A Port Town from Scratch: The Interwoven Urban Landscape of Late 19th Century Iskenderun

Since the late 16th century Iskenderun served as the port of Aleppo, one of the most important trade centers of the Ottoman Empire. Despite Iskenderun’s importance as a trade node in the Mediterranean, the town functioned as a mere landing stage full of marshlands until the 1880s when it gradually turned into a mid-sized port town with five neighborhoods and a wide range of public, industrial, educational, and sacred buildings as well as shops, stores, and restaurants. This doctoral thesis aims to present a multi-layered and networked framework to investigate Iskenderun’s sudden emergence into a proper town by calling its specific trajectories into play: its natural and built landscapes, social fabric, along with networks that tie it to the larger Ottoman lands and the wider world in its late 19th and early 20th-century context.

DAAD Funding; Associate Fellow of BGSMCS

First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag

Publications

• “Tarihsel Bir Belge Olarak Harita ve Geç Osmanlı İskenderun Haritaları’nın Bize Söyledikleri,” in Tarih Akademi 2 (2023): 114-119.
• with H. Sinan Omacan, and Didem Teksöz, “Saraçhane Arkeoloji Parkı İçin Bir Yaklaşım Önerisi,” in Toplumsal Tarih 275 (November, 2016) : 13-15.