LEFT HAND, RIGHT HAND?
Al-Ahram Weekly
Feb 12 2010
Egypt
As France hosts an ambitious Turkish cultural season with a major
exhibition in Paris, the relationship between France and Turkey has
rarely seemed less straightforward, writes David Tresilian
In what might be seen as a spectacular example of one hand not knowing
what the other hand is doing, the French government embarked last
year on a "season of Turkey in France," a country-wide celebration
of all things Turkish. At the same time, it is continuing efforts to
block Turkey’s application to join the European Union. Perhaps as
a result of such mixed messages, the season of Turkey in France is
turning out to be a somewhat ambiguous celebration.
Described as an opportunity to draw attention to the historical and
contemporary relationship between France and Turkey and to "a tradition
of friendship going back to the 16th century," the season consists
of more than 400 cultural and other events, including exhibitions,
concerts and lectures, taking place at venues across France with a
similar programme of French-themed events taking place in Turkey.
Getting underway with the visit of Turkish president Abdullah Gul to
France last year to open an exhibition, De Byzance a Istanbul, un port
pour deux continents, which is at the Grand Palais on the Champs –
Elys…es in Paris until January, the season runs until March and is
intended to encourage cultural, educational, scientific and economic
cooperation between France and Turkey.
It includes a set of exhibitions at the Louvre on Ottoman dress,
ancient Smyrna, and the Hittite civilisation of ancient Anatolia,
an exhibition on the city-planning of Istanbul at the Cit… de
l’architecture in Paris, and festivals of contemporary Turkish
literature, music, theatre and film. For five days last year the Eiffel
Tower was lit up with the red and white colours of the Turkish flag,
replacing its regular night-time illumination.
However, a first taste of the effects of the ambiguous political
background came during Gul’s visit, when French president Nicolas
Sarkozy, reportedly wanting to reduce the visibility of a season
decided during the presidency of his predecessor Jacques Chirac,
restricted the exhibition’s opening to a mere half-hour ceremony.
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, this was to avoid "showing
himself in public with the president of a country whose entry to the
European Union he opposes."
At a working dinner held between the two presidents, there was
"agreement on everything," the newspaper commented, aside from on "the
essential issue" of Turkey’s application to join the European Union.
"The two men decided not to talk about delicate issues," it went on,
Gul deciding instead to show that "his country, like Europe, had
the kind of ‘soft power’ that would allow it to work for peace and
stability in the region and for the spread of the values of democracy,
secularism and the market economy."
While France has never made a secret of its hostility to Turkish
membership of the EU, this received a kind of official sanction with
Sarkozy’s victory in the 2007 French presidential elections. Sarkozy
had expressed his opposition to Turkish EU membership before the
elections took place, and he has since reiterated it even though
accession negotiations with Turkey have been underway since 2005 and
the country has been recognised as a candidate country since 1999.
A blow to Franco-Turkish relations over Turkey’s bid for EU membership
came in 2004, when an article was added to the French constitution
stating that French acceptance of any new entrant to the EU would
require a referendum. Since this procedure has never been used for
any other country and French hostility to Turkish membership has been
confirmed in a succession of opinion polls, this article seems aimed
directly at Turkey.
A 2006 vote among French MPs designed to make it an offence in France
"to question the Armenian genocide," referring to the massacres carried
out against the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population during the First
World War, is also believed to have angered Turkey.
However, it has not just been French opposition that has slowed
negotiations towards Turkish entry.
According to the rules governing accession to the EU, candidate
countries must meet requirements regarding the stability of
institutions, the rule of law, human rights and the protection of
minorities, and they are required to demonstrate the existence of
a functioning market economy. They must also have the capacity to
implement the so-called acquis, a set of 35 "chapters" dealing with
everything from the free movement of goods to company law, taxation,
the judiciary and fundamental rights and institutions.
Thus far, negotiations have been opened with Turkey on 11 of these,
with only one having been provisionally closed. In 2006, the EU
announced that because Turkey had not implemented its obligations
under EU rules towards Cyprus, eight chapters could not be opened
and no further chapter could be provisionally closed. This block to
further negotiations has not yet gone away, even if a recent EU report
on enlargement noted that Turkey had fulfilled the political criteria
for accession and had made progress on the reform of the judiciary,
civil-military relations, and cultural rights.
The report noted that Turkey was a functioning market economy and
praised its "overall level of alignment" in areas such as the free
movement of goods, intellectual property rights, enterprise and
industrial policy, anti- trust policy, consumer and health protection,
science and research, and energy.
"Turkey has continued to develop a positive role contributing to
stabilisation in regions such as the South Caucasus and the Middle
East," the report continued. "In this context, diplomatic efforts to
normalise relations with Armenia have moved forward," not least in
the signature of an agreement between Turkey and Armenia last October,
reportedly helped along by the US and France.
***
Though it sits perhaps uncomfortably against this background, De
Byzance a Istanbul, un port pour deux continents is a splendid example
of French savoir-faire in grand exhibition making, bringing together
some 300 objects from public and private collections in France, Turkey
and elsewhere. It is designed to illustrate the theme of the meeting of
two continents in the city of Byzantium, which became Constantinople in
the 4th century CE, and, following Ottoman conquest in 1453, Istanbul.
In this the exhibition spectacularly succeeds, though it is not the
fault of the curator, Nazan ‘lcer, director of the Sakip Sabanci
Museum in Istanbul, if the later Ottoman parts of the exhibition
are richer and more satisfying to visit than the earlier Byzantine
sections. Passing from the Byzantine galleries containing exhibits
from Constantinople on the ground floor of the Grand Palais to those
dedicated to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul on the first floor is
rather like going from black and white to Technicolor.
While the architectural elements and white marble statuary that
make up much of the Constantinople part of the exhibition are all
that is left, or at least all that is readily transportable, of the
built environment of the city, on going to the upstairs galleries
the visitor enters an environment of gorgeously coloured textiles,
ceramics, illustrated books and manuscripts and paintings and jewelry
that make up the Ottoman section dedicated to the city of Istanbul.
When the Royal Academy in London mounted an exhibition on
Constantinople last year, Byzantium 330-1453 (reviewed in the Weekly
in November 2008), it focused on the religious images that made up
the major part of Byzantine iconography, including icons lent by St.
Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Those parts of the London
exhibition dedicated to home life in Constantinople and to the
Byzantine court were less successful than those presenting Byzantine
religious art, as is perhaps only natural given the magnificent
visual materials available for the latter and the comparative dearth
of surviving materials for the former.
The present exhibition’s first Byzantine gallery is a darkened,
double-volume space that ingeniously makes use of installed columns to
suggest the dimensions and character of a Byzantine hall. On display
here are major pieces presented against the background of a sketched-in
chronological timeline. These include a set of fragments of marble
statues dating from the 2nd century CE when Constantinople, capital
of the eastern Roman Empire from 330 CE, was still the provincial
Roman centre of Byzantium. The statues, originally commissioned as
decoration for a fountain, were discovered in 1949 during excavations
in the Silahtaraga area of Istanbul when work was underway to build
a power station.
There are also a pair of 10th-century griffins, Persian Sassanid in
inspiration and lent to the exhibition by the Istanbul Archaeological
Museum. These seem to indicate belated iconographic influence from
the Byzantines’ former enemy, which was defeated during the Arab
conquests of the 7th century CE.
The first long gallery takes the story of the city to 1453, date of
the final Ottoman conquest, the second, Ottoman gallery beginning
upstairs and signalled by passage through a display of architectural
elements. These include domes, which are a major element of Ottoman
architecture, particularly mosque architecture. Images of the interiors
of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman domes are projected onto the ceiling
space of the transitional area between the exhibition’s two parts,
the effect being to mark a watershed between one civilisation, Roman
and Byzantine, and another, Muslim and Ottoman, whose presence in the
city began with the conquest of Constantinople and its transformation
into Istanbul.
Probably the most famous Byzantine domes are those of the Hagia
Sophia in Istanbul, the cathedral church of holy wisdom built by the
Emperor Justinian in the 6th century CE, which was turned into a mosque
following the Ottoman conquest of the city and is today a museum. The
interiors of these domes would originally have been decorated with
paintings and mosaics, some of which still exist in situ. Images of
Byzantine dome architecture are projected in the company of images
of domes from Ottoman mosques, showing how architectural elements
from Byzantine architecture were both retained and transformed by
Ottoman architects.
The exhibition’s Istanbul section begins with Mehmed II, conqueror of
Constantinople, and though it displays some familiar materials, such
as a version of the famous portrait of Mehmed done by the Venetian
painter Gentile Bellini in 1480, there are also materials that are a
lot less familiar, at least to international audiences. These include
a fascinating notebook from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul
that contains doodled sketches made by the young Mehmed before he
came to the throne. They include practice versions of his tughra, a
kind of ornamental Ottoman signature affixed to documents to certify
their authenticity.
>>From here, the exhibition spreads out across a set of thematic
sections, from that dedicated to Suleiman the Magnificent, probably
the most famous Ottoman sultan who reigned from 1520 to 1566, to
those on life at the Ottoman court, the Istanbul street scene, and
everyday life in Ottoman Istanbul. Many of the materials displayed in
these sections are interchangeable, consisting of Ottoman ceramics,
textiles, carpets, jewellery, illuminated manuscripts, military items
and everyday objects that could fit under almost any theme.
Some of the objects are clearly luxury items intended for aristocratic
patrons, while others, such as examples of the famous Ottoman ceramics
produced at Iznik and decorated with characteristic tulips, were
probably within the means of less elevated clients. Striking exhibits
here include 16th-century Ottoman carpets from collections in Berlin
and Istanbul, ceramics lent by the Louvre, and European paintings and
other images, beginning with 16th and 17th-century pictures. These
include the famous painting of Suleiman the Magnificent, brought
from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum and attributed to Titian,
and end with nostalgic, picture-postcard imagery familiar from 19th
and 20th-century orientalism.
An interesting chapter by Semra Germaner of Istanbul’s Mimar
Sinan University in the exhibition catalogue comments on what the
author calls "Ottoman westernisation and western nostalgia" for the
"oriental city." While visiting western painters and photographers
specialised in the oriental and the picturesque, represented here
by paintings by otherwise little-known European painters like Fausto
Zonaro (1854-1929), Carlo Bossoli (1815-1884) and the better- known
Jean L…on G…r’me, 19th-century Ottoman Turkish intellectuals
were looking to Europe and particularly to France for new forms of
architecture, city-planning and iconography.
There are some excellent paintings by early 20th-century Ottoman
artists on display, masters of the European styles of the time, which
show the clear influence of European techniques and models. Germaner
mentions Osman Hamdi Bey (1842- 1910), founder of the Istanbul Ecole
des beaux-arts and director of the Imperial Museum, and AbdÃ"lmecid
Effendi (1868-1944), a son of Sultan AbdÃ"laziz, whose work Beethoven
au palais shows the imperial family gathered for a Beethoven recital
in a European bourgeois interior.
***
The last two themes in the Ottoman section, "religion and
cosmopolitanism" and "reform and transformation," seem to speak as
much to contemporary Turkey and its efforts to meet EU accession
criteria as they do to Ottoman and late Ottoman Istanbul. Installed
under the first heading are a set of tombstones with Ottoman Turkish,
Greek and Armenian inscriptions, these being part of a display of items
bearing witnesses to the city’s Greek, Armenian and Jewish minorities,
many of them dispersed during the collapse of the Ottoman state under
the stresses of the First World War and subsequent foreign invasion.
Under the second heading there is mention of the occupation of
Istanbul by allied forces in 1919, the end of the Ottoman sultanate
and the advent of the Turkish republic in 1923. This history has been
intensively revisited in recent years, particularly the fate of the
empire’s Armenian minorities.
The exhibition’s final sections return to double-volume spaces in
order to present the "eternal Istanbul" made famous by Nobel-prize
winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who also contributes an essay to
the exhibition catalogue. Pamuk’s is a city of loss and melancholy,
a kind of Middle Eastern Venice, marginalised after 1923 when the
Turkish capital moved to Ankara. Melancholic Istanbul is given visual
identity through a series of atmospheric black-and-white projections,
mixing images of Ottoman Istanbul with photographs from the 1950s,
60s and later. There are also some more recent colour images that
evoke a different mood.
The exhibition’s last room deals with finds made in Istanbul in
2004 during the building of the city’s metro. The most important of
these were made at Yenikapi, where the remains of the ancient port of
Theodosiacus were uncovered, together with ancient galleys carrying
cargoes of amphoras. Some 24 hulls have been discovered, finds from
which have been brought to Paris.
These are important because they bear witness to Byzantine shipping,
but the objects on display, all found within the last decade during
excavations for the metro, also lend depth to the exhibition’s overall
message of Istanbul as an urban palimpsest, its multiple layers still
present beneath the city that greets visitors today.