Flower Breeding in Early Modern Istanbul: A Science of Seeds

2020

Travellers in Ottoman Lands: The Botanical Legacy This book focuses on the botanical legacy of many parts of the former Ottoman Empire including present-day Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, the Balkans, and the Arabian Peninsula as seen and demonstrated by travellers both from within and from outside the region. The papers cover a wide variety of subjects, including Ottoman garden design and architecture; the flora of the area, notably bulbs and their cultural influence; literary, pictorial and photographic depictions of the botany and horticulture of the Ottoman lands; floral and related motifs in Ottoman art; culinary and medicinal aspects of the botanical heritage; and efforts related to conservation.​ Edited by Ines Aščerić-Todd, Sabina Knees, Janet Starkey, and Paul Starkey Archaeopress, 2018. ISBN: 978-1784919153 Reviewed by: Dr Özde Çeliktemel-Thomen Post-doctoral Fellow at Middle East Technical University, Department of History 13 May 2020 https://researchcentre.trtworld.com/publications/book-reviews/books-reviewed/books-reviewed/travellers-in-ottoman-lands-the-botanical-legacy

Purpose This article aims to investigate the marketing and consumption of flowers as a commodity from the sixteenth and to the eighteenth century in the Ottoman context, a non-western context, and to identify the specificities and similarities to the wider regional context with which it interacts. Design/methodology/approach Through utilising secondary historical data a two-level analysis is conducted. The first level provides information on the institutional actors such as flower merchants, the state, the flower research institutes, market channels and popular culture and their practices. The second level of analysis concerns the flower consumer. Findings The article shows that flower consumption and marketing in an early modern non-western context was not totally divergent from its “western” counterparts which share the same regional context, the Mediterranean. As part of the late Renaissance Mediterranean world, the flower cultivator as a leisure-time consumer is reminiscent of the “Renaissance man”, characterised as someone who consumes science, aesthetics and writing in his leisure time. However, Ottoman markets diverge from their counterparts through the formation of an institution, similar to a modern-day accreditation institution, which had an active role in generating standards, brands and norms for the flower market. Research limitations/implications The study is mainly focused on İstanbul, the capital of the empire and a large city by contemporary standards. Generalisation to the Ottoman context would require further studies. Originality/value The study is original because marketing and consumption in non-western histories, such as the Ottoman context, have been a neglected area, mainly because of a tendency to locate progress and modernisation in early modern west.

History of Science, 2023

Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowledge-making in multiple ways. It offered a refuge, severed contexts, and concealed the various workers that created it. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European naturalists in Istanbul, such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), procured illustrations of Ottoman nature as fundamental resources to identify, collect, and compare indigenous plants and newly bred varieties. Despite maintaining an actual mediation for cross-cultural interactions, these sources of virtual communication remain largely forgotten in modern scholarship. This article argues that this curious yet invisible corpus was not a nonagentive medium in an alienated leisure of a gentlemanscholar; instead, these illustrations were designed to call upon the viewer's constant attention in self-motivated scientific labor. Such handy tools responded and contributed to early modern scholars' modes of working, and in exchange they determined these sources' own function, position, and visibility-either as a by-product or as a derivative. It is therefore only when integrated into the labor history of science that the degrees of invisibility pertaining to both Ottoman nature studies and self-directed labor can come into a granular view.

TRAFO--Blog for Transnational Research, 2021

Starting in the year 1870 a new type of public recreation space referred to as “people’s garden” (millet bahçesi) or municipal garden (belediye bahçesi) started to take root in the Ottoman Empire’s town and cities, from the Balkans to North Africa. They often followed the expansion of infrastructural networks and administrative institutions that linked these territories more tightly to the empire’s centralized command. This paper looks at visual and textual documentation of a municipal garden in the city of Işkodra (now Shkoder, Albania) that opened during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). It makes a case for how the ordered and tidy appearance of this garden served as a symbol of Ottoman provincial reform, and how it signified the exercise of tighter administrative control over this region’s population.

MARKET GARDENS AND GARDENERS OF OTTOMAN ISTANBUL

is study is about market gardens and their gardeners, which were a distinctive part of Ottoman Istanbul until recently. It draws on first and second-hand sources to examine the locations, physical features, and property structures of market gardens together with those who worked in there and how they were organized. Moreover, the study reveals the role and importance of market gardens in the provisioning of the city.

Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empire of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi, 2017

Tafel VII. Courtesy o f the Staatsbibliothek M ünchen. W ang Yuanqi et al., conıps., Wanshou shengdian chuji, vzo juan (Peking: Nei fu, Kangxi 55 [1716]),juan 42,43a. Courtesy o f the Harvard-Yenching Library.

IJIA publishes Design in Theory articles that focus on the history, theory and critical analyses of architecture, urbanism and landscape design from the Islamic world which includes the Middle East, parts of Africa and Asia, and also more recent migratory geographies. These articles treat the historic, modern, and contemporary eras and employ diverse methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches.

Konstantinos Giakoumis (ed), Flora in Arts and Crafts of the Korça Region (12th Century BC to 19th Century AD). Bimësia në Arte dhe Artefakte të Rajonit të Korçës (Shek. XII para Kr. – Shek. XX p.Kr.) (Tirana: Pegi)., 2018

This paper addresses the issue of how the Ottomans perceived and interacted with the natural environment, pursuing an increasing scale from the private garden to parks and then on to rural and forest areas. Throughout their history, the Ottomans conceived the natural environment in a rather pragmatic manner. Being a common topos in the pre-industrial era, the environment’s foremost use had been to sustain the basic needs of the agricultural society. When it comes to aesthetics, the Ottoman Turks seem to be fond of naturalism, which in the 18th century reached a level of adoration of nature in visual arts. Finally, in the last century of the Ottoman empire the environment was approached also as a scientific subject.

Landscape Research, 2010

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A Cultural History of Plants vol. 3: In the Early Modern Era. Editors: Andrew Dalby, Annette Giesecke, 2022

The connectedness of humans to plants is the most fundamental of human relationships. Plants are, and historically have been, sources of food, shelter, bedding, tools, medicine, and, most importantly, the very air we breathe. Plants have inspired awe, a sense of wellbeing, religious fervor, and acquisitiveness alike. They have been collected, propagated, and mutated, as well as endangered or driven into extinction by human impacts such as global warming, deforestation, fire suppression, and over-grazing. A Cultural History of Plants traces the global dependence of human life and civilization on plants from antiquity to the twenty-first century and comprises contributions by experts and scholars in a wide range of fields, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, botany, classics, garden history, history, literature, and environmental studies more broadly. The series consists of six illustrated volumes, each devoted to an examination of plants as grounded in, and shaping, the cultural experiences of a particular historical period. Each of the six volumes, in turn, is structured in the same way, beginning with an introductory chapter that offers a sweeping view of the cultural history of plants in the period in question, followed by chapters on plants as staple foods, plants as luxury foods, trade and exploration, plant technology and science, plants and medicine, plants in (popular) culture, plants as natural ornaments, and the representation of plants. This cohesive structure offers readers the opportunity both to explore a meaningful cross-section of humans' uses of plants in a given period and to trace a particular use-as in medicine, for example-through time from volume to volume. The six volumes comprising A Cultural History of Plants are as follows: