Ayşe Ozil

Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2012-2013

DegreePh.D., History, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2009
Dissertation
The Structure of Community: Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire in North-Western Asia Minor, c. 1860-1910
Research Project
Ottoman Istanbul, 1453-1922: A Greek Perspective

Ayşe Ozil holds a Ph.D. in history (2009) from Birkbeck College, University of London. Her doctoral thesis, which is due to be published in 2012 by Routledge under the title Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia explores the meaning and practice of community among Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire in north-western Anatolia during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has contributed to the books H Mikrasiatiki Katastrofi kai oi Prosfyges: Mia Nea Optiki (A. Liakos, ed., 2011) and İstanbul’un Rum Mimarları (E. Şarlak and H. Kuruyazıcı, eds., 2010) and published Turkish translations of Greek works including Periegesis eis tin Pamphylian kata to 1850 by D. Danieloglou. Since 2009 she has taught at Boğaziçi and Sabancı universities. Her current research focuses on the social and cultural history of Greeks in Ottoman Istanbul.

About the Research Project

Ottoman Istanbul, 1453-1922: A Greek Perspective

After the end of Byzantium and the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453, Istanbul continued to hold the principal place among the cities of the new empire. For most historians who studied the city, the arrival of the Ottomans meant that the Turco-Muslim population then became the prime mover of its history throughout the following centuries of Ottoman rule. Greeks, however, along with other non-Muslims of the empire have been a constitutive part of the Ottoman population and undermining their history, which cannot be separated from the history of Ottoman Istanbul, does disservice to the multi-faceted past of the city. Putting together and expanding on a number of studies that focus on specific areas and time periods of Istanbul ’s Greek history, this project aims to bring a diachronic approach to understand the various trajectories that the Greek population of the city followed through the Ottoman centuries. Focusing on various aspects of society from administration to culture, it documents and situates the Greek presence in the broader history of Istanbul and examines how that presence influenced the making of an Ottoman capital.