This paper examines the impact of the secularization efforts that took place in the early twentieth century Turkey on the tradition of saint veneration within the contexts of venerations of Mevlana Rumi and Haji Bektash Veli. The research is based on primary sources, i.e. national newspapers published during the 20th century, and secondary sources. In the early 20th century, Turkish experiences with secularization and modernization transformed the saint veneration traditions from intimate spiritual experiences into public, civic ceremonies. This historical process has started with the suppression of the popular religion. Dervish lodges, tombs, and shrines were closed down and gatherings in those places were banned with a law on November 30, 1925 as a part of the larger efforts of eliminating the community based autonomous religious networks. The mausoleums were closed to visits and rites of veneration on the mausoleum sites were banned. This ban was a part of the forced secularization process in Turkey and indirectly initiated the process of innovation in the rites and sites of saint veneration. Starting from the next decade, certain mausoleums have been re-opened as museums. However, these sites were cleansed from religious practices including the veneration ceremonies. Localities with strong traditions of saint veneration have overcome this official obstacle by initiating ambiguously secular public festivals commemorating their principal saints. On March 2, 1927, Rumi’s mausoleum and the lodge were opened as a museum, “Asar-i Atika Muzesi”; but no Mevlevi ceremony was allowed. Commemoration of Rumi with traditional Shab-i Arus rituals, such as the recitation of “naat-i Sharif,” and the performance of “Sema,” was not possible. The initiation of a secular, public festival created an opportunity to communally commemorate Rumi and in time to revive core commemoration rituals in public festive forms. This historical process started in 1942 at the Konya Halk Evi and evolved into an international festival. Similarly, the opening of the Bektashi lodge in Hacibektas as a museum seems to create an opportunity to initiate a public commemoration of Haji Bektas Veli on August 16, 1964. Since then, an annual public commemoration of Haji Bektash has been held in Hacibektas starting on the 16th of August. The annual festival transformed the traditionally private commemoration of Haji Bektash into a secular public event. In spite of the official ban, devotees continued to practice religious rituals related to saint veneration tradition under the protest and surveillance of the museum personnel.

In this paper I examine the social construction of the modern home and the idealized role of the “new woman” through representation of women in serialized novels and articles juxtaposed with advertisements of home goods in the Armenian daily, Arewelk. Ultimately, I argue that during the decade leading to the 1908 Young Turk Revolution Arewelk circumvented Ottoman censors by turning the newspaper's attention to a female audience while maintaining a message of necessary societal change in late Ottoman Istanbul. In the late 19th century the Armenian community of Istanbul witnessed an explosion of printing despite the strict censorship of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Armenian newspapers, particularly Arewelk, came under heavy censorship. How then did they write on issues concerning Armenian identity or politics? The editor and proprietor of Arewelk, Karekin Boyadjian, carefully placed advertisements for Western products directed towards women and juxtaposed these advertisements with European serialized novels that presented a strong female protagonist who often challenged traditional gender roles. The use of serialized novels, along with articles penned by female Armenian intellectuals, such as Zabel Yesayan, on the role of women in rapidly changing world provided the newspaper's readership with the notion that the role of women as the custodian of the home was more than caring for the home. The role of the modern Ottoman-Armenian woman was to build and maintain a home that encouraged European influenced styles of adorning the house in an effort to create a space that fostered a modern identity and encouraged model citizenship.

In this paper, I examine how the Ottoman satirical journal Kalem covered the first year of the Young Turk Revolution. My reason for choosing to focus on political satire is to be able to understand the hidden social and political anxieties that appeared after the constitutional revolution. While contributors of the post-revolutionary non-satirical press were praising the new constitutional regime and attacking the ancient regime of Abdulhamid II, the contributors of the satirical journals targeted the Young Turks as well. Therefore, I argue that satire plays an important role in showing the neglected bitter facts at a time of very strict state censorship and post-revolutionary excitement and disillusionment in the Ottoman Empire. The reign of Abdulhamid II was notorious of strict government control and censorship of the press. After the proclamation of the constitution in 1908, Ottoman press started to flourish with great pace. Within the first two months following the revolution, hundreds of newspaper licenses were issued. The abolition of press censorship was a de facto phenomenon. When the news of the revolution reached Istanbul, newspaper editors refused to send copies of their publications to the censorship office. However, after a countercoup attempt that is known as the “31 March Incident” in 1909, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) found the pretext to have firmer control of the press. During its first year of publication, Kalem heavily criticized the indolence of the state bureaucracy, inadequacy and laziness of the new ministers, widespread corruption at all levels of the state apparatus, passivity of the state at the face of increasing European encroachment, and unrealistic expectations of people from the revolution. They also complained about attempts of the CUP to control and manipulate the post-revolutionary press, especially satirical press, for the purpose of spreading its own propaganda. Therefore, a detailed analysis of this journal will display the social and political anxieties that were often times overlooked or neglected by the non-satirical Ottoman press.

This paper focuses on the journalistic writings of Teodor Kasap, a Greek Ottoman journalist whose publications dominated the press of Istanbul in five languages from 1870 through 1877, when he was forced into exile. It offers an overview of Kasap’s contribution to the emergence of a culture of public dissent in the decades that followed the Crimean War, and argues for Kasap’s pivotal role in creating the secular and pluralist public culture that grounded the Young Ottoman constitutional movement. From the founding of his first journal, Diyojen, in 1870, through his arrest in 1877 on charges of violating the Ottoman press law with the publication of a cartoon satirizing press censorship, Teodor Kasap was one of the most prominent figures in Istanbul public life. The cultural unification he championed was an important precursor to the demand for a constitutional regime. This paper surveys the rhetorical strategies deployed by Kasap and his collaborators to unite their linguistically and religiously diverse readership and build a sense of common cultural belonging. Kasap’s journals, published in Turkish, Armenian, and Bulgarian as well as French and Greek, collectively transformed Ottoman press culture by expanding it to make room for a new social category: worldly, patriotic, both Muslim and Christian, and steeped in the popular culture of Ottoman Istanbul. By highlighting several episodes in which Kasap intervened in political and cultural disputes, I aim to draw out the substance of his newly invented national persona and sketch its impact on Ottoman public discourse. Kasap’s journalistic ethos combined an unmistakably cosmopolitan outlook with a pointed resistance to both the Tanzimat-era state’s vision and that of European elites. It celebrated the diversity of the Ottoman capital’s working class and the richness of Ottoman folk culture, a tradition that it insisted was shared by Muslim and non-Muslim subjects alike. Above all, it recast imperial subjects as citizens: members of a coherent body politic that stood apart from, and even in opposition to, their government. The efforts of this Turcophone Greek Orthodox journalist to expand and unite Istanbul’s reading public were central to the Young Ottoman project of building a new foundation for Ottoman politics.