Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage: Compatible or Conflicting Concept?

Cultural heritage embodies every aspect of culture from the past, which has been incorporated into current society. Collective urban identity includes all those individual components of collective memory that leave their spatial imprint on the city. The paper aims to research the transition of cities from the multicultural Ottoman Empire to the formation of nation-states and the management of cultural heritage and urban physiognomy by each of them. Moreover, the preservation of the collective memory and identity of cities is a decisive factor in their evolutionary course. The methodology followed includes the comparative analysis of 5 representative port-cities of the Ottoman Empire: Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Izmir, Beirut and Alexandria, where the element of cosmopolitanism is vivid. The searching period concerns the time just before its dissolution and the emergence of nation-states. The paper concludes that the rise of nationalism and the conflicts between states that will result from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire will irreversibly alter the population composition of these cities, which will evolve violently from multi-ethnic Ottoman cities to mono-ethnic cities in the 20th century. The abrupt emergence of nation-states resulted in the marginalization of key aspects of the cities' heritage in an attempt to create and consolidate new national narratives. This resulted in the dissolution of urban continuity in cities which affected not only the identity and self-definition of cities in global urban networks but also their development process and dynamics, depriving them of an important asset of differentiation and specialization. The lack of awareness of the importance of the cultural heritage of cities is also demonstrated by the fact that the Ottoman past should be a mere parenthesis in the history and landscape of them and is therefore eliminated from it.