Title: A Partnership of Unequals: Historicising Labour Relations between Local and Foreign Archaeologists in Türkiye through Ottoman Comparanda.
Part II – Theodore Macridy: The Ottoman Archaeologist Who Worked for the King of Prussia
By Filiz Tütüncü Çağlar (Aarhus University, Center for Urban Urban Network Evolutıons)
Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Time: 1730-1900
Room: H-232
Abstract: This lecture continues the discussion of unequal labour relations in archaeological practice by turning to the late Ottoman Empire and the experiences of Theodore Macridy Bey (1872–1940), one of the first professional Ottoman archaeologists. Drawing on Macridy’s letters, field reports, and contemporary European accounts, this talk examines how his work as commissar of the Imperial Museum entailed a complex balancing act between authority and subordination. Tasked with supervising foreign excavations under the 1884 Antiquities Law, Macridy was both an enforcer of Ottoman sovereignty and a facilitator of Western scholarship. His correspondence reveals the tensions and ironies of this position: while he was officially charged with protecting the Empire’s antiquities, he was often treated as a servant or obstacle by his European colleagues.
By tracing Macridy’s shifting roles from interpreter to archaeologist and curator, this lecture situates his career within broader structures of imperial power, professionalisation, and knowledge production. It argues that the extractive hierarchies that shaped Ottoman–Western collaborations at the turn of the twentieth century resonate with the asymmetries observed in contemporary fieldwork. Macridy’s story, read through his own voice, illuminates how language, bureaucracy, and labour intersected in the making of archaeology in the Ottoman world and how the legacies of those dynamics continue to define the discipline today.
About the speaker: Filiz Tütüncü Çağlar is an archaeologist and art historian specializing in the history of archaeology, with additional expertise in Byzantine and Islamic archaeology. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2017. Her doctoral dissertation, From Raqqa with Love: The Raqqa Excavations by the Ottoman Imperial Museum (1905–1906 and 1908), examined Ottoman archaeological investigations in Syria within their broader historical and disciplinary contexts, offering a critical reassessment of existing historiography. In 2018, Filiz began her postdoctoral research at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, in affiliation with the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Pergamon Museum. She was first a fellow of the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices program, and from 2019, a member of the Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) program, where she remains an active affiliate. Between 2020 and 2022, her research was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, further developing her collaboration with the Museum für Islamische Kunst and Freie Universität Berlin. In 2024, she was awarded an Einstein Fellowship at the Einstein Center Chronoi in Berlin, where she explored the temporal dimensions of Ottoman museology. Since May 2025, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Lost Cities” at Aarhus University, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation for three years. Her current research focuses on the entangled histories of Ottoman archaeology, examining institutional, political, and intellectual dynamics that shaped archaeological practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside her academic work, Filiz is actively engaged in museum education and public outreach. She regularly leads guided tours and educational programs at leading Berlin museums.
Organized by the Department of Archaeology
Organizer
