Description: Pazarola Hasan Bey is sitting on a footstool. In his left hand, he is holding a cup of coffee, in his right a cigarette. He is dressed in traditional and used clothes. The photograph was taken outside, probably in front of a closed shop. Next to Pazarola Hasan Bey stands a second
man. His head is outside the frame of the picture.
Comment: The photograph was used in the context of an article by Osman Cemal (Kaygılı)
with the title, ‘Istanbul’s most well-known man: Pazarola Hasan Bey’, in the weekly journal Resimli Ay. Pazarola Hasan bey (approx. 1880–1922) was a famous ‘crazy’ personality in Istanbul at the turn of the century. He was a factotum of the bazaar district around Beyazıt meydanı. The
merchants and retailers of the time valued him as a good luck charm who would bless their shops and goods.
Bibliograpy: (Kaygılı), Osman Cemal: İstanbul'un En Ma'ruf Adamı: Pazarola Hasan Bey.
Resimli Ay 2-12, March 1341 (1925), 10-13. – Karaklışa, Yavuz Selim (2006):
Eski İstanbul'un Delileri. Pazarola Hasan Bey. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı.
Copyright: Cengiz Kahraman
Archive: Cengiz Kahraman, Istanbul (Collection Private collection) , Inv. No.: PAZAROLA
HASAN BEY - KAHVE SIGARA - 01 Editors: Joël László, Cengiz Kahraman
Mavi Boncuk |
Beginning in summer 2013, SNSF research professor Nataša Mišković and her team explored everyday life in four former Ottoman cities in the 1920s and 1930s. They focused on press photographs from the archives of the largest daily newspapers in Turkey and Yugoslavia. From the mid-1920s, 'Cumhuriyet' and 'Akşam' in Istanbul and 'Politika' and 'Vreme' in Belgrade employed their own photo reporters on a fixed basis. These men probed the potential of the new field with great enthusiasm, producing dynamic pictures of a dynamic age, informing about local features and the overall character of these cities.
Photographs enable direct access to the past. An interesting image catches the eye and draws the observer into a different place and time. Nevertheless, working with photographs is a big challenge for historians. What exactly does an image show? When was it taken? Why and for whom? And who pressed the shutter release? Finding out more about the historical origin of photographs is a difficult and time-consuming task that requires much research and expert knowledge. However, detailed, informed answers to the above questions are a prerequisite for such historical work to begin.
The SIBA team went to great lengths to establish a precise context for the photographs gathered from numerous archives, museums and private collections in Turkey, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Close cooperation with local experts was especially important. Cengiz Kahraman, Director of the Istanbul Photography Museum, and Prof. Dr. Mehmed A. Akšamija, Professor of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, enthusiastically welcomed our initiative, opened their wonderful collections for us and continue to support us with their expert advice. In their own work, both struggle with a lack of financial and institutional support and low appreciation for the visual heritage of their countries.
As expected, the photographs from the four cities under investigation, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade and Ankara (SIBA), testify to half a millennium of joint Ottoman history, yet they tell us more about the Zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Next to stately mosques, we see modern sewage pipes being laid, cars and electric trams driving along newly paved streets, peasants in traditional costume selling their products in a recently opened market complex that meets the era's new standards of hygiene. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia celebrates the young nation with sport, music and dance at the big Pan-Slav 'Soko' meeting in Belgrade in 1930, while Turkey honours the nation on Republic Day with military parades, school processions and sports events. All this was documented by 'roving reporters' such as Selahattin Giz, Svetozar Grdijan, Namık Görgüç, Raka Ruben and Aca Simić — the latter on the move on his preferred mode of transport, a motorcycle with sidecar, a sensation in Belgrade at that time.
A selection of these pictures will be published on 3 June, 2016, as a scientific edition on the 'Visual Archive Southeastern Europe' digital database (VASE)[1]. On this occasion, VASE will be relaunched as a joint project by the Universities of Basel and Graz. Find more information here.
PDF of the international scientific conference for 2017.
Nataša Mišković
Yugoslavia and Turkey are two nation states which emerged at the end of World War I on the remains of the Ottoman (and in case of Yugoslavia, partly of the Habsburg) Empire. One was a monarchy formed at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918, with the former King of Serbia becoming the King of a 'three-named nation' of South-Slavs. The other, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was forged under the conviction that the Ottomanist policy of the last Sultans had failed and that the Anatolian 'heart' of the former empire was therefore to become exclusively Turk. The founding of the two new states triggered a dynamic development especially in the large cities, where the new regimes first implemented their nation building projects.
The Third Balkan Visual Meeting will look at these developments from a visual approach and explore how urban landscapes and everyday life in these cities changed under the new national order, addressing the following issues:
1. The city centre as a showcase of progress and modernity
2. The old çarşı/čaršija between neglect, nostalgia, and reform
3. Nationalist 'Zeitgeist': Nation and Body in the city
4. From subject to citizen: Gender, body and dress
5. Leisure and holidays
6. Workers and poverty relief
7. Art and Urban Planning
8. The ruler in the city: Progress, Repression, Neglect?
The main focus is on the cities which are under investigation in the ongoing Basel SIBA project: Sarajevo, Istanbul, Belgrade, Ankara, but also other cases are welcome. The SIBA project explores the cities named above through the photographic lens of local press reporters and press reports in large daily newspapers such as 'Politika', 'Vreme', 'Cumhuriyet' and 'Akşam' (see https://nahoststudien.unibas.ch/en/research/siba/).
Please submit your paper proposal, including name and affiliation, paper title, an abstract of up to 300 words and a short academic bio, to Yorick Tanner (yorick.tanner@unibas.ch) by 20 February 2017. Successful applicants will be notified by 12 March 2017. We plan to publish a selection of papers in an edited volume on the visual history of the Balkans and Anatolia.
Kontakt
Yorick Tanner| Maiengasse 51, CH-4056 Basel |yorick.tanner(at)unibas(dot)ch
[1] Visual Archive Southeastern Europe
The Visual Archive Southeastern Europe collects historical photographic material from this part of Europe and has made it accessible online as a scientific edition. VASE was initiated by SIBA’s partners at the University of Graz: the Department of Southeast European History and Anthropology, and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities. It has now been significantly extended through cooperation between the SIBA project based in Basel and these two partner institutions. The redesigned website, now launched as a joint project, will be presented at the University of Basel on 3rd June, 2016, at 4pm. Find the programme here [PDF (1.5 MB)].
Users can expect a carefully composed and edited scientific database comprising several thousand photographs. It holds photographs, postcards, posters and film stills from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Austria, Romania, Serbia and Turkey. The largest collection stems from the research project, ‘Visualizing Family, Gender Relations and the Body. The Balkans approx. 1860-1950’, conducted in Graz between 2010 and 2014 under the direction of Karl Kaser by Barbara Derler, Ana Djordjević and Anelia Kasabova. Its focus is on early Bosnian, Bulgarian and Serbian studio photography, as well as postcards. With its relaunch as a joint project between Graz and Basel, the database has gained exciting and hitherto scarcely known photographic material from the SIBA project in Basel. This collection edited by Nataša Mišković, Joël László, Milanka Matić, Mehmed A. Akšamija, Cengiz Kahraman, Kristina Ilić and Yorick Tanner gives an insight into press photography in interwar Yugoslavia and Turkey. The work of Bosnian photographer Alija M Akšamija, who took pictures of random pedestrians in and around Sarajevo at the end of the 1930s, is a special gem.
The database is being extended continually. By the end of 2016, images, posters and film stills collected by Karl Kaser as part of his research on Balkan cinema will be uploaded. In addition, a selection of photographs from the archive of Josip Broz Tito is being prepared in cooperation with the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade.
Next to precise image descriptions and comments, the edition, published in English, comprises a glossary allowing cross-references between the featured cities and languages. It also includes subject indexing based on the international Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), short biographies of the photographers and a full-text search function.