Sultanahmet Istanbul S Historic Peninsula

This book examines how the museum concept has expanded beyond the boundaries of a single building into the historic city itself through the process of musealization. By discussing the Sultanahmet district on Istanbul’s historic peninsula, the author provides insight into this important global phenomenon.

This book refutes the thesis of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Instead, it supports the Alliance of Civilizations supervised by the United Nations. It describes religious-historical and cultural monuments in the region including Istanbul Cibali-Fener-Balat-Ayvansaray where three monotheistic religions live together under the peaceful conditions and they practice their religions. The thesis of Alliance of Civilizations has been examined theoretically within the context of the book. Also the added CD at the back side of the book presents visual information about the issue. We hope that thesis of the Alliance of Civilizations, co-chaired by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero under the umbrella of the United Nations, will make considerable contribution to the world peace.

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents.