"The Discovery of Ottoman Greece unearths forgotten research by the early modern philhellenist and Lutheran reformer Martin Crusius. His extensive study of Greek Orthodox life, including interviews with traveling alms-seekers, sheds light on European views of Greek decline under Ottoman rule as well as on the global ambitions of Lutheran reform"--
This dissertation examines how early modern scholars studied cultures and religions that were not their own. The setting is sixteenth-century Tubingen, where a pious Lutheran named Martin Crusius compiled a rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Tracing how he became the period?s foremost expert on the Ottoman Greeks reveals that three fields of inquiry now often studied separately ?the Lutheran Reformation, the history of early modern Mediterranean, and the history of cultural encounter? were once a single arena of experience. This dissertation posits that by observing the early modern world through the eyes of Crusius and his contemporaries we begin to see how these historical phenomena were connected, how they developed as they did, and why it matters for historians today to study them together.Through an analysis of an extraordinarily well-preserved set of sources, Martin Crusius (1526-1607) and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece, makes three specific contributions. It, first, focuses attention on the Ottoman Greek world as an important template for early modern discourses of cultural difference. It shows how the categories by which Greeks understood themselves fundamentally framed the ones Crusius used and thus affords insight into a central paradox of much ethnographic writing: Crusius may have been biased, but he was not uninformed. Second, the project shows that ethnography in this period was not yet a crystalized discipline, but rather a form of knowledge-making in which tropes and techniques from several disciplines came together fruitfully. Third, by examining how Crusius and other Lutherans sought to spread their religious ideas amongst Greek Orthodox Christians, the project demonstrates that late sixteenth-century Lutheranism looked much more like global Catholicism than hitherto has been acknowledged. The Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire were thus not the inward-looking backwaters that previous generations of scholars saw in them.This study paints a portrait of a person, a place, and a period and one that balances abstraction with detail. It offers a story that demands of us to think both globally and locally and, indeed, encourages us to interrogate the very parameters of these divergent scales of analysis.
This volume considers the period of Ottoman rule in Greek history in light of changing scholarship about this era and makes it accessible for the first time to a wider audience.
A joint publication of the Gennadius Library and the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, Ottoman Athens is the first volume to focus on the Ottoman presence in Athens. This collection of 12 essays explores the architecture, antiquities, cartography, and documentary sources from the period, shedding light on little-studied material and illuminating daily life in Greece's most famous city during Ottoman rule. Topics include the Parthenon mosque; the neighborhood of Karykes and the fountain of the Exechoron; the restoration of the Benizelos Mansion; Ottoman-period baths in Athens; topographic maps of Athens during the Ottoman period; the Vienna Anonymous and the Bassano drawing; Ottoman-period pottery found in the Athenian Agora; and travelers' accounts of the hammams of Athens.
During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion’s tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.
This book explores the increasing interest in the Ottoman past in contemporary Greek society and its cultural sphere. It considers how the changing geo-political balances in South-East Europe since 1989 have offered Greek society an occasion to re-examine the transition from cultural diversity in the imperial context, to efforts to homogenize culture in the subsequent national contexts. This study shows how contemporary immigration and better relations with Turkey led to new directions in historiography, fiction and popular culture in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on how narratives about cultural co-existence under Ottoman rule are used as a prism of national self-awareness and argues that the interpretations of Greece’s Ottoman legacy are part of the cultural battles over national identity and belonging. The book examines these narratives within the context of tension between East and West and, not least, Greece’s place in Europe.
Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.
The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic ones for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of citizens in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide in pursuit of political ends while largely escaping accountability. While this brutal history is most widely known in the case of the Armenian genocide, few appreciate the extent to which the Empire’s Assyrian and Greek subjects suffered and died under similar policies. This comprehensive volume is the first to broadly examine the genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in comparative fashion, analyzing the similarities and differences among them and giving crucial context to present-day calls for recognition.
