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introduction Welcome to the House There is a distinctive type of house that once was found wherever the Ottomans lived. From the seventeenth century up until the first days of the twentieth century, when regions like Bulgaria, Greece, Bosnia, and Turkey were claiming a private title to their own part of this once great empire, timber-framed houses with protruding upper stories characterized a wide landscape, giving it a distinctive Ottoman stamp. Although these houses shared a common style, this book is not about their architectural vocabulary but about the way this type of house came to be imagined poetically at a turning point in Turkish history, and about the people who created and understood its poetic impact. At a higher level, this book addresses the powerful way in which the concept of home inhabits our memory and our imagination , and in so doing how it becomes a muse that can shape our personal and shared identities. The project for this book began when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey in 1993, investigating, as an Islamic art historian, the architecture of what by then was known as “the Turkish house.” People were forever asking what a foreigner like me was doing in Turkey, and my simple answer was that I had come to do research on the Turkish house. What I found, to my surprise, was that I had only to utter those three words to have my interlocutors’ faces become positively beatific. In fact, I came to expect a glow, as they repeated the words with a reverent love: “the Turkish house. . . .” After the glow, and a pause, would come stories about a specific house they knew, or one they had  | imagining the turkish house missed knowing: their grandfather’s house, their great-grandfather’s house, their uncle’s house that had been torn down or that was in a village they had not visited, or they had visited it, and how they wished to live in one. During that Fulbright year I began to collect those stories until I finally realized that my research question, which once asked why and how the architecture of this house changed over time, itself changed: How did this house come to evoke such strong emotions and memories of the past in the Turkish imagination? And what exactly do these emotions and memories express? In Turkey, representations of the Ottoman house, with its recognizable profile, began to take on this larger-than-life power at a crucial time of transition : between the beginning of the early twentieth century and the late 1930s, as a young Turkey struggled to release itself from its Ottoman past and take its place in the world family of nations. With the establishment of the state of Turkey in 1923, this transition took on an increasingly Westernizing trajectory: not only was the Ottoman political system of the sultan and his realm replaced by that of a Turkish republic and its citizens, but language, literature, music, script, dress, codes of behavior, and almost every other area of cultural production were regulated and revised in such a way that the Ottoman past was defamed or erased. Yet as these former Ottoman citizens became Turkish citizens, these men, women, and children, these imams and schoolteachers, these bureaucrats, shopkeepers, and housewives brought images and memories of an Ottoman house with them, and as they reconceptualized themselves as Turkish, they reconceptualized this house, making it Turkish, too. In Imagining the Turkish House, then, you will meet these people, especially the Ottoman citizens who became Turkish ones, and see how their values , their uncertainties, their spiritual longings, and their political strategies contributed to transforming the old Ottoman house into a Turkish emotive image, and how it became lodged in the Turkish imagination. You will meet Naim Efendi, the Ottoman patriarch who, as a character in the novel Mansion for Rent (Kiralık Konak, 1922), wrestles with a new Turkish world. In his old wooden house, he picks up a novel left by his son-in-law, but he cannot read it. It is in a new script, with a new vocabulary; even the genre of the novel itself is new. The educated Naim Efendi had never read a novel in his life! You will meet another old man, too, connected emotionally to another old wooden house, but he is a character in a 1996 cartoon. This old man has located his childhood house in a run-down neighborhood in Istanbul and...

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