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Ruins and Visions of Empire: Famagusta and the Quest for Revival in the Late Nineteenth Century

‘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

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  1. Namık Kemal, Rüya ve Mağusa Mektubu (Kahire, 1908), 59–60. []
  2. Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Namık Kemal: Devrinin İnsanları ve Olayları Arasında (Istanbul, 2010), vol. ii, pt. 1, 374–80. []

The Future of Holocaust Studies in Light of the ‘Catechism Debate’: Reflections from an Observer

This post has been adapted from a talk by Joseph Cronin, a former Researcher at the GHIL and now a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, delivered at the Holocaust Research Institute’s New Directions in Holocaust Studies workshop, which was held at Senate House London on 4 November 2021. He would like to thank Sandra Lipner and Kate Ferry-Swainson for giving him the opportunity to speak at this event. The talk was prompted by and reflected on Joseph’s perceptions of the ‘German Catechism’ debate that took place in the summer of 2021.

Continue reading The Future of Holocaust Studies in Light of the ‘Catechism Debate’: Reflections from an Observer