DIRECTOR’S BOOKSHELF
An Agora of Ideas
Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas in conversation with author Antonis Hadjikyriacou
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies supports more than a dozen fellows each year who conduct intensive research at Princeton. Former Seeger fellows have published hundreds of books with leading publishers and thousands of articles. Their scholarship reflects the broad, interdisciplinary nature of Hellenic Studies, spanning fields from history to religion to literature and periods from antiquity to the present.
In the latest edition of Director’s Bookshelf, Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas speaks with Antonis Hadjikyriacou about his new book, Continental Island: Cyprus and the Mediterranean in the Ottoman Age of Revolutions, (Χερσαίο νησί: Η Μεσόγειος και η Κύπρος στην oθωμανική εποχή των επαναστάσεων) published by Psιfides Press in April 2023. Hadjikyriacou is an assistant professor of Ottoman and Turkish History at Panteion University and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did this book project begin?
After completing my doctorate in 2011, I planned to publish my dissertation, a social and economic history of Ottoman Cyprus in the eighteenth century. Over the next decade, however, my research took different paths. These included examining a sixteenth-century Ottoman fiscal survey of Cyprus and using a computer system called Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, for researching geographic data. This trajectory gave me a long-term perspective on Cypriot history, in which I identified the catalytic role the Age of Revolutions played during the period from 1760-1840–which I consider the most turbulent in Cypriot history since at least the medieval era. This historical process radically transformed Cyprus’ position in, and connections with, the Eastern Mediterranean. I now live in Athens, and I opted to write a book in Greek instead of English to address local audiences and teaching needs.
Please tell us about your time at the Seeger Center and the research you conducted then.
The Seeger Center offered me a rare luxury for academics: the freedom and ability to develop my research agenda. The Hellenic Collections at Firestone Library provided me with all the resources I needed. The center provided a vibrant scholarly environment with lectures, seminars, and conferences–ample sources of inspiration and opportunities to learn about new approaches, methods, and modes of inquiry. I met colleagues, discussed and reflected upon many questions and, most importantly, made lasting friendships.
How did that research impact your work as a whole and this book project?
I initially planned to explore the notion of insularity, especially the importance of the fact that Cyprus was an island. Instead, the Seeger fellowship gave me a much-needed opportunity to take a step back and consider the broader implications of the research questions I had spent the previous seven years exploring. At Princeton, I met Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, who invited me to contribute to a project on democracy in the Mediterranean during the Age of Revolutions. Co-authoring a chapter with Michalis Sotiropoulos for the project’s book opened a new world for me, that of the Age of Revolutions, and cultivated a long-term professional collaboration and friendship. Thus, in more ways than one, my time at the Seeger Center provided crucial foundations for the book.
What would you like your readers to learn?
Geography is neither fixed nor self-explanatory; time and context affect its significance. That Cyprus is an island impacted its population in multiple ways during the three centuries of Ottoman presence, not to mention the preceding Venetian period or the subsequent British one. The Age of Revolutions reconfigured the position of the island in the Mediterranean world, extending Cyprus’ links and connections beyond the Anatolian southern coast and Greater Syria into Egypt. These connections led me to coin the term “peninsular island” (in Greek, χερσαίο νησί), suggesting that Cyprus is not quite an island, but rather something between an island and a peninsula. This attribute shifted its traditional orientation from the north and east to the south, forging new relationships and contributing to processes and phenomena of global importance during the Age of Revolutions.
A transformative journey to Greece inspired Stanley J. Seeger to found Hellenic Studies programs at Princeton. Please tell us about a journey that expanded your intellectual horizons or influenced your research.
After my Seeger fellowship, I began a two-year fellowship in Crete that profoundly transformed my research. I encountered a geography and environment radically different from everything I had experienced in Cyprus, contradicting all conventional wisdom on the similarities between the two islands.
But space is not just geography; it is also people and the dialectical interaction between the two. In Crete, I met individuals and forged relationships of an unexpected and deeply transformative nature. I acquired new and vital skills in GIS through the guidance of Apostolos Sarris and in Ottoman paleography with the help of Elias Kolovos. I consider myself extremely lucky to have spent this time at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, working with an excellent team of scholars and friends including Antonis Anastasopoulos, Marinos Sariyannis, Andreas Lyberatos, and Apostolos Delis. Beyond academia, I experienced and was influenced by a worldview that was different and more eye-opening than anything I had previously encountered, during a period that was particularly challenging for Greece.
Photo of Dimitri Gondicas by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy. Photo of Antonis Hadjikyriacou by Andreas Anastasiades.