SESSION: Environmental Approaches to the Eastern Mediterranean Landscape, 1750-1920
For centuries, the territories of the eastern Mediterranean were home to the ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse communities that comprised the Ottoman Empire. These territories simultaneously served as travel destinations for artists, antiquarians, and archaeologists seeking out the region’s ancient ruins, Biblical heritage, and ‘Orientalist’ exoticism. For insiders and outsiders to the region alike, the land of the eastern Mediterranean itself had long been a site of significance, whether as contested territory in trans-imperial and nationalist conflict or as the source of valuable commodities, whether antiquities, agricultural products, or geological matter. While scholars have explored travellers’ desire to assimilate the region into sublime or picturesque frameworks, there has been less critical study of how the region’s landscapes have been visually represented, particularly in vernacular image-making traditions. Art and visual culture witness the complex ways in which human labour and territorialization shaped the eastern Mediterranean through a broad array of cultural and aesthetic tropes pertaining to land, landscape, and ‘nature’.
We invite papers that approach artistic representations of eastern Mediterranean landscapes through an environmental lens, focusing on the period 1750-1920. The panel invites papers on topics including but not limited to: micro-ecologies; animal-human relations; agricultural labour and resistance; agroecological continuity/transformation; infrastructural/industrial impacts on landscape (e.g. railways, urbanisation); intersections of extractive practices (e.g. mining, archaeology); state/private/common land ownership; territories contested by local/national/imperial actors; landscape and tourism; landscapes as sites for mythology and history; (dis)continuities between ancient and modern land use; rivers, coasts, deserts, mountains; and images which conform/subvert pastoral/picturesque/sublime tropes.
Session Convenors:
Sebastian Marshall, University of St Andrews
Alexandra Solovyev, Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Speakers:
Fatma Sarıkaya-Işık, Middle East Technical University
Mapping the Liminal Hinterland: Vision, Nature, and Order in Ottoman Istanbul
The Beylik (Imperial) Waterways Map (1748–1774) stands as a rare artifact of Ottoman visual and environmental epistemology. Produced during the reign of Sultan Mahmud I, the map traces the water’s course from its rural source in the village of Gaibe—located in Istanbul’s southwestern hinterland—through the Land Walls to Topkapı Palace. Unlike most contemporary depictions focused on the intramural city, this map visualizes the seldom-represented rural hinterland, a threshold zone linking the imperial core with its ecological periphery.
This paper situates the Beylik Map within a broader genealogy of Ottoman visual culture, challenging Eurocentric narratives that confine “scientific mapping” to Enlightenment rationality. Combining miniature aesthetics with technical drawing, the map renders the extra-muros landscape not merely as terrain but as a moralized and governable space shaped by the imperial notion of mizan—cosmic equilibrium. The flow of water functions both as a hydraulic network and a visual metaphor of sovereignty, directing the administrative gaze from periphery to centre. Through its precise scaling, inscriptions, and rhythmic geometry, the map transforms nature into measurable knowledge, turning observation into regulation.
Depicting water as a system of flowing veins, the map articulates a hydraulic vision of governance—an epistemology in which flow itself becomes the organizing principle of both nature and power. The Beylik Map thus converts the rural hinterland into a measured landscape: a visual record of divine order and imperial rationality, bridging the sixteenth-century garden culture with the landscape aesthetics of the modern period.
Desmond Bryan Kraege, University of Lausanne
Mosquitoes at the Byblis Spring: Classical Imagination, Environmental Change, and Choiseul-Gouffier’s Anatolian Expedition
In 1793, French artist Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes painted a small scene depicting mythological figure Byblis’s metamorphosis into a spring, as described by Ovid. The artist set her in a verdant, idealised Mediterranean landscape. It remains unclear whether he was aware that the count of Choiseul-Gouffier, in a publication based on his travels in Greece and Anatolia, had included a representation of a real site he identified as the spring of Byblis (1782). Far from the lush scene depicted by Valenciennes and other artists, this image represented a chiefly mineral environment, where human presence was revealed through tents on elevated platforms, a far cry from the huts and temples of Western culture’s idealisation of Greek-culture territories.
The tension between these two images that purport to represent the same site is partly explained by Choiseul-Gouffier’s text, which points out that inhabitants were forced to live above ground level due to the high number of mosquitoes. This reveals the development of two types of environmental awareness, concerning firstly the difference between imaginary visions of the ancient Greek world and its reality, and secondly the consciousness of environmental change. Indeed, the presence of mosquitoes was interpreted as resulting from the gradual silting up of the Maeander estuary, explained in a chronological map: both phenomena, combined, were argued to have caused the decline of the region’s great ancient cities. This case study will provide a starting point for an analysis of the Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce’s confrontations with environmental realities and change in Anatolia.
Nadim Al Nakhl, McMaster University
Levantine Landscape in Melkite Iconography
This paper examines how Melkite icons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Eastern Mediterranean use local landscape imagery to express an Arab Christian identity. Rather than focusing on the theological content and Byzantine heritage of Melkite icons, this paper emphasises how land and environment shape communal identity.
Using close visual analysis of Levantine icons, the paper highlights how artists actively chose recognisable elements of regional geography, such as rivers, cities, and native flora, to anchor sacred narratives to the region and link them to Arab Christian identity.
In icons of St George, for example, he is shown slaying the dragon beside the Beirut River, with the city behind him, visually connecting the saint’s protection with that urban Arab Christian community.
An icon-map of the Holy Land arranges biblical events across the topography of Palestine, highlighting specific holy sites still inhabited and cared for by Arab Christians. It reinforces the idea that the Christian story remains rooted in the lived landscape of Palestine, offering a clear visual message: Arab Christians are not outsiders to the Holy Land but its continuous custodians.
Further, an icon of St Sergius and St Bacchus combines the Lebanese cedar with the holy city of Resafa, visually linking the land to saints venerated as patrons of the Arabs.
This paper argues that, by embedding sacred narratives in familiar geographies, Melkite artists created icons that serve as visible statements of belonging, affirming that Arab identity and Orthodox faith are deeply intertwined and rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean landscape.
Jenny Gaschke, Victoria and Albert Museum
An environmental perspective on the orientalist landscapes in the V&A’s Searight Collection
My paper will (re)introduce the V&A’s Searight Collection as both a rich archive and useful tool for investigating Eastern Mediterranean landscapes from an environmental and ecocritical perspective – as well as for (re)examining definitions of Orientalism.
Assembled by Rodney Searight (1909-1991), the collection consists of 19th- and early 20th-century watercolours, drawings, and prints, as well as books depicting and describing the Eastern Mediterranean and the wider Middle East. Today, frequently described as orientalist, Searight never saw his collection as such.
The artists represented in the collection were (mostly) British travellers from a broad range of professional backgrounds. Among their images, landscape is a dominant genre, and here subjects span topography, archaeology and architecture. I will argue that throughout, the material testifies to a visual engagement with the region’s climate from desertification to water management, to name one example.
Searight was a Shell executive who lived and worked in Egypt and Iraq for extended periods; significantly, he had also studied drawing at the Chelsea Art School. While the images described above are not unusual in the visual adaptation and appropriation of the Eastern Mediterranean, the collector’s agency distilled the material further, unintentionally making the collection the useful resource it is today.
Where, as a final step and given the 50th anniversary of Edward Said’s seminal publication in 2028, the paper challenges Searight’s own definition of his collection as non-orientalist, it might nevertheless offer an opportunity to expand the study, definition and interpretation of Orientalism through an environmental approach.