@article{article_1131205, title={“Of a Piece with Their Habitations”: Phanariots and Their Houses on the Phanar Waterfront}, journal={YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies}, volume={4}, pages={7–44}, year={2022}, DOI={10.53979/yillik.2022.2}, url={https://izlik.org/JA49DZ96UG}, author={Erkal, Namık and Sümertaş, Firuzan Melike}, keywords={Fener, Haliç, Fenerliler, Osmanlı Rumları, Erken Modern Konut Dokusu}, abstract={This paper discusses the early modern houses on Phanar’s extramural waterfront, one of Ottoman Istanbul’s main Greek Orthodox neighborhoods, located on the northwest of the walled city on the Golden Horn. Focusing on their emergence and transformation within their own context, this study aims to achieve an in-depth reading of these residences. The transformation of the waterfront settlement around Phanar, from fisher houses in the sixteenth century to the mansions of the rising mercantile elite of the Orthodox Christian community and then of boyars and hospodars of Wallachia and Moldavia (referred to as Phanariots after the neighborhood) in the “long” eighteenth century, constitutes the backbone of the study. The centripetal role of the relocation of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate to Phanar in the seventeenth century in the larger story of the emergence and transformation of the neighborhood in general and of the waterfront in particular is key. Special emphasis is given to the formal aspects of the Phanariot houses, which have been reconstructed through a close analysis of sources. It is argued that, while the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses in Phanar displayed a unique bipartite construction which combined masonry and timber, when the houses were later “canonized” in the early twentieth century, they had an incomplete presentation, distinguishing the masonry parts and dismissing the timber half. This bipartite scheme in the early modern period suggests connections to not only their materiality but also their functionality, plot pattern, and relation to the immediate urban context including the Golden Horn. In addition to their formal and urban aspects, these houses were peculiar in that they were frequently conceptualized as the inconspicuous, even “invisible,” houses of the Phanariots, a phenomenon which can be traced in the eyewitness accounts. Thus, we attempt to reconstruct the material form of the houses of Phanar as a way to understand the social and political form that they forged for themselves in the Ottoman Empire. The “demise” of Phanar and its transformation into a nostalgic neighborhood of a distant Greek past, both in Istanbul and in Greece, also constitutes a significant endnote.}