In the last fifty years of the Ottoman Empire, over a million refugees from the Russian Empire’s North Caucasus region arrived in the Ottoman domains for permanent settlement. These trans-regional migrants profoundly transformed Ottoman demographics, socio-cultural environments, and labor markets. State-centered historical accounts - the great bulk of the existing literature - marginalize their voices. This paper discusses different ways, in which we can recover refugees’ voices and restore their historical agency. By focusing on papers, written by refugees themselves, this paper will explore how the North Caucasians understood and articulated their new political and social status and investigate different ways of writing refugees’ agency into their own history. Petitions, written by refugees and their representatives to various local, regional, and imperial agencies, are a fascinating source of information about the migrants’ concerns and grievances. They underscore the refugees’ engagement with the authorities and sketch out boundaries, within which interactions between immigrants and the state occurred. Collective petitions also reflect the immigrants’ perceptions of what the Ottoman state expects from its new residents and their own standing with the state and within their host societies. Private letters, sent by refugees to their families in the Caucasus, a type of primary source rare to come by, tell us a story of North Caucasus refugees as trans-imperial migrants. These letters, not devoid of self-imposed censorship, shed light on refugees’ immediate needs in exile and family reunification-related issues. The paper is based on archival documents in Istanbul’s Prime Minister Archive, Sofia’s Sts. Cyril and Methodius National Library, and Tbilisi’s State Historical Archive.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of Muslims migrated from former Ottoman lands, fleeing an encroaching Russian Empire in the North Caucasus and Crimea and nationalist struggles in the Balkans. Various waves of this movement have been labeled a humanitarian disaster by both contemporary observers and historians, who note the toll of epidemic diseases within makeshift refugee camps and describe mortality rates exceeding several hundred migrants per day in the empire’s port cities. Despite this recognition of the importance of disease during migrant arrival, health and sickness remain understudied components in historiographies of both the migrants’ eventual integration into Ottoman society and in assessing the efforts of state actors to settle newcomers. Drawing upon underutilized sources from the Ottoman Prime Minister’s Archive, this paper will address these omissions through emphasizing the importance of environmental and health factors on migrant mobility and settlement beyond quarantine and refugee zones. Scholars emphasize multiple reasons the financially strapped empire accepted scores of impoverished newcomers. Aside from creating a loyal Muslim “buffer zone” and maintaining legitimacy as the Islamic caliphate, goals included the economic boon of a widened tax base and increased tillage of arable land. While humanitarian concerns remained a significant motivation in addressing migrant illness, state actors also recognized the success of these endeavors was dependent upon fostering a healthy, productive population. Thus, state generated sources discuss the need to move newly settled migrants struggling in environmentally difficult locations to more salubrious locales. Migrant petitions, often stored in the records of the Muhacirin Komisyonu (Emigrant Commission), reveal that migrants likewise engaged in evaluating the relative healthfulness and quality of land to request small- and large-scale transfers. Focusing on environmental and health concerns allows for greater exploration of refugee mobility within the empire, offers insight into long-term processes of settlement and integration, and highlights a point of dialogue between the state and migrants revealed by migrants’ own environmental evaluations.

Most scholarship on mass violence at the end of the Ottoman Empire has been produced within either a Turkish or an Armenian nationalist framework. Due to these conceptual blinders, the historical scholarship on forced migration is dominated by two separate literatures: one focusing almost exclusively on the travails of the Muslim muhacirin (‘refugees’) and a completely separate body of historical work detailing the suffering of the Christian populations of Anatolia. Studies of the systematic removal of the Muslim inhabitants of Caucasus and the Balkans are mostly written in Turkish, base their findings on documents culled from Ottoman archival collections, and strenuously avoid any discussion of what happened between 1913 and 1923. Conversely, the immense scholarship on the Armenian Aghed (‘Catastrophe’) or Assyrian Shato d'Sayfo (‘year of the sword’), relies extensively on survivor narratives, foreign consular reports, and missionary accounts, and is focused almost entirely on the period between 1914 and 1918. At the end of the 19th century, it was commonly believed by many Ottoman Armenians, that Muslim refugees were purposefully settled in areas of the Ottoman Empire with large Christian (Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and Assyrian) populations in order to ‘engineer’ a more homogenous nation-state. It has been widely speculated by a number of historians – but never proven empirically – that these traumatized refugees played a critical role in the state-sanctioned violence against Christian communities between 1915 and 1923. For instance, membership of the infamous Teşkilat-i Mahsusa (‘Special Organization’), a vehicle for state-directed violence, was composed in large part of muhacirin from the North Caucasus. This paper will seek to bridge the gulf between these two bodies of historical literature by focusing on the settlement of the Muslim muhacirin (‘refugees’) and, in particular, the changing relationship of these newcomers with the local populations in Adana in the decades before the violence. An exercise in micro-history, this paper will synthesize documents from the Ottoman archives, the British and French consulates, missionary accounts (ABCFM), newspapers and memoirs.

In my paper, I shall present the findings of my PhD project, in which I have examined the events that followed the so-called population exchange of 1923-25 between Greece and Turkey. In the course, of it, about 1.5 million Orthodox Christians from Turkey and 0.5 million Muslims from Greece were forced to leave their homelands and start anew in a country they had, in most cases, never seen before. The “exchange” was agreed upon as part of a peace treaty between the Greek and Turkish governments at the Lausanne conference in 1922. This treaty stated that all refugees, including those who had already left, should be compensated for the property and possessions they were  forced to leave behind. This principle looked simple on paper but, for various reasons, failed completely in both countries. In my project, I have studied the processes of permanent settlement, property distribution and compensation in the district of Izmir between 1924 and 1930, contextualizing them within the broader issues of citizenship and belonging in the young Turkish nation-state. Based on petitions to the central government written by both newcomers and locals, documents from the settlement agencies, newspaper articles, and autobiographical texts, I have traced the politics surrounding the distribution of formerly Christian property to exchangees. My paper will provide a close reading of several of those petitions, focusing on the strategies of legitimization that refugees employed in order to receive (or keep) the property that they desired. More particularly, I shall show how refugees discussed the relationship between financial interests of the state and their own right to compensation.