Bergama, continuously inhabited from prehistoric times to the present, is one of Türkiye’s most significant multi-layered cities. It bears tangible and intangible traces of successive eras, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Turkish Principalities, Ottoman, and Republican, creating a living palimpsest. These layers manifest as formations, transformations, continuities, and discontinuities in the city’s architecture, urban form, spatial practices, cultural meanings, and collective memory.

This lecture reveals the successive layers in dialogue to explore how they have shaped today’s urban fabric, and discusses how such a layered relook and understanding can guide the design of a new architectural and urban stratum. Accordingly, the first part of the lecture offers a diachronic reading of Bergama’s urban form and architecture to illuminate the complexity of its stratified context. The second part turns to design, questioning how contemporary interventions can converse with the inherited traces of stratified contexts, while respecting and extending the city’s multi-layered identity. The lecture concludes with a discussion on reconsidering the layers in dialogue as a source of inspiration for forward-looking architectural action within Bergama’s evolving narrative as a multi-layered city.

Biography:

A. GÜLİZ BİLGİN ALTINÖZ

[B. Arch | M.Sc. in Restoration, Architecture | Ph. D. in Restoration, Architecture]

A. Güliz Bilgin Altınöz is a professor in cultural heritage conservation at the Middle East Technical University Department of Architecture. She is the Director of the METU Centre of Research and Assessment of Historical Environments [TAÇDAM], and the METU Archaeology Museum. She is a member of the ICOMOS-Turkey National Committee’s Executive Board and the Expertise Committee on Tangible Cultural Heritage of the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO.

Her main academic and professional interest areas are theory and criticism in heritage studies; conservation, management, and planning of heritage places; multi-layered towns and urban archaeology; heritage recording and information management; decision support systems and GIS in heritage conservation; management and adaptation of cultural heritage to climate change, and cultural heritage risk assessment. She supervised M.Sc. and Ph. D. Thesis, conducted and participated in various national and international projects, and published articles and book chapters on these subjects.