Heritagisation of the “Ottoman/Turkish House” in the 1970s: Istanbul-based Actors, Associations and their Networks

Abstract

The “Ottoman House” or “Turkish House” refers to a category of urban, vernacular, residential buildings. As a heritage object, it has been the subject of many studies and monographs; however, its formal “heritagisation” in the 1970s has not received due critical scrutiny. This heritagisation process is connected with post-World War II European preservation discourses responding to growing concerns about the destruction of historic city centres through rapid urbanization; in the context of Istanbul and Turkey specifically, heritagisation is also related to the emergence of new actors and legal arrangements, all of which are encouraged by a host of supranational organizations, such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, and their heritage promotion policies. By tracing the interactions of Istanbul-based actors and their networks, this article discusses how and why the Ottoman/Turkish House, originally used to define a nationalist and revivalist professional agenda in the first decades of the 20th century, was turned into a heritage object in the 1970s.