The Voyvoda Street Lectures are hosting Prof. Uğur Derman at Objects and Rituals this month with a talk on "Ottoman Building Inscriptions in Istanbul." The lecture will be held at the Museum on Wednesday, February 22, at 6:30 p.m.
Prof. Uğur Derman briefly outlines the topic in the following words: "The inscriptions carved on buildings are often considered a country's ‘title deeds on stone.' Thousands of such inscriptions were used in Istanbul as well, from 1453, when it became the new Ottoman capital, to the present. Most, however, have not made it to our day. Practically all of these inscriptions were written in verse and all were dated by the chronogram used at the end. Calculating a chronogram was simple: every letter of the alphabet had a numeric value so that when all the letters used in the verse were added up, they amounted to a precise date. Some of these inscriptions were composed by well known Ottoman poets and engraved in the sülüs or talik embossed lettering style onto the stone of the building by master calligraphers of the period."
 Uğur Derman was born in 1935 in Bandırma. After completing Haydarpaşa high school in 1953, he studied Pharmacy in the faculty of Medicine at Istanbul University and graduated in 1960. In 1955, he had started learning the arts of the book in the Ottoman Empire under Necmeddin Okyay, a retired academic from the State Academy of Fine Arts, and he earned his degree in this discipline in 1960. In 1963, Derman opened an independent pharmacy and continued his practice until 1978.
Since 1961, he has been working to promote and teach Turkish book arts through independent works, papers and articles for encyclopedias (Turkish Encyclopedia, Islam Encyclopedia). Derman currently teaches at the Marmara University Turcology Research Institute and at the Mimar Sinan Academy of Fine Arts and was made full professor at Mimar Sinan University in 1997. To promote Turkish calligraphy art, the Ministry of Culture sent him to Cairo, Jedda and Chicago, and the Research Center for Islamic History, Arts and Culture (IRCICA), to Baghdad, Kuwait, Islamabad, Cairo and Tunis. Since 1977, he also heads the Türkpetrol foundation. |
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Voyvoda Street Lectures
Objects and Rituals Otoman
Prof. Uğur Derman
Building Inscriptions in Istanbul
Wednesday,
February 22, 2006
6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Free admission
The Ottoman Bank Museum
Bankalar (Voyvoda) Caddesi 35/37
(0212) 334 22 70
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