Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 4:45 p.m.—6:15 p.m.

BERIN F. GÜR

"Political Misuse, Conquest and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul”
Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

For the Islamist-nationalist circles in Turkey, the conquest of Istanbul on May 29, 1453 is a significant triumph inherited from the magnificent times of the Ottoman Empire, and believed to denote the founding moment of the Turkish nation. In this research, the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul is seen as a manipulated melancholy project of the Islamist-nationalist imagination, which fixes the conquest in (spatial) images of its own “mourning” and produces “lost objects” to use as a tool of political propaganda (although nothing has actually been lost). Architecture as the bearer of clues to the search for lost objects and spatial-political instruments of the conquest rhetoric thus becomes the subject of the research. Hagia Sophia, whose status as a prayer space (mosque) and secular space (museum) has always been the main issue of controversies, is instrumental in thinking of “the lost mosque”. Thus, in this research, the building is brought forward as “the lost object” of the politically manipulated melancholy project of the Islamist-nationalist imagination, and its political misuse as “the lost mosque” becomes the main focus.

Berin F. Gür is professor of Architecture at TED University (TEDU), Ankara, Turkey and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Modernities.  She has taught architectural design since 1992 and teaches classes on the spatial and formal analysis of buildings and its theory, reading architectural precedents, and topics in contemporary architecture. She has various publications in the international and national journals and books on the processes of architectural design and urban design; architectural design education; architectural criticism; ideologies and architecture, and the production of urban space. She was the head of TEDU Department of Architecture between 2013-2019; and worked as the Vice Dean between 2019-2021.

Her time at Cornell and the ICM will be spent working on her current book project, Conquest and Melancholy:  The Islamist-nationalist Rhetoric of the Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture. The book brings together two seemingly irrelevant terms: “conquest” associated with glory and victory, and “melancholy” associated with mourning and grief. Togetherness of conquest and melancholy in this book advocates re-conceptualization of melancholy as a manipulated project. And the following questions are formulated: How is the Istanbul’s conquest represented in the Islamist-nationalist imagination? What are the melancholy objects or, in other words, “the lost objects” of the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of conquest? What are the spatial political instruments of the conquest rhetoric?