14 Shifting Identities of the Ottoman Vernacular

Session Chair:
Aleksandar Ignjatovic, University of Belgrade

The “Ottoman house” refers to a vernacular building type and urban housing layout that became ubiquitous across a large swathe of regions, from Anatolia to the Adriatic in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Equally shared by different ethnic groups and religious denominations, it represented a common, pre-national cultural model and pre-modern architectural type distinguished by a number of elements that featured numerous local variants. However, despite being the “syncretic product of a multi-ethnic society”, it has been symptomatically identified as “Turkish” and “Oriental”. In the era of nationalism, which reached its peak after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman house and its associated meanings went on an unexpectedly complex and controversial semiotic journey.

Practically all post Ottoman successor states, including the republican Turkey, endeavoured to appropriate and “nationalize” the once common architectural heritage, both by scholarly interpretation and a “modern vernacular” building production. This included the unequivocal rebuttal of its Oriental identity through the question of its origins that became both complex and contradictory. Was the Ottoman house autochthonous or derivative? Was its ancestry Byzantine, Ancient Greek, Slavic, or genuinely Turkish; or even Thracian and Illyrian? Or was its cultural backbone pan-Balkan or Mediterranean? While architectural historians tried to trace back the Ottoman house’s roots, the cities in which it flourished had already been de-Ottomanized and “Europeanized” — from the Black Sea to the Adriatic coast, from the Dodecanese to the Danube — causing the precarious vernacular heritage to be paradoxically seen as an obstacle to the national culture and a source of its identity. At the same time, its architectural features were appreciated through the modernist lenses of rationality, functionalism, simplicity and honesty. Propelled by Le Corbusier’s enduring interest in what he called the “architectural masterpieces” of the Ottoman vernacular, various interpretations by historians, anthropologists and architects included the Ottoman house in the modernist discourse about universal responses to natural conditions and a cultural ethos that transcended history.

A key rationale for this session is a paradox that lies at the heart of this identitydynamics in which the once common heritage, which was initially despised and then so utterly transformed to become the epitome of national parochialism, was also seen as a protomodernist expression of universal and supra-ethnic principles. The proposed session would invite the participants to investigate this remarkable afterlife—both written and constructed—of Ottoman vernacular architecture, torn between cultural exceptionalism and cultural universalism.

Paper Abstracts:

Modern-Traditional Architecture in late-Ottoman-Era Haifa

The Arab house, just as the Ottoman house, has material and formative characteristics that are common in a wide geographic area. Its main structural component is stone — as opposed to wooden beams in the Ottoman house. Under the Ottoman rule, the new city of Haifa, located in the southern periphery of the Empire, was established as a port city and controlled the Levant area. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Haifa became a cosmopolitan city and a transportation hub that linked Europe to the Empire and the East. This study explores how Ottoman traditions affected the construction of the Haifa Arabic house. Which were the components both types of homes shared? What elements are vernacular and which “universal” in both buildings types? Significant technological and administrative changes led to several immigration waves of individuals as well as nuclear families to Haifa. Construction of the port and the Hijaz railway, as well as other Tanzimat reforms (1839-1876) triggered the need for living quarters. New entrepreneurs set up homes for rent. Growing demand for housing changed the structure of family dwellings and residential building characteristics. The residential model shifted from the “Liwan house” — widely spread throughout the Levant as a central component in the extended family home — to the “Central hall house”, or units for the nuclear family.

Examining long-term influences of local buildings and innovations imported from Europe or the heart of the Ottoman Empire, this paper traces how this syncretic model was designed: a combination of traditional autochthonous masonry with new building materials and new imported building elements. Joining the vernacular with the international, the Central hall house ushered in the new traditional-modern house model, ultimately changing the city’s landscape.

Keren Ben Hilel, Technion Israel Institute of Technology Yael Allweil, Technion Israel Institute of Technology Urban Rooms Transition: Revisiting the Immediacy of Sofa/Hayat Space in Vernacular Ottoman House and Re-Historicizing its Presence

Following the aftermath of the Cold War and the fall of communism in East Europe, as well as the recuperation of the post-Yugoslav states, yet re-drawing the lines of geographical and cultural multitude, it is observed that the remains of the Ottoman Era are being re-appreciated as the vernacular of the nations from Adriatic to Thracian milieu.

Apart from technology, programme, identity and semiotics of the Ottoman house as the vernacular and common denominator of the post-Cold War Balkan societies, this paper aims to reflect the stripped image of Ottoman identity off from the phenomenon, on behalf of providing a mental image of the house acting as a cross-cultural mediator that operates in the level of semantics of basic spatiality. Thus, neither focusing on a physical embodiment of the Ottoman house, nor group of dwellings, this paper is based on the conviction that not the corporal embodiment of the house, but the incorporeal and omnipresence of inside-ness and the uninterrupted feeling of being in represents the essence of the so-called vernacular.

In order to address what the Ottoman house refers to and which are its essential roots — by asking questions whether it is a stereotype or a spatial scheme, hierarchical planning of private and public space, or the use of significant interior and exterior elements; or the taxonomy of the building mass, or the separation of gender ¬— this paper will comprehend the cross-cultural continuity of the phenomenon. It will address questions related to sofa/hayat (the specific spatial entity acting as a transition space connecting individual rooms to the rest of the house, or the interiority of the house to the exteriority of the street), as a molecular space but not a molar house, acting both unitary and collectively. By utilizing a multi-fold reading methodology and focusing on the examples from Mostar (Herzegovina), Prizren (Kosovo) and Thessaloniki (Greece), Buldan (Turkey), the existing literature on the subject (Eldem, Kuban, Ögel, Akın etc.), as well as the concept of interiority and urban rooms in relation to the general history and theory of space (Lefebvre, Sennet, etc.) this paper would permit to discern the locality of the phenomenon together with its transversality in space and time.

Emine Görgül, ITU-Istanbul Technical University School of Architecture