Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires

Front matter

m

Routledge Advances in Urban History

IMPERIAL CITIES IN THE TSARIST, THE HABSBURG, AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRES

Contents

List of Figures and Maps List of Contributors Acknowledgments

1 Introduction ULRICH HOFMEISTER AND FLORIAN RIEDLER

PARTI Conceptual Opening

PART II Manifestations of the Imperial in Urban Space

3 The Imperial Palaces in Comparative Perspective: Topkapi, Kremlin, and Hofburg NILAY ÓZLÜ

4 Temeswar as an Imperial City in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century ROBERT BORN

5 Imperial Power, Imperial Identity, and Kazan Architecture: Visualizing the Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Russian Province GULCHACHAK NUGMANOVA xi XU vi Contents 6 Bound by Difference: The Merger of Rostov and Nakhichevan-on-Don into an Imperial Metropolis during the Nineteenth Century MICHEL ABESSER PART III

The City as a Palimpsest of Empires

Guarding the Imperial Border: The Fortress City of Nis between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, 1690-1740 FLORIAN RIEDLER

Empire after Empire: Austro-Hungarian Recalibration of the Ottoman Carsija of Sarajevo AIDA MURTIC

Lemberg or L'vov: The Symbolic Significance of a City at the Crossroads of the Austrian and the Russian Empires ELISABETH HAID-LENER

Kars: Bridgehead of Empires ELKE HARTMANN

(De)constructing Imperial Heritage: Moscow Zaryadye in Times of Transition OLGA ZABALUEVA

PART IV Conclusion 12 Imperial Cities and Recent Research Trends: Nostalgia

Water Infrastructure, and Segregation JULIA OBERTREIS

Name Index Place Name Index

Figures and Maps

Figures

0.1 Eszter Gantner (1971-2019). Photo by Michel Abesser, 2018

3.1a Funeral of Sultan Abdülaziz by the Middle Gate of the Topkap: Palace, 1876. Source: Le Monde Illustré, June 24, 1876, p. 412; Bibliothéque nationale de France, FOL-LC2-2943, ark:/12148/bpt6k63714684

3.1b The funeral procession of Emperor Franz Joseph leaving the Hofburg Palace, 1916. Source: Wikimedia, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Funeral Franz-Joseph.webm

3.1c Coronation procession of Tsar Nicholas II by the Spassky Gate of the Kremlin Palace, 1894. Source: Russian Historical Library, https://algoritm-centr.ru/en/ greece-and-rome/velikii-greh-kak-koronaciya-nikolaya-iiobernulas-hodynskoi-davkoi.html

3.2 The Emperor of Austria-Hungary Charles I and his wife Empress Zita during their visit to the Topkapı Palace in 1918. Source: Austrian National Library, 212.394-C

3.3 Armory Chamber in the Kremlin displaying the thrones, armor, portraits, and other valuables captioned in Ottoman Turkish. Source: Istanbul University, Rare Books Library, Abdülhamid II Albums, 91238-0022

3.4 Imperial Treasury at the Topkapı Palace, 1880-1893. Source: Istanbul University, Rare Books Library, Abdülhamid II Albums, 90838-0011

3.5a Unveiling of Mustafa Kemal's statue in the grounds of the Topkapı Palace, 1926. Courtesy of Cengiz Kahraman

3.5b Unveiling ceremony of the Prince Eugene monument on Heldenplatz, 1865. Source: Wien Museum Inv.Nr. 9572/1, https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/en/object/809826/

3.5c Demolition of the statue of Tsar Alexander II, 1918. Source: Kulturologia, https://kulturologia.ru/ blogs/260120/45288 viii Figures and Maps

4.1

4.2

5.2

6.1

6.2

7.1 8.1

Copper Engraved Plan of Temeswar after its Takeover by the Habsburg Troops, around 1740. Source: Matthäus Seutter, Temeswaria Oppidum superioris Hungariae [Temeswar, Town of Upper Hungary], Augsburg, ca. 1740. State and University Library Bremen, http://gauss. suub.uni-bremen.de/suub/hist/servlet/servlet.hmap?id-247967 95 The Internal Layout of Temeswar in 1752. Source: Th. Tróger: Plan von der innerlichen Ein- und Abtheilung

der Stadt und Vestung Temesvar... [Plan of the Internal Layout of the City and Fortress of Temeswar], 1752. Source: Budapest, Hadtórténeti Intézet és Müzeum, Sign. G Ih 667/7. https://maps.hungaricana.hu/en/HTITerkept ar/36043/?list=eyJxdWVyeSI6ICJGT1JSPShodGkpInO 103 Former Complex of Buildings of the Rascian Community in Temeswar. Photo by Robert Born, 2020 110 and b Map of Kazan, 1884. Source: M. K. Krylov, Plan

v 1884 g. [Map of the city of Kazan, according to the

project approved in 1884]. Kazan: V. M. Kliuchnikov, 1884 138 View of the Kazan Fortress by Vasilii Turin. Source:

Perspektivnye vidy gubernskogo goroda Kazani risovanyi

[Perspective views of the provinicial city of Kazan, drawn

from nature, lithographed and published by Vasilii

Turin]. Moskva, 1834 142 Map of Rostov-on-Don from 1768 by Alexander

Rigelman. Source: Vernadsky National Library of

Ukraine, Kiev Institute of Handwritings, f. 1, d. 292 176 Official plan for Nakhichevan from 1811. Source:

Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (sobranie

pervoe), Kniga chertezhei i risunkov (plany gorodov)

[Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire

(first collection), Book of drawings and illustrations

(town plans)], St. Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otdeleniia

Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1839 178 Map of Rostov-on-Don 1917, ed. by the City Board of

Rostov and its land surveyor Mamontov. Source: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_of_Rostov-on- Don_1917.jpg 191 Istanbul Gate of Niš Fortress. Photo by Florian Rieder, 2016 225 Čaršija after the great fire of 1879. Source: Austrian

National Library, PK 904 243

Figures and Maps ix

8.2 Regulation Plan for rebuilding the area of the city affected by fire, adopted on March 11, 1880. Source:

Historical Archives of Sarajevo, ZKP-514 246 8.3 Street scene at CarSija, 1892. Source: Austrian National Library, 133.731-D 250

8.4 Čaršija of Sarajevo. Circulated postcard, Verlag Albert

Thier Sarajevo, 1909. Source: Private collection of the author 252 8.5 Leo Delitz, “Der Kaiser verlässt die Begova-Moschee

in Sarajevo durch den offenen Bazar (Carsija)" [The

emperor walks out from Bey's Mosque in Sarajevo to the

open bazaar (Carsija)]. Heliogravure/aquarelle, 1910.

Source: Austrian National Library, Pk 1302, 47 259 10.1 “Russian” residential building on Gazi Ahmet Muhtar

Paşa Caddesi in Kars. Photo by Elke Hartmann, 2005 299 10.2 Historical postcard of Kars. Source: Houshamadyan

Collection 301 10.3 One of the Russian fountains in Kars. Photo by Elke

Hartmann, 2005 308 11.1 The view of Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral from

Zaryadye Park. Photo by Galina El'tsova, 2020 325

11.2 A view of Zaryadye Park, the *soaring bridge," and the

Kotel’nicheskaia Embankment high-rise building. Photo

by Olga Kuznetsova, 2021 329 11.3 Emperor Nicholas II in front of the Romanov Chambers

during the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of

the House of Romanov, May 25, 1913. Unknown

photographer. Collodion photography. Source: State

Historical Museum, Moscow, #82964/2666 M VI 40462,

State Catalogue #7599402 336

Maps

1.1 The three Eastern European empires in 1815 with the

cities portrayed in this volume. Cartography by Florian

Riedler, 2022 2 7.1 The relocation of the Habsburg-Ottoman border

between 1683 and 1739. Cartography by Florian Riedler,

2022 214

Contributors

Michel Abesser is a Lecturer for Russian Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He studied the history of Eastern Europe and sociology at the University of Jena and the European University at St. Petersburg. His dissertation explored cultural change and the economics of Soviet culture after 1953 through the lens of jazz and was published in 2018. He is currently working on a book project on Russian, Cossack, and Armenian economic entanglement in the lower Don region in late Imperial Russia.

Robert Born is a Research Fellow at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (BKGE) in Oldenburg, Germany. He studied art history, classical archaeology, and the history of Eastern Europe in Basel and Berlin. His research activities focus on the cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and East Central Europe in the Early Modern Period, Baroque art and architecture in East Central Europe, and the historiography of art in this region.

Elisabeth Haid-Lener studied history and Russian language in Vienna. She was a fellow in a doctoral program and research assistant at the University of Vienna. Her dissertation on Galicia as a subject of Austrian and Russian propaganda in World War I was published in 2019. Currently she is a post-doc researcher in an ERC project at the Institute of Political History in Budapest, Hungary, on post-World War I transitions.

Elke Hartmann is the Director of the Institute for Ottoman Studies and Turcology at Freie Universitát Berlin, Germany. She obtained a PhD at FU Berlin for her book Die Reichweite des Staates. Webrpflicht und moderne Staatlichkeit im Osmanischen Reich 1869-1910, which was published in 2016, and her habilitation at Péter Pázmány Catholic University Budapest for her studies on Armenian life and autobiographical writing in the Ottoman Empire. Her research areas focus on modern Ottoman history, especially on the military, political, administrative, xii Contributors social, ideological, and cultural transformations during modernization processes, contextualizing micro-historical case studies in a global context.

Ulrich Hofmeister is a historian at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he leads a research project on Russian city planning during the eighteenth century. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Vienna, Austria, in history. His research interests include the imperial history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as well as Russian urban history. He has published a monograph on Russian notions of an imperial civilizing mission in Central Asia (Die Bürde des Weißen Zaren, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2019).

Aida Murtié is an architect and doctoral candidate in art history at Heidelberg University, Germany. She is a member of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (earlier Cluster of Excellence *Asia and Europe in a Global Context"). She was a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. Her research interests include history of architecture, planning history, and heritage studies with a special focus on Southeastern Europe.

Gulchachak Nugmanova is an architect and leading researcher at the Scientific Research Institute of Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning, Moscow, Russia. In 2000, she defended her dissertation “The Tatar Estate in Kazan' From the Middle of the Nineteenth to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century" at the State Institute for Art Studies, Moscow. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century Russian provincial architecture focusing on the Middle Volga region. Her current research centers on architecture and imperial power in the relation between imperial center and provincial society in nineteenth-century Russia.

Julia Obertreis holds the chair of Modern and East European History at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Her research interests include the imperial history of Russia and the Soviet Union, urban history, environmental history, oral history, and the relation between global history and East European history. Her dissertation on housing and everyday life in Petrograd/Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s was published in German in 2004. The habilitation thesis, Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991, was published in 2017.

Nilay Özlü is an Associate Professor of Architectural and Cultural History at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. Her research focuses on late Ottoman architecture and urban landscapes, court studies, and museum studies. Özlü was the Barakat postdoctoral fellow at the University of

Contributors xiii

Oxford (2019-2020) and the Chevening visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (2021). She co-edited The City in the Muslim World (Routledge, 2015) and Spectacle, Entertainment, and Recreation (Intellect, 2023), and her research and publications have received awards from the Society of Architectural Historians, Barakat Trust, University of Oxford, Getty Foundation, and Istanbul Research Institute.

Florian Riedler studied history and obtained a PhD from SOAS, London, for a thesis on Ottoman political history. He was a research fellow at the German Orient Institute in Istanbul and at ZMO in Berlin. Currently, he is the scientific coordinator of the research network Transottomanica at the University of Leipzig, Germany. His research interests include Ottoman urban history, migration and mobility studies, and the history of infrastructure in the Ottoman Balkans. Among his latest publications is the co-edited volume The Balkan Route: Historical Transformations from Via Militaris to Autoput (2021).

Olga Zabalueva holds an MA in Museology from the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, and an MA in Cultural Analysis from Lund University, Sweden. As a museum professional, she has worked in different cultural institutions in Russia and in Sweden at research and collection departments. Olga is currently doing her PhD in Culture and Society (Tema Q) at Linkóping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on cultural policies and cultural memories in Russian and Swedish contexts, with special emphasis on the institutionalization of contested memories and *difficult heritage" in different political regimes.

Acknowledgments

Figure 0.1 Eszter Gantner (1971-2019). Photo by Michel Abesser, 2018.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Eszter Gantner. Her life was cut short by illness long before this book was finished, but without her, work for this volume would have never started at all. The Imperial Cities project began as a collective endeavor of Eszter and me, and her share in this project is immense. Eszter was an urban historian with a focus on East Central Europe. Her innovative and very diverse research covered questions of Jewish xvi Acknowledgments history, intellectual history, urban anthropology, and much more. When we were invited to jointly organize a conference on the three Eastern European empires at the German Historical Institute in Moscow, we quickly agreed that it should be dedicated to the relationship between urban and imperial structures. It was our common idea to subsume this research under the label of the Imperial City, and from the very beginning we planned to publish the outcome of the conference as an edited volume. We developed the framework of the book together, discussed different topical approaches and suitable cities, and selected conference participants and other potential authors. While outlining the structure and the content of the book, however, we did not pay enough attention to the bureaucratic necessities of such a project. It was only after Eszter passed away that I learned that without a signed contract with the publisher, Eszter cannot be officially named among the editors of the volume. But even without formal acknowledgment we would like to emphasize: Eszter is a co-author of the Imperial Cities concept, and this book is also hers. It is inexpressibly sad that she cannot see this volume finished. My colleague and friend Florian Riedler stepped in as co-editor after Eszter passed away, and we finalized this book together. It is our hope that Eszter would have also been satisfied with this volume.

From the first plans to organize a conference until the last steps of the editing process, the editors have received the assistance of many helping hands. Support for funding and organizing the conference and for publishing the volume was provided by the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the German Association for East European Studies, the Association of Historians of Eastern Europe, the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, the Department of Eastern European History of the University of Vienna, and the Department of History of the LMU Munich.

For their help in organizing the conference and in preparing the volume and for their contributions to our discussions, the editors are deeply grateful to Christoph Augustynowicz, Elena Bragina, Peter Clayson, Sandra Dahlke, Edhem Eldem, Gabriele Freitag, Ilya Gerasimov, Kerstin S. Jobst, Birte Kohtz, Max Novick, Julia Obertreis, Heidemarie Uhl, and Jeremy F. Walton.

As the starting point for her chapter on Kars, Elke Hartman took a text she had initially written in German for a collective volume on Russian cities in Asia, which is being edited by Helena Holzberger, Andreas Renner, and Sóren Urbansky. We are obliged to the editors of that book for the permission to include in our volume a chapter which is based on a text for their book. We are looking forward to that volume, which will

Acknowledgments | xvii contribute to the relationship between cities and empires from a different angle.

It was a long journey from the planning of the conference to the publishing of this volume, but our authors stayed the course. We therefore want to express our gratitude to them for their readiness to review their chapters time after time, for their patience, and for their ongoing commitment to this project. We hope that this book will further stoke the discussion on the relationship between cities and empires.

On behalf of the editors Ulrich Hofmeister

1 Introduction

As in all empires, imperial rule also constituted and shaped the cities of the three empires that dominated Eastern Europe until the First World War - the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires. Cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served as the stages where the empire was displayed in monumental architecture and public rituals. To this day, many cities possess a distinctively imperial legacy in the form of material remnants, groups of inhabitants, or memories that shape the perceptions of in- and outsiders.

This book explores the various ways imperial rule manifested itself in cities and how cities shaped the three empires under consideration. The contributions to this volume address in detail the imperial entanglements of eleven cities from a long-term perspective reaching back to the eighteenth century. The focus is not only on the imperial capitals but also on smaller cities in the periphery that had important functions as trade or border cities (Map 1.1). We call all of these cities *imperial cities," but it is important to note that we do not postulate the imperial city as a new city type. Rather, we understand the term as a research perspective that can be applied to all cities within an empire where traces of imperial rule can be found. While there is probably a general relationship between political power and cities, by comparing the three empires of Eastern Europe this volume seeks to establish commonalities in this particular geography and highlight transimperial exchanges and entanglements.

The first chapter of this volume, *Cities, Empires, and Eastern Europe: Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires" by Ulrich Hofmeister, explains the conceptual framework of the volume in greater detail. After addressing the history of the term *imperial city," which was never employed in a consistent manner, it proposes a new usage for this expression. In the framework of postcolonial research focusing on colonial overseas empires, the term *imperial city" has been employed to highlight transfers and influences from the colonies back to urban Europe,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130031-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Map 1.1 The three Eastern European empires in 1815 with the cities portrayed in this volume. For the sake of simplicity, the modern city names have been used. Cartography by Florian Riedler, 2022.

which have long been methodologically sidelined by a focus on colonial cities. However, the author questions the sharp distinction between colonial and imperial cities by identifying many cases in which these categories overlapped or shared common characteristics. This overlap is even more apparent in the case of continental empires, where geographical boundaries between center and periphery were harder to draw and where the legal distinction of homeland and colony in many cases did not exist. As a consequence, the author proposes using “imperial city" as an encompassing term for examining cities in the center as well as the borderlands of the Habsburg, Tsarist, and Ottoman Empires, whose urban development increasingly converged from the eighteenth century onward. Cities in all three empires had structural similarities such as population groups who traditionally brokered contact with the imperial center; they had to position themselves vis-à-vis Western European urban modernity, and, in the nineteenth century, they had to answer to the challenges of rising

Introduction 3 nationalism. Used as an umbrella term for cities both in the imperial core regions and the peripheries, the concept of *imperial city" offers a vantage point from which to determine the role of a given city for an empire and, at the same time, examine the presence of the empire in that city in an attempt to bring imperial and urban history together.

The second part of the book, *Manifestations of the Imperial in Urban Space," offers different examples of how empires were present in cities ranging from palaces and churches to settlement patterns and urban infrastructures. The section starts with the chapter by Nilay Özlü, “The Imperial Palaces in Comparative Perspective: Topkapi, Kremlin, and Hofburg." The author examines the ideological messages that were encapsulated in the palaces in the (former) capitals of Istanbul, Moscow, and Vienna and how these messages changed during the nineteenth century. All three palaces formed the symbolic centers of the respective imperial capitals and therefore played a key role in processions, accession festivities, etc. Particularly the dynasties' collections that were housed in palace armories and treasuries became important places to display imperial power, first to aristocratic circles and later to the public at large. Often these collections were given to museums, or the palaces themselves were musealized, a process that started in the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century and continued in Russia. Finally, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans, directly influenced by the other courts, began to show their collections, but only to foreign visitors. Only after 1908 was the Ottoman public allowed to visit Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Overall, the chapter demonstrates how the three traditional palaces became sites of transition and modernization in a period when the power of all three dynasties was at stake. This process was particularly visible in the shared goal of popularizing the dynasties by opening the palaces and repurposing them as museums.

The next chapter by Robert Born, *Temeswar as an Imperial City in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century," focuses on the reorganization of the city by the Habsburg Monarchy after the conquest from the Ottomans. This reorganization began immediately after 1716 when Temeswar and the province it belonged to were awarded a special status and were ruled directly by Vienna (and not as part of Hungary to which it was added only in 1778). Thus the city was rebuilt according to a plan that mainly reflected the military, fiscal, and representational considerations of the center and the dynasty. This was also expressed in a richly illustrated publication praising the contributions and construction activities of the Habsburg rulers, in particular Charles VI. Among the first measures, a number of new churches run by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries were built and furnished to support Catholic settlers in the city. Another urgent task was the construction of new fortifications and barracks, which both also had representative functions through inscriptions and the naming of gates and bastions after members of the dynasty. Hydraulic works such as the redirection of rivers and the digging of canals, as well as the development of the province's transport infrastructure, served military, and economic purposes. In the city itself, utilities such as street lighting, pavement, and water fountains were installed. The Habsburg dynasty's influence on the urban development of Temeswar was felt most strongly in the religious field through the promotion of Catholicism in the otherwise multi-ethnic and multi-confessional city. The ruling family sponsored the first public monument and a church dedicated to St. John of Nepomuk, who was the family's patron saint. At the same time, Emperor Charles VI acted as the patron of the Catholic cathedral that was, however, not completed until well into the second half of the century, long after the emperor's death. Two votive columns on the city's main squares completed the sacralization of urban space in the name of the dynasty.

Gulchachak Nugmanova's chapter, *Imperial Power, Imperial Identity, and Kazan Architecture: Visualizing the Empire in a Nineteenth-Century Russian Province," examines the creation and evolution of imperial architecture from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. It focuses on the transformation of the provincial city of Kazan, the important Tatar city conquered by Russia in the mid-sixteenth century. The author analyzes the construction and renovation of several prominent buildings during the nineteenth century. She shows that in Kazan the neoclassical style, which was perceived as the embodiment of imperial rule, was replaced by the so-called *Russian style" much later than in most other cities of the Tsarist Empire. This can be explained by the significance of the conquest of Kazan for Russia's identity as an empire, which is also underlined by a range of mutual interactions between prominent buildings in Kazan and the capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The chapter thus shows not only the impact of architectural models of the center on cities in the province but also the significance of Kazan for Russia's self-representation as an empire. Moreover, the chapter analyzes controversies about the appearance of non-Christian prayer houses during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In these debates, Russia's claims as a protector of the Orthodox faith collided with the need to accommodate the needs of minority confessions. In conclusion, Kazan can be understood as an example of an imperial project of internal colonization with a feedback loop between center and periphery.

Michel Abesser's chapter, *Bound by Difference: The Merger of Rostov and Nakhichevan-on-Don into an Imperial Metropolis during the Nineteenth Century," offers the case study of twin cities that embody some typical features of a Russian imperial city in the periphery. Nakhichevan was founded by the empire in the late eighteenth century to settle Armenian traders and craftsmen from Crimea and soon established itself as an

Introduction 5 important trading hub. In direct proximity, and drawing on Nakhichevan's resources, the town of Rostov grew in a rather uncontrolled process from a small fortress to an important commercial center, which overshadowed its neighbor in the second half of the nineteenth century. The success of Rostov was built on the close cooperation of trade networks from both cities in the booming Black Sea region. The chapter examines the conflicts over land, cooperation over infrastructure development, and the gradual merger of both cities into one metropolis in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to many other case studies in this volume, the key factors that expressed the imperial character of the two cities were ethnic diversity and migration rather than imperial representation.

The third part of the book, *The City as a Palimpsest of Empires," focuses on case studies of cities whose imperial character was defined by more than one empire. Florian Riedler's chapter, *Guarding the Imperial Border: The Fortress City of Ni$ between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, 1690-1740," examines how the geopolitical competition between two empires that resulted in the formation of a new border at the end of the seventeenth century fundamentally changed a city. At the center of attention is the fortress that was designed by the Habsburgs when they conquered Nis for a short time in 1690 and that was kept by the Ottomans when they repossessed the city. In the restoration that the Ottomans initiated in the 1720s, the fortress became the prime location to represent the empire architecturally in a number of ornamented gates. In addition, the frequent wars between the imperial contenders also affected Ottoman urban governance of the multi-ethnic city that had a large minority of Christian inhabitants. Ottoman policy oscillated between suspicion vis-à-vis the Christian population of the city for alleged acts of treason and the will to reintegrate them into urban life. Overall, the chapter shows that imperial politics shaping the urban environment in this border zone were always relational: they have to be conceived as mutual reactions to the imperial competitor beyond the border.

In the next chapter, "Empire after Empire: Austro-Hungarian Recalibration of the Ottoman Čaršija of Sarajevo," Aida Murtić examines the restructuring of the market area of the city in a time of imperial transition. Čaršija, the traditional economic hub of Sarajevo, had been designed according to the rules of Ottoman urbanism in the sixteenth century as a place where different urban groups interacted. It was destroyed to a large extent by a fire in 1879 at the beginning of Austrian rule, and thus the rebuilding that went along with new planning procedures and architectural practices became a test case for the efficiency and modernity of Austrian rule. Pragmatic considerations resulted in a reformed Čaršija where many of the old structures were preserved. Especially the conservation of the central mosque and its transformation into a historical monument was a way to integrate the Muslims symbolically into the new order. This happened in a wider framework of a new discourse on monument protection, new techniques of preservation, and the propagation of a new Orientalizing style for public buildings. The example shows how one empire used material elements from its predecessor in its imperial representation and self-conception, which evolved over time from a modernizing project to one of inclusion of different elements of urban heritage.

Elisabeth Haid-Lener's chapter, *Lemberg or L'vov: The Symbolic Significance of a City at the Crossroads of the Austrian and the Russian Empires," examines the situation of a city with a religiously and ethnically diverse population in a border region between two empires. Lviv became part of the Habsburg Monarchy as the capital of Galicia in the end of the eighteenth century and thrived because of investments in infrastructure and education. The city developed as a cultural and educational center of the imperial German culture and the local Polish nobility's culture, the latter becoming dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was challenged by the Ruthenian/Ukrainian national movement, which could act much more freely in Lviv than in neighboring Russia. During the First World War, when Galicia became a battleground between Austria- Hungary and Russia, Habsburg propagandists presented Lviv as a center of European culture in the East within the Austrian concept of a state composed of different nationalities. In contrast, Russian propaganda described the city as an outpost of Russian culture that needed to be liberated and fully Russified. However, the heavy-handed Habsburg military administration and the short Russian occupation of the city were instrumental in destroying the established model of an imperial city that was characterized by the peaceful cohabitation of different groups.

In a similar manner, Elke Hartmann's chapter, *Kars: Bridgehead of Empires," focuses on a border town between two empires. She analyzes the East Anatolian city of Kars between the Ottoman and the Tsarist Empires. Located in Russia's Trans-Caucasian zone of expansion, Kars was under Tsarist rule between 1878 and 1918 and flourished due to Russian investments in infrastructure and agriculture. Especially the Armenian population profited economically and culturally from Tsarist rule, while many Muslims fled to Ottoman territory. Armenians became the majority population in the city and the region, where other communities such as Russians, Greeks, Germans, and Orthodox religious sects also settled. When Kars became part of the Turkish Republic after the First World War, the Russian and Armenian heritage of the city was largely left to decay. The location at the Iron Curtain and the recent hostility between the Turkish Republic and the Republic of Armenia exacerbated the situation so that to this day this heritage can be appreciated only on a local level. Apart from the Armenian traders, the chapter highlights the