A scholar residing in Wallachia’s capital city of Bucharest in 1719 observed in a letter to his friend, a Patriarch: “All Phanar is here; I no longer recall Istanbul.” By “Phanar,” he was referring to a group of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian households of Istanbul and their neighborhood on the Golden Horn. Wallachia and Moldavia were Orthodox Christian principalities vassalized by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. When in Istanbul, Moldo-Wallachian nobility (boyars) resided in the Phanar. In turn, Phanar residents, like our scholar, settled and invested in the principalities. A major milestone in this mutual relationship occurred in the 1710s: the Ottoman State, for the first time, appointed a Greek resident of Phanar and former translator of the Court as voivode (prince) of Moldavia and Wallachia. For the next 100 years, voivodes would be selected from among influential houses of Phanar, later to be known collectively as the Phanariots. All Phanar—with its merchants, self-made ‘noble’ families, clergymen, and dependents—would increasingly connect Istanbul to the principalities and the non-Ottoman world.
From their households and neighborhoods in Istanbul, to their roles at the Sublime Porte and princely courts and capital cities, the Phanariots represent a unique case of cross-cultural entanglements and mobility for the long eighteenth century. The Ottoman, Greek, and Romanian languages and arts, ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ ideas, tastes, etiquettes, and especially spaces comprised the Phanariot lived experience. The Phanariot material culture represents the shared but fragmented and contested histories of Greece, Romania, and Turkey.
As the product of ANAMED’s four-year research program “Phanariot Materialities,” All Phanar Is Here aims to reassemble the fragments of this once-shared, rich cultural heritage, inviting the audience to retrace the footsteps of the Phanariots through unexpected routes, rare albums and books, and 3-D architectural and digital reconstructions. Specially produced works for the exhibition—such as 3-D models of buildings and neighborhoods designed and created by the faculty members of TED University’s Department of Architecture, and a Phanar House digitally recreated in a virtual environment by members of the Koç University KARMA XR Lab in collaboration with the curators—offer a rich experience across this ten-section exhibition stretching from Phanar to Bucharest, and subsequently to the shores of the Bosphorus. In addition to these, the lives of the Phanariots over a century are made visible to audiences through original paintings and books from the Ömer M. Koç Collection, the IMM Atatürk Library, the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Orientalist Painting Collection, the Istanbul Research Institute, the Sismanoglio Megaro, and the Koç University Suna Kıraç Library, along with documents, photographs, and drawings compiled from numerous other national and international institutions and collections.
Supported by Koç Holding and the Vehbi Koç Foundation.
Namık Günay Erkal is an architectural historian and the dean of Architecture and Design Faculty at TED University Ankara. His academic research and publications are on early modern Ottoman cities and urban architecture, focusing on maritime port structures, marketplaces, and custom houses; specifically, those of Istanbul’s harbors and the Golden Horn. He has specialized in representing buildings and urban fabrics that have long disappeared in reference to original textual and visual sources. Following his work on grain wholesale markets and state granaries of early modern Istanbul, his recent research project is on the documentation and representation of the larger Phanar waterfront and the Phanariot residential architecture.
Firuzan Melike Sümertaş is currently a research fellow at the Gennadius Library of American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her research focuses on the urban, architectural and visual culture of the late Ottoman Empire and its capital, with a particular focus on the Greek-Orthodox communities of İstanbul. She holds a PhD. in History from Boğaziçi University, M.A and B. Arch degrees from METU. She is involved with the İstanπόλις collaborative where she conducts research on the urban and architectural history of the nineteenth century Greek communities in Istanbul, with a particular focus on utilizing digital humanities tools for historical research.
Haris Theodorelis-Rigas is lecturer in Classical Greek and Latin in the Art History and Archaeology Department of Koç University. With a background in Classics, Development Studies and Political Science, he is also co-founder and series editor of İstos Yayın, Turkey’s first publishing house to specialize in Anatolian Greek literature, history and culture. His research interests include classical and Byzantine reception, as well as minority and liminal groups and their cultural heritage in post-Ottoman geographies.
