July 5-8, 2013
Benaki Museum, Athens

Bios and Abstracts are below

PANEL 1 - ANATOLIA

Şehnaz Şişmanoğlu Şimşek (Boğaziçi University) "Ottoman Greeks in Conflict:  The Case of Karamanlides in the 19th Century"

Nikos Michailides (Princeton University) "Music, Conversion and Identities in Trebizond from the 19th to the 21st Century" 

PANEL 2 - GREEKS AND OTTOMAN INSTITUTIONS

Irena Fliter (Tel Aviv University) "The Ottoman Culture of Diplomacy and Greek Diplomats between the Ottoman Empire and Prussia (1761-1821)" 

Elif Bayraktar Tellan (Bilkent University) "The Transformation of the Patriarchate in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Context" 

PANEL 3 - THE BALKANS

Theocharis Tsampouras (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) "17th Century Orthodox Art in the Balkans:  Social Change and New Artistic Priorities" 

Dilek Özkan (University of Athens) "Ottoman Responses to the Return Migration of the Greek-Orthodox people in Thessaly:  Re-conceptualizing State-Society Relations during the Tanzimat period" 


In the last fifteen years Greece has emerged as a center of writing on the Ottoman Empire.  A new generation of Greek scholars, some trained abroad, some trained in Greece, have produced an impressive body of literature that engages not only the history of the Greek communities in the Ottoman Empire, but some of the most fundamental issues in Ottoman history.  Whereas the pioneers of an earlier generation had to stand in splendid, but lonely, isolation, now a sufficiently large cohort has developed, such that one can speak of a community of scholars working in Greece on Ottoman history.

This workshop follows on the success of the two earlier workshops (Santorini, 2007 and Mytilene, 2010) on "The Greek Experience Under Ottoman Rule" sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies. Hosted by the Historical Archives of the Benaki Museum, Athens, this workshop is designed to bring together graduate students and recent Ph.D.s who are working in Greece on Ottoman history and culture, together with a small group of graduate students and early-career scholars from Turkey, Europe and the United States. The focus will be on Greeks and, more broadly, Greece in the Ottoman Empire. Students from all humanities disciplines and the social sciences are welcome to apply.

The workshop will focus on the experience of the Greeks under Ottoman rule. Prospective participants are encouraged to consider additional frameworks for their topic, beyond the Ottoman context. In accordance with recent trends in history writing, such as transnational and international history, presenters might want to think about the scale of their work.  Are they telling a local, a regional, or even a transnational or international story?  And what are the connections among and across these levels?

In addition to presentations and discussions, the workshop will acquaint participants with two important sources of material for the history of the Greek lands under Ottoman rule: (a) The Historical Archives of the Benaki Museum, housed in the historic Penelope Delta House, that contain Ottoman and Greek materials dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century; (b) The Benaki Museum of Islamic Art which includes strong collections from the Ottoman period. Benaki Curators will give on-site presentations on their Ottoman holdings, manuscripts, art, and material culture.

Organizing Committee (Princeton University): Dimitri Gondicas (Hellenic Studies), Molly Greene (History and Hellenic Studies), Heath Lowry (Near Eastern Studies), Teresa Shawcross (History and Hellenic Studies),

Host Committee (Benaki Museum): Maria Dimitriadou (Historical Archives), Mina Moraitou (Museum of Islamic Art), Tassos Sakellaropoulos (Historical Archives)
 

 


Bios and Abstracts

Irena Fliter holds a BA from the Humboldt University of Berlin, and a MA from the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. She is currently working on her PhD at Tel Aviv University on Ottoman diplomats in the 18th century between the Ottoman Empire and Prussia. In 2013, she works as a fellow of the Orient-Institut, part of the Max Weber foundation, continuing the research for her dissertation.

The Ottoman Culture of Diplomacy and Greek Diplomats between the Ottoman Empire and Prussia (1761-1821)
The focus of this paper is on the careers and experiences of Greek Ottoman diplomats, who worked for the Prussian embassy in Istanbul or were sent to Prussia between the years 1761 and 1821. They were part of the Ottoman diplomatic culture having a lifestyle, which we would today call international or cosmopolitan, working in fields of inter-state and inter-cultural relations and enjoying diplomatic privileges such as tax exemptions, expedient legal status and other commercial advantages. The Greek Ottoman diplomats cooperated or competed with their Muslim colleagues creating networks which transcended ethnic, national and religious boundaries. The extent of these networks and the activities of their members must be taken into consideration when discussing Ottoman exchange with European countries.
 

Nikos Michailidis has studied Political Science and International Relations at Panteion University, Greece (B.A); Boğaziçi University, Turkey (M.A); and Anthropology at York University, Canada (M.A). He is currently  a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Princeton, and is working on an ethnography of music-making and belonging in contemporary Turkey. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research conducted in Trabzon, Istanbul and Ankara, Nikos focuses on the rise of the "ethnic music" phenomenon in Turkey with special interest in a genre called Karadeniz/Pontian (Black Sea) music. His research creatively bridges anthropology with historiography, politics, ethnomusicology, and Hellenic and Turkish studies.

Infidel Sounds: Music, Conversion and Identities in Trebizond from the 19th to the 21st century
In my presentation I traced the legacies of religious conversion on the musical culture and identity of some Greek communities of Trebizond. Based on oral narrativ es and other information collected during my fieldwork in the eastern Black Sea province of Turkey in 2009, and on a unique text written by Ioannis Parharidis, a Greek school teacher of the 19th century in that region, I provide an analysis of the role of Islamization in the stigmatization and marginalization of the Pontian-lyra and its music among the converted population that facilitated cultural oblivion and their subsequent assimilation. Parharidis’ text is a unique source of its kind providing familiarization with the world of the Greek converts in this region in the late 19th century.
 

Dilek Özkan held BA in History (2005), from Istanbul Bilgi University and MA in History (2009), from Boğaziçi University. In her master thesis she focused on Philanthropy and the Greek Orthodox Orphanages in Istanbul.   Currently she is doing her PhD in Modern and Contemporary Greek Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and expecting submit her dissertation in 2014. Her dissertation deals with the first Greek-Ottoman Border (1832-1881) and the transformation of the state-society relations in Ottoman Thessaly.  

Ottoman Responses to the Return Migration of the Greek-Orthodox people in Thessaly: Re-conceptualizing State-Society Relations during the Tanzimat period 
The paper examines the return migration of the Greek Orthodox people to the Ottoman Empire by using Greek and Ottoman archival documents, and aims to display the changing status of the state-society relations during the Ottoman modernization, Tanzimat period. It discusses the role of the pro-migration policies of the Ottoman State to initiate re-settlement of the migrants on the one hand, on the other, maneuvers of the state to prevent ever-increasing number of the Greek citizens living in the Ottoman cities. Thence, as this paper tries to indicate, one can observe the formation of an Ottoman citizenship concept in a modern sense, which was shaped during this process, much before the Ottoman Citizenship Law was enacted in 1869.
 

Şehnaz Şişmanoğlu Şimşek

Undergraduate studies at the University of Boğaziçi in Philosophy (2000). MA in Turkish Literature at Bilkent University. Doctoral student at Boğaziçi University in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature. Phd dissertation is about one of the first Turkish novels written by Evangelinos Misailidis in Karamanlidika called Temaşa-i Dünya ve Cefakâr u Cefakeş [Contemplation of the World: The Sufferer and the Suffering] (1871-1872). Now she is a lecturer and coordinator of Turkish Courses at Kadir Has University.

Ottoman Greeks in Conflict: The Case of Karamanlides in the 19th Century 
The paper is about one of the first Turkish novels written by Evangelinos Misailidis in Karamanlidika called Temaşa-i Dünya ve Cefakâr u Cefakeş [Contemplation of the World: The Sufferer and the Suffering] (1871-1872). The novel is an adaptation of the Greek novel O Polipathis (“The Man of Many Sufferings”) (1839) written by a Grecophone Grigoris Paleologos who was born in Istanbul and has taken part in various Ottoman administrative departments also having a relation with Fanariot circles. Misailidis has re-written O Polipathis especially in terms of identity issues and this is what makes the novel an invaluable text to understand the heterogeneous identity aspects of Greek community in the Ottoman Empire at the end of 19th century. In this paper, taking into account Misailidis’ Temaşa-i Dünya, his discourse on identity and the way he defines himself and his community is analyzed aiming to shed some light on the identity consciousness of the Turcophone Christians and how it differs from the Grecophone Greeks.
 

Elif Bayraktar Tellan was born in Istanbul in 1978. After she graduated from Boğaziçi University, Department of Philosophy in 2000, she continued her graduate studies at the History Department of Bilkent University. She wrote her MA thesis on the Ottoman religious policies in Crete in 2005, and she finished her dissertation in 2011, titled “The Patriarch and the Sultan: The Struggle for Authority and the Quest for Order in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire”. She currently works at the Tourism Faculty of Istanbul Medeniyet University.

The Transformation of the Patriarchate in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Context
This study investigates the changing fortunes of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Istanbul as part of the Ottoman society from the 1700s to 1760s through a contextualization of the events in their Ottoman background. Based on a study of Ottoman and Greek documents, the work focuses on the transformation of the position of the Patriarchs, the changing jurisdiction of the Ottoman Orthodox high clergy, the duration of the Patriarchate term, the change of terminology in the bureaucratic language regarding the Ottoman Orthodox people and clergy, the struggle of the high clergy in a changing society against actors they were in conflict with, and finally the gradual establishment of gerondismos by 1763.

Theocharis Tsampouras studied Archaeology (2002) and History (2004) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and holds an M.A. (2005) and a Ph.D (2013) in Byzantine Art and Archaeology from the same university. In his doctoral dissertation he investigated the significance of the wall-paintings created by painting workshops originating from the region of Mount Grammos. He has worked on projects of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki involving excavations, documentation and digitization of collections and has also published several articles on seventeenth and nineteenth century painting. His current research focuses on the assessment of the common artistic language in the Balkans created by travelling painters in the seventeenth century.

Seventeenth century Orthodox art in the Balkans: social change and new artistic priorities.
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century a notable change in the quality of Orthodox art in the Balkans is observed, which seems strongly connected with the socioeconomic changes happening in this period. The shift of the Christian elites from urban environments to mountain communities created new conditions for the artistic production of the Balkans. Painter workshops of the cities fell in decline, but new mountain-based artist groups appeared instead. These groups were created at first as collaborations between master painters of the same extended families, but soon included many secondary painters and apprentices, as well as other craftsmen such as woodcarvers, goldsmiths and engravers. All of them strived for a homogenization of their creations, which allowed them to work quickly and efficiently and to overcome any geomorphological or language barriers, ultimately resulting in a notable geographic expansion of their work throughout the Balkans. The art of the seventeenth century, especially the art of the travelling painter groups of the Balkan mountain villages, provides us with a rare glimpse of the inner structure of Orthodox communities and the everyday life of the Balkan societies and constitutes a valuable example of transnational Balkan heritage.