Nicola Melis e Carlo Sanna
Empires do not vanish; they endure in fractured forms—sedimented in ri tuals, landscapes, institutional languages, and inherited silences. Decisively dissolved in 1924, the Ottoman Empire remains robust across vast post-im perial geographies. Its traces are not confined to archives or ruins but persist in reactivated forms: in the façades of restored mosques, in commemorative calendars, in culinary continuities, in political rhetoric, and the projection of cultural capital. These remainders constitute what might be called the Otto man “afterlives”—not residues of a defunct order but dynamic elements in the present, selectively mobilised, strategically forgotten, and often vigorously contested.
