Almost every serious study of the Seljuk and Ottoman buildings of Amasya carries the same reference somewhere in its bibliography: Albert Gabriel, Monuments turcs d'Anatolie, volume II. The French architect and art historian Albert-Louis Gabriel came to Amasya in the spring of 1928 and again in the autumn of 1930 to measure, draw and photograph the city's mosques, madrasas and tombs. The material appeared in the second volume of his survey, devoted to Amasya, Tokat and Sivas, and for a long time it remained the most detailed record of the city's monuments published in a Western language. The restitution drawing of the Darüşşifa that is reproduced in encyclopaedias today, and the early date proposed in the continuing debate over the Hilfet Gazi Tomb, both come from his work.

Gabriel's connection with Turkey reached far beyond those two short journeys. In 1926 he began teaching archaeology and art history at the Istanbul Darülfünun; commissioned by the Ministry of Education, he travelled through Anatolia for more than a decade; and in 1930 he played the leading part in founding the French Institute of Archaeology in Istanbul, the nucleus of today's French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA), becoming its first director. Bursa and Istanbul made him an honorary citizen, and the Turkish Historical Society elected him an honorary member. The long obituary published in Belleten after his death was written by Semavi Eyice and is one of the principal sources for this biography.

Family and Education

Albert-Louis Gabriel was born on 2 August 1883 in the small town of Cerisières in the Haute-Marne department of France. According to Eyice he was born in the house of his maternal grandfather; his father was an experienced architect. He received his early schooling in Bar-sur-Aube. In the study of the Istanbul institute's foundation by the French historian Jacques Thobie, his birthday is given as 3 August; Eyice's obituary and the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam entry agree on 2 August.

Despite the insistence of those who wanted to steer him onto another path, he chose his father's profession. While studying architecture at the École nationale des beaux-arts in Paris, he also attended the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne, and he graduated from both, as a qualified architect and with a licence in letters. Thobie writes that he entered the École des beaux-arts at the age of seventeen. His ability was noticed early in his career: in 1903 he won the Jean Leclaire prize of the Académie des beaux-arts, and in 1910 he received an honourable mention at the Salon des artistes français for watercolours and survey drawings made in Germany and Spain.

Delos, Rhodes and Fustat

Gabriel came to archaeology through the French School at Athens (École française d'Athènes). Between 1908 and 1911 he worked as architect on the School's excavations on the Aegean island of Delos, drawing the plans and sections of the Hellenistic houses that were being uncovered, along with their mosaic floors and even their furnishings. These plates were exhibited in Paris in 1911 and won him a second-class medal. Eyice notes that Gabriel's lifelong interest in ordinary domestic architecture began on Delos. It was in these years, in 1908, that he first set foot in Istanbul; but, as Eyice remarks, nothing is known of the impression the city of Abdülhamid II's last years made on the young architect.

His real encounter with Turkish architecture came on Rhodes, which was then about to pass out of Ottoman hands. The TDV entry dates this assignment to 1911, Thobie to 1913. Gabriel studied the castle of the Knights of St John and the military, civil and religious buildings of the town. When the island was occupied by Italy on 4 May 1912, he published two articles taking the Turkish side in La Revue socialiste, the review edited by Jean Jaurès. During the First World War he served in the French navy as a reserve officer and interpreter; according to the TDV entry he was for a time aboard a ship shelling the Anatolian coast off Kastellorizo. After the war he directed the restoration of the Auberge de France, one of the knights' inns on Rhodes, which had been altered while used as a house in the Turkish period, and returned it to its earlier form by 1921. When a bomb damaged the building towards the end of the Second World War, it was restored again under his direction between 1946 and 1950.

In 1919-1920 he took part in the excavations at Fustat together with Ali Bahgat Bey, director of the Arab Museum in Cairo. In 1921 he submitted to the Sorbonne a principal thesis on the walls of Rhodes and a secondary thesis on the Fustat excavations and the origins of the Arab house in Egypt, receiving the degree of docteur ès lettres. He expanded the Rhodes thesis into two volumes published as La Cité de Rhodes; the first dealt with the topography and military buildings of the town, the second with its civil and religious architecture. His Rhodes survey drawings, shown at the Salon des artistes français in 1923, earned him a first-class medal and the Louis Fould prize of the Académie des beaux-arts.

Academic Career and Istanbul

His teaching career began in 1923, when he became maître de conférences in art history at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Caen. In 1925 he moved to the University of Strasbourg as professor; in the same year he made study tours in Syria, then under French mandate, and worked at Palmyra. His article on the ruins of Qasr al-Hayr from the reign of the Umayyad caliph Hisham is, in Eyice's words, his only major article on Islamic art outside Anatolia.

In January 1926 the Istanbul Darülfünun invited him to its chair of archaeology. In the preface to Monuments turcs d'Anatolie, Gabriel explains that the invitation came with a condition: his teaching was to give room to the national antiquities of the country. The lectures he gave at the Faculty of Letters until 1930 were translated into Turkish by the librarian Fehmi Edhem Karatay, who knew French well. In these years he wrote his first typological essay on the mosques of Istanbul (1926), an article examining the views of Istanbul and Galata in Matrakçı Nasuh's Beyân-ı Menâzil from a topographical point of view, and a series of pieces on Turkish art history for the magazine Hayat.

The French Institute of Archaeology in Istanbul

France had long planned a counterpart in Istanbul to its schools in Athens and Rome. The Russians had maintained such an institution since 1895, and the Germans had opened the Istanbul branch of the German Archaeological Institute at the beginning of 1930. As Thobie relates, a report by René Dussaud dated 21 May 1929 proposed an institute in the buildings of the former French embassy and named Gabriel as the intended director. The project was carried forward by two friends, Jean Marx and Gabriel. Gabriel was formally appointed on 30 July 1930, took up his post on 1 October, and from October 1930 lived in the building of the old dragomans' office in the garden of the former French embassy in Beyoğlu. The Turkish government recognised the institution early in 1931; the TDV entry gives 1 February 1931 as the date of its official opening. The government had stipulated that the institute should work on Turkish history, archaeology, art history, geography and literature, and Gabriel kept faithfully to this programme.

Gabriel directed the institute until 1941. During the Second World War he returned to France; after the war he was reinstated and came back to Istanbul in May 1946. In this second period, however, he arrived each year in May and stayed only a few months. According to Eyice, his old influential friends were no longer in office, so the institute could not obtain adequate funding, its library could not grow, and in winter the building went unheated. Thobie, for his part, records that as early as the 1930s Gabriel wished to leave Istanbul in the winter, that this became a lasting habit, and that Ambassador Massigli expressed the hope that the director would at least occasionally appear at the institute. In 1956 the epigraphist Louis Robert was appointed in his place. Eyice writes that when he visited Gabriel at Bar-sur-Aube in 1967, Gabriel complained bitterly of the new director's attitude, and that the annual Anatolian bibliography Gabriel had begun to publish in 1951 had been discontinued by the new management.

Anatolian Journeys and Monuments Turcs d'Anatolie

Gabriel had already travelled over large parts of the provinces of Bursa, İzmir, Aydın, Konya, Antalya and Adana; but finding that no publication offered a sound basis for the study of the Islamic monuments of Turkey as a whole, he decided to extend his inquiry to the entire territory of the Republic. The Ministry of Education in Ankara adopted the project, paid for the journeys and assigned a senior Turkish official to accompany him on each of them. The sequence given in the preface runs as follows: in October-November 1927, with Fehmi Edhem Bey, Kütahya, Afyonkarahisar, Akşehir, Konya, Karaman, Niğde, Aksaray, Nevşehir and Kayseri; in April-May 1928, with Aziz (Ogan) Bey, Inspector General of Antiquities, Kayseri, then Sivas, Tokat, Niksar and Amasya; in October-November 1928, with Ahmed Tevhid Bey, Inspector General of Libraries, Niğde, Adana, Tarsus, Silifke, Mut, Karaman and Konya; in October-November 1929, Kayseri and Sivas once more; and in October-November 1930, again with Tevhid Bey, the region stretching from Sivas to the sea, that is Tokat, Amasya and Merzifon, together with Divriği.

The first volume of the work, covering Kayseri and Niğde, was published in Paris in 1931. In the preface Gabriel defines its purpose as providing historians of Islamic art with documentation on the Turkish monuments of Anatolia that would be as complete as possible, and states that all the survey drawings and photographs were unpublished and that, with a few exceptions, the monuments themselves had never been published. His method was clear: for each important town, a short historical note and a list of buildings, with a town plan where possible; then a description only of those buildings he judged of archaeological interest, setting out their particular features and dating them. Most of the inscriptions had already been published by Turkish scholars. Gabriel writes that he drew on the epigraphic collections of Halil Edhem Bey, İsmail Hakkı (Uzunçarşılı), Mehmed Behçet and Mübarek Galib, and that the copies of newly found inscriptions were checked on the spot or from photographs and translated by Ahmed Tevhid Bey. Among the sources of the first volume is İsmail Hakkı's 1345 (1927) collection of the inscriptions of Tokat, Niksar, Turhal, Pazar and Amasya.

Eyice saw the value of these volumes as reaching beyond the survey drawings. In the years Gabriel travelled, most of the monuments were ruinous and neglected; additions that spoiled their original character, the condition of their surroundings and the hard living conditions of provincial towns forced him to work within short periods and to complete some of the drawings after returning to Istanbul. Eyice therefore regards some omissions and errors in the plans as natural, but says that the finest feature of Gabriel's books is the drawings showing the buildings as they would have looked when intact. In a note to the obituary he adds that many of the monuments in the two volumes were later demolished entirely and can now be known only from the lines, plans and pictures on Gabriel's pages. Gabriel had planned to publish the other artistic centres, above all Konya, in the same format; the plan was never carried out.

Gabriel in Amasya

Gabriel came to Amasya twice. The first visit was in April-May 1928, at the end of the journey with Aziz Ogan that took in Sivas, Tokat and Niksar. The second was in October-November 1930, on the tour with Ahmed Tevhid Bey that covered Tokat, Amasya and Merzifon. With this second journey, in the words of the preface, the study of the region between Sivas and the sea was completed. The preface to the first volume, dated December 1930, announces that the second volume, covering the provinces of Amasya, Tokat and Sivas, was in the press.

The publication date of the second volume is given in two ways. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam and library catalogues give Paris 1934; Eyice's detailed bibliography in Belleten records the volume as "Paris 1932, 204 pages, 120 illustrations and 79 plates". According to the bibliography of the TDV entry on Amasya, the section devoted to the city occupies pages 3-74 of the volume. The book's photographs were printed as separate plates in photogravure. The work was translated into Turkish by Nuri Fudayl Kıcıroğlu and published in 2022 as Anadolu'daki Türk Anıtları.

In the Turkish "art cities" he visited, Gabriel paid little attention to buildings of the Ottoman period. The exception Eyice points out is Amasya, where Gabriel does discuss Ottoman works as well. The Amasya section therefore covers, alongside the Seljuk and Ilkhanid buildings, the mosques, madrasas and hospices of the fifteenth century, when the city was a princes' sanjak. Among the drawings in which Gabriel recorded ruinous buildings as they would have looked when intact, Eyice singles out the Amasya Bimarhane and the Hüseyin Ağa Madrasa in the same city. Also known as the Kapıağası or Büyükağa Madrasa, this is the octagonal madrasa built by Hüseyin Ağa, chief gatekeeper (kapı ağası) of Bayezid II. His restitution of the Darüşşifa is reproduced in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam entry "Amasya Dârüşşifâsı" as figure 32 of the book.

In later scholarship on the buildings of Amasya, Gabriel's views remain part of the discussion. At the Hilfet Gazi Madrasa and Tomb he shares the opinion that the madrasa was converted from a church, as the Dânişmendnâme relates; Metin Sözen holds the same view. As for the date of the tomb, the prevailing opinion places it in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, while Doğan Kuban proposes the middle of the twelfth century and Gabriel and Oktay Aslanapa the year 540 (1145-46). The pages Gabriel devoted to this building are pages 57-59 and plate XIV of the second volume. He discusses the Gökmedrese Mosque on pages 20-25 and plates VIII-IX, and the Yörgüç Paşa Mosque on pages 31-32.

At the Bayezid Paşa Mosque of 1414, Gabriel's interpretation has shaped the reading of the craftsmen's inscriptions on the building. The panels in the mosque's portico name masters bearing both the title "mimar" and the title "muallim". According to Semavi Eyice's TDV entry, Gabriel thought that those called "mimar" were not designers in today's sense but men who supervised construction, while the "muallim" may have been foremen or, in modern terms, site managers, and that one bearer of the same title might even be regarded as the assistant of another. Eyice adds that the real meaning of these titles has still not been fully clarified. Gabriel's discussion of the mosque occupies pages 25-31.

Some of the photographs Gabriel took in Amasya survive today. The Aziz Ogan Collection at the Boğaziçi University Archives and Documentation Centre holds negatives belonging to the second volume of the book, among them views of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, the Gökmedrese and the Darüşşifa. The fact that Aziz Ogan was Gabriel's travelling companion on the 1928 journey may explain how these negatives came into his collection; the archive record gives no information on this point.

Eastern Anatolia, Bursa and the Bosphorus Fortresses

In April-May and October-November 1932 Gabriel travelled through Mardin, Diyarbakır, Hasankeyf, Dara, Nusaybin, Harran, Urfa, Bitlis, Ahlat and Harput. The two-volume Voyages archéologiques dans la Turquie orientale that resulted from these journeys was published in 1940; this time he was helped with the reading of inscriptions by Jean Sauvaget. In the preface he writes that, owing to certain difficulties, he could not apply the programme of the earlier volumes unchanged in this region. In 1934 he spent a week in Isfahan and prepared a long article on its Friday Mosque.

His most extensive work on Ottoman architecture was devoted to Bursa. Until the Second World War, with the help of young architects assigned by the ministry, foremost among them A. Saim Ülgen, he documented the city's citadel, mosques, bedesten, khans, tombs and houses. Une capitale turque: Brousse-Bursa was published in two volumes; the TDV entry dates the edition to 1958, Eyice's obituary to 1956. Bursa made him an honorary citizen on 14 November 1955, Istanbul on 19 January 1955. During the war years in France he published Châteaux turcs du Bosphore (1943), which presents Anadoluhisarı, Rumelihisarı and Yedikule with their military and technical features. The two-volume monograph on the architect Sinan that he planned with M. Fuad Köprülü at Atatürk's wish was never completed.

Final Years

On returning to France in 1941 he was appointed professor of the history of Islamic and Oriental art at the Collège de France, where he taught until his retirement in 1953. In his later years he worked at Yazılıkaya, between Eskişehir and Afyonkarahisar, on the Phrygian city of Midas, and wrote two volumes of the Phrygie series (1952, 1965). In these volumes he gave ample space to the village houses of Yazılıkaya, so that the interest in houses that began on Delos lasted into his last books.

After retiring from the institute in Istanbul in 1956, he spent the last sixteen years of his life at Bar-sur-Aube, on the banks of the Aube, in the house of more than twenty rooms he had inherited from his father. Eyice, who stayed there as a guest for three days in June 1967, describes the house as filled with mementoes, pictures and survey drawings brought from Turkey and with a rich library. His date of death is given with a difference of two days. The telegram sent to Ankara by the Turkish Embassy in Paris on 26 December 1972, and the Belleten notice based on it, give 25 December; Eyice's obituary and the TDV entry accept 23 December 1972. The funeral was held on 27 December in the church of Saint-Pierre at Bar-sur-Aube, and he was buried in the town cemetery. The present whereabouts of the pictures, drawings and library left to his adopted heir are unknown, and the memoirs of Turkey he was writing in his last days were never published.

Honours

Gabriel was elected a full member of the German Archaeological Institute in 1932, a corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1933, an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society in 1940 and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1960. Ankara University made him an honorary professor in 1950, and Istanbul University awarded him an honorary doctorate on 24 January 1968. He was a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. Between 1930 and 1956 he lectured at Istanbul University, taught art history at the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography of Ankara University, and spoke on Turkish art in Geneva, Belgrade, Zagreb, Brussels and Amsterdam.

His Place in the Study of Amasya

Gabriel's work in Amasya was the product of two short visits, and he himself acknowledged that he had worked within narrow limits of time and that later monographs would make good its shortcomings. Even so, it was in this volume that the monuments of Amasya were first published together with systematic survey drawings and photographs. Today, when the craftsmen's inscriptions of the Bayezid Paşa Mosque, the date of the Hilfet Gazi Tomb or the original layout of the Darüşşifa are discussed, his measurements, plans and proposals are still used as points of comparison. His negatives, which show the condition of buildings before their restorations, are also among the visual documents to consult for the state of the city's monuments in the early twentieth century.

Chronology

2 August 1883: Born at Cerisières in Haute-Marne (3 August according to Thobie).

1903: Awarded the Jean Leclaire prize of the Académie des beaux-arts.

1908: First visit to Istanbul.

1908-1911: Worked as architect on the Delos excavations for the French School at Athens.

1911-1914: Worked on the buildings of the Knights on Rhodes (the assignment began in 1913 according to Thobie).

1919-1920: Took part in the Fustat excavations with Ali Bahgat Bey.

1921: Doctorate at the Sorbonne with a thesis on the walls of Rhodes.

1923: Became maître de conférences in art history at the University of Caen.

1925: Became professor at the University of Strasbourg.

January 1926: Began teaching archaeology and art history at the Istanbul Darülfünun.

April-May 1928: Studied Sivas, Tokat, Niksar and Amasya with Aziz Ogan.

October-November 1930: Studied Tokat, Amasya and Merzifon with Ahmed Tevhid Bey.

30 July 1930: Appointed director of the French Institute of Archaeology in Istanbul.

1931: First volume of Monuments turcs d'Anatolie, on Kayseri and Niğde, published; the institute recognised by the Turkish government.

1932-1934: Second volume, on Amasya, Tokat and Sivas, published (1932 according to Eyice, 1934 according to TDV).

1940: Voyages archéologiques dans la Turquie orientale published; elected honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society.

1941-1953: Professor of the history of Islamic and Oriental art at the Collège de France.

1955: Made an honorary citizen of Istanbul and Bursa.

1956: Retired as director of the institute in Istanbul.

24 January 1968: Honorary doctorate from Istanbul University.

23 December 1972: Died at Bar-sur-Aube (25 December according to the telegram and the Belleten notice).

2022: Monuments turcs d'Anatolie translated into Turkish.

Bibliography

The following sources were used in this article:

Online sources