Damla Özakay

Building, Inscribing, Inhabiting Along the Iris River Valley: Amasea/Amasya at the Crossroads of Turco-Mongol, Persianate, and Italianate Traditions

Damla Özakay is a scholar of Islamic art and architecture with a focus on architectural production and city-building practices in medieval Anatolia (1100-1500) and their transregional connections with Greater Iran, the Levant, and the Black Sea region. Through the study of religious, infrastructural, and funerary architecture, her research investigates how artistic patronage, urban identity formation, and memory-making intersected with broader cultural, political, and environmental processes. She received her PhD. from Harvard University’s joint degree program in Middle Eastern Studies and History of Art and Architecture. Her dissertation “Centralizing the Local: The Architecture of Death, Hospitality, Devotion, and Water in Amasya, c. 1209-1510” offers a long-term analysis of Amasya’s vivid and experimental architectural scene. It expands the discussion of how locality and transregionality worked together in the making of urban images in Anatolia during this period. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in History from Boğaziçi University.

Despite its provincialization in the scholarship, Amasya remained a key administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hub from its incorporation into the Ilkhanid Empire in 1256, and later into the Ottoman domains in the fifteenth century. Damla's project reframes the city as a site for power formation, idiom making, and cultural exchange, highlighting the crucial role of cities beyond imperial capitals. Through the study of architecture, the project traces how local actors adapted transregional and local visual idioms and urban environment to articulate urban prestige, civic attachment, and claims to centrality in a period of political fragmentation.