Some corner of a foreign field forever Ottoman

Abstract

Ever since the author was a small child, the local Ottoman Muslim cemetery has been a source of boundless fascination to him: an architectural enigma, a romantic Oriental fantasy that would embed itself in his consciousness and fire his imagination. Whenever he was driven past it in the back of his father’s Fiat 500, it appeared to him as some fantastical and exotic palace with fairytale towers, inhabited by dashing princes and foreign potentates, unlike anything he had ever seen around him. He longed to explore it more closely, but as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observes in The Little Prince, “sometimes there’s no harm in postponing your work until later”. And so, some 45 years on, as an architect and architectural historian, he felt it was high time to revisit the subject of his childhood fascination.