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SHINY THINGS AND SOVEREIGN LEGALITIES: EXPROPRIATION OF DYNASTIC PROPERTY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND EARLY TURKISH REPUBLIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2019

Ceyda Karamursel
Ceyda Karamursel*
Affiliation:
Ceyda Karamursel is a Lecturer in the Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article probes the legal expropriation of dynastic property in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Focused on the period from Abdülhamid II's deposal in 1909 to the decade immediately following the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, it takes parliamentary debates as entry points for exploring how this legislative process redefined the sovereign's relationship with property. Although this process was initially limited only to Yıldız Palace, the debates that surrounded it heuristically helped to shape a new understanding of public ownership of property that was put to use in other contexts in the years to come, most notably during and after World War I and the Armenian genocide, before establishing itself as the foundation of a new ownership regime with the republican appropriation and reuse of property two decades later.

Keywords

dynastic propertyexpropriationOttoman Empirepublic ownershipRepublic of Turkey
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 445 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: The first, albeit very different, version of this article was presented at the workshop “People and Things on the Move” at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago, in May 2015. I thank the organizers Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, and the workshop participants, whose insightful feedback was instrumental in shaping the later course that this article took. At the University of Pennsylvania, I thank Peter Holquist and Mehmet Darakcioglu, who read and listened to the paper and offered invaluable suggestions. At the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), I am thankful to Nelida Fuccaro, Hugh Kennedy, Yorgos Dedes, and especially Derek Mancini Lander, who not only invited me to present the article at SOAS's Near and Middle East History Seminar but also read it closely and provided much-needed direction. I am also indebted to Avner Wishnitzer, Yaşar Tolga Cora, Erdem Sönmez, and Yiğit Akın for their generosity in taking time to read and comment on different versions of the paper. I also thank the conveners of the Cambridge Middle East History Group Seminar, Helen Pfeifer, Andrew Arsan, and Arthur Asseraf, as well as the seminar participants Kate Fleet, Ebru Boyar, and Deniz Turker, for their invaluable input in bringing this article to conclusion. Last but not least, I am grateful to the anonymous readers at IJMES, most notably Reviewer 1, for their thorough categorizations, as well as the editors Akram Khater and Jeffrey Culang for a highly rewarding and pleasant review process.

1 Başbakanlık Ottoman Archives (hereafter, BOA), DH.MUI 40-1/49, 1327.Z.5 (18 December 1909).

2 Betül İpşirli Argit, “Manumitted Female Slaves of the Ottoman Imperial Harem (Sarayîs) in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul” (PhD diss., Boğaziçi University, 2009), 109. For a vivid depiction of the dethronement and removal process, see Şakir, Ziya, Çırağan Sarayı’nda 28 Yıl: Beşinci Murad (Istanbul: Kaknüs Yayınları, 2007), 109Google Scholar.

3 BOA, DH.MUI 40-1/49.

4 Peirce, Leslie, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 186–91Google Scholar; Murphey, Rhoads, Exploring Ottoman Sovereignty: Tradition, Image and Practice in the Ottoman Imperial Household, 1400–1800 (London: Continuum, 2008), 7Google Scholar; Şahin, Kaya, “Staging an Empire: An Ottoman Circumcision Ceremony as Cultural Performance,” The American Historical Review 123 (2018): 478–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deringil, Selim, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I.B.Tauris, 1998), 16–43Google Scholar.

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6 Bayly, C. A., Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 112Google Scholar. For the Ottoman case, see Zandi-Sayek, Sibel, “Ambiguities of Sovereignty: Property Rights and Spectacles of Statehood in Tanzimat Izmir,” in Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, eds. Bazzaz, Sahar, Batsaki, Yota, and Angelov, Dimiter (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 150Google Scholar; and Islamoglu, Huri, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, ed. Owen, Roger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. A product of liberal ideas recast in the late 19th century, the “project of res publica” had many precedents and parallels across the globe. On the cases of Imperial and Soviet Russia, close parallels to the Ottoman and Turkish republican experience, see Pravilova, Ekaterina, A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Anne O'Donnell, “A Noah's Ark: Material Life and the Foundations of Soviet Governance, 1916–1922” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014).

7 Deringil, Selim, “The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808 to 1908,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 3–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Şahin, “Staging an Empire,” 464.

9 Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 26.

10 Throughout this article, I use the term “the people” as the collective body in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic that was in the process of being redefined as the new sovereign. However, as with many other liberal fictions, “the people” is a highly elusive concept and what it signified varied from one context to another, a point that is apparent in parliamentary debates, which I tried to capture and maintain in the article. The other, equally important, point to be made here has to do with “things” that I treat simply and uniformly as such here. This is not to disregard the fact that law treated different types and subtypes of property differently and that each type of “thing” had its own brand of agency. Yet, the parliamentary debates lack that distinction entirely. While this is partially attributable to the general confusion with which the issue was discussed in parliament, it is more indicative of the legislative process’ distinctness from the judiciary. As Edward Rubin has noted, in the modern administrative states, which the Ottoman constitutional order was in the process of becoming, legislatures were responsible for allocating resources, creating administrative agencies, and enacting “a wide range of other provisions,” which bore only tangential similarities to the traditional concept of law; Rubin, Edward L., “Law and Legislation in the Administrative State,” Columbia Law Review 89 (1989): 369CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Morack, Ellinor, The Dowry of the State? The Politics of Abandoned Property and the Population Exchange in Turkey, 1921–1945 (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2017), 4Google Scholar.

12 Ӧzbek, Nadir, “The Politics of Taxation and the ‘Armenian Question’ during the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876–1908,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012): 773CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a theoretical treatment of the governmental logic that sets these limits, see Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007), 256–57Google Scholar; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2008), 4.

13 Üngӧr, Uğur Ümit and Polatel, Mehmet, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 6–7Google Scholar; Morack, The Dowry of the State?, 7; Mehmet Polatel, “Armenians and the Land Question in the Ottoman Empire 1870–1914” (PhD diss., Boğaziçi University, 2017); Bedross Der Matossian, “The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire,” European Journal of Turkish Studies [Online], Complete List, 2011, online since 6 October 2011, accessed 19 December 2017, http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4411; Akçam, Taner and Kurt, Ümit, The Spirit of the Laws. The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2015)Google Scholar; Onaran, Nevzat, Osmanlı’da Ermeni ve Rum Mallarının Türkleştirilmesi (1914–1919) and Cumhuriyet'te Ermeni ve Rum Mallarının Türkleştirilmesi (1920–1930) Emvâl-i Metrûkenin Tasfiyesi-I&II (Istanbul: Evrensel, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Ӧzbek, “The Politics of Taxation,” 773; Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. One prominent exception to this is Ellinor Morack's The Dowry of the State, which provides, throughout the book, thorough analyses of the contradictions and discrepancies between different governmental objectives and practices.

15 Ekmekcioglu, Lerna, “Republic of Paradox: The League of Nations Minority Protection Regime and the New Turkey's Step-Citizens,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46 (2014): 660Google Scholar.

16 Morack, The Dowry of the State, 78.

17 For an illustrative anecdote on the degree of blurriness of this line, see Sariyannis, “Ruler and the State,” 121–22. Literally meaning “house of wealth,” bayt al-māl (beytü’l mal in Turkish) denotes the royal treasury of the sultans and caliphs in Islamic jurisprudence and was regulated in accordance with Islamic (shariʿa) law; Noel J. Coulson et al., “Bayt al-Māl,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., accessed 10 August 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0109. For a comprehensive theoretical treatment of the problematic relationship between the person of the sovereign and the legal realm, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz's seminal study The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016). For a cautionary note on complex private relations based on the shariʿa property regime and the lack of a “historical dichotomous relation with a notion of the ‘public,’” see Messick, Brinkley, “Property and the Private in a Sharia System,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 70 (2003): 712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Hanioğlu, Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 148Google Scholar.

19 Matossian, Bedross Der, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014), 151Google Scholar.

20 Sohrabi, Nader, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Ibid., 224.

22 The most comprehensive study on the topic is Yavuz Selim Karakışla, “Exile Days of Abdülhamid II in Salonica (1909–1912) and Confiscation of his Wealth” (Master's thesis, Boğaziçi University, 1990), also published as a book entitled Exile Days of Sultan Abdülhamid II in Salonika (1909–1912) (Istanbul: Libra Kitap, 2015). The first part of this article builds on Karakışla's excellent study, shifting the focus to the categorical limits of the process.

23 Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi (Parliamentary minutes, hereafter MMZC), 18 Nisan 1325 (1 May 1909), 139–41.

24 MMZC, 20 Kanunusani 1325 (2 February 1910), 92–115.

25 MMZC, 18 Nisan 1325 (1 May 1909), 140; MMZC, 24 Haziran 1325 (7 July 1909), 215.

26 MMZC, 18 Nisan 1325 (1 May 1909), 140.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 MMZC, 19 Nisan 1325 (2 May 1909), 161.

30 Ibid., 148–49.

31 Ibid.

32 MMZC, 21 Nisan 1325 (4 May 1909), 208; 2 Temmuz 1325 (15 July 1909), 365–84 and the appendix to the same session, 1–7. This is evident in the institutional correspondence as well. For example, see the note written by the office of the Grand Vizier to the Ministry of Finance, BOA, BEO 3543/265857, 1327.R.21 (12 May 1909). For other examples on endowment deeds or estates of deceased dynasty members, implied to be appropriated by him, see BEO 3582/268577, 1327.C.5 (24 June 1909), BEO 3581/268565, 1327.C.5 (24 June 1909); MMZC, 21 Nisan 1325, 208.

33 Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism, 267–69.

34 MMZC, 21 Nisan 1325 (4 May 1909), 207–8. See also MMZC, 25 Nisan 1325 (8 May 1909), 272 and MMZC, 3 Mayıs 1325 (16 May 1909), 417–18.

35 The Başbakalık Ottoman Archives contains numerous documents on tracing, locating, and appraising Abdülhamid's wealth deposited in domestic and foreign banks. For the first and most comprehensive of these, see BOA, BEO 3542/ 265617, 1327.R.15 (6 May 1909).

36 “Şehzade Burhaneddin Efendi,” Tanin, 4 Mayıs 1325 (17 May 1909), 3.

37 BOA, BEO 3542/ 265617, 1327.R.15 (6 May 1909).

38 Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 7–8.

39 MMZC, 21 Nisan 1325 (4 May 1909), 208.

40 Ibid., 209.

41 Files pertaining to the requests and communiqués in that effect are numerous at BOA. For a few of those, see BOA, BEO 3542/ 265617, 1327.R.15 (6 May 1909) and the files connected to it, such as BEO 3582/268634, 1327.C.6 (25 June 1909); BEO 3631/272316, 1327.Ş.23 (9 September 1909); BEO 3690/276716, 1328.M.6 (18 January 1910); BEO 3711/278324, 1328.S.20 (3 March 1910).

42 For the Deutsche Bank account, for instance, which resulted in full recovery of Abdülhamid II's deposited money, stocks, and bonds in July 1909, see Karakışla, Exile Days of Sultan Abdülhamid II, 138–40.

43 For the Reichsbank case, see “Davayı Kazandık,” Tanin, 25 Teşrin-i Sani (8 December 1910), 4. For the Crédit Lyonnais case, see Karakışla, Exile Days of Sultan Abdülhamid II, 146.

44 MMZC, 4 Mayıs 1325 (17 May 1909), 480.

45 Ibid., 480.

46 Ibid., 481.

47 BOA, DH.MUI 65/55, 1328.Ra.5 (17 March 1910).

48 Ibid., 6.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 2.

51 Karakışla, Exile Days of Sultan Abdülhamid II, 140–44.

52 MMZC, 28 Temmuz 1325 (10 August 1909), 307.

53 See MMZC, 24 Haziran 1325 (7 July 1909), 213–21, for the commission's initial report. For more specific cases see MMZC, 12 Nisan 1326 (25 April 1910), 370; and “Yıldız Mefruşatı,” Tanin, 13 Haziran 1325 (26 June 1909), 3.

54 “Yıldız Otomobilleri,” Tanin, 10 Haziran 1325 (23 June 1909), 4.

55 MMZC, 16 Haziran 1325 (29 June 1909), 78.

56 “Yıldız Komisyon-u Mahsusundan,” Tanin, 8 Haziran 1325 (21 June 1909), 4.

57 “Yıldız Hasılatı,” Tanin, 9 Haziran 1325 (22 June 1909), 3.

58 “Yıldız Komisyonu,” Tanin, 20 Haziran 1325 (3 July 1909), 4.

59 MMZC, 8 Temmuz 1325 (21 July 1909), 473.

60 BOA, DH.MUI 42/56, 1328.M.19 (31 January 1910).

61 BOA, BEO 3673/275402, 1327.Za.22 (9 December 1909).

62 BOA, BEO 3581/268552, 1327.C.4 (23 June 1909).

63 For an excellent example of such criticism, see MMZC, 24 Haziran 1325 (7 July 1909), 215–21.

64 Akın, Yiğit, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3–4Google Scholar, 22; Özbek, Nadir, “Defining the Public Sphere during the Late Ottoman Empire: War, Mass Mobilization and the Young Turk Regime (1908–18),” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2007): 795–809CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 For late 18th- and early 19th-century applications, see Yaycioglu, Ali, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), 107–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more detailed study of the practice of müsadere, see Yasin Arslantaş, “Confiscation by the Ruler: A Study of the Ottoman Practice of Müsadere, 1700s–1839” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2017).

66 Philliou, Christine, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011), 30–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 46–47. Both Mehmet Mert Sunar and Ellinor Morack note, however, that in the aftermath of the Greek rebellion in 1821, property confiscations were extended to ordinary Greek subjects; Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent: A Study of the Janissary Corps, 1807–1826” (PhD diss., Binghamton University State University of New York, 2006), 183–84; Morack, The Dowry of the State, 49–51.

67 Sunar, “Cauldron of Dissent,” 28, 216–27.

68 Agmon, Iris, Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 148–50Google Scholar. For the differences from earlier practices of charity and poor relief, see Ener, Mine, Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

69 Maksudyan, Nazan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 108Google Scholar.

70 Morack, The Dowry of the State, 119; Hamed-Troyansky, Vladimir, “Circassian Refugees and the Making of Amman, 1878–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017): 605–23Google Scholar.

71 Ayoub, Samy, “The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State: Fashioning and Refashioning of Islamic Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2 (2015): 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Akın, When the War Came Home, 113–18. For the definition and scope of war taxes, see ibid., 20–22. In addition to the Law on War Taxes that was reintroduced during World War I, a law on the “Acquisition of Military Transport Vehicles,” together with numerous other supplementary ones, remained in effect throughout the war. For an example of a supplementary law, see “Seferberlikte vaz-ı yed edilecek emakin ve mebani hakkında kanun,” Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 8. Cilt, 1322 (14 October 1916).

73 Coulson et al., “Bayt al-Māl,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam.

74 Morack, The Dowry of the State, 106.

75 Ibid., 143–44.

76 Üngӧr and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction, 46. For the content of the law, see Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 7. Cilt (Dersaadet: Matbaa-i Amire, 1336), 737–740 (27 September 1915).

77 Üngӧr and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction, 46; “Ahir mahellere nakledilen eşhasın emval ve düyun ve matlubat-ı metrukesi hakkında kanun-ı muvakkat,” Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 7. Cilt, 737–38.

78 Üngӧr and Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction, 55–57. The temporary law was given a permanent status in November 1915 with procedural information and fourteen additional items, some of which were amended in the following years; Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 7. Cilt, 775–88 (10 November 1915); Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 8. Cilt, 1322 (14 October 1916); Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 9. Cilt, 759–760 (25 October 1917); Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 10. Cilt, 22 (8 December 1917); Düstur, Tertib-i Sani, 11. Cilt, 553–560 (8 January 1920).

79 Morack, The Dowry of the State, 148.

80 Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Zabıt Ceridesi (Parliamentary Minutes of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, hereafter TBMMZC), 14.03.1337 (1921), 123, quoted in Morack, The Dowry of the State, 151.

81 Morack, The Dowry of the State, 177.

82 Ibid., 122.

83 Ibid., 177. For a parliamentary debate in which the Greek and Armenian citizens were recast as rebels against the legitimate ruler (hurucu alelimam, khuruj ʿala al-imam), see TBMMZC, 16.04.1338 (1922), also quoted in Morack, The Dowry of the State, 165; and TBMMCZ, 27.2.1340 (1924), 429–30.

84 A highly controversial issue, the abolition of the caliphate had been subject to lengthy deliberations almost from the beginning of the War of Independence. For an example of one such early debate, see Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Gizli Celse Zabıtları (Closed Session Minutes of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, hereafter TBMMGCZ), 25.09.1336 (1920). Handling it rather cautiously and for the most part secretly, the nascent republican government delayed taking any action on the matter until the war and peace negotiations came to a conclusion in late 1923. The general debates on the office of the caliphate and its relationship to national sovereignty as well as the law were multifaceted and produced a vast number of contemporary accounts. For an essay collection on the subject by contemporary thinkers, see Hilâfet ve Millî Hakimiyet (Ankara: Matbuat ve İstihbarat Müdüriyeti [Matbuat ve İstihbarat Matbaası], 1339/1923). For the legal and religious contexts, see Adliye Vekili Seyyid Bey, Hilâfetin Mahiyet-i Şer'iyesi (Ankara: Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Matbaası, n.d.).

85 “Hilâfetin ilgasına ve Hanedan-ı Osmaninin Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Memaliki hâricine çıkarılmasına dair teklif-i Kanuni,” TBMMCZ, 3.3.1340 (1924), 27–69. For the bill itself see “Hilâfetin İlgâ ve Hânedân-ı Osmâniyye'nin Türkiye Cumhûriyyeti Memâliki Hâricine Çıkarılmasına Dâir Kânun, numerosu: 431,” Resmî Ceride, no. 63, 6 Mart 1340 (6 March 1924), 6.

86 Ibid., 27.

87 Ibid.

88 TBMMCZ, 25.2.1340 (1924), 345.

89 Ibid., 345–46; Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası Nizamnamesi (Ankara, 1339/1923).

90 TBMMCZ, 27.2.1340 (1924), 429–30.

91 TBMMCZ, 3.3.1340 (1924), 28–29.

92 Ibid., 29–31; Resimli Ay Mecmuası, no. 2, vol. 1, Mart 1340 (March 1924), 23.

93 Ibid., 24.

94 TBMMCZ, 3.3.1340 (1924), 68–69.

95 Resimli Ay Mecmuası, no. 2, vol. 1, Mart 1340 (March 1924), 20.

96 TBMMZC, 5.1.1340 (1924), 665–66; Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 29.

97 Bennett, Tony, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 128–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Resimli Ay Mecmuası, no. 3, vol. 1, Nisan 1340 (April 1924), 20.

99 Resimli Ay Mecmuası, no. 6, vol. 1, Temmuz 1340 (July 1924), 33, 36.

100 İstanbul Asar-ı Atika Müzeleri, Topkapı Sarayı, Muhtasar Rehber (İstanbul: Matbaa-i Amire, 1341/1925).

101 Ibid., 5–6. For a comprehensive overview of Topkapı Palace's transformation in the long 19th century, see Nilay Özlü, “From Imperial Palace to Museum: The Topkapı Palace during the Long Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., Boğaziçi University, 2018).

102 McClellan, Andrew, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994), 7Google Scholar. This very point is also stressed by Sinop deputy Rıza Nur, as he proposed the conversion of the palaces to museums shortly after their full confiscation; TBMMZC, 9.3.1340 (1924), 202.

103 Shaw, Wendy M. K., Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003), 188Google Scholar.

104 TBMMZC, 24.3.1340 (1924), 1030.

105 Ibid.

106 See the finance minister Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey's note in ibid.

107 Başbakanlık Republican Archives (hereafter, BCA), 30 18 1 1.10.35.7 / 132–34.

108 For a detailed list of the items see BCA, 30 18 1 1.10.35.7, 132–34 attachment, pages 166–67.

109 TBMMCZ, 5.1.1341 (1925), 12; BCA, 30 18 1 1.15.58.19, 132–34 attachment, pages 171–73; BCA, 30 18 1 1.1.14.39, 132–34 attachment, pages 135–39; BCA, 30 18 1 1.16.77.3, 132–34 attachment, pages 125–34.

110 Özlü, “From Imperial Palace to Museum,” 574; Göncü, T. Cengiz, “Arşiv Araştırmaları ve Milli Saraylar,” in 150. Yılında Dolmabahçe Sarayı Uluslararası Sempozyumu: 23–26 Kasım 2006, Dolmabahçe Saray: bildiriler (İstanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar, 2007), 128Google Scholar.

111 Records pertaining to such transfers are numerous at the Başbakanlık Republican Archives. For some illustrative cases, which are also attached to the large file of inventory lists, see BCA, 30 18 1 1.19.35.7, 132–34; BCA, 30 18 1 1.22.78.20, 132–34; BCA, 30 18 1 1.20.59.12, 132–34; BCA, 30 18 1 1.20.45.18, 132–34; BCA, 30 18 1 1.22.78.16, 132–34; BCA, 30 18 1 1.20.47.18, 132–34; BCA, 30 18 1 1.21.64.10, 132–34.

112 Kezer, Zeynep, “Of Forgotten People and Forgotten Places: Nation-Building and the Dismantling of Ankara's Non-Muslim Landscapes,” in On Location: Heritage Cities and Sites, ed. Ruggles, D. Fairchild (New York: Springer, 2012), 174Google Scholar. BCA, 30 18 1 2.28.37.16, 3–22. See attachment 3–22, pages 3–4, 7–10, 15–22 for the detailed list, which again contained small, trivial items such as doormats, mosquito nets, and pitchers, in addition to numerous bigger, valuable items, especially paintings.

113 BCA, 30 18 1 1.14.37.17.

114 BCA, 30 18 1 1.14.43.7. For a related governmental decree that ordered the removal of all portraits of the Ottoman sultans from palace/museum displays, see BCA, 30 18 1 1.15.53.2.

115 BCA, 30 18 1 1.15.59.12.

116 BCA, 30 18 1 2.14.68.15, 132–95; BCA, 30 18 1 2.31.66.17, 132–117.

117 BCA, 30 18 1 2.23.67.10, 403–4; BCA, 30 18 1 1.28.30.2, 239–39; BCA, 30 18 1 1.28.26.10.

118 BCA, 30 18 1 1.26.63.15, 132–34.

119 “İstanbulluların Büyük Misafiri,” Servet-i Fünun, no. 1612–138, vol. 35, 7 Temmuz (July) 1927.

120 TBMMZC, 5.1.1341 (1925), 11.

121 TBMMZC, 5.1.1341 (1925), 12.