‘Ruin’ was the primary term used by countless visitors to describe the Cypriot port town of Famagusta during the period of Ottoman rule (1571–1878), to the extent that the two terms became almost synonymous. A notable example is Namık Kemal (1840–88), the foremost Ottoman thinker and a critic of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), who left a lasting mark on modern Turkish political thought and literature by reworking the concepts of vatan (fatherland) and hürriyet (liberty). Stripped of his freedom and imprisoned in Famagusta between 1873 and 1876, he evoked the city’s uncanny atmosphere, a deserted urban landscape marked by ruins that signalled both a prosperous past and a post-apocalyptic present: ‘As I gazed out the window and saw plains full of ruins and piles of stones as if the mountains had been shattered, I felt as if Raphael’s trumpet had been blown—but I hadn’t heard it.’1 Despite the intensity and desolation of the cityscape, he soon drafted a memorandum at the behest of the island’s governor. This proposal outlined a port renovation project intended to revive Famagusta as a major commercial harbour in the Eastern Mediterranean and as a base for military operations—capable of projecting power into the empire’s Arabian provinces and beyond, especially in the aftermath of the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869.2
Continue reading Ruins and Visions of Empire: Famagusta and the Quest for Revival in the Late Nineteenth CenturyAuthor: Okcan Yıldırımtürk
Okcan Yıldırımtürk is a fourth-year PhD candidate in history at the Freie Universität Berlin. Originally from Cyprus, he specializes in Ottoman historiography and has a strong interest in the connected histories of the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the transition to the post-Ottoman world.
