Title: A Partnership of Unequals: Historicising Labour Relations between Local and Foreign Archaeologists in Türkiye through Ottoman Comparanda
Part II – Theodore Macridy: The Ottoman Archaeologist Who Worked for the King of Prussia by Filiz Tütüncü Çağlar (Aarhus University)
Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Time: 17:30
Room: H-232
Abstract: This lecture explores unequal labour relations in late Ottoman archaeology through the career of Theodore Macridy Bey (1872–1940), one of the first professional Ottoman archaeologists. Using his letters, reports, and European accounts, it examines how Macridy’s role as commissar of the Imperial Museum required navigating between authority and subordination. Charged with enforcing the 1884 Antiquities Law, he defended Ottoman sovereignty while facilitating Western excavations—often being treated as a subordinate by European colleagues.
By tracing his progression from interpreter to curator, the lecture situates Macridy within imperial power structures and the professionalisation of archaeology. It highlights how extractive hierarchies in Ottoman–Western collaborations around 1900 echo inequalities in modern fieldwork. Macridy’s experience reveals how language, bureaucracy, and labour shaped archaeology in the Ottoman world and how their legacies persist in the discipline today.
About the speaker: Filiz Tütüncü Çağlar is an archaeologist and art historian specializing in the history of archaeology, with expertise in Byzantine and Islamic archaeology. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Victoria in 2017 with a dissertation on Ottoman excavations in Raqqa. After postdoctoral research at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, she received an Einstein Fellowship at the Einstein Center Chronoi in 2024. Since 2025, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in the “Lost Cities” project at Aarhus University, focusing on Ottoman archaeological practice.