Reassembling Phanariots’ Masonry Neighborhood in Istanbul: Digital Visualization as Urban Historical Research

Early modern Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire’s capital, was a major urban center well-known for its large religious complexes and bazaars, a masonry architecture of lead-covered domes still enduring. In contrast, the residential architecture was mostly timber-framed, and due to the material ephemerality in fires, little is known about and left of the city’s residential neighborhoods. This article considers the Phanar waterfront—the neighborhood of a group of Greek Orthodox Christians known as Phanariots—as a significant exception to this urban historiographical enigma. The article visualizes the data on Phanar semi-masonry houses in historical sources with digital three-dimensional (3D) tools as it documents, reassembles, and investigates the neighborhood’s main street. Taking the mid-nineteenth century as a hallmark of reliable representation and diachronic analysis, the article aims to demonstrate digital 3D reconstruction as a scholarly method for documenting and researching lost urban heritage.