Of a Grof, a Graveyard, and a Gong: On Postimperial, Interimperial Persons, Places, and Things

The concept of postempire — the uncanny relationship between the present and multiple imperial pasts — entails a focus on the specific persons, places, and things that convey imperial legacies and inspire postimperial collective memories. In this lecture, I offer a general model for the study of postempire with an emphasis on postimperial uncanniness in interimperial sites. I then explore the potency of postimperial persons, postimperial places, and postimperial things through three specific, evocative cases. My examples are each ambivalent interimperial legacies of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires. 

First, I consider the Croatian Grof Nikola Šubić Zrinski as a postimperial, interimperial person. Zrinski was the heroic martyr of the Battle of Szigetvár (1566) against the Ottomans; his nationalization as an icon of both Croatian and Hungarian public memory belies the porous logic of the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier that shaped his life and death. Following this, I examine Istanbul’s Polonezköy (Adampol) cemetery as a peculiar postimperial, interimperial place. Founded on the outskirts of Ottoman Istanbul in 1842 by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, the town sheltered Polish émigrés who fled Romanov domains after both the November Uprising of 1830-1831 and, later, the January Uprising of 1863-1864. 

Although Polonezköy remains home to a dwindling Polish-Turkish community, its most evocative and prominent postimperial site is its Catholic cemetery. Finally, I unravel the provocative history of Vienna’s Pummerin, a giant bell housed in the north tower of Stephansdom, which “booms” once a year to ring in the new year. Despite its central location in both Vienna and Austria at large, the bell is a relic of interimperial warfare, forged from Ottoman cannonballs abandoned after the second Siege of Vienna in 1683. In the case of the Grof, the graveyard, and the gong alike, interimperial pasts uncannily haunt the postimperial present.

 

Jeremy F. Walton is a cultural anthropologist whose research resides at the intersection of memory studies, urban studies, the comparative study of empires and imperialism, and critical perspectives on materiality. He leads the research group “REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” at the University of Rijeka, Croatia, with support from a European Research Council consolidator grant (#10100290). Prior to this, he led the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Walton received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. His first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. He has also held research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and New York University’s Religious Studies Program. His writing has appeared in a plethora of scholarly and popular journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, Die Welt Des Islams, History and Anthropology, The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Jadaliyya, and Sidecar (The New Left Review). REVENANT, which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on postimperial memories and legacies in post-Habsburg, post-Ottoman realms, and post-Romanov realms.