Ruin and Knowledge in Pera: Discovering Istanbul’s Genoese Heritage at the Moment of Its Destruction

Abstract

Abstract The 1860s and 1870s saw a massive campaign of reordering of Galata and Pera’s urban space, led by the newly founded district municipality of Altıncı Daire-i Belediye (the Sixth District)—the model municipal organization for the rest of the Ottoman Empire. The most striking and widespread part of this campaign was the destruction of the district’s medieval Genoese walls, dating back to the fourteenth century. The walls and the attached moats were replaced by wider streets and modern apartment buildings, owned mostly by the local elites. This episode in the history of Istanbul has conventionally been narrated as a careless – albeit necessary—case of urban modernization, often in relation to the similar and roughly contemporary destruction of city walls in European cities. In this article, I rather argue that the destruction of the city walls was actually framed as a project of heritage and knowledge production from the very start. I trace how the history of the Genoese Pera was produced in the popular and scientific circles amidst the destruction of its most important physical manifestation, by concentrating especially on the central role played by the municipal archivist Victor-Marie de Launay. Launay’s later collaborations with Osman Hamdi Bey are relatively well known, but his contributions to the history of the district and an early discourse on urban heritage and archaeology are underappreciated, and, I argue, critical to understanding how the ruins of the district’s past were instrumentalized in making of a space for historical expertise. Launay was a central figure in the emergent antiquarian and archaeological networks in the Ottoman capital in the second half of the nineteenth century, the scholarly output produced in these circles had a lingering effect on the modern history-writing of Pera that has conventionally underlined its “European” heritage at the expense of its Ottoman past.