ART HISTORY AND THE FOUNDING OF THE MODERN TURKISH STATE Burcu Dogramaci Translated by Charlotte Schoell-Glass The Origins of Art History in Turkey “The true leader in life is knowledge”: with this sentence the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, defined one of the principles of his reformist politics. The building of a landscape of universities was one of the political leadership’s main concerns after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Its aim was the modernization of a country that had been dominated for centuries in all areas of society, its culture and the sciences, by Islam. Religious schooling institutions (‘Darülfünun’) were secularized immediately, and institutes and universities after the Western European model were founded in quick succession. The establishment of art history as a discipline in Turkey was achieved in the 1940s. At that time, Turkish ministries tried to bring foreign scholars to the country to press ahead with the establishment of art history. The foundations for the development of the field had been laid early on by the Vienna art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941). He had been in close contact with Istanbul already in the 1920s and 1930s.1 In search of their own Turkish identity outside of the Ottoman culture, republican schol- ars in Turkey were fascinated by Strzygowski’s ideas and ideologies. In his writings and lectures the art historian emphasized the importance of nation and ‘race’ for the production of culture. These arguments, founded on ethnicity, were in accordance with the Kemalists’ sense of nationhood and their concern with superseding Islamic cultural history.2 Strzygowski also emphasized the necessity of re-evaluating those cultures in Asia that 1 Strzygowski was invited in 1932 to speak at the First Turkish History Conference under Atatürk’s patronage. See Birinci Türk Tarihi Kongresi Konferanslar-Müzakere Zabitları (Ankara, 1932) 160 f. 2 See Selçuk Mülayim, ‘Sanat Tarihinin Attilası Josef Strzygowski’, Sanat Tarihi Araştir- maları Dergisi 8 (1989) 68. 486 burcu dogramaci previously had found only scarce attention.3 Even today the Vienna art historian is still recognized as the Nestor of art history in Turkey who challenged the Eurocentric perspectives of his field.4 This explains why the Turkish ministry of education turned to Vienna in 1939 when searching for a suitable art historian to build an institute of art history at the newly founded University of Ankara.5 This contact how- ever was aborted in the first instance. It was only in a second attempt that Turkish authorities were able to invite a Viennese art historian to the Uni- versity of Istanbul. In 1943, Ernst Diez (1878–1961) travelled to the Bosporus together with his assistant Oktay Aslanapa, who had received his doctoral degree in Vienna. Ernst Diez had been Josef Strzygowski’s student and his assistant since 1911, and had undertaken numerous research trips to Asia on Strzygowski’s behalf. With his surveys on the Art of Islamic Peoples (Kunst der islamischen Völker) and Churasanic Monuments (Churasanische Baudenkmäler) he opened up the geographic boundaries of Western Euro- pean art history.6 In these monographs, Diez brought to bear the method- ology that had been developed by Josef Strzygowski: from the individual monument one could draw conclusions about the styles of peoples and larger global connections; objects were interpreted as part of the history of humankind. After trips to the United States where he had taught and conducted research, Diez had been teaching in Vienna since 1939 when he accepted the invitation from Turkey in 1943. Status Nascendi in Istanbul and Ankara A specialist of Islamic art, Ernst Diez was particularly well suited to found- ing the discipline in Turkey. In contrast to the profile of art history in Western Europe it was not Western European art that was central to the new institution, but the history of art in the Islamic world and specifi- cally that of the territory of the Ottoman Empire. With scarce financial and technical means, the sixty-five-year-old art historian began to build 3 See, for example, Josef Strzygowski, Kleinasien: Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte (Leip- zig, 1903). 4 See Oktay Aslanapa, Türkiye’de Avsturyalı Sanat Tarihçileri ve Sanatkârlar (Istanbul, 1993) 9. 5 See the correspondence between the ministry and Hans Sedlmayr in the archive of the Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna. 6 Ernst Diez, Kunst der islamischen Völker (Berlin, 1915); Diez, Churasanische Baudenk- mäler (Berlin, 1918)..