Ayşe Özil
Non-Muslims in Ottoman Constitutive Legislation: Islahat Edict (1856) and the Greek General Regulations (1862)
The Ottoman reform edict of 1856 (Islahat Fermanı) is considered one of the two
constitutive documents of the late Ottoman state, ushering a period of change in the mid19th
century. While its significance is recognized as a turning point by almost all related
scholarship, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what the document actually says.
An examination of the edict reveals that it was a declaration which almost exclusively
focused on the situation, and particularly the “rights”, of the non-Muslim subjects of the
Ottoman state and delineated their place in the administrative, legal, and judicial spheres
of the empire. The present investigation asks how and why such a fundamental document
of the Ottoman state concerned itself with matters of its non-Muslim subjects. The paper
explores perspectives of the late Ottoman administration about the inclusion of its
Christian and Jewish subjects in the wider imperial realm against the background of the
domestic and international political context. It traces the realities, demands, and
prescriptions of plurality as reflected in the administrative sphere. In investigating the
Islahat Edict, the essay also juxtaposes the edict to non-Muslim “constitutions” which
were issued in the same period. Focusing on the case of the Greek General Regulations of
1862, it looks at how communal administrations were organized and what kind of an
outlook this organization reflects about non-Muslim presence and institutional standing
under the modernizing Ottoman state. Ultimately, the paper inquires into the
construction of imperial subjecthood and the accommodation of ethno-religious
difference in the political/administrative realm.
Salim Çevik
Ottomanism and Varieties of Official Nationalism
This paper takes Ottomanism (Ottoman official nationalism) as a case of official
nationalism, and explores the trajectory of Ottomanism and its fluctuations throughout
the 19th century. This exploration is done through a comparative analysis of Ottomanism
with regard to the official nationalisms of Habsburgs and Romanovs. The Ottomans
followed a policy which vacillated between the Habsburg model of federal plurality and
the Romanov model of centralization and assimilation. This vacillation is most evident in
their approach to millet system which simultaneously followed the contradictory policies
of undermining millet boundaries in order to promote a sense of unity across the multifaith
society and policies of promoting and safeguarding the privileges and group specific
rights of non-Muslim communities. Understandably, the peripheral powers opted for a
more plural form of Ottomanism a la Habsburg while the central bureaucracy and
particularly the Turkish element within the army inclined towards a more centralized
system. In certain ways the trajectory of Ottomanism and ideological splits within the
Ottomanist camp (like the division in 1902 Congress) can be read within this dilemma and
vacillation between the federative-pluralist Habsburg model and the centralistassimilationist
Romanov model. Moreover, even rival ideologies of Ottomanism, Islamism
and Turkism are better understood if they are contextualized as alternative versions of
Ottoman official nationalism.
Mogens Pelt[1]
The Making of an Ottoman Greek Businessman in the Context of Milli Iktisat and War,
1914-1918
This paper will examine the personal experience of Bodosakis-Athanasisadis[1], an Ottoman
Greek who supplied the Ottoman Army during the First World War. Bodosakis was born
in Bor in Cappadocia around 1890 and lived the first three decades of his life in the
Ottoman Empire. Around the turn of the century, his family moved to Mersin, where his
career took off in earnest. Chief among his business ventures, was his role as one of their
main suppliers of the Ottoman Army. As a result of these businesses, he forged
professional contacts with leading Young Turks active in the region. Under the aegis of
these powerful men, he advanced to become the official contractor for the Ottoman Army
and the units working on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. Due to these contributions, Enver
Pasha awarded him the highest honour ever given to an Ottoman Greek, during a
ceremony held at the Adana railway station in 1917.
The paper will discuss the way in which he made his career, how he forged his relations
with leading Ottoman officials and military men in the region, and how he made these
networks work for him. I shall also discuss how his official identity as an Ottoman Greek
affected his position and the choices he made. In this way, by following his practice I
expect to come to terms with the main issues and intentions that conditioned the
complex business of supplying the Ottoman army during the First World War.
[1] Associate Professor SAXO-Institute - Archaeology, Ethnology, Greek & Latin, History.
Books by Mogens Pelt:
Military Intervention and a Crisis of Democracy in Turkey: The Menderes Era and Its Demise
Adnan Menderes' election to power in 1950 signalled a new epoch in the history of modern Turkey. For the first time a democratic government ruled the country, challenging the political monopoly of the Kemalist elites. However, this period was short-lived. In 1960, Turkey's army staged a coup d'etat and Menderes was hanged the following year. Here, Mogens Pelt examines the era of the rule of the Democratic Party and the legacy of the military intervention that brought it to an end. Although the armed forces officially returned power to the civilians in 1961, this intervention allowed the military to become a major player in Turkey's political process, weakening the role of elected politicians. This unique exploration of the Menderes period sheds new light on the shaping of post-war Turkey and will be vital for those researching the Turkish Republic, and the influence of the military in its destiny.
Tying Greece to the West:Tying Greece to the West examines the reconstruction of Greece in the post-war era and how Greek foreign economic and political relations with the United States and West Germany developed, especially the Greek-West German trade and the American and West German financial and aid policy.It posits that US-West German policy towards Greece took the shape of a ‘burden-sharing’ i.e. Bonn gradually took over certain policies vis-à-vis Greece which were originally formulated in Washington and that this took place with American connivance. Furthermore, it investigates which impact Greek foreign relations had on the domestic development, particularly in relation to the establishment of the dictatorship in 1967, the so-called Colonels Regime.
Died 1979)
Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiadis ( Πρόδρομος Μποδοσάκης Αθανασιάδης ) was one of the most important figures in 20th century Greek industrial history. He created an immense industrial empire with weapons factories, mines and plants in diverse branches of industry in the 1930s.
He was born to a Cappadocian Greek family in the region of Bor, Cappadocia, Asia minor in 1890. Prodomos migrated to Greece after the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22). From 1934, he controlled the Pyrkal, one of the oldest Greek defence industries with significant contribution during the Greco-Italian War.
References
Klemann, Hein A.M. (2013). Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939-1945. Berg. p. 353. ISBN 9780857850607. In the 1930s Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiadis created a huge industrial empire with arms factories, mines and plants in diverse branches of industry.
Boinodiris, Stavros (2010). Andros Odyssey: Liberation: (1900-1940). iUniverse. p. 22. ISBN 9781440193859. Prodromos Athanasiades-Bodosakis was born in Bor, Cappadocia. After the exchange of populations he became a Greek industrialist who in 1934 took over Pyrkal, an armament company and one of the oldest defense industries.
Dmitri Stamatopoulos
The Law of the Millets: Multinational Coexistence, Multicultural Tolerance or IntraCommunity
Hegemony?
In order to explain the present-day powerful position of the Orthodox Churches in Eastern
and Southeastern Europe, we ought not to turn our attention solely to the historical
relation of these churches with the state (as most historians researching this field have
done up until now), but primarily to the means by which these churches succeeded in
gaining control of the realm of private sphere and thus, influencing the formation of civil
society, especially through a flexible management of the family law cases in the private
sphere. Actually, we have a question about the historical background of secularization in
this region of Europe.
Alp Eren Topal
Ottomanism Revisited: The Young Ottomans and Hürriyet
The Young Ottomans was a dissident group of Ottoman mid-rank bureaucrats and men
of letters who emerged in the 1860s advocating the cause of extensive political reform in
the Empire. Its end goal was the containment of bureaucratic despotism through the
establishment of a constitution and a parliament. The emergence of the Young Ottoman
opposition coincided with a tumultuous era of the Empire which includes the institution
of first Ottoman law of subjecthood (Tabiiyet Kanunu) and a massive revolt in Crete. This
paper will deal with how the Young Ottomans envisioned a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic
Ottoman society though their articles in the newspaper Hürriyet (Liberty) which they
published in London between 1868-70. In Hürriyet, the Young Ottomans criticised the
Ottoman law of subjecthood as well as general policy of the Sublime Porte with regard to
non-Muslims and minorities of the Empire. Through these criticism they fleshed out their
own vision of how different elements of the Empire could co-exist. While attacking the
Sublime Porte’s policies for being little more than lip service to the principle of equality
of all subjects, they proposed an alternative system whereby each community would be
justly represented under a constitution based on sharia. While Young Ottomans have long
been credited for their advocacy of “Ottomanism,” the context, limits and extent of their
multicultural visions has remained largely unexplored due to inaccessibility of Hürriyet,
which was the only platform where they could express their ideas without any
reservation. Having read through all the issues of Hürriyet, I will bring new evidence and
also demonstrate what kind of an “Islamic” model of coexistence Young Ottoman ideas
proposed.
Madeleine Elfenbein
Unruly Children of the Homeland: Ottomanism’s Non-Muslim Authors
Despite recent scholarship on the success of Ottomanist ideas and practices of civic
participation among wide swaths of the empire’s Christian and Jewish subjects, the
historiography of Ottomanism persists in viewing it as a project conceived and promoted
by Muslim elites. This paper aims to put forth a different view by highlighting the central
role of non-Muslims in developing the Ottomanist project. It focuses on the lives and
careers of Teodor Kasap and Şahinoğlu Filip Diyarbakırlı, two Istanbul journalists who
were at the forefront of shaping Ottomanist discourse in both its earlier, democratic and
later, imperial forms. Positioned at the margins of their respective religious
communities—Filip as an Armenian Catholic, and Kasap as a native of Kayseri’s
Turcophone Greek Orthodox (Karamanli) community—each identified strongly with the
Ottoman polity as a national homeland (vatan). Both worked alongside prominent Muslim
collaborators—Filip with Ali Suavi, and Kasap with Namık Kemal—who would later be
canonized as leaders of the Young Ottoman movement. The two figures reacted
differently to rapid shifts in the political climate over the course of the 1870s: Filip became
increasingly friendly with state authorities, and his newspaper Vakit enjoyed the favor of
Sultan Abdülhamid II. Kasap, meanwhile, became increasingly outspoken through the
pointed satire of his journal Hayâl, as well as a daily newspaper, Istikbâl, which frequently
butted heads with Filip’s Vakit. Ultimately, Kasap was forced to abandon journalism
entirely, while Filip enjoyed a long career. The juxtaposition of their careers underscores
the diversity and the cumulative impact of non-Muslim contributions to Ottomanist
ideologies in the late Tanzimat and Hamidian Eras.
Johanna Chovanec
Melancholy and Memory in Literature, with a Special Focus on Essays by Sema Kaygusuz
This paper discusses how the discourse of melancholy has been evolving in modern
Turkish literature whilst paying special attention to recent trends. Going beyond Orhan
Pamuk’s discursive notion of post-imperial hüzün, Sema Kaygusuz connects melancholy
with collective silence and the necessity of remembering the past. Melancholic narratives
in Turkish literature capture and evoke a commonly felt experience of loss connected to
the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. In many novels, the downfall of the Empire and
the break from its cultural as well as political particularities appear as a projection surface
for identification or as a counter-model to the societal and political shortcomings of
today. Authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, or Elif Şafak recall the
pluralistic, multinational heritage, mourn the loss of imperial power, and lament the
disconnection from Ottoman musical as well as literary traditions. Against the background
of Europeanisation, the empire becomes a frame of reference to stress questions such as
cultural authenticity or identity. By means of recent essays and short stories written by
Sema Kaygusuz, this paper discusses how the discourse on melancholy has been widened
and increasingly connected to the notion of memory as well as overcoming collective
amnesia.
Isa Blumi
Mobilizing Ottoman Multinationalism: A Global Story about the Modern World
Scholars have long studied Western imperialism through the prism of pre-World War I
literature and journalism. Characterizing the contours of some of this literature as
Orientalism has become programmatic and predictable. The resulting, at times, rigid
analysis of this literature often misses, however, the contested dynamics within. This is
especially the case with Ottoman state contributions to the global transformations
interlinking the rise of a Western colonialist ethos—orientalism, imperialism, and
racism—with the political, structural and economic changes directly impacting the world.
Essentially, those colonial pretensions servicing the ambitions of European imperialism at
the expense of peoples in the “Orient” were written in the context of the proverbial anticolonial
pushback by, among others, patriotic Ottomans. This article explores the
possibility that such a response, usefully framed as Ottomanism, contributed regularly to
the way peoples interacted in the larger context of a contentious exchange between rival
imperialist projects. This is especially clear in respect to the kind of propaganda used in
Western media and how Ottoman subjects understood the possibility to resist British and
French encroachments until World War I. By mobilizing the ecumenical possibilities
embedded in both Ottoman “nationalism” representing the empire’s diverse cultural,
political, and socio-economic heritage, along with the strategic lines of solidarity along
the zones of contestation beyond the Ottoman Empire’s formal political reach, this paper
upsets the narrative that restricts the tensions afflicting the late imperialist period within
and beyond the Balkans and Middle East to that of competing ethno-nationalist or
sectarian modernist projects. Rather, the struggles prove animated as much by temporary
reflections of injustices introduced into the daily lives of active, culturally, economically,
and socially diverse polities. The resulting answers to momentary confrontations with
modern forms of imperialism servicing global finance capitalism ushers in a new
appreciation for how “different” peoples living within the Ottoman (and by extension
Habsburg) empires reanimated the rhetoric of the era, today too neatly confined by
discourses of difference and inter-communality.
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