Architectural reality in Ottoman waqfiyyas

Although a high number of researches have been made on the Ottoman Architecture, a large number of them relate the researches and narratives under the contemporary titles such as function, construction and design. The common characteristic of these studies is that their comparisons on the contemporary and the pre-modern worlds by creating an Ottoman world which is symmetrical of the contemporary version and developing a reflection of a homogeneous architectural production. There is quite small number of studies focusing on semantics which assess architecture to its social and cultural context. Similarly, there is no study has yet been carried out to understand how the Ottomans expressed the architectural reality within their own written language which is different from the modern epistemic structure. There are many examples in the Ottoman archive documents which demonstrate the architectural descriptions. At this point the thesis focuses on a group of archival records which called waqfiyyas (endowment deeds) and tries to explore how did the Ottomans view and interpret their architecture in their own written language by paying attention to the interaction between language, visual discourse, spatial practices and the textual mediations of the architecture in the pre-modern Ottoman world. In Ottoman legal system, the terms of an endowment are recorded in a waqfiyya (endowment deed) and registered in the law-court. In the deed, the founder announces the purpose of the endowment, specifies the beneficiaries, describes the properties such as religious and secular buildings, rural properties and makes provisions for its administration, appoints persons to supervise the endowment. These semi-literary,semi-legal accounts expressed the language, social and cultural preoccupations, knowledge and ignorance of their time. From this perspective, these semi-legal, semi-literary written descriptions of Ottoman architecture, which were closely connected to the concerns and rhetorics of the day and projected from within without suggest some of the distortions in our contemporary models for interpreting the architecture, will be helpful in correlating the pre-modern architectural production to its social cultural and historical context.