Talk
Chamber Talks
Gentlemen's Clubs in the Late Ottoman Empire
Utku Can Akın & Mustafa Türkan
10 February 2026 / 18:30
In the nineteenth century, Pera and Galata served as hosts to gentlemen's societies and meeting halls, among other functions. The habitués of these gentlemen's societies were people from different parts of the same city, but who knew how to speak the same language in the same halls. Bureaucrats attempting to establish on paper how the city should function through memoranda, reports, and instructions emanating from the state's pen; scholars who had made curiosity their profession along the line extending from library to lectern; lawyers who made it their business to ensure justice found its place between people; physicians who undertook to speak for the sick and the vulnerable; bankers who managed the networks of commercial exchange connecting the world from their accounting houses in Galata; and engineers who had made their mechanical expertise a matter of prestige—all were present in the same assembly. They all came from a society that filtered through their different social positions, speaking and listening behind the same veil of civility in accordance with the same rhythm, circulating knowledge and prestige at the same table.
Literature, science, professional debates, municipal affairs, and politics were discussed at the same table. While these assemblies, where texts, reports, and news were read and discussed, were more than that. These gentlemen's societies were spaces where not only socialization took place, but where regular meetings were held around membership regimes, conversational etiquette was displayed, and codes of manners, civility, and trust were established. The city was envisioned through various technical imaginaries, from illumination to transportation, from communication to safe navigation.
In this conversation, based on the doctoral dissertation of Utku Can Akın, recipient of the Istanbul Research Institute's 2025 Research and Write-Up Grant for PhD Candidates, the discussion will address how these societies, functioning as knowledge infrastructures, put knowledge into dynamic circulation within an "economy of trust" and how this permeated broader social imaginaries. Joining Utku Can Akın as a discussant in this conversation will be Mustafa Türkan, who was awarded the YILLIK 7 Early Career Article Prize for an article co-authored with Akın.
The talk will take place on the ground floor of the Istanbul Research Institute. Admission is free, and no reservations are required. The event will be conducted in Turkish, and simultaneous interpretation will not be provided. A recording of the talk will subsequently be published on the Istanbul Research Institute’s YouTube channel.
About Chamber Talks
Chamber Talks initiated by the Istanbul Research Institute (İAE) in 2008 to add a different dimension to Istanbul studies aims to feature the latest research and discussions about Istanbul, with its scope ranging from history to architecture, and from music to cinema.
About Utku Can Akın
Utku Can Akın examines how knowledge was produced, circulated, and gained institutional forms in late Ottoman Istanbul in his doctoral research at the University of Toronto. His work focuses particularly on scientific and literary societies. Treating these societies as knowledge infrastructures, Akın investigates the transformative effect of the "economy of trust" established by epistemic communities and how this effect permeated broader social imaginaries.
About Mustafa Türkan
Mustafa Türkan is pursuing his doctoral studies at Bahçeşehir University. His doctoral work discusses how cinema produced ways of seeing in the process extending from the Late Ottoman period to the Early Republic, and how the nation learned to look at the world through this means. By tracing the transformations the image of 'modernity' underwent across different media, Türkan positions the visual culture of cinema along the axes of media materiality, the logistics of perception, and the gradual replacement of the human gaze by machine vision.
