Joya: AiR / Berin Golonu / USA-TUR
photo Simon Beckmann
Joya: AiR / Berin Golonu / USA-TUR
“The quiet, oxygen-rich environment of the Joya: AiR residency, its natural beauty, and the warmth of its sun, as well as its hosts, provided the clarity I needed to make progress on my book. As I write about Istanbul’s historical green spaces, I have come across accounts of the exotic species that the Ottoman Sultanate imported into their gardens from across the world. One of these accounts describes the cultivation of the cork oak (Quercus suber), which is native to some of the countries of the Western Mediterranean, including Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, France, Portugal and Spain. Even though the tree is not native to Istanbul or Anatolia, there were efforts to cultivate it as a forestry product when the Ottoman Empire was trying to develop a beverage and wine industry in the late nineteenth century. The cork oak has the distinction of offering harvests of this lucrative forestry product without sacrificing the life of the tree. The cork that is stripped from the trunk regenerates every nine years, and the trees can live to be 200 or even 300 years old, providing dozens of harvests.
Before going in search of the extant cork oak trees in Türkiye, I decided to come to Spain to observe these species in their native habitat. Spain contains cork oak forests as well as cultivated groves referred to as dehesas. I was able to visit a dehesa called Haza de Lino, which was about a two-hour drive away from the Joya: AiR residency. This was the highest altitude cork oak grove in the world and it, too, had been planted in the nineteenth century. The Quercus suber groves shared the hills of this region with a complementary plant, the grape vine. At the local bodega, we sampled the delicious Haza de Lino wine, which, of course, sources both the grapes and the cork locally.
At Joya: AiR, I further researched the status of Quercus suber production in Türkiye to learn that the first Quercus suber saplings sent to Istanbul had been a diplomatic gift from the king of Spain to the Ottoman Sultan. Although cork oak production never took off during the Ottoman Empire, some of the saplings sent from Spain were planted on the Sultan’s farm in the Aydın province. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the seeds from these original saplings were collected and planted in a managed grove in Izmir, which now contains tens of thousands of trees. It may have taken close to a century to realize the vision of developing a locally grown cork industry in Türkiye, but the King of Spain’s gift of diplomacy did eventually bear fruit. I encountered one last surprise as I shared this information during the presentation I gave to the other residents at Joya: AiR. At the end of my talk, Simon brought out a giant piece of harvested cork that he’d kept as a souvenir from a childhood road trip that he and his family had taken to Corsica, where they happened upon a Quercus suber harvest”.
Berin Golonu is an art historian, critic and curator from Istanbul, and now teaching at the University at Buffalo. Her research and teaching focus is on urban ecologies, spatial practices, landscape imagery and trade networks in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Her first monograph, titled Naturalizing Modernization, Urban Greenspace and Cultural Memory in Late Ottoman Istanbul, traces changing concepts of urban public space in the Ottoman capital during the long nineteenth century, and draws connections with the uses of historical greenspaces today. Sections of this research have been published in the edited volume Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics (Routledge, 2020) and Infrastructures and Society in (Post) Ottoman Geographies (Forum Transregionale Studien, 2021). Golonu’s research articles and art criticism have appeared in Third Text, Journal of Visual Culture, Artforum, Art in America, X-Tra, Modern Painters and frieze. Along with Candice Hopkins and Marisa Jahn, she is the co-editor of the volume Recipes for an Encounter (Western Front Editions, 2010). From 2003-2008, Golonu served as a curator at YBCA in San Francisco. Recent fellowship awards include the Getty/ACLS Fellowship in the History of Art; an American Research Institute in Turkey/NEH Fellowship, and a Leibniz Fellowship for Historical Authenticity.