Archaeological Explorations and Nation Building in the Occupied Ottoman Territories under Revolutionary Turmoil

• In Event: Imperial Collapse and Post-Imperial Transitions in the Black Sea Region, 1917-1926

Abstract

Several European countries, including the Russian Empire, had been interested and involved in the scientific exploration of Ottoman territories in the second half of the nineteenth century. When the Russian Caucasian Army occupied several provinces of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Anatolia in the course of the First World War, this military occupation gave scholars of the Russian Empire an opportunity to forestall the European scholars in a region where Russian forces entered before the European armies. The scientific societies of the Russian Empire organized, funded and dispatched several teams of scholars to the occupied regions. Conquering the territories of Eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea region was a part of the irredentist scientific imperialism, as long as the empire existed.

With the outbreak of revolution, not only the political nature of the Russian state and the military situation at the fronts changed. The scientists at the Caucasian front and the scientific studies were also affected radically. Imperialist scientific irredentism was replaced with national irredentism. During the first months of 1917, a special department under the governor-generalship of the occupied regions was established to centralize archaeological studies in the region. Looking at the reorganization of archaeological studies at the front under Ignatii Iakovlevich Stelletskii, and the nationalistically inspired expeditions of Ekvtime Takaishvili and Iliad Zdanevich in 1917, this paper analyzes how archaeological and ethnographic studies of the occupied regions were affected by, adapted to and shaped the political events occurring in the former Russian Empire and at the Caucasian front.

Author

• Halit Dundar Akarca, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)