Blind spots: how death became visible in late Ottoman Istanbul, 1870–1900

Biological death did not automatically acquire perceptual, epistemic, or administrative legibility in late Ottoman Istanbul. Drawing on Ottoman archival records and contemporary press reports, this article examines how concealed, decomposed, fragmented, and otherwise indeterminate human remains entered regimes of recognition, identification, and official intervention. I use the term governed invisibility to describe how historically produced spatial, sensory, material, and institutional arrangements conditioned the perceptibility and administrative handling of human remains without deliberate concealment. Smell, decomposition, accidental exposure, and infrastructural disruption precipitated discovery, while police intervention, medical examination, personal objects, documentary traces, and forensic procedures recast bodily remains as objects of identification and evidentiary interpretation. Whereas existing scholarship has followed death from notification and examination through certification and registration, this article reconstructs the unstable threshold preceding those processes, tracing an uneven passage from disappearance to perceptible presence, from presence to a recognizable body, and from the body to administrative and forensic evidence.