L'Alhambra

The Alhambra, a palatial complex founded in the 13th and 14th centuries by the Arab rulers of Granada, remained in obscurity for several centuries after the end of the Reconquista.The Spaniards were the first to "rediscover" the Alhambra in the 18th century, while its foreign visitors made it one of the first tourist destinations in the 19th century. Many of them left precious traces of their visit: writings, photographs and, above all, comments in the Alhambra Visitors’ Book, kept since 1829. Historian Edhem Eldem has analysed this fascinating document to offer a completely new vision of the Alhambra and what it represented.From Chateaubriand to Owen Jones and from Washington Irving to Jean-Léon Gérôme, Westerners have built up an image of Andalusia that is marked by romanticism and orientalism. But the Western enthusiasm should not make us forget the "Oriental" visitors to the monument: North Africans, who were numerous but not very vocal; Ottoman diplomats and travellers, who were sometimes more Orientalist than the Europeans; Arabs from the Mashreq, who were increasingly influenced by the Arab nationalism advocated by the Nahda, the "Arab renaissance".The author has reconstructed these cross-views from the register of visitors, the press of the time, memoirs and travel accounts, in order to draw up a cultural history of the relationship between East and West, North and South, Islam and Christianity, centre and periphery.Edhem Eldem is a professor at the University of Boğaziçi in Istanbul and holds the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History at the Collège de France. His work focuses on the social, cultural and mental history of the last century of the Ottoman Empire, with a particular emphasis on Westernization and Orientalism.