This exhibition presents one of Ernest Mamboury’s notebooks, discovered in the Müller-Wiener Archive of the DAI in Istanbul. It immediately became clear that Müller-Wiener drew upon the information in this notebook to develop his research on the topography of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. What makes this notebook so important? Can it be regarded as evidence of a relationship between the two scholars?
The Swiss scholar Ernest Mamboury was born in 1878. He studied at the École Normale of Lausanne (1894-1898), in Geneva (1898-1903), and at the Académie Julian in Paris (1904-1905). As soon as he arrived in Istanbul as a tourist in 1909, he fell in love with the city and decided to stay there, dedicating his entire life to documenting the city and particularly its Byzantine past. Beyond his employment as a French and Literature teacher at Galatasaray High School, he also taught technical drawing and mathematics for almost thirty years. This is intensely reflected in his notebook, which shows traces of both his scientific work and his teaching activity. Interestingly enough, Mamboury continued to fill this notebook from 1949 until March 1953, just a few months before his death.
Wolfgang Müller-Wiener was born in Friedrichswerth, Germany in 1923. He worked as an architectural historian (Bauforscher), archaeologist and Byzantinist. When he was appointed as the first director of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in 1976, his scientific focus shifted from Abu Mena in Egypt to Milet and especially to the historic topography of Istanbul. This led to two main publications on Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople: “Bildlexikon zur Topographie Istanbuls Byzantion, Konstantinupolis” and “Die Häfen von Byzantion, Konstantinupolis”, to which he devoted himself until his death in 1991.
It is well known that not just Müller-Wiener, but the entire scholarly community greatly benefited from Mamboury’s studies. It is extremely interesting to find concrete evidence of this in the notebook in question. Müller-Wiener called it the “Grüne Notitzbuch”, and also mentioned it and used it as a template for his work and drawings in some of his other archival documents.
As for Mamboury’s relatively small notebook itself, it has 74 pages that contain notes and descriptions of different monuments, sites and events written in French, together with detailed drawings and sketches. Particularly notable are his review of a lecture that Albert Gabriel gave in Paris, his observations on the old tombs in Galata and Pera, his remarks on the Pantokrator Church (Zeyrek Camii), his notes on the Galata walls (that were intended to be demolished to make room for a car park), his detailed drawings of the Hippodrome, of a historic bath in Beyazit Square and of the Ibrahim Pasha Palace, and his notes on the Hagia Eirene excavations.
Furthermore, it is interesting to see that most of Mamboury’s travels and visits to monuments and sites – such as his Büyükçekmece tour, his trip to a Byzantine church in Heybeliada (Chalki) and his visit to the Alibeyköy excavation site – overlap with the itineraries in Müller-Wiener’s own studies. Thus, the notebook gives us an idea of the background to both scholars’ research pursuits. The Müller-Wiener Archive offers a fascinating glimpse into Mamboury’s scholarly work, based on personal notes, drawings, maps, letters, scholarly articles, and newspaper cuttings. Mamboury’s notebook is just one of thousands of documents in the Müller-Wiener Archive that awaits to be exhibited. As a first step into the world of Müller-Wiener’s legacy, Mamboury’s notebook helps us to explore the role of different generations of scholars and their interaction in relation to the study of the historical topography of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. In view of this, in addition to the pages of the notebook (notes and drawing), a selection of photographs and historical documents from the Müller-Wiener Archive and Ottoman archives will be displayed.