Thursday 25 July 2019

Laudatory to descriptive

A subtle change occurred between the first Ottoman stamps, i.e., the tughra issue of 1863, and the Duloz issue of 1865. This difference is not between the designs, which are very obviously different, but in the inscriptions.

The 1863 tughra issue reads “Sublime Ottoman Empire”. The 1865 Duloz issue reads “Post of the Ottoman Empire”. The first inscription is laudatory. The second is descriptive.

Duloz stamp

I turn now to the main entrance to the Seraskerât (Ministry of War), the celebrated Seraskerât Gate, built in 1865, the year the Duloz stamps were issued. (It became the main entrance to Istanbul University in the 20th century.)


The Seraskerât Gate is a Tanzimât structure, built with an eye to the West, gothic and modernisation, whilst being consciously revivalist in its Moresque motifs.

Its modernity lies not only in its neo-Gothic solidity, but also in the fact that it adopted a graphic layout for its inscriptions that was resolutely novel. The greatest novelty was the central inscription that reads, in large thulth script by Sefik Bey (1819–80), ‘Då’ire-i UmËr-ı ‘Askeriye’, or literally ‘Office of Military Affairs’. This is a relatively early example (1282/1865–6) of the nineteenth-century practice of explicitly naming buildings by citing their nature and/or function, or the institution that they housed or represented. 

In earlier times, buildings would be calligraphically marked with a poetic inscription in praise of the sultan or the founding figure of the building, including lines describing the building physically, metaphorically and functionally, providing at the very end a chronogram that would date its construction, endowment or repair. Alternatively, again in earlier times, an inscription would not refer directly to the building, but would contextually refer to its function. In most cases, the inspiration for that would be a Koranic verse or Hadīth.

What differentiated the novel way of labelling the Seraskerât Gate was its directness and its implicit reliance on the legibility of the inscription. The Seraskerât Gate boasted in huge letters the simple name of the institution it represented was boldly innovative.

Front façade of the Bâb-ı Seraskerât, today Istanbul University Gate, displaying, from top to bottom, the tughra covered with ‘T. C.’, the university’s name in bronze lettering, and the original calligraphic programme. 

Public buildings, government offices, municipal halls and post offices were all gradually subjected to the same epigraphic treatment. Why?  

The practice was born at the juncture of several phenomena. A rather predictable one of these was, of course, western inspiration. A certain degree of emulation was involved in the process, due to the transformations which the Ottoman state and society were undergoing.

The modernisation of the state was certainly one of the most important developments in this respect: from a pre- or early-modern structure dominated by informal and personal relations, the Ottoman bureaucracy was rapidly growing, while at the same time becoming more specialised and more impersonal.

It was in the capital of the empire that this phenomenon left its strongest imprints on the urban landscape: ministries, offices, bureaus, barracks, schools, hospitals, factories and prisons were being built at an ever-increasing pace in order to accommodate the new services of the modernising state.
Labelling, describing, showing, separating and directing became important issues in an urban environment that was becoming more complex and more anonymous every day.

I return to the stamps.

Being coterminous with the building and labelling of the Seraskerât Gate, the Duloz issue fell under similar influences. Self-evidently a stamp for the post, the need was felt nevertheless to label the stamp as being for the post, i.e., the “Post of the Ottoman Empire”. Description was felt to be more Western and, therefore, more up-to-date than mere laudation “Sublime Ottoman Empire”. 
© John Dunn.

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