The volume Monuments, patrons, contexts presents the proceedings of a symposium held on June 27, 2008, at the Netherlands Institute in Turkey in honour of the historian Machiel Kiel. Best known for his often pioneering work on the Ottoman Balkans, the scope of the contributions by friends and colleagues is as wide as the honouree’s lifework: Heath Lowry discovers a hitherto unknown sultanic mosque from around 1400 in the course of his fieldwork in Greece. Grigor Boykov finds already vanished monuments on the basis of textual sources. Mariya Kiprovska, similarly looking at monuments, brings to light a curious case of what appears to be a “gazi-turned-saint”. Aziz Nazmi Shakir-Tash ventures through the Ottoman Rhodopes, an old stonecutter’s notebook in hand, and wonders about the earliest Ottoman monuments there. Suraiya Faroqhi accompanies the 17th-century scholar Abdurrahman Hibri on the hajj from his native Edirne and reviews his observations on architecture and politics. Hedda Reindl-Kiel turns our attention to the 18th-century reconstruction of Muslim infrastructure after the Venetian conquest of the Morea on one hand, to the patronage of a palace eunuch on the other. The topic of infrastructure, now from a Bulgarian perspective, is also addressed by Stephen Lewis. İlknur Kolay looks at building materials and discerns a change in terminology in the 17th century. Kemal Kutgün Eyüpgiller covers new ground with a study on 18th century military architecture along the Bosporus. Maximilian Hartmuth and Zeynep Ahunbay deal with the restoration and preservation of Ottoman monuments in Bosnia, with one writing about the 1890s, the other about the reconstruction of a historic mosque lost in the 1990s war. The research articles are followed by the thus far most complete bibliography of Kiel’s work.
