New nations, shared Ottoman past Cities across modern Serbia, Bosnia and Turkey spent many years as part of the Ottoman Empire, before new nation states were established in the aftermath of the First World War. Photo archives from the 1920s and ‘30s open a window into everyday life in the period, a topic at the heart of Professor Nataša Mišković’s research. In the aftermath of the First World War, new nation states were established on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire which aimed to fully break with the past. Yet the Empire left a legacy of many shared cultural practices across southeastern Europe and western Asia. As the Principal Investigator of the SIBA project, Professor Nataša Mišković is exploring everyday life in four post-Ottoman cities during the 1920s and ‘30s through local press photography from the period. “The aim of the project is to look at the public urban space and explore to what extent it changed under the new national regimes,” she says. This research centres on photos of Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade and Ankara, all cities which were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. “We wanted to have imagery from local press photographers, and to look at how they perceived their city,” outlines Professor Mišković. “Like the internet or social media today, rotary printing was a totally new technology which required investment. Before WW1 there were almost no photographs in local newspapers in the region.”
SIBA Exploring Post-Ottoman Cities Through the Photographers’ Lens. New Approaches to Lifeworld Research in Turkey and Yugoslavia, 1920s and 1930s (SIBA) Professor Nataša Mišković University of Basel | Department of Social Studies | Rheinsprung 21 | 4051 Basel | Schweiz T: +41 61 207 19 91 E: natasa.miskovic@unibas.ch W: https://nahoststudien. philhist.unibas.ch/de/ personen/natasa-miskovic/ W: https://nahoststudien. philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/ forschungsprojekte/siba/ Nataša Mišković is research professor at the University of Basel, Department of Social Sciences, since 2013. Her research focus is on the shared history of the Balkans and the Middle East, on visual history and on the history of Yugoslavia. Her new project is on History and Film on Nation-building, Violence and Memory from the European Periphery.
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Namık Görgüç/Selahattin Giz: Photographing a worker on the Beyazıt Mosque minaret, Istanbul 1936. Cengiz Kahraman Photography Collection (siba.1158).
Everyday life in post-Ottoman cities A database of several thousand photos has been built up from archives, museums and private collections across the region, part of which is available to the public on the online database Visual Archive Southeastern Europe (VASE). While some areas of these four cities
different sections of society mixed. While the rulers of the new Yugoslavia and Turkey were keen to build a new sense of national identity, people still drew on their cultural heritage in everyday life, and Professor Mišković says this is still in evidence today. “People from the Balkans who travel to Turkey generally do not have any difficulties in getting around, and vice-versa,” she says. The photos have been displayed through a travelling exhibition called Cities on the Move — post-Ottoman, which has been shown in seven European cities. Professor Mišković hopes it has inspired people from the region to reflect on their history, and others to perceive post-Ottoman cities as modern European cities. “We want to encourage people to take a wider view of their own past, not reduced so much to their own national view, and to encourage them to ask questions about enforced narratives,” she says.
We use the photographs to give people a sensual, visual, emotional experience to help them dive into their own past. We want to show that the past is connected and shared. became closely associated with the new nation state, others retained their earlier character. “In each of the cities there are locations which are closely associated with the nation state. In Istanbul it’s Taksim square, which is in Beyoğlu, a modern part of the city,” explains Professor Mišković. There is also a social anthropological dimension to this research, as the photos reveal differences in the way people dressed. “Elites who supported the new regime presented themselves as being national and often dressed according to the latest international fashions. Whereas poor people, who didn’t have the money to buy new clothes, often stuck to the old ways. Uniforms were introduced for school children,” continues Professor Mišković. The photos themselves relate to five different aspects of everyday life, including images of the bazaar, where people from
This exhibition has had a very positive reception, attracting thousands of visitors in Istanbul, Belgrade and Sarajevo. The exhibition has helped to challenge established perceptions of the nation’s past. “We use the photographs to give people a sensual, visual, emotional experience to help them dive into their own past. We want to show that the past is connected and shared,” continues Professor Mišković. This is a topic Professor Mišković explored further in her film Zeitgeist, which she produced on base of material from her database. “We used the pictures from the exhibition to do a 30-minute experimental film, based on digitally enhanced historical photographs from Turkey and Yugoslavia. Arranged in a visual narrative, you can see people in an urban scenery, but it’s not easy to see which city it is,” she says.
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