According to the Ottoman Archive Document, from the Sculptor Melike Ahmed Hanım to Melek Ahmed Hanım

Abstract

It is a known fact that the studies on Turk sculpture art were limited within the time of the last term of Ottoman empire and first term of republican. The number of the first woman sculptors whose name is rarely encountered and who we can have information about them can be included in this. When the Sanayi-i Nefise School and the Inas Girls’ Art School were involved, the studies conducted on this subject is an important phenomenon to contribute even if very little. In this context, Halil Özyiğit’s articles and studies which focus on history and education make it easier to access the information from sculpture students to painting students. Therefore, we decided to create this study in order to investigate the artists whose names we just encountered or who we could access very little information about them. The most common female artists about whom we have information are Sabiha Bengütaş, Nermin Faruki, Melek Cemal Sofu and Iraida Barry, to name a few. Therefore, we turned our scope to the people who are almost non-known and even less known about. At this point, we encountered Burcu Saldıran’s special study named “Cumhuriyet Dönemi Kadın Heykeltıraşların Biyografi ve Sanat Üslubu Açısından İncelenmesi (1923-1950)”, which is we couldn’t get much information about. This thesis filled a really important gap in its field and took our attention as a study which gives best results about “Melek Ahmed Hanım” which will be the subject of our study. When we say this study, we started to search for the more different and answer to the question of what kind of information we could obtain. Thanks to this, we face the fact that we could correct a mistake. About Miss. Melek, we started to scan the archive of the premiership of the Ottoman empire. However, we couldn’t reach a result at the first attempt. When we degrade our research as “Sculptor”, we encountered an interesting result: “Sculptor Miss. Melike Ahmed”. At this point, the node has been solved. In Ottoman Turkish, the spelling of “Melek” and “Melike” are the same. This struggled researchers to access our artist. Because, there is no name like that between women artists. And it is obvious that the documents which we obtained are about Miss. Melek Ahmed. Thus, Our study gained originality with finding a document which is overlooked and gained this document to Turkish literature. And also we got different information about Miss. Melek Ahmed.