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Büke Uras, The Balyans: Ottoman Architecture and Balyan Archive

Istanbul: KORPUS, 2022, 351 p.
Ahmet Ersoy
p. 209-215
Référence(s) :

Büke Uras, The Balyans: Ottoman Architecture and Balyan Archive, Istanbul: KORPUS, 2022, 351 p.

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1The Balyans, a prominent family of Armenian amiras and architects who shaped the urban and architectural landscape of the Ottoman capital through the nineteenth century, occupied an ineluctably central yet also precarious position in the modern historiography of Ottoman architecture. Their outstanding role as masterminds of architectural activity, and as authors of the most prestigious royal buildings embellishing late Ottoman Istanbul clashed with the state-centered priorities and ethno-religious biases of nationalist scholarship in Turkey. The monocultural partialities of the nation state experience, coupled by the post-genocidal, self-defensive reflexes embedded in mainstream visions of history in Turkey, denied the Armenian family’s entry into the pantheon of celebrated Ottoman artists and architects as defined by art historians of the Republican era. Furthermore, the overwhelming impact of the decline and westernization paradigms dominating Ottoman studies through the twentieth century yielded an unfavorable vision of the final century of the Ottoman Empire as a period of cultural weakness readily associated with the diminishing political power of the state. Informed by these paradigms, and conditioned by the purist aesthetic biases of Modernism, architectural historians, including highly esteemed international scholars like Godfrey Goodwin, fostered a totalizing vision of nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture as derivative, overly-ornate, overly-westernized, and therefore inauthentic. While designated “star architects” like Sinan were thought to have generated a robust, characteristic and genuine imperial style in accord with the culmination of Ottoman power in the sixteenth century, Balyans and other non-Muslim agents of the late Ottoman artistic scene were defined as local agents who lacked knowledge and creativity, and acted as mere intermediaries of harmful western cultural penetration. In sum, from the viewpoint of mainstream historiography, historical conjuncture and ethno-religious identity did not work in favor of the Balyans.

2Yet, despite the drawbacks and pressures of the historical mainstream, rigorous efforts of a few pioneering scholars in the second half of the twentieth century helped reveal the essential impact of Balyans as prominent social, political, and cultural agents of late Ottoman Istanbul. The first comprehensive study on the Balyans, a monograph entitled The Role of the Balyan Family in Ottoman Architecture, was initially published in Turkish in 1981 by Pars Tuğlacı, to be re-edited in English in 1990. Bringing together Ottoman archival data and European accounts with rich archival and narrative resources in Armenian, Tuğlacı’s magisterial work played a formative role in inserting the Balyans into the map of Ottoman architectural history. Biographical and art historical studies by scholars such as Kevork Pamukciyan and Afife Batur supplemented Tuğlacı’s work by fleshing out the Balyans’ outstanding professional and cultural impact as harbingers of Ottoman cultural modernity. The latest significant contribution to Balyan scholarship that builds upon revisionist art historical approaches of the recent decades is Alyson Wharton’s book, The Architects of Ottoman Constantinople: The Balyan Family and the History of Ottoman Architecture (2015). Wharton’s work critically engages with the habitual templates of Ottoman architectural history and further reveals mechanisms of distortion and silencing embedded in its established narratives. Her detailed and analytical study of buildings and query into previously unexplored sources in Ottoman Turkish and Armenian help situate the Balyans within a complex array of professional and social networks woven around their activities as architects, intellectuals, entrepreneurs and political actors.

3Büke Uras’ recent work, The Balyans: Ottoman Architecture and Balyan Archive (2022), published in separate English and Turkish-language editions, is a welcome and valuable addition to the emerging compendium of critical studies on the Balyan family. What makes Uras’ book an indispensable source of reference for academic and general audiences alike is its reproduction and analytical investigation of rare archival material hitherto unpublished in English or Turkish. The primary resource of the book is a sizable archive of original drawings collected by Sarkis Balyan (1831-1899), mainly comprising designs (building plans, sections, elevations, site plans, and decorative elements) made under his supervision as royal architect. None of these drawings are signed, but the majority seem to be authored by three architect brothers of the Balyan family, Sarkis, Nigoğos (1826-1858), and Hagob (1838-1875), who were involved in the design and implementation of the most significant public and royal building complexes of the Ottoman capital through the second half of the nineteenth century. Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century Sarkis Balyan entrusted his personal collection of drawings and photographs to architect and family friend Levon Güreğyan (Léon Gurekian, 1869-1950), whose family safeguarded the archive in their residence in Italy through the world wars and the Cold War, for about a century. In 2014 Levon Güreğyan’s grandson Armen Gurekian was able to fulfil his grandfather’s will and transfer the material to the National Museum-Institute of Architecture after Alexander Tamanian (NMIAAT) in Yerevan. Save for a comprehensive study published in 2017 in Eastern Armenian by Ashot Haykazun Grigoryan (entitled A Treasure Garden of the Armenian Nation: The Balyans / Հայոց ազգին պարտեզի գանձերը։ Պալյաններ), which draws upon the Balyan collection that had recently been acquired by the NMIAAT, only few drawings from the aforementioned archive had been reproduced so far in other languages. Uras’ bilingual edition is a significant contribution to scholarship on the Balyans not only for reproducing the bulk of this invaluable archival resource and making it available to wider audiences, but also for its diligent endeavor to identify, provide with critical commentaries, and densely contextualize the rich array of drawings included in the collection. Uras’ meticulous study not only taps into the rich visual reservoir of the original Balyan archive. It also engages closely with a wide range of alternative archival and secondary sources, such as the series of watercolor perspective drawings signed by Sarkis Balyan and located in the Nubar Library in Paris (only parts of which had been published earlier by Tuğlacı), illustrations of steam engines and pumps developed by Sarkis Balyan and published in contemporary French technical journals, or valuable pieces of information from myriad Armenian journals and newspapers, retrieved with the help of project coordinators Arsen Yarman and Kevork Özkaragöz. Data from these diverse resources are combined synthetically in the book in order to provide richly textured historical insights on the life and practice of the Balyans.

4Uras’ book comprises five main sections. The first chapter, “Balyan Architecture Archive”, starts with a historiographical overview informed by recent revisionist interventions in Balyan scholarship. It addresses the ethno-national, modernist, and orientalist biases that have ailed mainstream history writing on Balyans through the twentieth century. A final section appended to the chapter touches upon discussions of authorship and problems of identification related to the buildings attributed to the Balyan family. It later focuses on the road story of the Balyan archive, from its initial compilation by Sarkis Balyan, to its long period of cocooning in the Gurekian family residence, to its final transfer to its proper institutional setting at the NMIAAT. The second chapter, “Balyan Family: Personal Histories”, provides a richly illustrated and well-documented survey of the biographies of Balyan family members, from the earliest known paterfamilias of the house, the eighteenth-century building master Bali Kalfa, to the generation of amiras during the first half of the nineteenth century, to the final practicing member of the family, the French-educated architect Levon Balyan who died in 1925. Marshaling evidence from a wide range of archival and visual resources, and assessing narrative evidence provided by numerous secondary sources in Armenian, Uras revisits the dispute on the origins of the Balyan family and foregrounds the opinion that traces their lineage to the village of Lusonk near the eastern Anatolian town of Bayburt (Papert). The third chapter of the book, “Balyan Architecture and Its Representations”, uses photographic evidence to reflect on the innovative role of the Balyans in introducing industrialized building technologies and developing new and systematic strategies for the management of construction sites. The following chapter, entitled “Balyan Architecture in the Tanzimat Period”, traces the development and diversification of Balyan architecture in terms of building style and morphology, situating the prodigious output of the family in the context of late Ottoman history and its complex dynamics of modernizing change.

5The final and the bulkiest chapter, “Balyan Archive Catalogue”, constitutes the real core of Uras’ study where the author provides detailed commentaries on individual drawings from the Balyan archive. The main point of reference informing the structure of this chapter is archival material from the NMIAAT and the Nubar Library collections. But in his historicizing outlook, Uras also taps into a wide array of narrative and visual resources, linking together and contextualizing documents of the Balyan collection as indicators of the family members’ role and impact as prominent professional, cultural, and communal agents. The chapter is organized as a thematized survey of the Balyans’ astonishingly variegated design activity in the second half of the nineteenth century, containing their alternative proposals and final projects for monumental royal palaces, residential units, military, industrial, religious, and public official buildings, as well as decorative compositions and urban schemes. Uras’ sedulous effort to align, connect, and identify the contents of the NMIAAT archive constitutes an original and laudable contribution to Balyan scholarship, especially since the entire collection is made up of unsigned, and mostly unmarked drawings. Through a careful, comparative examination of the drawings, and verifying data from narrative sources, Uras is able to identify, for instance, middle class housing proposals that were destined to be inserted within the dense urban fabric of the Pera neighborhood; a design proposal for the central offices of the Sublime Porte, to be built anew after the 1878 fire; or what appears to be an early, classically-inspired façade proposal for the new Çırağan shore palace, drafted by Nigoğos Balyan around 1857, more than a decade before the building’s completion. A careful, diagnostic analysis of finalized designs, draft project sheets, or alternative and revised design solutions in the archive reveals crucial information about the Balyan atelier, their working methods, design protocols, and modes of engagement with craftsmen, patrons, and the public. These insights are not only important in evidencing particulars of the design process in the late Ottoman context. Corroborating the Balyan family’s full-fledged involvement in architectural production as designer-architects, in the modern sense of the term, they also help invalidate the persistent claims about their limited involvement in construction activity as mere contractors or coordinators.

6Among the most notable projects discussed in detail in the book is the unrealized Aziziye Mosque (c. 1874); a monumental, single-domed, four minaret structure on the Bosphorus that harks back to classical Ottoman models of the sixteenth century. The drawings include multiple plan layouts, as well as a series of differing façade and decorative arrangements that reveal multiple alternatives considered by the architect during the design process. The decorative program of the building draws on the standard repertoire of royal Ottoman buildings from the period, combining revived early Ottoman elements with an eclectic blend of Orientalizing motifs from the broader Islamic geography. In documenting this eclectic, Islamized outlook, Uras identifies one Sarkis Balyan drawing at the Nubar collection, an interior perspective associated earlier with the Çırağan Palace because of its heavily Moorish decorative program, to be an initial design study for the Aziziye Mosque. Yet in its overall structural and spatial layout, the building is a bold departure from the period’s architectural conventions as it reintroduces a local building type that had been the hallmark of royal power in earlier centuries. This extraordinary project, available to us in its multiple design incarnations, is testimony to the creative authority of the Balyans over late Ottoman design activity, and to their pioneering, formative impact on the shaping of a period of revivalist, historicizing experimentation in Ottoman architecture.

7The Balyans: Ottoman Architecture and Balyan Archive is an amply-illustrated and expertly designed book. One notable drawback of the study that contrasts with its exhaustive approach to primary sources is the absence of adequately detailed information about the contents, composition, and the material qualities of the documents constituting the Balyan archive. The reader is left uninformed about the total number of drawings included in the archive, and about the presence of documents in other formats like photographs. The book would have benefited from an appendix listing all the contents of the Balyan archive. Also, a further, more detailed discussion regarding the format and the specific technomaterial aspects of the drawings themselves would have contributed to the author’s attempt to explore the broader technical context of design activity in the late Ottoman domain.

8One other shortcoming pertains to the structure of the fifth chapter of the book. The analytical framework of this section is mainly indexed to the contents of the archive, with subsections defined on the basis of project categories, like palaces, religious buildings, or decorative designs. Yet, due to the unevenness of the archival material, sparsely documented project categories lead up to shorter, less developed chapter sections, like the final, brief part of the fifth chapter concentrating on the urban design initiatives of the Balyans.

9Yet, in the end, these are drawbacks that are too minor to take away from the scholarly value and significance of the book. In its comprehensive, analytical outlook and rich documentation, Uras’ study promises to be an indispensable reference work for researchers of the Ottoman and Armenian past. As a source of richly detailed, updated knowledge on a celebrated family of Ottoman-Armenian architects, the book will serve as an informative, enriching resource, not only for readers interested in architecture and the politics of culture in the Ottoman domain, but also for those eager to know more about the entangled, globally connected histories of the nineteenth century.

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Ahmet Ersoy, « Büke Uras, The Balyans: Ottoman Architecture and Balyan Archive »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 14 | 2022, 209-215.

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Ahmet Ersoy, « Büke Uras, The Balyans: Ottoman Architecture and Balyan Archive »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 14 | 2022, mis en ligne le 16 janvier 2023, consulté le 17 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/3047 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.3047

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Ahmet Ersoy

University of Boğaziçi

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