8h30-10h30 > Written culture in the Ottoman Balkans : issues, approaches and perspectives

Written culture in the Ottoman Balkans: issues, approaches and perspectives

Mar 11 juil 23
8h30-10h30
Déméter 019

Abstract : 

The Balkans often appear as one of the numerous regions of the Ottoman realm: on the one hand, the history of Islamic art tends to focus on Ottoman areas that have been part of the Islamic world for a longer period of time (Arab provinces, Anatolia), as well as the flamboyant capital, Istanbul. On the other hand, text specialists relied on documents kept in contemporary Turkey’s archives for a long period, tending to both neglect locally preserved collections and emphasize imperial discourses as well as centralizing interpretations. In this context, and because they were constitutive elements of the development of the empire very early on, it could be understood that the Balkans were unified (politically, legally, economically, etc.) under the aegis of the Ottomans. However, this idea tends to be nuanced by a renewal of research, reassessing centre-periphery dynamics and focusing on local particularities. From this perspective, what can be said about materiality?

This panel will focus on one of the dimension intersecting various aspects of materiality in Islamic art, namely written culture. By bringing together four specialists of written productions - also familiar with the collections preserved by local institutions - this panel aims to offer an overview of recent research on the written culture of the Ottoman Balkans. It will thus be a question of highlighting the local written productions and local writing practices, on different media (manuscripts and epigraphy as well as administrative documents and objects), without, however, decontextualizing: the links with the other parts of the Empire as well as with external areas are also a theme that will be addressed throughout the presentations, by investigating the circulation of objects and history of collections.

Convenor:
Vincent Thérouin, Sorbonne Université

Rania Mohammad, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
The Arabic documents at the Croatian archives (Dubrovnik and Zadar)

Tatjana Paić-Vukić, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Personal notebooks from the Ottoman era in the Oriental Collection of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb

Silvana Rachieru, Faculty of History, University of Bucharest
Adakale, the island between empires: archival collections and material culture for a regional history

Vincent Thérouin, Sorbonne Université
Monumental inscriptions in the Early Ottoman Balkans - preliminary considerations regarding the scripts and formal aspects