In 2024, 300 years are commemorated since the Arabic-speaking Christians of Ottoman Syria split into the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and the Greek Catholic Melkite Church. In 1724, printing was a potent weapon in the hands of the Arab Christians’ leaders, intent on making their dogmas – and opinions of each other – known to a broader audience. It all started in one of the Romanian Principalities, Wallachia (now in Romania), in 1701-1702, when Athanasios Dabbas, at the time Antiochian Metropolitan of Aleppo, printed two Arabic liturgical texts that he distributed freely to the parishes of Greater Syria, where no presses existed. This achievement was enabled by the help he received from the prince Constantin Brâncoveanu (1698-1714) and his master printer Antim the Iberian, a future Metropolitan of Wallachia (d. 1716). Dabbas then transferred the typographic tools and printing know-how from Bucharest to Aleppo in Syria, where he established the first Arabic press in the Ottoman lands and printed 11 titles by 1711. His successor on the Antiochian See, Sylvester (1724-1766), resumed printing in the Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, where Syrian monks manufactured Arabic type that they used in printing four books in Iași (1745-1746), two in Bucharest (1747), and then five in Sylvester’s new press in Beirut, the first Christian Orthodox press of Lebanon (1750-1753). In this paper, I shall tell the story of these outstanding characters and their Arabic books, products of a visionary plan where importing the printing technology was included to bring modernity to the Ottoman-ruled Middle East, and unity to the troubled Church of Antioch. I am conducting this novel research within the ERC-funded TYPARABIC project I am heading in Bucharest, Romania (2021-2026).

In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant public sphere was emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean accompanied by extensive political and economic transformations. While previous studied have often focused on this phenomenon within the context of specific countries, such as the Ottoman Empire and Greece, historical evidence challenges this perspective. The circulation of newspapers contributed to the emergence of a transnational public sphere that encompassed several countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. In this paper, I examine the interactions between the Grecophone newspapers of the Ottoman Empire and those of Greece in the 1860s and 1870s. Through close readings of news articles and editorials, I trace the significant impact of Greece’s political life on the Ottoman Greek community. The Ottoman Greek newspapers reported in great detail what was happening in Athens, where constitutional monarchy was relatively strong. Thus, Grecophone readers in the Ottoman Empire had been accustomed with ideas of constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy long before they became popular in Ottoman political discourse with the movement of the Young Ottomans. Moreover, although newspapers from Athens and Istanbul were written in the same language and aimed at the same audience, they were published in different countries. Thus, they served different nation-building projects which intended to establish Athens or Istanbul as the center of the Greek nation. Finally, my research into the cost of newspaper subscriptions reveals the elitist nature of the public sphere because an annual subscription was beyond the means of a worker in Istanbul. Thus, it can be argued that the intended audience of these newspapers was the emerging elites of merchants and financiers, who sought to translate their wealth into sociocultural influence and political power. Newspapers served as conduits for the views of these bankers, and the transnational public sphere allowed them to disseminate their views in different countries. The characteristics of this public sphere also reveal that these elites were not sure which country was better suited to satisfy their ambitions. In the 1870s, the popularity of Ottomanism among the Christians of the Ottoman Empire as well as the “repatriation” of capital and men of capital to Greece were expressions of this quest. Without newspapers, this whole process would have been unthinkable.

The newspaper Ανατoλή [Anatoli, Şark (Tr), Orient (Eng)], established by Evangelinos Misailidis in 1850, occupies a prominent role within this longstanding history. It continued to be published until late 1923, with only brief interruptions. While there is a significant body of literature on Anatoli, having the distinction of being the longest-running Ottoman newspaper published in Turkish, there is a lack of research specifically focusing on Νέα Ανατoλή [Nea Anatoli, Şark-ı Cedid (Tr), New Orient (Eng)]. Nea Anatoli, published between 1922 and 1923, is considered the successor to Anatoli. This paper is on Nea Anatoli, a Turcophone Greek newspaper that was published in the Allied-occupied Constantinople and during the Greco-Turkish war in Anatolia. This discussion will focus on how the newspaper defined and established its own identity, including its editorial line, political stance, and perspective on significant events such as military developments in Anatolia, the collapse of the Greek front, the Fire of Smyrna, the Lausanne Peace Negotiations and Treaty, the Population Exchange, and the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in two years coincided with a crucial period in Greek-Turkish relations and the very final years of the Ottoman Empire. With the end of Nea Anatoli's publishing life, the legacy of Turkish-speaking Greek journalism ceased to exist within the present-day borders of Turkey due to the compulsory expulsion of the majority of Greeks through exile and population exchange. The study of Nea Anatoli, the last element in this lineage, makes a substantial contribution to the historical analysis of the Ottoman press and the history of the Ottoman Greek community.

The prophetic lineage of the famous Hanbali scholar ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166), namesake of the Sufi brotherhood Qādiriyya, was disputed early on—especially by his rivals. Nevertheless, it became widely accepted that al-Jīlānī was indeed a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. The (prophetic) lineage of al-Jīlānī and his descendants is discussed (and sometimes deliberately omitted) in several biographical dictionaries between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is the subject of local family histories and several individual studies and treatises from at least the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, al-Jīlānī’s descent is also elaborated in the hagiographical literature. Apart from the two main hagiographical texts about the "Pole of the Poles" by ʿAlī b. Yūsuf al-Shaṭṭanawfī (d. 713/1314) and Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-Tādhifī (d. 962/1555), there were several prestigious authors who wrote about and defended the prophetic lineage of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī over the centuries: al-Fayrūzabādī (d. 817/1415) comments on it, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) discusses it, and Jaʿfar al-Barzanjī (d. 1177/1764), famous poet of praise poetry about the Prophet Muḥammad, includes a section on al-Jīlānī’s lineage in his hagiography of the saint. While the individual studies and treatises about al-Jīlānī and his descendants written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries seem to aim at verifying and confirming (or contesting) ʿAbd al-Qādir’s lineage (and, perhaps more importantly, the elevated status of his descendants), this paper intends to examine the way genealogical information about al-Jīlānī and/or his descendants is presented in hagiographical texts. What information is included, omitted, or added, and how is it framed? What images are invoked when talking about al-Jīlānī’s prophetic descent? What is the function of the sections devoted to genealogy in the hagiographical texts? And, finally, can we observe a change over time, a tendency to verify, as we find it in other texts about al-Jīlānī and his descendants in later centuries? In this paper, I attempt to trace how hagiographical literature produces, disseminates, and popularizes genealogical knowledge and how it interacts with the knowledge presented in more sober biographical dictionaries, historical works, and scholarly treatises that purport only to document and/or verify genealogical information. I argue that we can understand the genealogical knowledge articulated in hagiographical texts as a form of popularization of scholarly knowledge, as Peter Burke suggests in his influential work on the process of knowledge production, “What is the History of Knowledge?”

This presentation delves into the historical significance of Galatasarayı Library (founded in 1754), initiated by the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud I at the end of his life, examining its implications for contemporary individuals and its function as a symbol of cultural capital for prospective ruling elites, who got educated in Galatasarayı School. By scrutinizing the phenomenon of endowment libraries, particularly those established by the Ottoman sultan Mahmud I, this study analyzes the distinctive features of the Galatasarayı Library, encompassing its foundation, audience, management, and utilization. Drawing upon Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital, I argue that Ottoman libraries transcended mere repositories of knowledge, evolving into imperial institutions symbolizing the state's grandeur and the sultan's authority. Through an examination of Galatasarayı Library's audience, location, and establishment process, I aim to illustrate how Sultan Mahmud I sought to bolster his authoritative power by enhancing visibility and symbolic presence within the library and its surroundings. While doing so, the primary sources used are archival documentation, the library's catalogs, and narrative sources. This presentation elucidates the multifaceted roles of libraries, with a particular focus on the Galatasarayı Library, shedding light on the complex processes involved in their establishment. By exploring the cultural and political connotations embedded in the library's history, from its inception to its fall in 1838, terminated in Ayasofya and Fatih Libraries with the same founder, Mahmud I, I endeavor to provide fresh insights into the symbolic significance promoted by Ottoman libraries. In this regard, I will rely on a transfer procession for book cargo from Topkapı Palace to Galata, the interior throne utilized by the sultan for some occasions, and commutes to the library. In conclusion, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of libraries as cultural artifacts. It reveals the symbolic connotations that may be inherent in Ottoman library institutions, thereby enriching our appreciation of their historical and sociopolitical contexts.

Istanbul enjoys a modern reputation as THE Ottoman city—the megalopolis that served as the empire’s “capital” from its conquest in 1453 through the collapse of Ottoman power. Yet from the perspective of Ottoman courtly residence patterns, Istanbul only became the virtually unchallenged seat of the House of Osman in 1703, when the success of an Istanbul-based revolt saw the dynasty promise to abandon their then predominantly Edirne-based patterns of habitation and reside almost exclusively in Istanbul. This sudden and monumental shift in the geographic range of Ottoman courtly mobility saw the ambit of the imperial retinue’s immediate influence shrink by several orders of magnitude from the level of the macro-province of Rumelia to that of the metropolitan city. While previous studies of Istanbul’s urban history have shed considerable light on the changed relationships between “palace and populace” in this brave new world, few if any such works have examined courtly-municipal engagements in the period through Ottoman ego-documents, a genre of literary production that permits historians to analyze the symbiotic bond between courtly and municipal populations beyond the at times highly circumscribed and ideological viewpoints provided by authors working largely within courtly networks of patronage. In order to highlight the potential of these autobiographical sources for studying the broader municipal visibility and influence of the Ottoman court’s intra-Istanbuline migration patterns, this paper examines the presentation of Sultan Mahmud I’s (r. 1730-54) itineraries in the diary of Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi (d. 1790-91), a member of the Ottoman religious establishment who kept a record of his daily life over a c. five year period in the late 1740s and early 1750s. While Sıdkı Mustafa was not required by his profession to write about the activities of the Ottoman sultan, he nonetheless includes some of Mahmud I’s movements among the fires, earthquakes, and other municipal happenings that intersperse his diaristic record of his life in the city. Hence, based on an inter-textual close reading of the diary alongside contemporary court chronicles and imperial daybooks, this paper argues that Sıdkı Mustafa includes the Ottoman emperor’s relocations in his diary because he considered them to be important and potentially impactful events for those who dwelt in eighteenth-century Istanbul. This was due to the regularity of courtly mobility in the municipality, the power, wealth, and resources brokered at the Ottoman court, as well as the sensorial spectacle that typically accompanied the sultan’s movements through urban space.