As France hosts an ambitious Turkish cultural season with a major exhibition in Paris, the relationship between France and Turkey has rarely seemed less straightforward, writes David Tresilian In what might be seen as a spectacular example of one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing, the French government embarked last year on a "season of Turkey in France," a country-wide celebration of all things Turkish. At the same time, it is continuing efforts to block Turkey's application to join the European Union. Perhaps as a result of such mixed messages, the season of Turkey in France is turning out to be a somewhat ambiguous celebration. Described as an opportunity to draw attention to the historical and contemporary relationship between France and Turkey and to "a tradition of friendship going back to the 16th century," the season consists of more than 400 cultural and other events, including exhibitions, concerts and lectures, taking place at venues across France with a similar programme of French-themed events taking place in Turkey. Getting underway with the visit of Turkish president Abdullah G�l to France last year to open an exhibition, De Byzance � Istanbul, un port pour deux continents, which is at the Grand Palais on the Champs - Elys...es in Paris until January, the season runs until March and is intended to encourage cultural, educational, scientific and economic cooperation between France and Turkey. It includes a set of exhibitions at the Louvre on Ottoman dress, ancient Smyrna, and the Hittite civilisation of ancient Anatolia, an exhibition on the city-planning of Istanbul at the Cit... de l'architecture in Paris, and festivals of contemporary Turkish literature, music, theatre and film. For five days last year the Eiffel Tower was lit up with the red and white colours of the Turkish flag, replacing its regular night-time illumination. However, a first taste of the effects of the ambiguous political background came during G�l's visit, when French president Nicolas Sarkozy, reportedly wanting to reduce the visibility of a season decided during the presidency of his predecessor Jacques Chirac, restricted the exhibition's opening to a mere half-hour ceremony. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, this was to avoid "showing himself in public with the president of a country whose entry to the European Union he opposes." At a working dinner held between the two presidents, there was "agreement on everything," the newspaper commented, aside from on "the essential issue" of Turkey's application to join the European Union. "The two men decided not to talk about delicate issues," it went on, G�l deciding instead to show that "his country, like Europe, had the kind of 'soft power' that would allow it to work for peace and stability in the region and for the spread of the values of democracy, secularism and the market economy." While France has never made a secret of its hostility to Turkish membership of the EU, this received a kind of official sanction with Sarkozy's victory in the 2007 French presidential elections. Sarkozy had expressed his opposition to Turkish EU membership before the elections took place, and he has since reiterated it even though accession negotiations with Turkey have been underway since 2005 and the country has been recognised as a candidate country since 1999. A blow to Franco-Turkish relations over Turkey's bid for EU membership came in 2004, when an article was added to the French constitution stating that French acceptance of any new entrant to the EU would require a referendum. Since this procedure has never been used for any other country and French hostility to Turkish membership has been confirmed in a succession of opinion polls, this article seems aimed directly at Turkey. A 2006 vote among French MPs designed to make it an offence in France "to question the Armenian genocide," referring to the massacres carried out against the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population during the First World War, is also believed to have angered Turkey. However, it has not just been French opposition that has slowed negotiations towards Turkish entry. According to the rules governing accession to the EU, candidate countries must meet requirements regarding the stability of institutions, the rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities, and they are required to demonstrate the existence of a functioning market economy. They must also have the capacity to implement the so-called acquis, a set of 35 "chapters" dealing with everything from the free movement of goods to company law, taxation, the judiciary and fundamental rights and institutions. Thus far, negotiations have been opened with Turkey on 11 of these, with only one having been provisionally closed. In 2006, the EU announced that because Turkey had not implemented its obligations under EU rules towards Cyprus, eight chapters could not be opened and no further chapter could be provisionally closed. This block to further negotiations has not yet gone away, even if a recent EU report on enlargement noted that Turkey had fulfilled the political criteria for accession and had made progress on the reform of the judiciary, civil-military relations, and cultural rights. The report noted that Turkey was a functioning market economy and praised its "overall level of alignment" in areas such as the free movement of goods, intellectual property rights, enterprise and industrial policy, anti- trust policy, consumer and health protection, science and research, and energy. "Turkey has continued to develop a positive role contributing to stabilisation in regions such as the South Caucasus and the Middle East," the report continued. "In this context, diplomatic efforts to normalise relations with Armenia have moved forward," not least in the signature of an agreement between Turkey and Armenia last October, reportedly helped along by the US and France. *** Though it sits perhaps uncomfortably against this background, De Byzance � Istanbul, un port pour deux continents is a splendid example of French savoir-faire in grand exhibition making, bringing together some 300 objects from public and private collections in France, Turkey and elsewhere. It is designed to illustrate the theme of the meeting of two continents in the city of Byzantium, which became Constantinople in the 4th century CE, and, following Ottoman conquest in 1453, Istanbul. In this the exhibition spectacularly succeeds, though it is not the fault of the curator, Nazan 'l�er, director of the Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul, if the later Ottoman parts of the exhibition are richer and more satisfying to visit than the earlier Byzantine sections. Passing from the Byzantine galleries containing exhibits from Constantinople on the ground floor of the Grand Palais to those dedicated to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul on the first floor is rather like going from black and white to Technicolor. While the architectural elements and white marble statuary that make up much of the Constantinople part of the exhibition are all that is left, or at least all that is readily transportable, of the built environment of the city, on going to the upstairs galleries the visitor enters an environment of gorgeously coloured textiles, ceramics, illustrated books and manuscripts and paintings and jewelry that make up the Ottoman section dedicated to the city of Istanbul. When the Royal Academy in London mounted an exhibition on Constantinople last year, Byzantium 330-1453 (reviewed in the Weekly in November 2008), it focused on the religious images that made up the major part of Byzantine iconography, including icons lent by St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai. Those parts of the London exhibition dedicated to home life in Constantinople and to the Byzantine court were less successful than those presenting Byzantine religious art, as is perhaps only natural given the magnificent visual materials available for the latter and the comparative dearth of surviving materials for the former. The present exhibition's first Byzantine gallery is a darkened, double-volume space that ingeniously makes use of installed columns to suggest the dimensions and character of a Byzantine hall. On display here are major pieces presented against the background of a sketched-in chronological timeline. These include a set of fragments of marble statues dating from the 2nd century CE when Constantinople, capital of the eastern Roman Empire from 330 CE, was still the provincial Roman centre of Byzantium. The statues, originally commissioned as decoration for a fountain, were discovered in 1949 during excavations in the Silahtaraga area of Istanbul when work was underway to build a power station. There are also a pair of 10th-century griffins, Persian Sassanid in inspiration and lent to the exhibition by the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. These seem to indicate belated iconographic influence from the Byzantines' former enemy, which was defeated during the Arab conquests of the 7th century CE. The first long gallery takes the story of the city to 1453, date of the final Ottoman conquest, the second, Ottoman gallery beginning upstairs and signalled by passage through a display of architectural elements. These include domes, which are a major element of Ottoman architecture, particularly mosque architecture. Images of the interiors of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman domes are projected onto the ceiling space of the transitional area between the exhibition's two parts, the effect being to mark a watershed between one civilisation, Roman and Byzantine, and another, Muslim and Ottoman, whose presence in the city began with the conquest of Constantinople and its transformation into Istanbul. Probably the most famous Byzantine domes are those of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the cathedral church of holy wisdom built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century CE, which was turned into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of the city and is today a museum. The interiors of these domes would originally have been decorated with paintings and mosaics, some of which still exist in situ. Images of Byzantine dome architecture are projected in the company of images of domes from Ottoman mosques, showing how architectural elements from Byzantine architecture were both retained and transformed by Ottoman architects. The exhibition's Istanbul section begins with Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, and though it displays some familiar materials, such as a version of the famous portrait of Mehmed done by the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini in 1480, there are also materials that are a lot less familiar, at least to international audiences. These include a fascinating notebook from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul that contains doodled sketches made by the young Mehmed before he came to the throne. They include practice versions of his tughra, a kind of ornamental Ottoman signature affixed to documents to certify their authenticity. From here, the exhibition spreads out across a set of thematic sections, from that dedicated to Suleiman the Magnificent, probably the most famous Ottoman sultan who reigned from 1520 to 1566, to those on life at the Ottoman court, the Istanbul street scene, and everyday life in Ottoman Istanbul. Many of the materials displayed in these sections are interchangeable, consisting of Ottoman ceramics, textiles, carpets, jewellery, illuminated manuscripts, military items and everyday objects that could fit under almost any theme. Some of the objects are clearly luxury items intended for aristocratic patrons, while others, such as examples of the famous Ottoman ceramics produced at Iznik and decorated with characteristic tulips, were probably within the means of less elevated clients. Striking exhibits here include 16th-century Ottoman carpets from collections in Berlin and Istanbul, ceramics lent by the Louvre, and European paintings and other images, beginning with 16th and 17th-century pictures. These include the famous painting of Suleiman the Magnificent, brought from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum and attributed to Titian, and end with nostalgic, picture-postcard imagery familiar from 19th and 20th-century orientalism. An interesting chapter by Semra Germaner of Istanbul's Mimar Sinan University in the exhibition catalogue comments on what the author calls "Ottoman westernisation and western nostalgia" for the "oriental city." While visiting western painters and photographers specialised in the oriental and the picturesque, represented here by paintings by otherwise little-known European painters like Fausto Zonaro (1854-1929), Carlo Bossoli (1815-1884) and the better- known Jean L...on G...r'me, 19th-century Ottoman Turkish intellectuals were looking to Europe and particularly to France for new forms of architecture, city-planning and iconography. There are some excellent paintings by early 20th-century Ottoman artists on display, masters of the European styles of the time, which show the clear influence of European techniques and models. Germaner mentions Osman Hamdi Bey (1842- 1910), founder of the Istanbul Ecole des beaux-arts and director of the Imperial Museum, and Abd�lmecid Effendi (1868-1944), a son of Sultan Abd�laziz, whose work Beethoven au palais shows the imperial family gathered for a Beethoven recital in a European bourgeois interior. *** The last two themes in the Ottoman section, "religion and cosmopolitanism" and "reform and transformation," seem to speak as much to contemporary Turkey and its efforts to meet EU accession criteria as they do to Ottoman and late Ottoman Istanbul. Installed under the first heading are a set of tombstones with Ottoman Turkish, Greek and Armenian inscriptions, these being part of a display of items bearing witnesses to the city's Greek, Armenian and Jewish minorities, many of them dispersed during the collapse of the Ottoman state under the stresses of the First World War and subsequent foreign invasion. Under the second heading there is mention of the occupation of Istanbul by allied forces in 1919, the end of the Ottoman sultanate and the advent of the Turkish republic in 1923. This history has been intensively revisited in recent years, particularly the fate of the empire's Armenian minorities. The exhibition's final sections return to double-volume spaces in order to present the "eternal Istanbul" made famous by Nobel-prize winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who also contributes an essay to the exhibition catalogue. Pamuk's is a city of loss and melancholy, a kind of Middle Eastern Venice, marginalised after 1923 when the Turkish capital moved to Ankara. Melancholic Istanbul is given visual identity through a series of atmospheric black-and-white projections, mixing images of Ottoman Istanbul with photographs from the 1950s, 60s and later. There are also some more recent colour images that evoke a different mood. The exhibition's last room deals with finds made in Istanbul in 2004 during the building of the city's metro. The most important of these were made at Yenikapi, where the remains of the ancient port of Theodosiacus were uncovered, together with ancient galleys carrying cargoes of amphoras. Some 24 hulls have been discovered, finds from which have been brought to Paris. These are important because they bear witness to Byzantine shipping, but the objects on display, all found within the last decade during excavations for the metro, also lend depth to the exhibition's overall message of Istanbul as an urban palimpsest, its multiple layers still present beneath the city that greets visitors today.
