The T-shaped Zaviye/İmarets of Edirne: A Key Mechanism for Ottoman Urban Morphological Transformation

Abstract:This article examines the process that formed the urban fabric of early Ottoman Edirne from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. By examining the physical structures built in the course of the first century after the Ottoman conquest of the city the article traces the formation of the Ottoman urban morphology, which replaced the inherited Byzantine spatial order of urban tissue. The study argues that Ottoman-era normative patterns, visible in the spatial modification of other Bithynian and Balkan cities, are also clearly discernible in Edirne. Scholars have previously examined in detail the rich architectural heritage of early Ottoman Edirne mostly from artistic and architectural perspectives, but paid little attention to the changes of the city’s physical form. The few publications that study the spatial transformation of the city in the Ottoman era have failed to comprehend the key role of the T-type zaviye/imarets in the process of structural change and have not identified the existence of a normative pattern, which dominated the transformation of the Ottoman cities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the period from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.