New Exhibition Explores Balkans' Post-Ottoman Heritage

Cities are living, fluid organisms that never cease to transform, and transformation is governed as much by the practical needs of its residents as by geopolitical and historical circumstances. 

Historically, the Balkans went through a series of transformations that changed the region culturally, politically and sociologically.

A large portion of the Balkans was ruled for centuries by the Ottoman Empire and this left a strong mark on the urban geography of its cities. A brand new exhibition opening soon at the Historical Museum of Serbia explores the ways in which four cities in Turkey and the former Yugoslavia changed in the early 1900s and how this change was tracked and documented by early photojournalists and reporters. 

Cities in Motion - Post-Ottoman Heritage brings 200 digitally-processed photographs submitted by Turkish and Yugoslav reporters from the 1920s and 1930s who worked for major regional newspapers such as Cumhuriyet, Aksam, Politika and Vreme. 

These reporters roamed their hometowns - Ankara, Istanbul, Belgrade and Sarajevo - on a mission to document how the central urban areas changed to reflect new times, new politics and new cultural trends. 

The Ottoman Empire had its administrative and political centre in Turkey but its cultural and political influence was very much present and quite strong in all territories under its rule. Major cities of the Balkans, parts of the territory that would later become Yugoslavia, carried strong traits of this dominance. 

This was, and to an extent still is, evident in the urban planning and architecture, but also in the everyday lives of the people living in those cities. When the Ottoman Empire fell, things started to change, slowly but steadily...