Modern scholarship has not given Edirne the attention it deserves regarding its significance as one of the capitals of the Ottoman Empire. This edited volume offers a reinterpretation of Edirne’s history from Early Ottoman times to recent periods of the Turkish Republic. Presently, disconnections and discontinuities introduced by the transition from empire to nation state still characterize the image of the city and the historiography about it. In contrast, this volume examines how the city engages in the forming, deflecting and creative appropriation of its heritage, a process that has turned Edirne into a UNESCO heritage hotspot. A closer historical analysis demonstrates the dissonances and contradictions that these different interpretations and uses of heritage produce. From the beginning, Edirne was shaped by its connectivity and relationality to other places, above all to Istanbul. This perspective is employed at many different levels, e.g., with regard to its population, institutions, architecture, infrastructures and popular culture, but also regarding the imaginations Edirne triggered. In sum, this multi-disciplinary volume boosts urban history beyond Istanbul and offers new insight into Ottoman and Turkish connectivities from the vantage point of certain key moments of Edirne’s history.

Inscriptions on buildings are a distinctive feature of Islamic architecture, and this book studies the 79 surviving monumental inscriptions in the Iranian world from the first five centuries of the Muslim era (A.D. 622-1106), the period in which all the major trends of monumental epigraphy in the area were set. These foundation, commemorative, and funerary texts come from the region between Iraq and Soviet Central Asia. Written primarily in Arabic, they embellished architectural monuments and furnishings whose nature implies the construction of major buildings. An extended introduction discusses such general topics as titulature, patronage, and stylistic development. Each text is then presented individually with photographs, drawings, transcriptions, translations and an extensive commentary, which presents the inscription in its larger palaeographic and historical contexts.

Once known as Adrianople and Hadrianopolis, and today as Edirne, this border town of the European part of Turkey is an astonishingly inconspicuous place. If the visitors come to see it, it is mainly for one of two reasons. The huge draw for the people who love historical architecture is the magnificent Selimiye Mosque Complex, built by the most famous Ottoman architect, Sinan, and proudly listed by the UNESCO as the world heritage site. The unusual location of Edirne, at the confluence of three rivers, has always been a mixture of blessings and disastrous floods, and was even recorded in the Greek mythology, in the story of matricidal Orestes. The traces of the indigenous inhabitants of the area, the Thracians, that gave the region its name, are scattered near Edirne. These mysterious dolmens, so frequently associated with Western Europe only, still guard many secrets of the past of Thrace. While this book is the tale of the city and its monuments, it is foremost the history of its inhabitants. One of the ambitions of the author was to record beautifully multicultural and multi-ethnic past, still reflected in Edirne's architecture. Unfortunately, the intricate mosaic of various religions and nationalities is no more, its pieces scattered by the wars, conflicts, and disasters.

Presents a comprehensive A-to-Z reference to the empire that once encompassed large parts of the modern-day Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe.