'Karagöz is ours': İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu's cultural revivalism and the Long Turkish Modernity

• Published in: Journal of art historiography 2023-12 (29), p.1-14
• Main Author: D'Antone, Ambra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Archaeology; Art history; Culture; Early modern period; Historiography; Inscriptions; Modernity; Theater; Traditions
• ISSN: 2042-4752

The plays of shadow theatre had gained their popularity in the region during the Ottoman Empire, so their relevance within the newly founded Turkish Republic was initially threatened by concerns on the new position and function of 'Ottomanness', a collective cultural consciousness which the Turkish Republican government sought to declare obsolescent, looking instead to Europe for more modern and desirable models of cultural identity.2 For Baltacioglu, shadow theatre ought to be at the heart of this national rejuvenation: it was the symptom of a widespread cultural crisis within the Republic, as well as a potent pharmakon to address it.3 The postulate of a clean-cut historical and cultural demarcation between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic as distinct entities, one belonging to the Early Modern period and one to the realm of the modern and contemporary, follows linear historical and historiographical tropes which have critically misinformed what it means to talk about modernity in Turkey.4 By means of diagrams that closely recall Alfred J. Barr's now disparaged hand-drawn charts of Cubist and Abstract Art, the tendency among scholars has been to understand the onset of modernity in Turkish art as a linear narrative of progression, with clearly demarcated areas of influence.5 In truth, the instances of continuity and of disorderly timelines as the Ottoman Empire became the Turkish Republic outnumber those that would support the idea of a radical rupture between them. [...]this revivalism, promoted by Baltacioglu and others in his circle, was itself meant as an operation in the service of nationalism. 11 Through these initial queries, Baltacioglu attempted to capture and to establish new conventions of Turkish art historiography, guided by the principle that 'in art historical research, truth and reality must replace conjecture', which took inspiration from the scientific method.12 Part of these conjectures, he explained, were arguments such as those by French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, which maligned Turkish art and attributed its existence wholly to the influence of Arab, Persian and Byzantine art.13 Disputing these views as untruthful and un-scientific, Baltacioglu highlighted aspects of originality in Turkish art and challenged the notion of artistic selfsufficiency: even Greek art, he stated, which had been considered for a long time to have no past beyond itself, had borrowed elements from the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Phoenicians.14 The ac