The Apparatus of Understanding

Eyüp, 20 April 2012

The inscription begins [Updated 23 April with full transcription]:

Hüvel-hallâk ül-bâki
Cennet-mekân gazi Sultan
Süleyman Han tâbe serâhu
Hazretlerinin vakf-ı şerifi
Hizmelerinden merhum ve magfur lehu
Muhammad Ra'if Efendi'nin
Ruhçun Radıyallahu
Ta'ala el-Fatiha
Fi 9 Safer 1258 [22 March 1842]

 Roughly translated:

He is the Creator, the Everlasting
The late Sultan
Süleyman Han may he rest in peace...

There's more, of course, explaining who this man was, his role in Süleyman's court, and so forth, but I was just struck at the way that translating -- or even beginning to translate -- changes the meaning of this photograph. When I took the photograph, I was worrying about the constraints of a 50 mm lens, about focus, about exposure, about the balance of the photograph. But reading the gravestone is a different act -- one that involves its own labor (deciphering the script, dictionaries) and one that involves a different result.

I wrote about Istanbul cemeteries two years ago; looking back at what I wrote, I was struck by this passage:

If those [Muslim] cemeteries have almost been overflowing, broken Ottoman headstones balanced in corners, new graves built upon, beside, and beyond the old, a kind of continual writing and rewriting of the past, this cemetery had space.

My grasp of Ottoman in those days was even more tenuous than it is now, and what struck me is the very different ways in which I engage with the cemeteries in Eyüp now. Obviously, there's an aesthetic pleasure in my wanderings there -- shadow and texture and shape -- but there's also a tangible content to the place that didn't exist for me two years ago. Not sure where that leaves me, but I suppose it's worth ending with what I was trying to work out the other day:

As for what this has to do with a headstone on a grave in Eyüp, maybe this: This is a marker of a particular historical moment, a woman -- based on the decoration, we can tell more or less immediately that the grave marks a woman -- who was herself implicated in a social moment. But we're now in a moment in the present in which her gravestone -- written in Ottoman -- is more or less illegible to most people who pass it. Yet despite the illegibility of the marker itself, the grave -- probably more properly the graves -- has a social effect. The fields of the dead in Eyüp have something to do with the way the neighborhood is variously understood, experienced, visited, and -- in this case -- photographed.