Takhayyul Seminar: Remembrance of Ottoman Times Past and the Politics of the Balkan Present

Across the former Ottoman territories of southeast Europe, structures associated with the empire have recently witnessed remarkable forms of revitalization in recent years. In this presentation I examine two renovated sites of Neo-Ottoman memory in the Balkans: Ferhadija Mosque and Maškovića Han. As the most visible mosque in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, Ferhadija remains a lightning rod in the present. Here, I focus on two recent moments in its history: its destruction in 1993 and its restoration in 2016. Croatia’s Maškovića Han, by contrast, materializes a less contentious political temporality. While Maškovića was also reconstructed recently, in 2014, the past available to remembrance here is vague, subsumed within the abstraction of “heritage” in a manner that Ferhadija is not.

Jeremy F. Walton leads the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities, ” at the Max Planck Institute for he Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Dr. Walton received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. His first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey.

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Zoom Link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/91380999590

Meeting ID: 913 8099 9590