Heritage Making in the Eastern Mediterranean
Session at the Society of Architectural Historians Meeting, Mexico City, April 15–19, 2026
Deadline: Jun 5, 2025
Heritage making, previously masked by the guise of historic preservation and perceived as a technical endeavor, is increasingly recognized as an intentional, complex, and contested practice. Heritage is entangled not only with top-down identity formations, territoriality, and the processes of nation and empire-building but also with acts of resistance, diasporic communities, and minority rights. Moreover, in recent decades, discussions around the repatriation of cultural artifacts and decolonization of museums, alongside the emergence of fields like critical heritage studies, have led to a layered understanding of “cultural heritage.” Along those lines, critical evaluations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century restoration and conservation practices have highlighted the impact such interventions had in shaping heritage sites.
While heritage making has traditionally been seen as a modern concept that originated in Europe, this session challenges that perspective by scrutinizing heritage practices in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on late Ottoman and contemporaneous West Asian and North African geographies. Potential topics may include queries about sites and monuments that served as tokens for emerging national identities among various communities, including Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Serbs, Egyptians, and Arabs. We are also interested in explorations of different communities’ collecting and display practices, as well as imaginaries associated with the reconfigurations of Ottoman imperial identities. Other areas of interest include the appropriations of palimpsestic monuments, such as the recontextualization of Byzantine edifices through Ottoman and Muslim agencies, alongside non-Muslim engagements with Islamic heritage. Examples of restoration, architectural reconstruction, and urban systematization that contributed to heritage formation are especially welcome. Additionally, long-term assessments of monuments, collections, and heritage sites extending beyond the Ottoman era into their post-Ottoman contexts are encouraged. Critical inquiries into the literature on monuments and memory in the modern era, compared to practices in the Eastern Mediterranean, and non-elite and indigenous perceptions of heritage, offer further avenues for exploration.
Session Chair(s): Belgin Turan Özkaya, Middle East Technical University (belt@metu.edu.tr); and Nilay Özlü, Istanbul Technical University (nilay.ozlu@gmail.com)
For submissions and further information: https://www.sah.org/2026