English
History is always the present history. A fiction story that must be supported by rigorous methods of experimental science to work (otherwise, we should never forget it, we´re not even talking about history), but belonging by right to the battlefield in the history of ideas, always located, as is well known in the Middle Ages, in a literary region beyond genres.
History is produced by tracking values of our time in past periods that have as principal aim to legitimate and pass them off as needed. In this exercise of justification of the present, everything that does not fit is misrepresented, omitted or quieted.
Impressed by his massive and heterogeneous nature, when Flaubert visited Istanbul in 1850 he wrote a famous letter in which he predicted that the ancient Constantinople would be the capital of the world a century later. According to Orhan Pamuk, what occurred, therefore, within the prescribed time was that after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul had become a city possessed by bitterness, poverty and ruin.
Among the ruins of a glorious past there was a magnificent and disturbing world atlas of 1513 during the rule of Atatürk, which, despite being from the first moment it was found out one of the great national treasures of the modern and laic Turkey, whose representation decorates even today the Turkish notes, has since then continued strictly away from public display. Even scholars who want to examine it directly often meet, despite its excellent state of preservation, some insurmountable bureaucratic difficulties.
Somehow not surprisingly it is so, as the map in question has a number of questions with the potential to cause us to seriously rethink the version of conventionally transmitted history.
The author of the portolan chart is the great navigator and excellent Turkish cartographer Muhiddin Piri Ibn Haci Mehmet, -such is its astonishing degree of accuracy of detail that his treatise of 209 chapters and 215 navigation maps served the Turkish sailors for centuries. He not only wrote in the explanatory text of the profile of the Americas that Christopher Columbus first came to the beaches of the West Indies in a year equivalent to 1485 of the Christian era, thus giving reason to those who argue that the 1492 voyage was not the first one performed and enlarging the abyss of the enigmatic inscription in black marble found in the tomb of Innocent VIII in Rome, but also drew guanacos, native animal species still not located by the Spanish in the moment of making the map, on the representation of South American territories.
Not to mention the profile of Atlantis, which seems to be glimpsed in the bottom of the letter.
Paul Oilzum
Despite a very restricted access, the fabulous map is a ubiquitous presence in the city, as you´ll see when you rent apartments in Istanbul
