Invisible Ink: Erasures and Revelations of Valide Han

Year 2024, Volume: 6, 107 - 118, 31.12.2024

Christine Philliou

https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2024.8

Abstract

The question of erasures in Istanbul is what we might call a “softball” question—a question that practically answers itself. There is no doubt that there has been erasure, and it is not hard to stumble onto cases of it. There are so many cases and kinds of erasure in Istanbul that the difficulty lies only in finding an instance that can be clearly tracked, and the process of erasure documented with empirical evidence. Even when physical structures have been allowed to survive, the cognitive frame that would allow them to make sense has been annihilated for anyone outside the scholarly community, and often even for those within it. So when we speak of erasure, we are talking not just about the erasure of buildings and people, but also about words, narrative frameworks, and even cognitive paradigms premised on this erasure. Once we find a case that can be tracked with empirical evidence, once we have tracked it and brought it and the process by which it was erased to light, the erasure becomes so obvious that it is hard to believe it was never noticed before. In this way, the patterns of memory, the formulation of research questions, and the ways of thinking that allowed the erasure to happen in the first place become just as interesting as the thing or the people that were erased. In what follows, I consider the case of Valide Han—the ways it and its history have been studied and discussed, erased and partially reimagined, and the specificities with which it has been associated. Furthermore, I demonstrate the actors and social processes that spring to the surface when we closely examine some of the empirical evidence about it from the Ottoman era, in this case the early nineteenth century.

Keywords

MECLİS, Ottoman Istanbul, Architecture, Büyük Valide Han

Thanks

Research for this essay was done in the framework of the Istanpolis collaborative and thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for the project entitled “Visualizing Local Christian Communities in Late Ottoman Istanbul” (2023-2026). I would also like to thank Panagiotis Poulos and Firuzan Melike Sümertaş for bringing to my attention some key supplementary sources relevant to Valide Han.

References

• Rhoads Murphey, “The Growth in Istanbul’s Commercial Capacity, 1700–1765: The Role of New Commercial Construction and Renovation in Urban Renewal,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 61, no. 1/ 2 (2008).