Projects
Despite the apparent importance of Edirne in the Ottoman era, the city received very little scholarly attention to date. All details of its development and transformation from a major Byzantine urban center into a capital of a Muslim state still remain virtually unstudied. The very few pioneering academic works on Edirne did not exhaust the topic and failed to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the transformation of Adrianople into one of the world's most prominent Islamic centers. Therefore, the city still awaits a thorough and profound study on its history, architecture, and development of urban space that would bring to light and underline its significance and well-deserved place in the history of South East Europe.
The aim of the project is to offer a study on the development of Edirne in the course of the first century of Ottoman rule over the city, which will make amends for the existing significant gap in the related literature. The project will focus on the process of transformation and conversion of the Byzantine Adrianople into the Ottoman capital Edirne through a detailed study on the change of city's spatial hierarchy and urban morphology consciously carried out in the early Ottoman era through architectural patronage. Examining Edirne's development in comparison to other major cities transformed by the Ottomans, like Bursa (Prusa) and İznik (Nicaea), the project will argue that Edirne's modification contributed significantly for the shaping of a distinctive model of urban planning, employed by the Ottomans that was replicated at a smaller scale in other parts of the Balkans. Some of the cities modified or created from scratch by the Ottomans after the thus established model, such as Dydimoteicho, Plovdiv, Skopje, and Sarajevo, nowadays are one of the principal cities of the modern Balkan states.