Ottoman History Podcast

with Zozan Pehlivan

hosted by Chris Gratien and Ayah Aboelela

| What do environmental features like plants, animals, landscapes, and climate have to do with the political transformation of the Ottoman Empire? Everything, according to our guest in this episode, Zozan Pehlivan, author of The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century. As Prof. Pehlivan explains, environmental history can be a fascinating window onto how imperial and global developments reshaped local society. Focusing on the region of Kurdistan, Pehlivan explores the changing relationships between peasants and pastoralists under the influence of commercialization, Ottoman centralization, and climatic change. She argues that these forces interacted to shape a "political ecology of violence," reflected not only in the shocking anti-Armenian violence of the 1890s, but also in quotidian conflicts over land and livestock fueled by Ottoman policy.   

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Namık Erkal, Firuzan Melike Sümertaş ve Haris Theodorelis-Rigas

Sunucu: Can Gümüş

| 1719’da Bükreş’te yaşayan bir âlim, İstanbul’daki bir dostuna yazdığı mektupta, “Cümle Fener burada; artık İstanbul’u hatırlamıyorum” diyordu. Koç Üniversitesi Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi’nde (ANAMED) açılan Cümle Fener Burada: Hane, Mahalle, Saray ve Şehir sergisine adını veren bu ifade, Fenerlilerin tarihini yalnızca bir topluluğun yükselişi ve dolaşımı üzerinden değil, İstanbul ile Eflak ve Boğdan arasında kurulan mekânsal bağlar ile nesnelerin, siyasi ritüellerin ve kültürel pratiklerin dolaşımı üzerinden düşünmeye davet ediyor.

Bu bölümde “Fenerliler Çağı”nı ve 1821 sonrasındaki dönüşümü, voyvodaların atanma merasimlerini, Haliç kıyısında yaşanan mimari ve mekânsal değişimi ve Fenerlilerin maddi kültürünü konuşuyoruz. Aynı zamanda, bir araştırma sergisinin üretim ve sergileme süreçlerini ele alıyor, dağılmış ve çoğu zaman kaybolmuş bir mirasın nasıl görünür kılındığını, küratoryal anlatının bilinen ile varsayılan, mevcut ile kayıp arasındaki boşluklarla nasıl çalıştığını tartışıyoruz. Maddi kültür, mekân ve gündelik hayata odaklanan bu yaklaşım vesilesiyle, Fenerlileri ulusal tarihyazımlarının sabit kategorilerinin ötesinde, farklı coğrafyalar arasında şekillenen çok katmanlı bir topluluk olarak ele alıyor.

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with Elyse Semerdjian

hosted by Matthew Ghazarian

| How can feminist approaches to the body and embodiment change the ways we approach the history of violence? In this episode we discuss these topics with Elyse Semerdjian, author of Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press 2023). Rather than ask about the official intent, geopolitics, or international legal implications of this violence, Semerdjian shifts the focus onto the bodies, skin, and bones of Armenians targeted for removal and extermination. Her work sheds new light on the efforts to recover Armenians taken into Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish households in an attempt to rebuild the body of the nation; the tattoos that marked the bodies of Armenians among nomadic pastoralist communities in the deserts of the Jazira region; and the role of bones and bodily remnants in sustaining and complicating commemoration of the Armenian genocide.

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with Mostafa Hussein

hosted by Chris Gratien

| Zionism, as a cultural and political movement of Hebrew revival, sought to forge a connection between the modern Jewish people and a deep past located in the geography of late Ottoman and British Palestine. As our guest in this episode, Mostafa Hussein, explores in a new book, this revival in turn birthed an intellectual project of intimate and often contradictory engagement with Arabo-Islamic culture, a process that he describes as Hebrew Orientalism. As we discuss, Jewish orientalists from diverse backgrounds between East and West developed an interest in a variety of medieval Arabic texts, drawing on history, geography, botany, literature, and linguistics to forge cultural exchange in service of Zionist aspirations. Whether these scholars imagined a future of conflict or coexistence in Palestine, their work illuminates how Arab cultural heritage was integral to the remaking of modern Jewish identity.   

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with Kate Dannies

hosted by Sam Dolbee and Can Gümüş

| For the last century of its history, the Ottoman army fought war after war for the survival of the empire. In this episode, Kate Dannies explores another fight for survival: that of millions of Ottoman families, as sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers were drafted into the new imperial army. As Prof. Dannies argues in her new book, the transition to a modern army staffed by conscripts created a new social contract between state and society with the "breadwinner soldier" at the center. As the Ottoman Empire made growing demands on its citizens, they made growing demands on the government to exempt or pay soldiers with dependents. When the mobilization of the Balkan Wars and the First World War prompted the Ottoman government to conscript breadwinner soldiers at unprecedented levels, many rebelled against the terms of military service. In this conversation, we explore the social history of the Ottoman Empire's last wars through the lens of family life, charting a new history of what war meant for ordinary Ottoman citizens.         

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with Ashley Dimmig

hosted by Abbey Stockstill and Musa Kazım Azimli

| The jewel-encrusted musket of Mahmud I is one of the most popular pieces at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In this episode, curator Ashley Dimmig joins us to discuss her experience curating Islamic art and the manifold mysteries of the ornate 18th-century gun once owned by an Ottoman Sultan. These mysteries include practical questions about its design and the contents of its secret compartments as well as more conceptual puzzles about past provenance and effective presentation of Ottoman artifacts to international audience in an American city. In addition to discussing the fascinating history of the gun, Dr. Dimmig reflects on the exciting challenge of curating connections that allow every museum visitor to find an entry point into an exhibit.   

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with Mustafa Aksakal

hosted by Chris Gratien and Sıla Önder

| The First World War brought an end to six centuries of Ottoman imperial rule and in many ways, made the Middle East region as it is known today. In this episode recorded live at the University of Virginia Institute for the Arts and Humanities, we are joined by Mustafa Aksakal, author of two books about the Ottoman Empire's involvement in WWI. In his new book The War That Made the Middle East, Prof. Aksakal takes a fresh look at the fateful decisions of the empire's last days, as well as how the First World War transformed Ottoman society and politics with devastating consequences for the people who lived it and lasting implications for the future Middle East region.   

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with A. Tunç Şen

hosted by Maryam Patton

| What did it mean to know the future in the early modern Ottoman Empire? And who had the authority to interpret the heavens? In this episode, A. Tunç Şen discusses his new book Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600. Şen takes us into the world of Ottoman court munajjims—astral experts whose work combined mathematical astronomy, astrological interpretation, and political counsel—and uncovers the roles they fulfilled within the Ottoman court bureaucracy. They advised rulers and officials not usually on whether something should happen, but on when, including the auspicious timing of military campaigns, building projects, ceremonies, and other acts of state. Their authority rested on technical skill, especially the ability to calculate planetary positions and the ascendant, as well as on a broader cosmological understanding of how the heavens shaped events on earth. Under Bayezid II, munajjims enjoyed unusual prestige and high salaries, reflecting the sultan’s own interest in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophical kingship. Under Süleyman, however, their standing declined, while other forms of esoteric expertise, such as geomancy and letterism, became more prominent. By following the salaries, writings, frustrations, and ambitions of Ottoman munajjims, Şen reconstructs a social history of scientific authority in the early modern Ottoman Empire.   

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with Murat Yıldız

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| In the late Ottoman capital, imperial politics became a field of collaboration and competition between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, especially in the years following the 1908 constitutional revolution. And as our guest Murat Yıldız argues in a new book, the world of sports also emerged as an arena of political contestation, as gymnasts, footballers, weightlifters, boxers, coaches, teachers, journalists, and fans pursued a civic project that blended athletics, aesthetics, morality, and community. Sport did not erase the communal boundaries that existed off the field, but it often transcended them, as middle and upper class men participated in a shared culture that equated the physical development of the body with the moral development of the person. In this conversation, we explore the Ottoman world of sports at the end of empire, as the growth of a multiethnic civil society facilitated to the proliferation of sports club and writing about athletics, gender, and the body in the Ottoman public press.         

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Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file revealed that it was not her first ordeal. A survivor of the Greco-Turkish War, she, like many Ottoman-born Greeks, had already lived many lives on a journey that brought her from the shores of Asia Minor to Athens and the United States. In this episode, we explore the stories, sounds, and sentiments of the Ottoman Greek diaspora in the wake of the Great Catastrophe and the Exchange of Populations through the extraordinary life of a single mother in New York City and her battle with the American deportation state.

This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans.   

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