BAU collaborates with the University of Cambridge to hold an international conference examining the notion of the urban palimpsests in the Eastern Mediterranean context. This international conference which will take place from May 7-10, 2019 grows out of the Impact of the Ancient City a five-year, a European Research Council–funded research project led by Prof. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and senior researcher Dr. Elizabeth Key Fowden based at the University of Cambridge. Since March 2017, Dr Suna Çağaptay from the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Bahçeşehir University has been working as an area coordinator (Eastern Mediterranean cities) for the Impact of the Ancient City project.
The conference aims to discuss the term palimpsest as an urban metaphor. It is a commonplace today to speak of cities with long histories as palimpsests. But the multiple texts of a palimpsest rarely relate to each other in any way, besides having been written on the same material. How can the same be said of the urban layers of a city? The image of the palimpsest is attractive because it evokes the invisible city, its concealed layers, its absent presences. This conference will investigate examples of Greco-Roman cities across the Eastern Mediterranean from the late antique to the contemporary period that will test whether the image of the palimpsest can be made useful to the archaeologist and historian of the city. The tangible traces of the Greco-Roman city were made meaningful through diverse ways of reflecting on the past, many of which diverge widely from modern modes of identification and signification. For this reason, the sessions of case studies follow initial papers on the urban imagination in four broad cultural spheres that have animated the Eastern Mediterranean over time: Arabic, Byzantine, Frankish and Ottoman.
For more information and details: https://impanccit.wixsite.com/impanccit
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