by Malte Fuhrmann[1]
- Publisher : S. FISCHER; 1. edition (23 Oct. 2019)
- Language : German
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 3103972628
- ISBN-13 : 978-3103972627
Mavi Boncuk | A historical journey through Istanbul, from Justinian to Erdoğan: The historian Malte Fuhrmann has lived in the city on the Bosphorus for many years - here he tells of the ghosts of the city that are omnipresent in the old walls, of rebellious janissaries and plundering crusaders, of Court intrigues and bloody union demonstrations.
Istanbul is a city of diversity and contradictions, full of history and stories. Christianity and Islam, Europe and Asia, but also rulers and rebels meet there, as in 2013 at Gezi Park. Malte Fuhrmann takes this event, which he witnessed himself, as the starting point for his journey through time, from Constantinople under Justinian to the conquest of the city by Mehmed II and Erdoğan.
This book is a treasure trove of discoveries for anyone who wants to explore Istanbul and understand Turkey today. Lively and captivating like the city itself.
Reviewed by: Ellinor Morack, Institute for Oriental Studies, Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg
Anyone who has traveled to Istanbul will definitely return. Malte Fuhrmann, a historian of Southeast Europe with a focus on German-Ottoman ties and Mediterranean port cities, managed to stay longer and, after years of research and teaching on the spot, wrote a book about the history of the city. In it he spans the arc from late antiquity to the present. The book is aimed at a wide audience, but is significantly more comprehensive and up-to-date than competing works. Unlike Bettany Hughes, for example, who covers the period from 1914 to 2016 on a meager 45 pages, Fuhrmann comprehensively deals with the 20th and the first two decades of the 21st century on over a hundred pages. With recourse to the latest Turkish research, the book also achieves its greatest narrative depth in contemporary history.
The author gets the rest of the city's history, which lasts more than two millennia, under control by focusing on the "right to the city" (Henri Lefebvre), i.e. the question of the distribution of the economic and cultural added value that the city dwellers generated: how was it designed, negotiated and won? This access allows him to study such diverse aspects as the spatial design of the city, its everyday use by different groups of the population, diverse forms of leisure activities and entertainment, but also protests and uprisings as interrelated, mutually dependent ones and at the same time changeable - to consider social practices.
The author, whose research focuses on the 19th and early 20th centuries, has thoroughly read up on pre-modern epochs. The first chapter is dedicated to the extraordinary and fateful geographical situation and an outline of the development of Byzantium up to the 4th century AD. The actual story begins in AD 337, when Emperor Constantine died and the city was named after him. The following three of a total of 17 chapters deal with the Byzantine period, including the Catholic rule in the 13th century. A further nine chapters deal with the period from the Ottoman conquest in 1453. Four are devoted to the years 1453 to 1800, two each to the long 19th and 20th centuries. Chapter 15 deals with the development of the megacity since 1980, the following the story of the Gezi uprising of 2013. The final chapter offers a conclusion that also takes into account the latest events, namely the attempted coup in 2016 and the election of a Kemalist mayor in 2019. Notes arranged according to chapters, the bibliography and an index of people and places form the conclusion. As the subtitle "City of Sultans and Rebels" already suggests, Fuhrmann is particularly interested in rebellions and uprisings, which Constantinople and Istanbul have seldom lacked. He spans the arc from the Nika uprising of the circus parties in 532 to the clashes over Gezi Park in 2013, which he witnessed himself. The chaotic phases of the Eastern Roman and Ottoman periods, in which the city population had a large part in the deposition of emperors (later sultans), are also illustrated and sometimes compared with one another. It is pleasant that Fuhrmann addresses both socio-cultural factors such as the ever-precarious supply of food and other material resources, as well as no less important conflicts that revolve around the organization of life in the city.
In addition to the "right to the city", two other leitmotifs run through the book: Firstly, the idea of Ibn Khaldun of the limited lifetime of empires passing through different phases, which Fuhrmann presents in order to then explain the numerous deviations from this rule the author applies these criteria, rather playfully, to the period of AKP rule in Turkey. Second, for the period from the 19th century, which was characterized by the centralization and modernization of the Ottoman state, Fuhrmann uses Foucault's concept of a specifically modern governmentality back and specifies this in relation to the Ottoman and Turkish context as state thinking and acting that gives priority to the interests of the state over those of its citizens. Of course it is difficult to write about a city without going into the development of architecture and urban planning. Fuhrmann does this in an exemplary way, by describing the historical conditions under which buildings, but also entire districts, were built, converted, demolished or converted. It is not limited to city walls, churches, mosques and palaces, but also includes secular buildings such as barracks, universities and ministries as well as the dwellings of the poor. It is a pity that neither maps nor illustrations show which buildings and districts are meant and where they are located. needs help to find your way here.
It is easy to read thanks to a style that is as fluent as it is precise. Both of the few longer quotes are carefully selected poems that show how much joie de vivre, humor and sense of eroticism the earlier city dwellers had. In doing so, the author never slips into orientalizing observations, but on the contrary, he succeeds in making it clear in which points the city dwellers differed from their European contemporaries - and in which they were ahead of them. He points out, for example, that the Istanbul population sometimes had access to the stately parks as early as the 18th century, when Europeans could only dream of it. Only one aspect seems to have interested him little : the religion. Fuhrmann goes into religious aspects of social history such as religious foundations and the building of churches. He also discusses the significance of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), the dispute over the relationship between the human and divine nature of Christ, and the propagandistic significance of the "rediscovery" of the tomb of the prophet's companion Abu Ayyub al-Ansari shortly after the Ottoman one Conquest. On the other hand, important events such as the rise of Christianity to the state religion and the schism between Rome and Constantinople of 1054 are not mentioned, but rather assume that they are known From an Ottoman point of view, it is objectionable that Fuhrmann perpetuates the myth that the Tanzimat Edict of Gülhane (1839) had already promised equality for all Ottoman subjects (p. 239; in fact, this was only done with the reform edict of 1856 ).
Romania is missing from the list of states founded after the Berlin Congress in 1878 (p. 260). The historical context in which the Armenian massacres of 1894-1897 took place is described vividly, but only "clashes" in the provinces are mentioned, and the number of victims of several hundred thousand is not mentioned (p. 278). The description of the effects of the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923-24 on the Istanbul Greeks is also imprecise (p. 303). Overall, however, Fuhrmann convinces with his focus on rule and rebellion, which makes it possible to make diachronic comparisons and to ask about long-term continuities - and thus also to shed light on the current situation in Turkey. It is no coincidence that the Gezi protests of 2013 form the narrative framework for working out connecting lines and similarities to earlier popular uprisings and for understanding the historical context of past and present conflicts.
HistLit 2020-2-118 / Ellinor Morack about Fuhrmann, Malte: Constantinople - Istanbul. City of sultans and rebels . Frankfurt am Main 2019, in: H-Soz-Kult 06/10/2020.
Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire, Cambridge: University Press 2020, 480 pages.
Down and out on the quays of İzmir: ‘European’ musicians, innkeepers, and prostitutes in the Ottoman port-cities
Mediterranean Historical Review
Volume 24, 2009 - Issue 2: The late Ottoman port-cities and their inhabitants: subjectivity, urbanity, and conflicting ordersOne of the factors that contributed to the late nineteenth-century Europeanization of Ottoman urban society was the entertainment sector, in particular bars, music halls and brothels. In the big cities of Rumelia and western Anatolia, a relevant number of the workforce in this sector originated from countries such as Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy or France; they exposed local society to new forms of sociability. This article is intended as an initial step in assessing the impact of coastal popular culture in shaping Hamidian port-city society. It tackles the question of whether it is possible to write such a history with a perspective of agency, by focusing on the people on stage or behind the bar, their migratory background, life-stories, and worldviews. It distinguishes between three milieus: musicians organized in orchestras; individual singers, dancers, bar or pension owners; and prostitutes and pimps or traffickers. All three seem to have retained a liminal lifestyle, with one foot in their place of origin and the other in the region they operated in. Despite their constant interaction with customers or audiences, integration into local society was not the rule, but an exception. The respective milieu of persons engaged in similar semi-itinerant entertainment work was the predominant group of social organization.
[1] Current research area:
Developmentality in Southeast Europe: The evolution of the development discourse in Bulgaria and Turkey in the transport infrastructure debate (1908-1989)
Regional focus:
Eastern Mediterranean; Southeastern Europe; Habsburg, Ottoman, and German Empires and their successor states
Dr. Malte Fuhrmann
Publications
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