Travelling Exhibition 'Cities on the Move - Post-Ottoman. Ankara, Belgrade, Istanbul und Sarajevo im Visier von Fotoreportern, 1902er und 1930er Jahre'

For 500 years, the Ottoman Empire ruled over the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor (Anatolia) until, at the end of World War I, it ultimately fell apart. Out of its ruins, modern nation states were created, which rejected the Ottoman legacy. This resulted in profound changes in the everyday lives of people, especially of those living in the large cities. Press photographs of the interwar period highlight the changes in four selected cities within two of these nation states: Istanbul and Ankara in Turkey, Belgrade and Sarajevo in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). These four cities experienced the changes in equally profound, but very different ways: Istanbul was the former centre of the fallen Ottoman world; Ankara became the capital of the Turkish Republic. Belgrade, the seat of the Serbian king, was expanded to become the capital of Yugoslavia and, for the first time, the Bosnian city of Sarajevo was administered in its own language. The images presented in this exhibition provide unexpected insights into unknown, yet somehow familiar, life worlds: in the city centres, fashionably dressed pedestrians walk by new buildings and numerous construction sites. Military and sports groups celebrate the young nations in street parades and newly opened sports stadiums. Yet the bazaar, the heart of every Ottoman town, continues to function as a meeting place where people buy and sell while sharing the latest gossip. Here, time seems to stand still. The photographs are grouped accordingly, to cover five topics: 1. The City Centre; 2. Nation and the Body; 3. Dressing the Nation; 4. Leisure and Religion; 5. The Bazaar. They document an urban public that is surprisingly similar in Istanbul, Belgrade, Ankara and Sarajevo. We find many references to the post-Ottoman context, but even more to European urbanity and the zeitgeist of the 1920s and 1930s.The images were mostly taken by photographers working for the leading Turkish and Yugoslav daily newspapers published in Belgrade and Istanbul at that time: for Cumhuriyet, Namık Görgüç and Selahattin Giz, for Politika, Aleksandar Simić and Raka Ruben, and for Vreme, Svetozar Grdijan. These press photographers often worked in pairs and usually shared their work. It is therefore difficult to attribute authorship. Pictures originating from Politika and Cumhuriyet are indicated as the work of Simić/Ruben (Politika) and Görgüç/Giz (Cumhuriyet). Giz' archive is today owned by Yapı Kredi (Yapı Kredi Tarih Arşivi, Istanbul). The pictures attributed to Aca Simić and today held by the Belgrade Museum of Applied Arts (Muzej primenjene umetnosti) were purchased directly from the photographer's widow. In other cases, Simić signed his own negatives. The Vreme archive that holds Svetozar Grdijan's work is in the possession of Borba Fotodokumentacija. Sarajevo photography professor Mehmed A. Ak�amija and Istanbul photo historian and curator of the Museum of Photography, Cengiz Kahraman, have opened their outstanding photography collections for this exhibition. The authorship of these pictures and others provided by the Ankara Municipality (Ankara Büyükşehir Belediyesi), the Ankara National Library (Ankara Milli Kütüphane), the Belgrade Theatre Museum (Muzej Pozori�ne Umetnosti), the Sarajevo City Museum (Muzej Sarajeva), the Sarajevo Historical Archive (Historijski Arhiv Sarajeva), Bilgi University, and VEKAM, is attributed where the author's identity has been researched and is known. In addition, several photographs taken by the exceptional Bosnian photographer Alija M. Ak�amija, then 19 years old, and by Istanbul photographer Jean Weinberg, are on display. This exhibition is the result of the research project SIBA - A Visual Approach to Explore Everyday Life in Turkish and Yugoslav Cities, 1920s and 1930s, which is associated to the Middle Eastern Studies, Social Sciences Department, University of Basel, and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the exhibition, we use the same identification numbers as in our scientific database. The four figures indicated under the photographic reproductions link the pictures with the captions list in this guide and, with the consent of the copyright holders, with detailed descriptions available on our scientific online portal VASE, the Visual Archive Southeastern Europe (http://gams.uni-graz.at/vase).