Early Vernacular Cosmopolitanism and the Hungarian Plea for Revisiting Ottoman-Turkish Architecture

• In Event: Collecting, Preserving, Restoring, and Displaying the Ottoman Architectural Heritage of the Balkans in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

Abstract

Turkish Architecture in Hungary faced many waves of rediscovery over the twentieth century. After the late seventeenth-century reconquest of central Hungary, Ottoman art in general was if not intentionally deprecated only moderately valued or simply considered a faint copy of the creative genius of lost Byzantium. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Eastern origin of the Hungarian tribes became a way to promote national pride, culminating in the idiosyncratic designs of buildings invested with strong identities. Still, the first explicit form of valuing Ottoman architecture came towards the end of the First World War, when according to the then-actual foreign policy, Hungary was seeking to revisit its ages-long cultural relations to the Sublime Port. Károly Kós’ early work in cultural and architectural history on Istambul (1918) was reintroduced into scholarship only in the last twenty years, being appraised as a parallel in architectural theory of criticisms of Western civilization that stepped into the foreground by the end of the Great War. The paper will ask if these developments around 1920 could have contributed to the post-1945 positive reevaluation of Ottoman-Turkish built heritage in Hungary? The often remarked simple, qualitative, and honest approach of the Turks’ towards ritual and public edifices made them a good candidate for a novel, regionally founded form of modernism.

Author

• Deodáth Zuh, Eszterházy Károly Catholic U (Hungary)