The Külliye as Hypotext: a New Reading of Ottoman Imperial Mosques and Tombs

Abstract This article reflects on Istanbul as a palimpsest city, more specifically, about how architectural typologies, practices, visual tropes and narratives migrate through different contexts in time and space. As a city inherited from the Byzantine Empire, negotiating the intersection of past and present as well as topography and politics has been fundamental to shaping Ottoman Istanbul. The article explores the imperial city through one of its ‘original’ Ottoman structures, the religious and social complex known as külliye , in order to frame its agency, both formal and urbanistic, to reveal not only its extremely rich and imaginative iterations from the conquest of Constantinople to the Tanzimat but also the spatiotemporal relationships between them.