Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi Project

Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi is one of the places that carries the sociocultural memory of Üsküdar. The project with its full name “Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi: Sociocultural, Historical and Religious Dimensions”, which is carried out within the scope of TÜBİTAK 3501 within Marmara University, covers the time period in which written and visual materials will be identified from the establishment of this important place in 1753 until 1971, when Necmettin Efendi, the last sheikh, passed away. Through the inventory to be identified, it is aimed to reveal the multidimensional history of an Ottoman social and religious institution. This project will be a role model in the field, as the literature on similar studies mostly examines institutions in a specific dimension and does not deal with them in a multidimensional way. The project does not only focus on written and visual sources; it expands the research questions with oral history studies and brings a new dimension to the analysis and presentation of the results of the collected data with digital history methods.

The most important output of the project is the creation of an internet portal with a database that will create a written, verbal and visual archive of Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi, which has survived to the present day and played an exceptional role in the Republican period. In this way, the cultural heritage formed around the tekke will be transferred to future generations. Focusing on the role of the Özbekler Tekkesi in the political, cultural and religious history of Islam, the Ottoman Empire and Türkiye, the project will present comprehensive research on the impact of the tekke on religious, intellectual, spatial, socio-economic, political and daily life in the historical process. For this purpose, the outputs of the project include identifying, digitizing the records, archival documents and epigraphic materials related to the tekke  as the primary sources and translating them into contemporary language, creating a database from the information and data contained in these sources, and publishing the findings in print and digital form with articles written by expert academics. At the end of the project, it is aimed to create an editorial book, a workshop and a web page presenting the results of the studies.

* The image on the page is taken from Salt Archive.