Possessing Nature in the Late Ottoman Period: Afterlife of Animals as Skeletons and Taxidermy Collections

Göçmengil G.

Animals in Anatolian and Turkish History, İstanbul, Türkiye, 16 - 17 Mayıs 2024, ss.1-2

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-2
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Throughout its history, live animals in the Ottoman Empire were turned into commodities of spectacle entertainment, either as labor or for personal charisma and curiosity. Although this understanding continued until the mid-19th century, with the proliferation of zoo premises, personal hunting collections and educational museum collections, the skeletons of these animals or their taxidermy collections continued to be used in other ways after their end of life.

This post-life use is generally documented from the mid-19th century onwards and is primarily characterized by collections used for medical and zoological education. Parallel to this, the afterlife of the animals collected irregularly around the Ottoman Sultanate and the Yıldız Palace turned into a rare cabinet of curiosities consisting of specimens, including stuffed animals and skeletons, scattered around the “proto” zoo.
In the late 19th and 20th centuries, both in Ottoman medical, veterinary, and secondary educational institutions, as well as in American (Robert College, Merzifon Anatolian College) and French (Saint Joseph) schools, and their museums, taxidermy collections were systematically assembled, experts were brought in for taxidermy and/or attempts were made to train them.

In the late Ottoman period, the boundaries of “possessing nature” generally disappeared with little trace of the collections gathered around the Ottoman Sultanate due to poor preservation, those collected for education in schools were generally damaged by institutional apathy and neglect of the specimens, and today, except for a few successful examples, both the collections themselves and the history of their acquisition have been lost. In general, the use of animals in the afterlife has alternated between being pragmatic curiosity cabinet objects or educational specimens, but in neither case has the preservation and survival of the collections been long-lasting.