Published May 8, 2026
Horticulture explored as a metaphor in new open access article by Art History Faculty
Assistant Professor Berin Golonu's article, "Hyphenated Subjects, Hybrid Species, and Transplants: The Deroin Family’s Horticultural Network in Late Ottoman Istanbul and Beyond", has been published in the peer reviewed journal Yıllık: Annual of Istanbul Studies and will appear in print in the eighth issue of this journal (December 2026).
Article information:
Gölönü, Berin. 2026. “Hyphenated Subjects, Hybrid Species, and Transplants: The Deroin Family’s Horticultural Network in Late Ottoman Istanbul and Beyond”. YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies, no. Advanced Online Publication.
https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.1904005
Abstract:
Ottoman elites’ drive to assemble collections of exotic specimens in their gardens during the long nineteenth century led them to recruit horticultural experts from around the world. One was Pierre Gustave Deroin, a French immigrant who lived in Istanbul between the years 1861 and 1914. Deroin’s sons followed him in his vocation and benefited from his transnational networks, some of them tending to the gardens he planted in Istanbul. This paper looks at horticulture as a metaphor for the inseparability of the local and global in late Ottoman Istanbul’s modernization processes. It aims to unsettle notions of national purity and cultural authenticity by looking at the pluralism of late Ottoman urban society through the Deroin family’s life and work, setting up a comparison between their hyphenated subjecthood as French-Ottoman and Levantine Catholics and the diversity of plants they cultivated in Istanbul’s royal and public gardens. Just as the imported trees cultivated by some members of the Deroin family grew into localized fixtures of Istanbul, these hyphenated subjects might be viewed as transplants who rooted themselves in Istanbul and contributed to its place-making practices. Keywords: Deroin, horticulture, Ottoman gardens, parks, landscape architecture
--
YILLIK is a peer-reviewed, open access, international academic journal featuring cutting-edge research on Istanbul’s past and present, published by the Istanbul Research Institute in print and online (via DergiPark).