Four collections comprising more than 12,000 historical glass slides and black-and-white photographs taken in the territory of present-day Turkey between the 1920s and 1990s are currently being digitised and enriched with metadata. They are being made successively available to the public in the database of the Museum for Islamic Art (syrianheritage.gbv.de).
The photographers represented in these collections are Wolfgang Zorer (1889–1939), Erhard Glitz (1904–1969), Josef Härle (1937–2015) and Michael Meinecke (1941–1995). The oldest photographs are by Wolfgang Zorer, who worked as an excavation photographer and surveyor in Turkey after the First World War; his images come from the estate of Ernst Herzfeld. Erhard Glitz travelled extensively through Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s, presenting his atmospheric photographs of historical sites to German audiences in lectures. The geography professor Josef Härle undertook various research trips and organised field excursions with his students across regions of present-day Turkey. Both Glitz and Härle produced numerous photographs that reflect a primarily geographical perspective. The images taken by Michael Meinecke, who later became Director of the Museum for Islamic Art, document many little-known historical buildings, primarily – though not exclusively – from the Seljuk period in Anatolia. Among them are details of inscriptions and tilework that informed Meinecke's doctoral dissertation and are otherwise barely documented photographically.
The photographs of all four photographers capture the most diverse aspects of life: historical buildings such as mosques, caravanserais and residential houses, the varied landscapes, and the everyday lives of people across different regions of present-day Turkey.
The Database
The more than 12,000 digitised images are being uploaded to the database (syrianheritage.gbv.de) in stages. The database was originally created to make photographs of Syria's endangered cultural heritage accessible worldwide. It has since grown to more than 265,000 photographs, plans and documents, becoming an important resource for the documentation of the broader Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa region.
Like most other images in the database, the photographs by Wolfgang Zorer, Erhard Glitz, Josef Härle and Michael Meinecke are provided with metadata on the subjects depicted, their locations and terms of use, and are freely accessible without registration.
Outreach
A particular concern of the project is communicating the significance of these historical photographs to the general public, especially people with a personal connection to Turkey. To this end, interviews and public events have taken place, the results of which feed into an online exhibition.
Exhibition on the Islamic·Art Online Portal
Selected highlights from the digitised historical photographs of Turkey are presented in an online exhibition on the Islamic·Art portal – complemented by comments from Berliners with ties to Turkey, who have shared their memories and associations with the images.
Michael Meinecke's Connections to Turkey
In cooperation with the TAM Museum Berlin, 2026 will see the establishment of contacts with family members, friends and colleagues of Michael Meinecke, shedding light on his personality and his entanglements with Turkey, and examining his legacy through the perspectives of his contemporaries. Interviews with these contacts will be produced as oral history videos and published on the Islamic·Art online portal. Photographs and their backgrounds will be shared on social media to reach a wider public. At the end of 2026, an interactive storytelling salon will be held in the Brugsch Pasha Hall of the Museum for Islamic Art.
Project Director: Dr Anne Mollenhauer
Research Staff: Dr Hiba Bizreh, Alaaeddin Haddad, Dr Karin Pütt, Mehmet Tütüncü
Cooperation Partner: TAM Museum (Gülşah Stapel, Verda Kaya)
Project Funding: Funding Programme for the Digitisation of Cultural Heritage Objects by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of the State of Berlin (digiS); Freunde des Museums für Islamische Kunst im Pergamonmuseum e.V.
Duration: 27 January 2025 – 31 December 2026
