Review of “Empires of Memory”
By Zora Kostadinova (UCL)
Across the former Ottoman territories of southeast Europe, structures associated with the Ottoman Empire have witnessed significant forms of revitalization. Standing as sites of memory or lieux de memoire, after Pierre Nora’s famous concept, these places evoke and generate different tropes of affect, nostalgia, and aesthetics. As such, they reveal the particularity of contemporary local formations of relatedness to a past Empire, in the present. This process of memorialization is never quite free from local political imaginaries in the host countries, on one hand, but on the other, neither is it free from the political objectives of the donor countries who invest in restoration. In a dialogue with one another, this post-imperial transnational communication creates new political discourses that build on a previously forsaken imperial legacy which mobilises political, religious, and cultural imaginations locally.
In the last of the seminars on the Balkans for the Takhayyul project the social and cultural anthropologist Jeremy Walton presented “Remembrance of Ottoman Times Past and the Politics of the Balkan Present: Notes on Ferhadija Mosque and Maškovića Caravanserai”. His presentation is a part of a larger research project titled Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities. The project is an investigation of the multiplicity of ways in which memories of imperial pasts are restored, presented, and used as loci for political and aesthetic relatedness. As such they inform the present and potentially can shape the future by acting as affective ground for deployment of textures of memory and nostalgia. The project raises important questions about the Balkans as a space for inter-imperiality, a meeting place of Empires which have established an enduring mark on the social, cultural, and political fabric of the countries they ruled; a plethora of their own rules and logics of operation, which arguably still lives in the collective psyche via a genealogy of intergenerational transmission of memory.
Even though these Empires are long gone, echoes and traces of once powerful political entities still manifest in a manner of Imperial durability or duress through architectural sites, coffee houses and institutions. Walton’s project brings into conversation Ann Stoler concept of duress to both question and affirm Svetlana Boym’s models of nostalgia. Working with “temporal, spatial and affective coordinates” the idea of the durability of Empire in the present leaves different traces in different locations, at times mappable and at times made ambiguous by the passage of time and their various historicization. Thus, what makes this project of a great value to the region is its ability to address these ambiguities of time and space of imperial pasts, to convey more complex cultural politics of the present without falling into the trap of coherent historicity – which Walton is suspicious of.
The reason why this is becoming an increasingly important field to engage with and to observe, as Walton argued, is because of the enmeshment between the political, religious and the social spheres, that such imperial pasts can play rolls in the present. Thus, the ongoing Turkish investment in restoring cultural heritage in the Balkans, does not only draw on the nostalgias and imperial registries of the local population, but it also works towards imagining a new future for itself vis-à-vis its past rule of the Balkans.
The two sites that were the focus of the presentation are located in two different countries, Croatia, and Bosnia, and are both places of inter-imperiality, having been ruled by the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, respectively. However, the way in which they engage with memory and nostalgia for the Empire are markedly different, reflecting their own locality.
The first site of memory we looked at was the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka, the capital city of the Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska.
In the war of the 1990s Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary formations notoriously engaged in wanton destruction of the Bosnian Muslim religious and cultural heritage. It has been estimated that up to 90% of Bosnian Muslim cultural heritage was destroyed in a process of an intense ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population. This distraction was not without its own historical tropes of ridding the region from the last remnants of the ‘Turkish yoke’ as such orientalist tropes circulated widely during the 1990s war in Bosnia. In this sense the mosque represented both the Ottoman as well as Islamic other. Originally erected in 1579 by the city’s Ottoman Governor Ferhad Paša Sokolović and presumably designed by one of Mimar Sinan’s students, its grandiloquence is difficult to ignore. In 1993 it was demolished on the orders of the Republika Srpska authorities, and in 2001 when the city of Banja Luka issued a permit to the Islamic Community to reconstruct the Mosque, Serb nationalists violently attacked the Muslim congregation that gathered on the site to lay the cornerstone. It officially returned to service in 2016 restored with funds by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA).
Walton approaches its restoration as a site with a fraught past, carrying a difficult heritage for the local population. He analyses its restoration as a process of “restorative nostalgia”. The opening of the Mosque accompanied by the distinct presence of Turkish national officials in 2016 serves to affirm the Turkish political present, whereby Turkey works towards securing its own political future in the region. Thus, restorative nostalgia for the lost home indeed emerges as a desire of Turkey, who through financial support appeals to the local Bosnian imperial duress, in securing for itself a neo-Ottoman future. Turkey’s current political and cultural agenda of Neo-Ottomanism finds a metaphoric home in the trope of the lost home in Bosnia as a postwar phenomenon, or the political aspirations of the Turkish ruling party AKP to return home to its imperial periphery in a demonstration of political and cultural largesse.
Through the restorative process of the Mosque, which is a monument to once thriving Ottoman architecture, and a place of worship at the same time, Walton argues that Neo-Ottomanism as a future political project becomes imaginable. This site of memory is presented as an affective object which embodies both political and religious imaginaries. The enmeshment of the political and the religious, next to creating a tense present, also opens questions for the future.
Croatia, on the other hand, is also a place of inter-imperiality but shows an entirely different engagement with Ottoman imperial memory. Walton showed this with the second site the Maškovića Han, built by Yusuf Pasha or Jusuf Mašković (1604-1646) an Ottoman vezir from Vrane, Croatia in 1644. The han spells Croatia’s own engagement and disengagement at the same time, with a rather marginal Ottoman past in comparison to neighbouring Bosnia. The Ottoman Empire conquered Vrane in 1527 and it stayed under their administration for a century before it was taken by the Republic of Venice. Today the restored Maškovića Han is akin to a hotel complex which hosts tourists and travellers. As such, the site is an example of how Imperial cultural heritage can be made of use to revive economically marginal areas of the country, turning them into a tourist attraction with hotel accommodation and restaurant and a Museum.
Walton presented Maškovića Han as an example of post-Ottoman memory as aestheticized heritage. This site of memory represents somewhat of a consumer catalogue. On one hand, the restaurant offers an Oriental menu where “Izmir koftesi” is served evoking the sensory memory, much like in Marcel Proust’s concept of the involuntary memory awakened through the taste buds. On the other hand, the material objects as exhibits in the Museum, such as the decapitated heads of Ottoman tombstones and a white manikin dressed in an Ottoman attire, in what Walton called a Museum as oubliette, are evocative of a different texture of memory and associated, through its metaphors of foreign Ottoman rule, with a less desired past. The white manikin dressed in Ottoman attire; representative of what Walton ironically called “Meet your local Ottoman” gives the impression of a level of exhibitionism which opens different textures of cultural politics of historicity in Vrane and Croatia generally. In Bosnia for example, Ottoman tombstones represent sacred landscape, and therefore places of affect and worship, as the anthropologist David Henig shows in his book Remaking Muslim Lives (2020). Their presence in the Bosnian post-war landscapes is associated with a pre-war and pre-Yugoslav past which a great number of Bosnian Muslims look towards with a form of reverence and respect.
In Vrane, on the other hand post-Ottoman memory resembles an off shot of Orientalism. There is a textured othering of Ottoman cultural heritage. Thus, the aesthetization of memory is not only a method of restoring and preserving cultural heritage but also of fostering an emotive detachment from this heritage which by framing itself as an object of consumerism, simultaneously acts as a dissociative trope with affects and emotions.
Post-Ottoman memory as aestheticized heritage, by the virtue of being aestheticized is not embodied through affect and an emotion, but it is rather “ingested” through the orientalised cuisine for instance. It is consumed in a way of pleasure and leisure, rather than affect, like we saw with the Ferhadija Mosque. There is no affective enmeshment between the material object and the viewer or between the site of memory as a nostalgic longing or a restoration of a home. Even though the han in a way represents more of a physical home than the Mosque, with its fourteen rooms, it serves no such counterpoint to observers in their imaginations. Integrating historical knowledge only in a very limited way, it creates what Walton has referred to as an empty time.
Walton’s presentation forms a natural conclusion to the ideas of Empire in the Balkans that we have investigated so far in our seminar series. It does so especially as it takes the discussion in the direction of urban ethnography, the urban as a site of Empire, where Empires played a prominent role in the process of urbanisation and modernisation of Balkan cities. Here, the modern urban evokes the early twentieth century theorists who designed new methodologies to engage with the urban inbuilt environment, which he elegantly deploys in his research.
In the duration of his presentation Walton made us aware of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the urban walker or the flaneur, as a witness to these sites of memory, whereby the material object of research interacts with the researcher as the flaneur who produces the knowledge. The implications of Benjamin’s flaneur however, resonate with what constitutes memory and how sites of memory can never quite cohere around a single metaphor or a single interpretation of meaning.
This recognition in turn acts in reminding us again and again, that historicism, as Benjamin has it, should be less about “causal connection between various moments in history” and more about “the constellation which [our] own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (Benjamin 1968, 263). The imaginary of the Empire as a temporality from the past shifts into a durable memory which through it claims the “collective subject” (Trouillot 1995, 16), even if it is always embodied and enacted by the individual. Walton offers a form of a resolution to this tension between the collective and the individual, well familiar to the scholars of memory, by making the researcher central to the imagination of how the past becomes articulated as an Empire of Memory. In this articulation, scholars as flaneurs in the process of knowledge production are also contributing.