This dissertation examines the cultural property-related activities conducted in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and under the Allied Occupation. It studies the actions and policies predominantly of the Ottoman, British, French, and Italian states and institutions and to a lesser extent the Russian and Greek ones from the beginning of the war in 1914 to the end of the Allied occupation in Istanbul in 1923. This work draws from a range of different archives and primary sources written in Ottoman Turkish, English, French, and Italian, such as government reports and communications between different governmental bodies, popular periodicals, archeological bulletins, memoirs, and books in order to present a new and inclusive way to look at the development of our relationship to cultural property and its uses, especially in times of armed conflict. This work also offers a map to the historical linkages between policies and practices regarding the cultural property. The central argument of this work is that the First World War created an international push towards the creation of protection and preservation measures for cultural property and that belligerents employed these measures as an additional marker of civilization and a tool of war and occupation.

This study investigates how cultural property-related activities, such as establishing museums and engaging in archeological excavations, was propelled by war, especially by the German destruction of cultural property in the first year of the war, and by the division (or the prospect of the division) of the Ottoman Empire. This work relates these topics to the different and sometimes clashing visions and plans regarding the nature of the Ottoman society, its past, and its future. I focus on the Ottoman Empire in its entirety, but I zoom out to look at wartime Greece and zoom in to Allied-occupied Istanbul to explore strategies of creation of public opinion via cultural property. I also study the reception of these cultural property-related activities and their impact on the making of international law.