Studies of late Ottoman Macedonia typically highlight inter-communal violence and the extent to which nationalism was present or not amongst inhabitants, an approach Keith Brown terms “methodological nationalism”. Such a framework inevitably obscures the nuances of everyday life and glosses over the different socio-economic factors motivating the decision-making process. In this context, the Vlachs, a nomadic, Romance-speaking people of the Balkans, have been studied through the prism of their relationship to either Romania or Greece, with their educational movement, which first took off in the 1860s, inevitably linked to competing nationalist ideologies. This approach, which reads national consciousness onto educational choice, has frequently been used to demonstrate that the Vlachs were either Romanians or Greeks. This paper problematizes such interpretations, reframing the Vlach school movement within its broader Ottomans social context, and examining the relationship between school attendance and socio-economic status. It also explores the influence of Ottomanist ideas on the major figures driving the movement, and posits an intellectual connection between Vlach teachers and Ottoman imperial educational discourses. Ultimately, it argues that Vlach school attendance was linked to the promotion of personal and communal financial and cultural interests, rather than nationalistic ones. Born in Avdella, Grevena kaza, during the 1830s, Apostol Margarit, the founder of the Vlach school movement, began his work as a teacher in the 1860s and attempted to open his first school as early as 1862. British, Greek, and Romanian educational statistics indicate a rapidly growing number of Vlach schools, which multiplied throughout the 1870s and 1880s. A further examination of these figures reveals important information about the students themselves and indicates a socioeconomic divide between Vlachs in urban and rural areas, with the former choosing classical education in Greek lycées and the latter preferring the curricula of Vlach language schools, with their more technical focus on skills directly applicable to life in the countryside. After reviewing these statistics, this paper turns to Margarit’s treatise, titled Les Grecs, Les Valaques, Les Albanais, et L’Empire Ottoman, which makes an impassioned argument in favor of accepting the Ottoman Empire as a “tutor and a savior” whose imperial umbrella may serve as the protector of Vlach interests, enabling them to be educated in their native language and thus giving them the tools to become productive members of the society they inhabit.

On August 12, 1877, English philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts appealed to the humanity and Christian charity of readers of the Daily Telegraph, beseeching them to send relief to Muslim women and children displaced by the 1877-1878 Russo-Ottoman War, a conflict that would uproot more than a million Balkan Muslims. On August 15, she announced the formation of the Turkish Compassionate Fund (TCF), an organization intended to aid non-combatants. Soon after, Sultan Abdülhamid II disseminated an album of photographs of wounded Muslim refugees to European ambassadors in Istanbul. British Ambassador A.H. Layard forwarded the album to London, cautioning that the Sultan was convinced Europe held no compassion for Muslim suffering; the ambassador hoped the TCF would persuade the Sultan that “England” did. Over the next two years, the TCF channeled money through Layard and the British consular corps to provide food, clothing, and housing for refugees throughout Rumelia and Western Anatolia. The fund’s soup kitchens fed nearly 17,000 in Istanbul in mid-February of 1878, and an offshoot of the fund employed refugee women into the 1890s. For those displaced by the war, the TCF’s relief may have made the difference between life and death. Historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman refugees have incorporated the lenses of health and environment in their accounts of migrant experiences. Scholars have described epidemics, tabulated devastating mortality rates in port cities, and considered the role of famine and malaria in migrant settlement. Focusing on TCF’s relief effort and using materials from the Ottoman State Archive, the British Foreign Office, and published primary sources, this paper contributes to scholars’ evolving narrative of the tragic matrix of sickness and death experienced by Ottoman immigrants. The paper explores the evolution of “the refugee” as a social category and examines how Abdülhamid II, officials, diplomats, observers, and philanthropists generated images and stories about forced migrants. It argues that aid and philanthropy were processes unfolding at multiple scales and within multiple spaces – across diplomatic channels, in Victorian parlors, on the shores of the Black Sea, at railway stations in Rumelia and mosques in Istanbul, and eventually in the exhibition halls of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Portrayals of Muslim refugees reflected domestic and international politics, ideas of sanitation, and ideologies of civilization, nationalism, welfare, and productivity. Ultimately, the construction and consumption of “the refugee” as a worthy object of aid conditioned migrants’ trajectories and material outcomes.

My paper seeks to examine the daily experiences and strategies of Muslim Ottoman women in the families of soldiers who served in the Ottoman military, fought in wars or became martyred for their empire during the Hamidian period by analyzing their petitions sent to the state departments and to the Sultan to request financial aid. It particularly takes the Ottoman-Greek War of 1897 as a context to explore “the negotiation process” between the state officials and the women in the families of soldiers who participated or became martyred in the Ottoman-Greek War of 1897 while uncovering these women’s daily experiences and the ways that they exercised their agencies by analyzing their petitions and the state’s responses to them. Petitions of women in soldiers’ families are significant sources to see how wars affected the daily lives of these women who became economically destitute after losing the only breadwinner of the household due to wars. These poor women had to raise their children as a single parent, they became refugees and lost their properties, and they had to sell their assets to make a living for their families. Embracing a powerful identity of being “a mother/wife/daughter of a soldier,” these women bargained for their requests with the state and used “discursive strategies” to manipulate the system for their own sakes. By strategically claiming in their petitions that “a just and merciful” Sultan could not let such soldiers’ families live in poverty and destitution, not only they aimed to manipulate the system for their own sakes but also they became a source of legitimacy of a just Sultan and its regime. Thus, while this paper aims to reveal these destitute women’s endeavors and strategies to voice their requests, it also mirrors the socio-economic and political transformations of the Ottoman state in the late nineteenth century. It additionally intends to explore how these transformations along with internal and external problems that the empire weathered affected the everyday lives of Ottoman subjects, particularly women, on the ground, regarding the relationships between the concepts of class, gender, war and legitimation during the Hamidian period. There is still little knowledge about the daily experiences of Muslim Ottoman women during the Hamidian period and this research aimed to contribute to this literature and to bring new insights to Ottoman gender historiography.