In 1910, an art historical treatise on the Kariye mosque, formerly the katholikon of the Chora monastery (Fig. 1), appeared in bookshops in Ottoman Constantinople. Published by İkbal publishers and printed by Şems, one of the printing houses in the vicinity of the seat of the Ottoman government, known as Bâb-ı Âlî, it was written by Mehmed Ziya, an Ottoman Muslim educator and intellectual.

Fig. 1

- G. Berggren, Exterior view of Kariye mosque/Chora monastery with surroundings, ca. 1880, D-DAI-IST-2814

An overview of Mehmed Ziya's life and works may help us better understand his personality. Mehmed Ziya was born in 1866 or 1867 (1283) in Süleymaniye, an old quarter of the Ottoman capital. His family had a record of service to the state and the arts: his father Osman Vasfi Efendi was director of the Pious Foundations in Tokat (Tokat Evkaf-ı Hümâyun), a town in the Black Sea region, while his great grandfather Ismâil Ağa was head of the Baltacı (halberdiers) in the Ottoman palace. His grandfather Eyyûbî Hâfiz Civan Mehmed Ârif Ağa was a poet linked to the Ottoman palace. Mehmed Ziya attended the Hamidiye Sıbyan (primary) school and continued his studies in the Mekteb-i Sultanî, that is, the Galatasaray imperial high school. We know that, while at Galatasaray, he also studied Italian for a year. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts with a specialization in drawing. While a university student, he took an apprenticeship with the Ministry of Finance.

On 14 August 1889 he was appointed to the Gümülcine (present-day Komotini, Greece) high school as instructor of history and physics. This is how his career as an educator started. After Gümülcine, Mehmed Ziya served in high schools in Edirne/Adrianople, Tekirdağ/Rodosto, Halep/Aleppo, Konya, Bursa, Midili/Mytilene, and various schools in Constantinople. He occasionally left the classroom to act as headmaster and even school inspector. Being a teacher was not the only way that Mehmed Ziya served the Ottoman state. He also worked as director of the Statistics Administration, where he attempted to introduce European standards.

Where Mehmed Ziya truly excelled, however, was in his work on historical monuments. He was an active member of the Friends of Istanbul Society (İstanbul Muhibleri Cemiyeti), established on 15 July 1911 with the aim of raising awareness and protecting the natural beauty and historical monuments of the Ottoman capital. Mehmed Ziya was also elected member of the Permanent Committee of Antiquities (Âsâr-ı Atîka Encümen-i Dâimîsi), established on 30 May 1917. In it, he joined important figures in the field of the protection of monuments, such as the Director of the Imperial Museum Halil Ethem (Eldem) and the intellectual Celâl Esat (Arseven). Mehmed Ziya was member of other committees relating to educational issues, including the Grand Committee of the Ministry of Education (Meclis-i Kebîr-i Maârif) and the Committee on Ottoman History (Târih-i Osmânî Encümeni).

Mehmed Ziya's predilection for the monuments of Constantinople and beyond is reflected in his publications. He wrote books and articles on other topics, such as his Illustrated Botany (Resimli İlm-i Nebâtât, Istanbul, 1314), and, on Islam, The Mevlevihane in Yenikapi (Yenikapı Mevlevîhânesi, Istanbul, 1329) and the Biography of the Prophet Mohammad (Siyer-i Nebî, Istanbul, 1340), But his books on art history stand out. For example, in the late nineteenth century he produced an Art History (Târîh-i Sanâyi, Istanbul, 1309), and, in the early twentieth described the historical monuments of Konya and its vicinity in his Journey from Bursa to Konya (Bursa'dan Konya'ya Seyahat, Istanbul, 1328). Istanbul and the Bosporus: the remains of Byzantine and Ottoman civilizations (İstanbul ve Boğaziçi: Bizans ve Osmanlı Medeniyetlerinin Âsâr-ı Bâkiyesi, Istanbul, 1336) is his most famous work. His book The Kariye Mosque (Kaʻriye Câmi-i Şerifi, Istanbul, 1326) provides a detailed account of the mosaics and frescoes in the Church of Saviour of the Chora monastery. Mehmed Ziya was also known for his work on commemorations, another aspect of his attachment to history: It was his idea to establish a national day to celebrating ‘Ottoman Independence.’ In September 1923, we see him head of the executive committee that organized the Sadabad Day Commemoration. Mehmed Ziya passed away on 27 March 1930, and was buried in Eyüp, a suburb of Istanbul.Footnote ¹ Istanbul and the Bosporus and The Kariye Mosque, both written in the early twentieth century, best reflect Mehmed Ziya's steady interest in Byzantine history and art.

Byzantium had attracted Ottoman and Western interest in the nineteenth century, but the turn of the nineteenth century marks the beginning of a distinct engagement with Byzantium in the West. The roots of such engagement date back to the sixteenth century, when Pierre Gilles explored the Ottoman capital. By contrast with his eye-witness account, subsequent men of learning based their studies on Byzantium on literary sources without having ever visited Byzantine monuments. One had to wait until the middle of the nineteenth century for a return of Western visitors in search of Byzantium in the Ottoman capital itself. This return coincided with the emergence of tourism, the mass production of visuals (notably, postcards), and the publication of an increasing number of travel accounts. At the same time, one notices the birth of Byzantine archaeology. The Fossati brothers took the opportunity to uncover and study precious decorations in the Hagia Sophia. Wilhelm Salzenberg, who worked with them, produced the first scholarly publication on this sublime building, including folio and other plans. Actual digging came a couple of decades later, when in 1885 Charles Newton conducted a limited excavation around the Serpent Column in the Sultanahmet square of the Ottoman capital.Footnote ²

Alongside Western interest in Byzantium, there emerged a Russian interest also. Considering themselves heirs to the Byzantine Empire, Russians are documented to have travelled to Mount Athos, the Holy Land, and Constantinople as early as 1835. Their interest in the Byzantine legacy focused most on the Slavic-Byzantine roots of their culture and the Arabic-speaking populations in the Holy Land. In 1894, they established the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople (RAIK) with a focus on Byzantine studies and archaeology. Its scholarly production is significant, but even before that Russians contributed to scholarly knowledge. One key contribution was made in 1884, when Nikodim Kondakov produced a remarkable publication on the Chora monastery mosaics: in it, he introduced the idea that these mosaics were not made by followers of Giotto but were an expression of Byzantine artistic vitality. He also provided the first complete photographic documentation of these decorations with photographs of the highest quality. The RAIK itself would return to this monument in 1906 with the seminal work of Feodor Ivanovich Schmitt.Footnote ³

Among the Ottoman populations, the Greek Orthodox were arguably the first to (re-)discover Byzantium. Although, as Ousterhout has argued, their explorations of Byzantine heritage were often accompanied by nostalgia for a past with which they could identify,Footnote ⁴ their contribution was significant. Konstantios, who would later be elected Ecumenical Patriarch Konstantios I, wrote Konstantias as early as 1820. The title is an allusion both to his own name and to that of Constantinople, and in it he combines his erudition on the Byzantine legacy of the Ottoman capital with the spirit of the Enlightenment.Footnote ⁵ Rather than history (time), his focus was on the city (space), a choice which allowed Konstantios to accommodate the Ottoman Empire as a political entity without antagonizing it.Footnote ⁶ In 1851 Skarlatos Vyzantios published the first volume of his monumental work on Constantinople. He too maintained the focus on space, which allowed him to develop an approach conducive to Helleno-Ottoman understanding.Footnote ⁷ The Hellenic Literary Society at Constantinople brought together many Ottoman Greeks and foreigners with an interest in archaeology in general, and Byzantine antiquity in particular. The Society studied Byzantine architecture and inscriptions and collected Byzantine coins. It published a map of the Byzantine walls in the early 1880s, and Chora monastery, in particular, was repeatedly studied between 1888 and 1890.Footnote ⁸ Among the Society members, Alexandros Paspates and Pelopidas Kouppas stand out for their work on Byzantium in Constantinople. One of Paspates’ more renowned books is the Vyzantinai Meletai (Byzantine Studies). Kouppas, in turn, with Alexander Van Millingen identified Kariye mosque as the katholikon of Chora monastery as early as the 1860s. Significantly, Kouppas, an architect, participated in the first state-sponsored restoration of Chora/Kariye in the 1870s.Footnote ⁹

Against such a backdrop, an interest in Byzantium on the part of Ottoman Turks also emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century. Byzantium had been incorporated in seventeenth-century chronicles, such as the works of Katib Çelebi and Hüseyin Hezarfen.Footnote ¹⁰ In the nineteenth century, and more precisely by the 1870s, Byzantium was incorporated in the official narrative. Not yet an integral part of a standard Ottoman history curriculum, it was developed mostly in response to Western audiences. In the 1890s, Kaiser Wilhelm II's interest in Christian and Byzantine antiquities in the Ottoman Empire accentuated that of Ottoman Muslims. However, especially after the rise of the Young Turks to power in 1908 and, especially after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Byzantium became increasingly essentialized in a negative spirit.Footnote ¹¹

Such negative approaches were not new to the Ottoman Turks. In fact, they had been mainstream even before the Balkan Wars. Influenced by Western ideas on the Byzantines, such as those elaborated by Gibbon, Ottoman Turkish intellectuals tended to consider Byzantium an empire of decadence and debauchery. This was compounded by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire under pressure by Balkan nationalisms that claimed Byzantium as their legacy, and especially Slavic and Greek appropriations of that legacy of it.Footnote ¹²

A more positive approach to Byzantium may be seen in the Imperial Museum (that is, the Ottoman archaeological museum), which from an early stage (at least 1868), started to exhibit Byzantine artefacts; though the one-time capital of the Byzantine Empire was never to see a museum solely dedicated to Byzantium.Footnote ¹³ A small minority of intellectuals too were able to conceptualize Byzantium in positive terms. Mehmed Ziya was one of them, and the first to study the Byzantine edifices of Constantinople.Footnote ¹⁴

Mehmed Ziya published his art historical treatise on the Chora monastery in 1910.Footnote ¹⁵ He had come to know the monument in two ways. First, Mustafa Efendi, who had been chief custodian of the mosque since 1286 (1869), had developed the habit of guiding foreign and local visitors around its Byzantine mosaics and frescoes (Fig. 2). Mehmed Ziya was one of those who benefited from Mustafa Efendi's openness to share his knowledge on this important Byzantine monument, and for this he was grateful.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, there was another source of knowledge for Mehmed Ziya, arguably more influential than Mustafa Efendi. This was Charles Diehl, a well-known French scholar who exerted an influence on other Ottoman intellectuals with a positive predisposition towards Byzantium as well. This was no coincidence. Diehl offered Mehmed Ziya and these other Ottoman figures arguments to support and substantiate their positive attitude towards Byzantium. A revisionist, Diehl questioned the approach that saw Byzantium as decadent. Moreover, he identified links between Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. This too was useful to Mehmed Ziya and others in their efforts to build an imperial genealogy that would render the Ottomans heirs to Byzantium.Footnote ¹⁷

Fig. 2

- Sebah and Joaillier, 1892, Chora monastery, Nativity, D-DAI-IST-10068

Such was the impact of Diehl's work that Mehmed Ziya decided to translate two of his articles into Ottoman Turkish. These two articles – in reality, the second is the second instalment of the first - constitute the core of Mehmed Ziya's treatise on the Chora monastery.Footnote ¹⁸ These allowed Mehmed Ziya to discuss the mosaics and frescoes of the katholikon church. His translation is practically verbatim.

There is one more article by Diehl complementing Mehmed Ziya's book but, unlike those mentioned, this is abridged in translation and is complemented by some additions made by Mehmed Ziya.Footnote ¹⁹ These betray a dialogue between him and Diehl's original text, along with an effort to adapt his text to a Muslim audience. For example, where Diehl discusses the domed basilicas, Mehmed Ziya finds an opportunity to add that some mosques – and these one would expect to have been better known to his readership - follow this type of construction.Footnote ²⁰ Importantly, by including this article in his treatise, Mehmed Ziya attempts to go one step beyond the description of the mosaics and frescoes of Chora monastery to introduce his readers to the claim that Byzantine art is rooted in Anatolia.

At the beginning and at the end of the book, one comes across passages written by Mehmed Ziya himself. These provide unique insight into what kind of an intellectual he was. Already in the first lines of the book it becomes evident that Mehmed Ziya saw himself as a public intellectual dedicated to raising awareness among the wider public on the Chora monastery and to protecting it while making visible to visitors as many of its Byzantine decorations as possible. In his attempt to trace the reasons behind the widespread ignorance of such a monument among the Muslims, he argues that this is to be expected, given that the only written source on it in Ottoman Turkish is the four or five lines that Hüseyin Ayvansarâyî affords it in his Hadîkatü’l-Cevami (The Gardens of Mosques, 1781). Instead, Mehmed Ziya argues, the French can enjoy a 500-page edition in their language, with a thorough and detailed analysis and documentation of the monument. He notes too that the tourist guidebook available to foreigners allowed them only a cursory understanding of the mosaics and frescoes at Chora monastery. Even then, though foreign tourists prioritized a visit to Kariye mosque/Chora monastery whereas Ottoman Muslims tended to ignore its environs, the quality of information tourists received from local guides was, in Mehmed Ziya's eyes, problematic, not least because it tended to ignore Ottoman culture. In a nutshell, Mehmed Ziya attempted not only to inform his compatriots who seemed to lag behind in knowledge compared to Europeans but also, by raising awareness on this monument among Ottoman Muslims, to create the right dynamics for a proper knowledge of the Chora Monastery which might be disseminated to everyone with an interest in it.Footnote ²¹

Mehmed Ziya employed at least two more ways – besides Diehl's articles – in his effort to raise awareness among his compatriots on the importance of the Chora monastery and to advance a claim in favour of its protection. The first was a school visit he arranged to the Kariye mosque. Prompted by interest expressed by students at the Mercan İdadisi, the high school in Istanbul where he was a master, he decided to take those attending the first section of the second grade to Chora monastery with a view to showing them its Byzantine decorations; the visit took place on 7 December 1909. Inspired by the attention given by his students to the monument, he decided to dedicate his book to them.Footnote ²² The move should not evade our attention. The Mercan İdadisi was one of the schools created in the Ottoman Empire as part of its modernization programme. Mehmed Ziya's message through the visit to Kariye mosque was similarly in tune with such programme. A letter, in an appendix to the book, that the students sent to their master following the visit and the dedication of the book to them shows that they had fully grasped the modernization message. Learning about the antiquities of their country was to them synonymous with progress. More than the Chora monastery, however, the students focused on their master, especially the service he paid to his country by promoting knowledge, and his fatherly affection to them.Footnote ²³

The letter Mehmed Ziya addressed to the Director of the Imperial Museum Halil Bey marks the second way through which he attempted to safeguard the frescoes and mosaics of the Chora monastery. Dated 13 June 1910, this too is appended in the book, and is a direct invitation to the head of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire to have the monastic church restored. While recalling that the mosque had been restored in the past,Footnote ²⁴ Mehmed Ziya was specific in his proposals: he suggested having the frescoes in the Parekklesion cleaned, likewise the mosaics at the corners of the large dome in the main mosque. The main mosque being a place of Muslim worship, however, the human figures were not to be visible during prayer. This is why Mehmed Ziya proposed to have them covered by removable parts on condition that these would indeed be removed during visits (Fig. 3). In addition, he expressed the hope that the decorations over the sanctuary would also be cleaned. He much regretted the fact that the inscription of the name of Theodore Metochites, the patron of the Chora monastery, had been whitewashed not long before he wrote his letter to Halil Bey. For Mehmed Ziya, such an inscription attested to the church's history and should be promptly cleaned. Last but not least, he suggested opening the graves of the Byzantine dignitaries buried inside the church: this simple operation would help bring to light important evidence for the Byzantine life of the monument. Significantly, while aware of past efforts by chief custodian of the mosque Mustafa Efendi to clean as best as he could some of the Chora decorations, in his invitation to Halil Bey, Mehmed Ziya stressed that the restoration of the temple should be carried out by experts in the field.Footnote ²⁵

Fig. 3

- Sebah and Joaillier, c. 1900, Chora monastery, Mosaic remains and cover, D-DAI-IST-10029

To conclude, Mehmed Ziya combined the best features of a self-conscious public servant, an inspired educator and an intellectual appealing to a wide audience. He was a pioneer who got against the grain of his time that saw Byzantium as an empire of debauchery and treated it as an enemy through its identification with Greek and Slavic nationalisms. He was a visionary who could see in the Chora monastery the art that, though rooted in Anatolia, could speak to the entire world, Ottomans and foreigners alike. There is no evidence that he was in touch with particular Westerners in this effort, beyond his knowledge of French literature on Byzantium, nor that he communicated with Russian experts. He seems to have conducted his research on this Constantinopolitan monument in parallel to Ottoman Greeks, rather than in collaboration with them. His specific suggestions to Halil Bey reveal a man dedicated to heritage protection, ahead of his time and, perhaps, of ours.

Dr Artemis Papatheodorou (DPhil, Oxon.) is a cultural historian specializing in the history of archaeology, heritage and the classical reception in the Ottoman long nineteenth century. She is currently the Chester Dale Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has held various other fellowships, including more recently that of Early Career Fellow in Hellenic Studies by the Centre for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, and that of Provenance Research Fellow at ANAMED / Berlin Museums. She has taught history at the American University of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Greece).