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Monumental and magnificently decorated tents played a key role in Ottoman courtly life and ceremonies over the course of the dynasty’s six-century reign (circa 1299-1922), building on similar practices in other Islamic cultures before and contemporary with the Ottoman Empire. While their primacy remained steadfast, Ottoman imperial tents’ aesthetic properties, functions, and meanings shifted over time to suit new socio-political contexts as well as changing courtly tastes. Far from an unconscious vestige of their origins as a nomadic principality in late thirteenth-century Anatolia, Ottoman sultans strategically deployed the longstanding Islamic tradition of princely tentage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an era marked by transformation. This dissertation explores several themes related to the study of fabric architecture in the late Ottoman period through an analysis of written and visual sources, chief among them a corpus of rarely seen extant tents as well as illustrated manuscripts, photography, and printed commodities such as newspapers and postcards. These themes include the built environment and its mobility and temporality; the mediated experience of nature; royal ceremonies, rites, and rituals; as well as the construction of modernity through infrastructural building and the formation of national history and identity. In short, imperial tents functioned as vehicles for choreographing courtly spaces, facilitating mobilities, enhancing leisure activities, framing ceremonies, and crafting a modern imperial identity predicated on the Ottomans’ storied past.

Cem ceremonies are the primary communal assemblies of the spiritual lineages of the Alevi Muslim minority living in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the surrounding regions. Alevis designate settings for the cem known as cemevis or cem evis (literally “houses of the cem”). Cemevis may be purpose built structures or buildings temporarily converted for ritual observance. The essential requirement of the cemevi is that it be suitable for the cem, both spatially and in terms of the intentionality and appropriate moral background of the host and participants. The setting must permit all in attendance, men and women, to have equal visual and aural access to each other and to their Dede, the elder spiritual guide who descends from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. This leaves the cemevi open to a wide variety of design schemes, materials, furniture and decor, all of which make the ceremony possible, yet do not determine or confine its liturgy. The emphasis on community and comportment allows symbolic imagery and reenactments to activate and envelop the space in a meaningful, albeit often temporary, manner. Both the increasing visibility of purpose-built Alevi centres since the late twentieth century and the hidden nature of cem sites during periods of persecution dating back to the sixteenth century are related to Alevi resistance to elements in mainstream Islamic culture in the region. Alevis sometimes refer to the practices and ideologies of their Sunni neighbours as “cami kūltūrū” (“mosque culture”), differentiating this from themselves and their own cem-centred worship.This project explores the development, use, meaning, and changing role of the Alevi cemevi and its iconography from the thirteenth century to the present within the geographical region framed by the Turkish Republic. Through a combination of architectural site visits, the collection of oral histories, and an analysis of the historical setting, this study examines the relationship between ceremony and space, village architecture and religious settings, definitions of places of worship determined by Turkish law, and the place of an Alevi architecture within the history of Islamic religious architecture.