AN OTTOMAN MUSEOLOGIST AND ARCHAEOLOGIST: OSMAN HAMDI BEY

Abstract

In the last periods of the Ottoman Empire, students were sent to various countries of Europe in order to follow the developments. İbrahim Edhem Pasha was among the first students sent to Europe for education by the Ottoman Empire and was an enlightened person who served in high positions such as minister and grand vizier for a period. He also sent his son Osman Hamdi to France for a good education. Osman Hamdi Bey, known as the Turkish painter, worked in many different fields such as bureaucracy, diplomacy, art and archeology; he is an important figure who strived to move his country forward in the fields of art, archeology and history. Osman Hamdi visited exhibitions and museums while studying law in France. As a result of his interest in painting and archaeology, he enrolled in the Paris School of Fine Arts. Here, in addition to the art lessons he took from important artists of the period, he also took archaeology and asar-ı atika courses. He saw how conscious and systematic Europeans were in these fields, and when he returned to his country, he carried out various studies to create this awareness. Among these efforts were his personal presence at the head of the excavations, the Asar-ı Atika Regulation, which he was instrumental in enacting in order to prevent the smuggling of antiquities abroad, and the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi, the first fine arts school of the Ottoman Empire, which he built. The school of fine arts, which he opened in order to bring the education he received in Europe to his own land, trained students by important architects and artists. After becoming the director of the museum, Osman Hamdi Bey went into the field and headed archaeological excavations. He was also the first Turkish archaeologist. In this study, Osman Hamdi Bey's contributions to the fields of museology and archaeology are discussed. In this article, which is prepared with the documentation technique, one of the qualitative research methods, Osman Hamdi Bey, one of the intellectual figures of the late Ottoman period, is introduced in different aspects and the importance of his works for Turkish museology and archaeology is explained.