Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Erkal N. G. (Yürütücü), Türkay Coşkun S.
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2022 - 2023
Cities change in time and some earlier settlement layers disappear. Material knowledge on lost layers can be best acquired by archaeological excavations. However, it is not always feasible to have archaeological excavations in cities’ established quarters. When conditions do not favor archaeological excavations, another method to acquire physical knowledge on the lost layers is to make diachronic morphological analyses based on first-hand visual and textual sources. The primary objective in this kind of research is the existence of reliable visual and textual data. Depending on the accuracy of evidence, the analyses give way to the physical elements' visualizations in different degrees with the aid of relevant computer softwares. Istanbul is an archaeological city where there is enough evidence to realize reconstructions by diachronic analyses. It is a feasible method applied by many research projects since earlier years (even before the use of computers) near archaeological excavations. The proposed project case is one of the urban archaeological sites of the city: extended Fener (Phanar) waterfront from Cibali to Balat. The project aims to restitute the original physical contextof the Phanariot houses. These partially stone multistorey mansions were built in between the Golden Horn (Haliç) and Byzantine fortifications from the 17th to early 19th centuries. They mostly belonged to the Greek-Ottoman statesmen (hospodars, boyars and courtly entourage who ruled over Wallachia and Moldovia in the 18th and early 19th centuries) and merchants who were named generically as Phanariots after this neighborhood. The Panariot houses might have constituted the largest single area of masonry residential buildings outside Galata and Pera before the 19th century. After 1821 Greek independence and the end of the Phanariot statesmanship, these houses started to decay and be replaced by new structures in a slow process until the early 20th century. In the present-day, there are only 7 buildings left in situ, where Istanbul Municipality have recently started conservation projects. However these valuable conservation projects are confined to their plot and have produced limited information on the neighborhoods’ urban history at large. According to the primary research for this TEDU-IRF proposal, it was possible to find over 20 more houses from the original historical documentsextending over the one km shore from Cibali to Balat. The architecture of Phanariot houses has been studied in isolation as a form of "taş oda" (stone room) typology, which had found application in Istanbul's grand mansions, schools and libraries from the 16th to early 19th century. Indeed, the houses were located on unique thin and long row pattern plots and had also constituted of large wooden sections towards the waterfront, which have been mostly overlooked by former researchers. Based on the hypothesis that Phanariot houses were not only regular versions of taş odas, but hybrid buildings unique to their own milieu, this project aims to reconstruct their physical context in digital medium from the scale of the house to the larger neighborhood. This digital humanities project that reinstalls and visualizes the Phanariot houses will provide the basis for interpreting their contextual originality.