Mustafa Cezar (1920-2009) was a historian and art historian born in Amasya. In a career that led from a teachers' training school to a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, he published more than 160 works in the form of articles, papers and books. His books fall into three fields: Ottoman histories for a wide readership, studies of social and institutional history based on archival documents, and works on Ottoman urbanism and on the opening of Ottoman art to the West. Since his works are under copyright, only their bibliographical details, their contents and short quotations are given on this page. His life is told in detail in Mustafa Cezar: The Amasya-Born Teacher Who Wrote the Ottoman History.

Life

Cezar was born in Amasya in 1920. In 1938 he graduated from the Sivas Teachers' School and began teaching in primary schools; after completing the Gazi Institute of Education he worked as a history teacher and headmaster at the secondary schools of Dörtyol, Yalova and Fındıklı in Istanbul. In 1959 he was appointed teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught Turkish History, Turkish Art History and the History of the Revolution, and from 1962 to 1970 he was deputy director of the academy. He became associate professor in 1969 and professor in 1978. After the academy became Mimar Sinan University he retired in 1987 from the Department of Archaeology and Art History of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which he headed, but continued teaching until 2002. He died in Istanbul on 3 December 2009.

Works

His first research article appeared in 1948 and his first book in 1949. His first books, dated 1949, bear the titles Tarih I, Tarih II and Tarih III, which suggest school history textbooks; their contents could not be examined in the course of this study. His principal works in book form, in order of publication, are as follows:

Özlü Osmanlı Tarihi (1956)

This is a handbook giving Ottoman history in a short and orderly narrative. It may be regarded as the forerunner of the large Ottoman history that began to appear the following year; no detailed review of it could be found.

Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi (1957-1960)

Resimli-Haritalı Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi (Illustrated Detailed Ottoman History with Maps), first published in four volumes in Istanbul by İskit Yayınevi, is a detailed Ottoman history for a wide readership. It begins with the homeland and migrations of the Turks, covers the Muslim Turkish states and the origins of the Ottomans, and then proceeds sultan by sultan; the four volumes written by Cezar close with the period from Mustafa I to Mustafa II. Between the accounts of the sultans are scattered numbered "Supplements" describing institutions, titles, weapons, buildings and everyday life; the authors of these supplementary texts are Mithat Sertoğlu and Mustafa Cezar. The work was reprinted by the Turkish Historical Society in 2011 and, in six volumes, in 2021, the fifth and sixth volumes of these editions being the work of Mithat Sertoğlu.

Osmanlı Devrinde İstanbul Yapılarında Tahribat Yapan Yangınlar ve Tabii Afetler (1963)

Published as the first number of the publications of the Turkish Art History Institute of the Academy of Fine Arts, this study (Fires and Natural Disasters that Damaged the Buildings of Istanbul in the Ottoman Period) lists, on the basis of manuscript sources and archival documents, the damage done to buildings by the fires and natural disasters of Ottoman Istanbul. In his introduction Cezar notes that Istanbul suffered more from fires than from natural disasters and that the main reason was the prevalence of timber construction; leaving the fire organisation and the social effects of fires to a separate study, he follows only the destruction of buildings. The book's value for art history lies in documenting how the original form of many monuments was altered by fire and earthquake.

Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler (1965)

Published as the 28th book of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts series, this study of social history (The Levends in Ottoman History) runs to more than five hundred pages and is supported by documentary appendices. Cezar begins by observing that the court chroniclers left the social and economic matters concerning the people only as brief notes scattered among thousands of pages, and that although levends and sekbans appear frequently in the registers of important affairs and the Islamic court registers, no Ottoman historian had given a coherent account of them. The central idea of the book is that the levend movement was the expression of a crisis born of the breakdown, in the second half of the sixteenth century, of the village economy resting on the timar system. Masterless levends, levends kept in the households of statesmen, state levends raised in wartime and naval levends are examined in separate chapters. The author does not present his book as illuminating the subject completely, but defines it as a foundation for later research.

Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi (1971)

Published in Istanbul as the 8th book of the Art Series of Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, in XVI + 660 pages, this book (The Opening to the West in Art and Osman Hamdi) is the fruit of seven years' work. It consists of two parts originally conceived as two separate works. The first part examines the efforts at reform from the Tulip Period to the Nizâm-ı Cedîd of Selim III, 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 initiatives in theatre and music; here the author argues that Westernisation did not arise from society itself but was carried out by the ruling cadre in order to save the state from collapse. The second part is devoted to Osman Hamdi's life, his museum work, the excavations, his painting and the founding of the School of Fine Arts. The book contains large colour reproductions of eighty paintings by Osman Hamdi, forty-two black-and-white reproductions and drawings, seventy-one document texts and thirty-three facsimiles of documents. Cezar republished the book in an enlarged second edition in 1995.

Other Publications on Osman Hamdi (1967, 1987)

Cezar's first publication on Osman Hamdi was the brochure Osman Hamdi Bey, prepared for the exhibition of his paintings that Cezar organised in 1967 at the museum attached to the academy. His study published in 1987 as Müzeci ve Ressam Osman Hamdi Bey (Osman Hamdi Bey, Museum Director and Painter) is connected with the exhibition of Osman Hamdi's paintings opened that year at Mimar Sinan University; the introductory text of the exhibition catalogue is also by Cezar. The speech he gave in 2004 on the anniversary of Osman Hamdi's death, describing how the book was written in the archives, was printed the following year in the catalogue of the university's Osman Hamdi Bey exhibition.

Hun Sanatı Üzerine (1974) and Anadolu Öncesi Türklerde Şehir ve Mimarlık (1977)

These two studies (On Hun Art; City and Architecture among the Turks before Anatolia) show that Cezar's interest extended to Turkish art before the Ottomans and to the urbanism of Central Asia. The second widens his own speciality, the history of cities and architecture, towards the Turkic communities before Anatolia. No detailed review of their contents could be found.

Tipik Yapılarıyla Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Çarşı ve Klasik Dönem İmar Sistemi (1983, 1985)

This is Cezar's most comprehensive work in urban history. It first appeared in English in 1983, in Ahmet Edip Uysal's translation, as Typical Commercial Buildings of the Ottoman Classical Period and the Ottoman Construction System among the publications of Türkiye İş Bankası, and was reviewed by Walter B. Denny in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 1985. The Turkish text was printed in 1985 as the 9th book of the Mimar Sinan University Publications. The book treats the markets, arastas, hans and bedestens of Anatolia and the Balkans one by one with plans and photographs, and also examines the working of the Ottoman building system of the classical period.

100. Yılda Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi'nden Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi'ne (1983)

This is the centenary book of the institution where Cezar worked for more than forty years, and tells the history of the academy, founded in 1883 as the School of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), up to its transformation into a university. It may be regarded as an expanded continuation of the short history he published in 1968 for the academy's foundation day.

XIX. Yüzyıl Beyoğlusu (1991)

Printed among Akbank's cultural publications in 476 pages, with an English summary, colour maps and pictures, this book (Nineteenth-Century Beyoğlu) treats the history, social life and architecture of Beyoğlu, the modernising district of Istanbul, in the nineteenth century.

Osmanlı Başkenti İstanbul (2002)

Published by the Erol Kerim Aksoy Foundation, this is his last major book (Istanbul, the Ottoman Capital). It covers the city's population and population policies, the accounts of travellers, the waterworks, fires, ceremonies and building regulations, and contains inventory-like records of vanished buildings. The chapter on fires is something of a return to the subject of his first study forty years earlier. A review published in 2002 described the book as the most comprehensive history of Ottoman Istanbul.

Amasya in His Works

No evidence could be found that Cezar devoted a separate book or article to Amasya, but the city of his birth appears in three of his major works as part of Ottoman history and urbanism. The table of contents of the Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi includes the headings "Lala Yörgüç Paşa'nın Amasya Çevresindeki Faaliyetleri" (The Activities of Lala Yörgüç Pasha around Amasya), "Şehzade Ahmed'in Amasya'ya Girmesi" (Prince Ahmed's Entry into Amasya), "Yavuz Selim'in Kış Mevsimini Amasya'da Geçirmesi" (Selim I Spends the Winter in Amasya), "Amasya Muahedesi" (The Treaty of Amasya) and "Bayezid'in Amasya'ya Gitmek İstememesi" (Bayezid's Unwillingness to Go to Amasya). Thus the weight of the city in Ottoman politics, from Yörgüç Pasha to Prince Bayezid, reaches the reader under separate subheadings in his most widely read book.

In Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler Amasya is named together with the first instance of raising paid troops. Cezar concludes that the earliest example of paid soldiers raised under a special name outside the state's military order were the troops that Prince Ahmed, sanjak governor of Amasya, raised during his struggle for the throne with his brother Selim and called "yevmlü" (day-paid), and he bases this on a report of 1512 by the judge of Bursa. In describing Süleyman's halt at Amasya after the execution of Prince Mustafa he draws on Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi; and in treating the subject of madrasa students who could find no employment, he notes in a footnote that according to Georges Perrot, who visited the city in 1861, two thousand students studied in eighteen madrasas in Amasya, a city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants.

In the book on markets the Amasya bedesten appears with its plan and a photograph of its gate. Cezar describes the building as "halen hayli harap durumda" (still in a rather ruinous state) and places it among the simple bedestens of modest dimensions; according to the inscription over the gate, the bedesten was built in 888 (1483) by the kapıağası Hüseyin Ağa. In the same book, in a footnote showing how early Ottoman places of worship were named in inscriptions and endowment deeds, three examples are given from Amasya: the mosques of Yakup Pasha (Pir İlyas), known as a mosque and dervish lodge, of Bayezid Pasha, called an imaret in its inscription and endowment deed, and of Yörgüç Pasha, again called an imaret in its inscription. None of these lines was written as a sentimental reference to his native city; Amasya enters the scene as an ordinary part of the Ottoman history and urbanism he describes.

Influence and Assessment in the Sources

The review in the Turkish Historical Society's journal Belleten assesses Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi as an important work that sheds light on the life, many-sided personality and art of Osman Hamdi, insufficiently known until then beyond one or two repetitive articles, and that establishes his place in the cultural life of recent history. A biographical encyclopedia likewise regards the book as a basic source for those studying the Westernisation of Turkish art. His student and colleague Semra Germaner says that the book is a very fundamental work based on archival documents, and that the importance given to archival research in the department took root by following his example.

Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler has remained one of the basic studies of its subject, appearing in the bibliographies of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam articles "Celâlî İsyanları", "Levent" and "Sekban". The English edition of the book on markets also entered the international literature. On the day after Cezar's death, the ÇEKÜL Foundation, whose founding he had supported and on whose High Advisory Board he sat, remembered him as an art historian who had contributed to the protection of the historical and cultural heritage through his books, his articles, the scholars he trained and his service on conservation boards. The 2011 and 2021 editions of the Mufassal Osmanlı Tarihi show that the work is still read sixty years after its first publication.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Official sources

Books

  • Mustafa Cezar, Osmanlı Devrinde İstanbul Yapılarında Tahribat Yapan Yangınlar ve Tabii Afetler, İstanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Türk San'atı Tarihi Enstitüsü, 1963, pp. 3-5. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14124/9644
  • Mustafa Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler, İstanbul: İstanbul Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi Yayınları 28, 1965, pp. V-VIII, 31-32, 96, 106, 198, 529. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14124/9337
  • Mustafa Cezar, Tipik Yapılarıyla Osmanlı Şehirciliğinde Çarşı ve Klasik Dönem İmar Sistemi, İstanbul: Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi Yayını 9, 1985, pp. 51, 289-290, 413. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14124/6436
  • Mustafa Cezar, "Sanatta Batıya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi Kitabı Üzerine" (speech of 24 February 2004), Aydın Ayan (ed.), MSGSÜ İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi Koleksiyonu'ndan Osman Hamdi Bey Sergisi, İstanbul: Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, 2005, pp. 9-15. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14124/9377
  • Türk ve Dünya Ünlüleri Ansiklopedisi, vol. 25, article "Mustafa Cezar".
  • Banu Mahir (ed.), Semra Germaner Armağanı, İstanbul: Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, 2014. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14124/10019

Other sources

Online sources