Among the books through which generations first learned Ottoman history at school is one that bears the signature of a teacher born in Amasya. Mustafa Cezar was born in 1920 in this city on the Yeşilırmak; he followed a long professional path from Anatolian primary-school classrooms to a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, and left behind well over a hundred publications. He is remembered above all for the illustrated and mapped Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi (Detailed Ottoman History) and for his study Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (The Opening to the West in Art and Osman Hamdi). His less familiar books are among the first comprehensive studies of Ottoman social history, of the fires of Istanbul and of Ottoman market architecture, and the name of the city where he was born appears in the pages of several of them.

A Child of the Republic Born in Amasya

Cezar's year and place of birth are given in the same way in every biographical text written about him: 1920, Amasya. The sources give only the year; his exact birthday is not known. We found no detail about his family, or about the neighborhood or house where he spent his childhood. The only family fact comes from the biography in the Türk ve Dünya Ünlüleri Ansiklopedisi (Encyclopedia of Turkish and World Celebrities): Cezar lost his father while still at middle school and continued his education by working.

A profile published in Milliyet Pazar in 2002 describes him as one of "the generation of the Republic that wrestled with Anatolia's poverty and lack of means," and calls Amasya "the charming provincial capital of the Ottomans," saying he grew up here absorbing the culture of the empire. These sentences do not report a documented fact; they are a writer's impression. Even so, the history of Amasya gives the impression some ground. The city was one of the places where Ottoman princes served as sanjak governors and where members of the dynasty destined for the throne learned statecraft; Bayezid II, too, had governed here before he took the throne. That a man who would write Ottoman history for a lifetime was born in such a city lends the story a certain flavor. We found no evidence that Cezar devoted a separate book or article to Amasya; the city does, however, appear in three of his major works, treated in its own context as part of Ottoman history and urbanism.

For Anatolian children who went to school in the early years of the Republic and grew up in poverty, the most open door was the teachers' school. Boarding without fees and gaining a profession quickly ran through these schools, and Cezar's life path passes through that door as well.

From Teachers' School to the Gazi Institute of Education

Cezar graduated from the Sivas Teachers' School in 1938 and began teaching at a primary school. According to the biography as transmitted, his first post was in a district of Giresun; the source does not name the district. After working at a few schools he entered the History-Geography Department of the Gazi Institute of Education in Ankara and graduated in 1946. The institute trained teachers for middle and secondary schools, so Cezar moved from the primary-school classroom to teaching history.

In these years he again taught in Anatolia. According to the memorial notice of the ÇEKÜL Foundation, he worked as a history teacher and principal at middle schools in Dörtyol, Yalova and Istanbul Fındıklı. His writing life belongs to the same period. His first research article appeared in 1948 in Aylık Ansiklopedi; his first book came out the following year, in 1949. Biographical sources list three books from 1949 under the titles Tarih I, Tarih II and Tarih III; from the titles one senses that they were history books for school use, but we could not see their contents.

Eight years passed between the first book and the first edition of a multi-volume Ottoman history. This is notable as a sign of Cezar's working pace. The Milliyet article points the same way when it says that beneath his "calm appearance" there was an "unending hunger for work and writing." He himself would later say that by the time he came to the academy "I had been working in the field of history for years, collecting documents," a reminder that his acquaintance with archives went back to his teaching years.

The Years at the Academy of Fine Arts

In 1959 Cezar was brought to the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul as a teacher. This date appears in the ÇEKÜL Foundation's text; another source passes over the same event as "the late 1950s." The firmest evidence comes from Cezar himself: in a speech delivered in the university auditorium on 24 February 2004 he said, "since 1959, when I came to the Academy, that is, forty-five years," and in the same speech he explained that when he arrived his field was history and that he turned to art history only later. The academy was the continuation of an institution founded in 1883 under the leadership of Osman Hamdi Bey as the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (School of Fine Arts); in this respect Cezar's later book on Osman Hamdi also carries a link of place.

At the academy he taught Turkish History, Turkish Art History and the History of the Revolution. The art historian Semra Germaner, one of his students in those years, recalls that when she entered the painting department in 1962 the courses on Turkish art were given by Nurettin Ormancı, Kerim Silivrili, Mustafa Cezar and Rıfkı Melul Meriç, covering carpets and tiles with architecture taking priority. When Germaner returned from Paris in 1973 and was appointed assistant at the academy, the situation was much the same: art history courses belonged to the Painting Department, Nermin Sinemoğlu was responsible for Western art, and the courses on Turkish-Islamic art were taught by Cezar, Ormancı, Silivrili and Nejat Diyarbekirli. This testimony shows that for his first twenty years at the academy Cezar worked as a teacher without a department of his own, teaching across all departments.

From 1962 to 1970 he served as deputy director of the academy. By his own account, it was he who drafted the letters sent to embassies in search of Osman Hamdi's paintings abroad, and the academy's directors of the time, Asım Bey and Hüseyin Gezer, signed them. When the academy gained university status in 1969 Cezar became an associate professor; in 1978 he was promoted to full professor.

When the academy became Mimar Sinan University under the Higher Education Law of 1981, art history gained a department of its own within the Faculty of Science and Letters. Biographical sources say that Cezar chaired the Department of Archaeology and Art History established in this faculty. A festschrift published by the department in 2014 dates its founding to 1983 and lists its core staff as Nermin Sinemoğlu, Mustafa Cezar, Nejat Diyarbekirli, Semra Germaner, Zeynep İnankur and Zeki Sönmez, who had previously taught art history to all the academy's departments; in her interview in the same volume Germaner names Cezar as the department's first chair. The difference in dates may stem from the conversion to a university taking place in 1982 and the department beginning teaching in 1983.

Cezar retired in 1987, but continued to give undergraduate and graduate courses in the Faculties of Architecture and Fine Arts until 2002. His name appears often on the acknowledgment pages of theses written in these years. İpek Aksüğür Duben, in her 1983 study Türk Resmi ve Eleştirisi (1880-1950), calls him the teacher who was "a source of inspiration with his knowledge and conviction"; Tülin Çoruhlu, in her 1987 study of the decoration of Ottoman muskets and pistols, thanks him as the teacher who guided her; and Şerife Cengiz, examining the decoration of Adana's architectural monuments in 1986, writes that he shed light on the direction of her thesis. The range of these subjects shows how far his interests reached, from painting to the ornament of firearms, from Anatolian architecture to the history of criticism. The span from his first teaching post to his last class exceeds sixty years; his years at the academy alone exceed forty.

He was trained as a historian, taught from an art history chair and wrote works that bound the two together. For this reason some sources call him a historian and others an art historian. What is distinctive in Cezar is that he treated political history together with material culture: buildings, markets, weapons and dress.

A Book Written in the Archives: Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi

In his 2004 speech Cezar described in detail how his most frequently consulted book came to be written. On arriving at the academy he had wanted to learn about its founder and its past, but found nothing reliable at hand. Nurullah Berk's two books on Turkish painting, one in French and one in Turkish, gave Osman Hamdi and the Sanayi-i Nefise only half a page or a page, and that full of errors. Arif Müfit Mansel's two articles in Anatolia and Belleten were little more than a summary of the book Elvâh-ı Nakşiye Koleksiyonu, published in 1924 by Osman Hamdi's brother İbrahim Edhem Bey. Neither the academy library nor the library of the Archaeological Museum satisfied him. When he asked the museum's director at the time, Necati Tolunay, for permission to see the institution's old papers, he was told, "There is no such thing."

He therefore turned to the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry. In this period, which he described with the saying "archival work is digging a well with a needle," there were no photocopiers, so he had the documents he identified photographed; he had about a thousand of them printed on 18 x 24 cards, sorted them into envelopes and wrote on each its number and a short summary. He then moved on to the Ottoman newspapers. In the Municipal Library, then housed in the Beyazıt Madrasa, he went through, in his words, the entire run of newspapers published in the Ottoman period, taking notes on some reports and copying others directly into the new script. On learning that the papers of the Ministry of Education (Maarif Nezareti) lay heaped in a room at Topkapı Palace, he worked in that room for two or three months, going in each morning and leaving each evening with the clerks, gave the unsorted documents his own numbers and had them photographed as well.

Material from the family was added to the documents. Osman Hamdi's granddaughter Cenan Hanım gave him photographs and letters. In 1967 an exhibition of Osman Hamdi's paintings was opened in the museum attached to the academy; the paintings were not given for display in the academy building, but only on condition that they be shown in the museum. With works brought from collectors added to the eight canvases in the museum's possession, the exhibition held twenty-five paintings. Cezar says he followed the trail of the pictures "like a police detective," reaching one painting through the owner of another. The catalogue prepared for this exhibition was his first publication on Osman Hamdi; the following year he published a further small, twelve-page history of the academy for its founding day. In the same speech he recounts the letters he wrote to the Ministry of Education, the Prime Ministry, the Governorship of Istanbul and the District Governorship of Gebze asking that Osman Hamdi's house at Eskihisar be made a museum, and how, despite the man living in the house who repeatedly turned him away at the door, he met the district governor and asked that the house be placed under protection.

Publishing the book was a problem of its own. Publishers who saw the bulky manuscript said they could not print it. In the end the poet Ümit Yaşar Oğuzcan, who had earlier interviewed him about the academy, took on the book when he became head of the Istanbul operations of the İş Bankası Cultural Publications. Cezar also tells of the condition Oğuzcan set: when the book came out, Cezar was to host him at a lavish dinner with music, and half of the royalties went to that evening. The book appeared in 1971 in the Art Series of the İş Bankası Cultural Publications, with sixteen pages of front matter and 660 pages of text.

A notice in Belleten, the journal of the Turkish Historical Society, reports that the book was the fruit of seven years of intensive work and consisted of two parts originally conceived as separate works. In the first part Cezar argues that Westernization did not arise from society itself but was carried out under pressure from the ruling elite, and that its first aim was to save the state from collapse. He contends that beneath some of the changes in art and culture lay a military reform tied to the very survival of the state more than any will for cultural transformation. He examines the efforts at innovation from the Tulip Period to the Nizâm-ı Cedîd of Selim III, the attitudes of the sultans toward art, the Western influence that entered Ottoman architecture with the baroque and rococo and continued with the Empire style, the court architects, the Western painters working at the palace, the first painting exhibition, and the ventures in theater and music. The second part is devoted to Osman Hamdi: his life, his directorship of the museum, the excavations carried out by foreigners and by the Imperial Museum from Egypt to Iraq and from Syria to Anatolia, the Antiquities Regulation (Âsâr-ı Atîka Nizamnamesi) of 1884, his painting, the exhibitions and the founding of the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi. The book contains large color reproductions of eighty of Osman Hamdi's paintings, forty-two black-and-white reproductions and drawings, seventy-one document texts and thirty-three document facsimiles.

In Cezar's own description the book was neither a biography nor a history book about Osman Hamdi alone; it set out to show the services of a man who stood at the head of two important institutions within the Turkey of his day and the state of Ottoman society. For this reason he traced how painting instruction in Turkey began in military schools, following the drawing classes at the War College and the Imperial School of Military Engineering (Mühendishane-i Berrî-i Hümayun); and he brought to light from the documents an attempt to found a school of architecture under Mahmud II in the 1830s, and an official initiative for an academy, a few years before the Sanayi-i Nefise, that came to nothing. The Türk ve Dünya Ünlüleri Ansiklopedisi regards the book as a basic source for those studying the Westernization of Turkish art. Semra Germaner likewise says that it is a fundamental work based on archival documents, that Cezar laid great stress on the importance of archival research, and that this approach took root in the department by following him. Cezar republished the book in an expanded form in 1995, and in 1987 treated the same figure separately under the title Müzeci ve Ressam Osman Hamdi Bey. In the text he wrote for the 1987 exhibition he presents Osman Hamdi, for his service to the museum, his archaeological work, his founding of the Academy of Fine Arts and his painting, as "one of our standard-bearers of culture."

The Milliyet article counts Cezar among the few intellectuals who did not see the nineteenth century merely as an age of decline and decay, but also as a "period of revival and resistance." The writer says that people of various political views interpreted the century as an age of rot, that it was taught this way in schools as well, and describes the Osman Hamdi book as a work of cultural history written around this view. This assessment is the writer's own opinion, but it shows how Cezar's work was read within the debates of the time.

Works

According to the ÇEKÜL Foundation, Cezar produced more than 160 publications in the form of articles, research essays, conference papers and books. His principal works in book and booklet form are the following:

  • Özlü Osmanlı Tarihi (1956)
  • Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi, 4 volumes (1957-1960)
  • Osmanlı Devrinde İstanbul Yapılarında Tahribat Yapan Yangınlar ve Tabii Afetler (1963)
  • Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler (1965)
  • Osman Hamdi Bey (exhibition booklet, 1967)
  • Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (1971; expanded second edition 1995)
  • Hun Sanatı Üzerine (1974)
  • Anadolu Öncesi Türklerde Şehir ve Mimarlık (1977)
  • Typical Commercial Buildings of the Ottoman Classical Period and the Ottoman Construction System (1983)
  • 100. Yılda Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi'nden Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi'ne (1983)
  • Tipik Yapılarıyla Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Çarşı ve Klasik Dönem İmar Sistemi (1985)
  • Müzeci ve Ressam Osman Hamdi Bey (1987)
  • XIX. Yüzyıl Beyoğlusu (1991)
  • Osmanlı Başkenti İstanbul (2002)

Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi

The work that introduced Cezar's name to a wide readership is the Resimli-Haritalı Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi (Illustrated and Mapped Detailed Ottoman History). Its first edition was issued in 1957 by İskit Yayınevi and was completed in four volumes between 1957 and 1960. The work begins with the homeland and migrations of the Turks; after covering the Muslim Turkish states, the Crusades and the origins of the Ottomans, it proceeds sultan by sultan. According to the second edition of the Turkish Historical Society, published in 2021, the first volume reaches the reign of Mehmed II (the Conqueror), the second opens with Bayezid II, the third begins with Selim II, and the fourth runs from Mustafa I to Mustafa II. The four volumes written by Cezar thus cover, roughly, the first four centuries of the Ottoman state.

The arrangement of the work differs from that of ordinary history books. Numbered "Supplements" (İlaveler) are scattered among the accounts of the sultans; the first volume alone counts sixty-six of them. They include such topics as the dream of Osman Gazi and his marriage to Bala Hatun, the Ottoman titles of sultan, khan and padishah, the horse-tail standard and the tughra, cannon and weapons in the Ottoman army, the walls of Istanbul, the question of how many times Istanbul was besieged, the law code and mosque complex (külliye) of Mehmed II, the divan, banners and flags, and the institution of the çelebi. The imprint of the 2021 edition names Mithat Sertoğlu and Mustafa Cezar as the authors of the supplementary texts, and Servet R. İskit and Zarif Orgun as editors. While writing political history, the book also makes room for the details of daily life and institutions. The bibliography of the first volume is on pages 606-608.

Amasya appears several times within this political narrative under headings of its own. The table of contents lists, for the reign of Murad II, "Lala Yörgüç Paşa's Activities around Amasya"; for the accession of Selim I (Selim the Grim), "Şehzade Ahmed's Entry into Amasya"; and for the return from Chaldiran, "Selim the Grim Spending the Winter in Amasya." In the account of the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent there are the headings "The Treaty of Amasya" and, in the section on the struggle for the throne between the princes, "Bayezid's Reluctance to Go to Amasya." In this way the city's weight in Ottoman politics, from Lala Yörgüç Paşa to Şehzade Bayezid, reaches the reader under separate subheadings in his most widely read book.

The publication history is also informative. The book was reprinted by the Turkish Historical Society in 2011; the second printing of 2021 appeared in 5,000 copies and in six volumes. In this edition Mustafa Cezar is named as the author of the first four volumes and Midhat Sertoğlu as the author of the fifth and sixth; the fifth volume begins with Ahmed III, the sixth begins with Abdülmecid and reaches the reign of Vahideddin. The 2002 article in Milliyet Pazar speaks of the book as "in 6 volumes." This may refer to the form in which the work grew to six volumes with Sertoğlu's additions, but we found no bibliographic record that explains it. The same article says that the work was "the Ottoman history we always used" and that it ought to be reprinted; the Turkish Historical Society edition followed nine years later, in 2011.

The Fires of Istanbul

Osmanlı Devrinde İstanbul Yapılarında Tahribat Yapan Yangınlar ve Tabii Afetler (Fires and Natural Disasters that Damaged the Buildings of Istanbul in the Ottoman Period) appeared in 1963 as the first publication of the academy's Institute of Turkish Art History, an offprint from the institute's research series. In his introduction Cezar says that Istanbul suffered far more from fires than from natural disasters, chiefly because timber was the standard building material: apart from mosques, madrasas and baths, houses, mansions, palaces, some small mosques and even certain inns were built of wood. He states plainly that he leaves the fire brigade organization and the economic and social effects of the fires to a separate study and aims only to trace the damage to buildings. He names one by one the buildings mentioned in the sources; where no details exist, he confines himself to giving the area over which a fire spread and the number of buildings burned. His finding that fires and disasters altered the original form of many monuments is what gives the book its real importance for art history.

The study rests on manuscripts and archival documents. Cezar writes that the printed sources give no information on fires in the reign of Mehmed II and that the chroniclers' first records belong to the reign of Bayezid II. The oldest document he could find is an undated fifteenth-century record in the Topkapı Palace archive: from it we learn that a fire that broke out on the sixth night of Ramadan at the Sultan Pazarı near the Fatih Mosque burned one hundred and twenty-three shops and sixteen rooms. The oldest dated information is the lightning strike of 1489 on the Güngörmez Church at the Atmeydanı, then used as a powder magazine, and the explosion of the depot.

Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler

Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler (The Levends in Ottoman History, 1965) appeared as the twenty-eighth book in the academy's publication series and is a study of more than five hundred pages, extending to appendices of documents. In his introduction Cezar says that the official chroniclers and other Ottoman historians preferred to write about political events concerning the palace and the government, and that social and economic matters bound up with the people survive in their works only as words and phrases scattered among thousands of pages. The levends are such a subject: the words levend and sekban occur often in the sources, but apart from a page or two in Cevdet Paşa no Ottoman historian explains them. Yet the registers of important affairs (mühimme defterleri) and the Islamic court registers are full of entries on levendât and sekbânân. Cezar does not claim that his book fully illuminates the subject; he is content to say that it sets out principles that can serve as a foundation stone for future research.

The central idea of the book is that the levend movement was the expression of a crisis born in the second half of the sixteenth century from the breakdown of the balance of a village economy based on the timar system. Cezar follows the movement in three forms: the masterless levends, who began with robbery and brigandage and reached their widest spread in the Great Celali disturbances; the retained levends, kept in the households of governors and statesmen; and the state levends, whom the government raised and sent to the front in wartime. A separate chapter is devoted to the naval levends. He regards it as a great gap that no work had yet been written on the state levends, even though their numbers often approached one hundred thousand.

The part of the book most closely concerning Amasya is the one devoted to the first instance of raising paid troops. Cezar concludes that the earliest example of someone raising salaried soldiers under a special name outside the state's military order was Şehzade Ahmed (Prince Ahmed), son of Bayezid II and governor of the sanjak of Amasya; he says that until older documents come to light, these troops may be regarded as the first paid soldiers whose name and form passed on to later periods. During his struggle for the throne with his brother Selim the Grim, the prince called the soldiers he raised "yevmlü" (day-wage men) and paid them salaries; Cezar bases this on a report (arz tezkeresi) of the kadı of Bursa, Eflatunzade, dated 15 June 1512. In describing the aftermath of the execution of Şehzade Mustafa, son of Süleyman the Magnificent, he also draws on the third volume of Hüseyin Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi. According to this, on returning from the Persian campaign Süleyman halted at Amasya, the sanjak of the son he had had executed, showered favors on the prince's circle and remitted certain taxes of the people. When discussing the madrasa students (suhte) who could find no employment, he counts Amasya among the cities with many madrasas and quotes in a footnote Georges Perrot, who visited the city in 1861, to the effect that two thousand students studied in eighteen madrasas in an Amasya of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Hüsameddin's work also appears in the book's bibliography.

The Milliyet article notes that in this work an important subject of social history is treated from a very different angle, and mentions Cezar as a writer who also knew the history of material culture well. According to the same article, even the dullest historical topics are read with interest from his pen; he opposed charlatan judgments by working and producing rather than by making noise. The durability of the book can be traced elsewhere too. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi articles "Celâlî İsyanları" (1993), "Levent" (2003) and "Sekban" (2009) cite Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler in their bibliographies with page references; the "Levent" article also cites Cezar's paper "Kara Levendleri" (The Land Levends), published in 1967 in the proceedings of the Turkish Historical Congress.

Markets, Bedestens and the Bedesten of Amasya

Tipik Yapılarıyla Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Çarşı ve Klasik Dönem İmar Sistemi (The Market in Ottoman Urbanism through Its Typical Buildings and the Classical-Period Construction System, 1985) is Cezar's most comprehensive work in urban history. The book first appeared in English in 1983, translated by Ahmet Edip Uysal, as Typical Commercial Buildings of the Ottoman Classical Period and the Ottoman Construction System among the publications of Türkiye İş Bankası; this edition was reviewed by Walter B. Denny in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 1985. In the introduction to the Turkish edition Cezar observes that urban studies in Turkey mostly dealt with the present state and future of cities and showed little interest in their past. In his view, the training of both administrators and city planners required the study not only of how cities had changed from the past to the present, but also of their religious, cultural, commercial, military and administrative buildings, in short, of the whole act of building.

The book examines Anatolian and Balkan markets, arastas, inns and bedestens one by one with plans and photographs, and the bedesten of Amasya is among them. Cezar introduces it as a building "at present in a rather ruined state" and places it in the group of simple bedestens: although there appear to have been two vaulted shops on either side of its two doors, the shops did not surround all the facades and the building itself is of modest size. The surviving walls of the structure, which had a door on each of its four sides, form a rectangle close to a square. The fairly long projection of two of the doors suggests to Cezar that an additional section of the bedesten, or a link with another commercial building, existed there. According to him the bedesten was built in 1483 by Kapıağası Hüseyin Ağa, who also had an octagonal madrasa built in the city. Its walls are of rubble stone and its roof of brick, with cut stone used at the door; the inscription above the door states that the building was erected by Hüseyin Ağa in 888 (1483) and was his pious foundation. The book also publishes a photograph of the building's door and its plan.

Amasya appears again elsewhere in the book, in a long footnote on how early Ottoman places of worship were named in the sources. To show that inscriptions and endowment deeds sometimes called these buildings mosques, sometimes imarets and sometimes zaviyes, Cezar gives three examples from Amasya in his list: the Yakup Paşa (Pir İlyas) mosque, traditionally known as a mosque and dervish lodge; the Bayezid Paşa mosque, called an imaret in its inscription and its endowment deed; and the Yörgüç Paşa mosque, likewise called an imaret in its inscription.

Other Studies on the City and Architecture

Anadolu Öncesi Türklerde Şehir ve Mimarlık (City and Architecture among the Turks before Anatolia, 1977) and Hun Sanatı Üzerine (On Hunnic Art, 1974) show that his interests reached as far as Central Asia. 100. Yılda Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi'nden Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi'ne (1983) is the centenary book of the institution where he worked; since the academy was founded in 1883, the date of publication matches this reckoning, and the book may be seen as an expanded sequel to the small history of the academy of 1968. XIX. Yüzyıl Beyoğlusu (Nineteenth-Century Beyoğlu, 1991) was printed by Akbank among its cultural publications, in 476 pages with color maps and illustrations and an English summary. The book deals with the history, social life and architecture of Beyoğlu, one of Istanbul's modernizing districts.

Osmanlı Başkenti İstanbul

Of his last major book, Osmanlı Başkenti İstanbul (Istanbul, the Ottoman Capital; Erol Kerim Aksoy Foundation, 2002), Milliyet Pazar offers this assessment: the most compact and orderly history written on Istanbul in the Ottoman period; the work of an author who prefers conveying information to speculation. According to the article, the book deals with the population policies applied to the city's population and growth, the information supplied by travelers, the waterways, fires, ceremonies and building regulations; it also includes inventory-like records of buildings such as Mimar Sinan's Sinan Paşa Mosque in Beşiktaş and of a bath that disappeared during the Menderes-era redevelopment works. The chapter on fires reads like a return to the subject of his first research forty years earlier. The writer also draws attention to the pages (154-155) in which Cezar criticizes fanciful views on the formation of the city's dead-end streets, and describes the book as a reference work on the level of a guide to Istanbul. Referring to him as "Mustafa Cezar Hoca," the article says the book will be a handbook for every lover of Istanbul.

His Ties to Amasya

In the sources, Cezar's personal tie to Amasya is limited to his birth: he is counted among those born in Amasya, and the Milliyet article says he "was born in Amasya in 1920." Spending his youth and working years in Sivas, in Ankara, in Giresun, Dörtyol and Yalova and finally in Istanbul makes him a typical traveler of that generation, who taught in various Anatolian towns and settled in the big city. In the sources available to us there is no record of a street, school, library or monument in Amasya bearing his name.

In his works, however, the city comes on stage several times through a historian's eyes. In the Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi there are subheadings running from Lala Yörgüç Paşa to the Treaty of Amasya; in Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler, Şehzade Ahmed's day-wage soldiers, Süleyman's halt at Amasya and the city's madrasas; and in the book on markets, the bedesten of Amasya and the naming of three Amasya mosques. None of these was written as a sentimental reference to his birthplace; Amasya appears as an ordinary part of the Ottoman history and Ottoman urbanism he describes. His use of Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi in the levends book can also be read as an early bridge between the city's local historiography and academic Ottoman history.

Last Years and Death

Cezar did not break his ties with the academy after retirement. He closed the speech he gave on 24 February 2004, the 94th anniversary of Osman Hamdi's death and the 121st of the university's founding, by saying that he felt at peace in the belief that he had served, in his own measure, the institution under whose roof he had been proud to work for forty-five years. In the same speech he says he had "long and wholeheartedly" wished for the academy to take the name Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. The text was published the following year in the catalogue of the Osman Hamdi Bey exhibition prepared for the university's 122nd anniversary.

Cezar died in Istanbul on 3 December 2009, at the age of 89. Only one source gives Karacaahmet Cemetery as his place of burial; we could not confirm this from another source. In a memorial notice published the day after his death, on 4 December 2009, the ÇEKÜL Foundation remembered him as a member of its High Advisory Board who had supported the founding of the foundation, and saluted him as a man who "made every moment of his 89 years fruitful." The same notice states that through his books, articles, the scholars he trained and his duties on conservation boards, he contributed to the protection of the historical and cultural heritage. Since the foundation was established in 1990, Cezar's association with it falls in the years after his retirement.

Legacy

A historian's legacy lies in his books and his students. Cezar's books reached readers again in 2021, eleven years after his death, with the new edition of the Turkish Historical Society; the books on the levends, on the fires and on the markets, as well as the Osman Hamdi exhibition booklets, can also be read in full in the university's open-access archive. In the more than forty years he taught at the academy, many architects, painters and art history students attended his classes. There is no complete list of his students, but the acknowledgment pages of theses and the testimonies on the department's history show that his archive-based approach to research passed through him from one generation to the next.

His works concentrate on nineteenth-century Ottoman culture, the process of Westernization, social history, and urban and architectural history. The child born in a princes' city of Anatolia, at the end of a road that began at a teachers' school, wrote a book on the Ottoman capital; the bedesten of his birthplace and the soldiers of its princes also found a place in the books of that long road.

Chronology

1920: Born in Amasya.

1938: Graduated from the Sivas Teachers' School and began teaching at a primary school.

1946: Graduated from the History-Geography Department of the Gazi Institute of Education.

1948: His first research article was published.

1949: His first book was published.

1956: Özlü Osmanlı Tarihi was published.

1957-1960: The four volumes of the Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi were published.

1959: Came to the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts as a teacher (his own statement and ÇEKÜL; another source says "the late 1950s").

1962-1970: Deputy director of the academy.

1963: His study of fires and natural disasters in Istanbul was published.

1965: Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler was published.

1967: Organized the Osman Hamdi painting exhibition in the museum attached to the academy; his paper "Kara Levendleri" was published.

1969: Became an associate professor.

1971: Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi was published.

1978: Became a full professor.

1982: The academy became Mimar Sinan University.

1983: Founding of the art history department and his term as its first chair; the English edition of the book on markets and the academy's centenary book were published.

1985: Tipik Yapılarıyla Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Çarşı ve Klasik Dönem İmar Sistemi was published.

1987: Retired.

2002: Osmanlı Başkenti İstanbul was published; he continued teaching until this year.

24 February 2004: Gave his speech on the writing of Sanatta Batıya Açılış at the Osman Hamdi Bey commemoration.

3 December 2009: Died in Istanbul.

2011 and 2021: The Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi was reprinted by the Turkish Historical Society (the 2021 edition in six volumes).

Bibliography

Academic studies

Official sources

Books

Other sources

Online sources