East: Ottomans at the Alhambra

If we know so much about Fuad Efendi’s visit to the Alhambra in 1844, entirely ignored by Ottoman and Turkish sources, it is because it made the headlines of the Granada press, partly due to the Ottoman ambassador’s unexpectedly Western looks and attitude. Like him, many of the early Ottoman visitors were high-profile bureaucrats and statesmen of Turkish culture, such as the famous Midhat Pasha, whose limited knowledge on the Alhambra and Al-Andalus came largely from Western sources. True, from the 1860s on, a relative interest for the Andalusian past had begun to inspire a few works in Turkish, including tragedies in the 1870s and 1880s about the fall of Al-Andalus, probably derived from a sense of impending doom in the Ottoman Balkans. Nevertheless, the Ottoman-Turkish discovery of Al-Andalus turned out to be a short-lived and superficial fad, soon overridden by Western-inspired clichés. Even the craze for Moresque architecture witnessed in Istanbul in the 1860s, which some scholars have interpreted as a conscious historicist effort at appropriating a Medieval Islamic past, consisted rather of a stylistic and cosmetic transfer from Europe, with no other aim than to give an easily identifiable Oriental touch to the imperial capital.