Aslı Niyazioğlu
University of Oxford
BGC Fellow

Talismanic Antiquities of Early Modern Istanbul: Serpent Column and Ottoman Historians

For their early modern Ottoman observers, Istanbul’s antiquities were not irrelevant remains of a distant past, as often assumed, but played a significant role in the urban life as talismans. Ottoman literati wrote about how columns, sculptures, and obelisks possessed occult powers to repel pests, foretell the future, and sustain the city in many other ways. This talk will focus on Ottoman stories about an ancient bronze column that was praised as an effective protection against snakes. We will explore what Ottoman writers wanted to say about the particular occult powers of this talisman, for whom they wrote, and how their narratives changed from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century.

Asli Niyazioğlu is Associate Professor of Ottoman history at the University of Oxford. Her scholarship focuses on the role of imagination in the making of urban communities in early modern Istanbul. In her first book, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul (Routledge, 2016), she discussed how the narration of dreams provided Ottoman biographers with a means to form learned communities in seventeenth-century Istanbul. She is currently completing two books on Istanbul’s cultural history: a short monograph on poets’ gardens in the sixteenth-century commissioned by the Cambridge University Press and a book on Ottoman stories about talismanic antiquities which she is writing as a Fields of Future Fellow at Bard Graduate Center. In these books and related publications, Niyazioğlu excavates the rich narrative archive of Ottoman literati to reconstruct the complex relationship between the practices of writing and place-making in early modern Istanbul.

Tuesday, October 8, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.