In 1855/1860, Dimitrie Papazoglu (1811−1892) opened a museum in his private residence on Calea Văcărești, no 151, Bucharest, with objects amassed during and after retiring from his military career, ca. 1855. Papazoglu doubled opening a museum with the publication of a catalogue, in 1864, which listed Egyptian and ‘Oriental’ artefacts, some even sourced locally. Their presence in a private collection from a region in the process of creating a national state, independent from the Ottoman Empire, raises a series of questions. Could these artefacts be attributed to a form of internalized Orientalist discourse or is it simply a consequence of the Westernization process? How do the Ottoman era and Islamic objects reconcile with Papazoglu’s discursive goal for collecting being for ‘the feeling of love of the progress of my nation’? Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the meaning of these artefacts in the general context of the collection, and the negotiation within the process of articulation a concept of Romanian heritage. The analysis will focus on the museum catalogue published in 1864, supported by additional archival material, to assess the labels Papazoglu used for defining the variety of objects he collected, and how these taxonomies underpin the production of knowledge on the concepts of heritage and of ‘Oriental.’
Islamic, Ottoman Era Artefacts and the Politics of Memory
Dimitrie Papazoglu’s Collection of ‘Antiquities and Oriental Rarities’ for ‘The Feeling of Love of the Progress of My Nation’
