The conference Centres and Peripheries in Ottoman Architecture is held in Sarajevo on April 22-24,.2010.

What was Ottoman architecture? Whose was it, why and where? While such seemingly elementary questions once seemed superseded, a critical rethinking of approaches and canons in art history over the past few decades has made it attainable to pose them again. These advances have also resulted in a novel interest in monuments and artistic phenomena long excluded from the standard narratives due to lack of monumentality, peripheral location, or stylistic provincialism, that is, if viewed against contemporary phenomena in the centre(s) of power and cultural production. With foci of inquiry and criteria for appraisal gradually shifting from stylistic cohesion, development, and scale to (also) include questions of patronage, site, and social function, these approaches make not only possible but indispensable an increased visibility of such monuments in the literature that maps and constitutes art histories. This provides an opportunity for, and at the same time underlines the necessity of, a renewed discussion of Ottoman architecture in the Balkans and its place in the historical narratives of both Ottoman and European architecture.