Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

In the early 1900s, a man whose family had come to define both archaeology and museology in the Ottoman center came to define the empire’s first programmatic attempts at protecting, preserving, and restoring monumental buildings. Halil Edhem assumed Directorship of the Imperial Museum in 1910, following in the footsteps of his older brother Osman Hamdi, the man widely credited with founding indigenous Ottoman practices of archaeology and museology. After Halil Edhem helped create the first Ottoman law to explicitly protect monuments of historic importance, he continued to write extensively about the need for their improved upkeep. When the Ottoman Empire fell, Halil Edhem continued to serve as director of the renamed museum and to advocate for heritage conservation. He reformulated his efforts within the context of the Republic of Turkey, championing the interpretation of Ottoman, Islamic, and even pre-Islamic monuments as part of the new “Turkish” heritage and identity that were being prescribed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Although the contributions of Osman Hamdi to Ottoman archaeology and museology have been well studied, his brother’s contributions to these disciplines remain underexamined. I examine the life and works of Halil Edhem in order to frame heritage conservation as an outgrowth of the aforementioned disciplines. I posit that heritage conservation began as an Ottoman duty to protect symbols of a glorious past and shifted to become part of the wider Kemalist projects of Turkification and secularization, and that Halil played a key role in championing both motivating ideologies.