza, who harassed the people in the village of Evciler in Bursa; Mâryem of Konya, who killed her husbands and buried them in the floor of a room of her house; Alaeddin from Skopje, who was captured by pirates; Nicolò Algarotti, a Venetian broker; and many others. The volume’s micro-historical perspective strengthens its place in historiography, and moreover, it updates the historical record by sharing the overlooked stories of “ordinary” people and recording their names in the Ottoman historical literature one by one.

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A century before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well acquainted with the European political and cultural scene and charged with their own ideological agendas, deconstructed tired clichés about “the Orient.” In this book, Zeynep Çelik recontextualizes Eurocentric postcolonial studies, unearthing an important episode in modern Middle Eastern intellectual history and curating a selection of primary texts illustrating the debates.

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