Born into one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of Ottoman Crete, Ahmet Cevat Emre (1876-1961) led an eventful life. After his early education in autonomous Crete, he developed a trajectory similar to that of Abdülhamid’s opponents during the 1890s. Like many Young Turks, he was exiled to Libya from where he made his escape to Europe. Following the Constitutional Revolution in 1908, he joined other like-minded reformists in Istanbul, where he penned articles in the press and taught Turkish philology and literature in the Darülfünun. In his post-imperial life that overlapped with the first four decades of the Turkish republic, Ahmet Cevat continued his career as a linguist, educator, editor, and parliamentarian. Despite bearing witness to and taking part in many transformative events both in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish republic, his life has attracted little scholarly interest. The foremost goal of this paper is to juxtapose Ahmet Cevat’s intellectual and political career with his Cretan origins. He began his post-revolutionary career in Istanbul as the impact of the conflict on his native island permeated the Ottoman public life through daily reports in the press and empire-wide rallies and economic boycott of Greece. Cretans who had, only a decade ago, left the island as refugees acted as the engine of this movement, some as porters refusing to unload the cargo of Greek ships and some others as vigilantes preventing customers from entering Greek shops. Though ardent opponents of Greece, and occasionally even Greek-Ottomans, most Muslim Cretans—including Ahmet Cevat—were native speakers of Greek. He spoke no Turkish until the age of seven yet went on to become one of the most authoritative figures on Turkish language and it is this tension that provides the setting for my paper. By drawing on Ahmet Cevat’s writings on language from empire to republic and his memoir published in 1960, this paper will explore the interplay between the native and adopted language. It will do this in the context of Cretans’ origin narratives at a time of growing anti-Greek feeling in the Ottoman Empire and later in the Turkish nation-state.

Dr. Riza Nur, a native of Sinop and a graduate of Imperial School of Medicine, had a controversial political career within the historical climate of (late Ottoman) empire to (Turkish) nation-state. His political life intersected with milestones of late Ottoman/Turkish history: parliament member in 1908 during the restoration of Ottoman constitution, political exile during World War I until the Armistice in 1920, and a fiery ideologue of Turkish nationalism who served as a member of the Turkish Delegation during the Lausanne Treaty negotiations in 1923. In current historiography, both conventional and revisionist, he has been remembered as the architect of racial reconfiguration of postwar population politics in modern Turkey, fundamentally shaping the legal framework of the category of “minority” and historical narrative on the origins of Turkishness. This paper scrutinizes the intersection of Riza Nur’s medical career predating the above described political life by analyzing his pre-1908 medical writings alongside his memoire, entitled Hayatim and Hatiratim, written in 1927 and published in 1965. He was a prolific author of many medical texts about the prevention of venereal diseases and male circumcision, some of which were published also for general audience. This paper has two goals: it seeks to reframe a(nother) biographical narrative of Riza Nur by analyzing how his medical expertise on public hygiene, sexual health, and modern/reformist surgical intervention on male genitalia contributed to eugenics and sexology debates in the late Ottoman/early Republican context. While doing so, this paper suggests a reading of Riza Nur’s medical writings in relation to his memoire to trace the affective and political implications of his medical endeavors as a late nineteenth century Ottoman physician on a Turkish [Republican] self and his (desired) audience. The second goal of this paper is to read Riza Nur’s medical writings alongside his autobiographical narrative regarding his own sexuality and sexual experiences as reflected in his memoire, in which Riza Nur gestures to the notion of impossibility of life in the absence of “phallus.” Linking the early medical expertise with his later political career, the paper traces Riza Nur’s narrative of selfhood, [sexual] desire, and the implication of life within the condition of phallocracy as precursors to the biopolitical as well as sexual frameworks of Turkish nationalist discourse.

The Ottoman Empire left unforgettable and unrecoverable footprints visible in many ways after the Great War. Around two million citizens mobilized into the armed forces were killed in the trenches, wounded, captivated or died from diseases. Alongside this loss of human capital, Ottoman imperial policies led to irreversible disintegration in already disentangling political, economic, and social ties of the empire. Particularly Armenians and Arabs fell victim of these deadly ‘precautions’ as they were deemed a fifth column by the Ottoman state. Arab notables were executed in the city squares of Damascus and Beirut, while Armenian intellectuals were murdered on their way to deportation. As millions of Armenians were forcibly resettled in Syria, five thousand Arab families were relocated to the Central Anatolia. Seferberlik connotes, for Armenians, massacres of men in Ottoman military uniform; Similarly, for the Arabs, the term has become a synonym for the terrible famine and locust invasion that overran Greater Syria. Not only did many people witness but also experienced the entangled tragedies of these peoples. One of them was a former Ottoman official and Bedouin notable, Faiz el-Ghusein. His life shattered by the war and Cemal Pasha’s terror regime compelled him to encounter with the annihilation of Armenians. He penned down what he had seen and heard even before the war ended and the British propaganda bureau availed itself to publish the text casting light on the atrocities it belligerent state committed. This paper focuses on recontextualizing Faiz’s witness account and its writing process and probes into what it tells about the genocide, political conditions at the time, and its author.

'Go and tell the Armenians there that until the end of the war they are free to live as Muslims' Cemal Pasha (1872–1922) held the most significant position following Talat and Enver in the history of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government. Following the re-declaration of constitutionalism on 23 July 1908, Cemal was elected member of the head office (Merkezi Umum-i), thus being thrust into the forefront of the CUP. He joined the Action Army, which the CUP mobilized against the counter-revolutionary uprising that broke out in April 1909. He served in Istanbul as district governor of Üsküdar in 1909 and was then dispatched to Adana as governor. In 1911 he was appointed to the governorship of Baghdad. He took part in the CUP putsch in January 1913 against the Freedom and Accord Party government. The new grand vizier Mahmud ?evket Pasha assigned Cemal the military governorship of Istanbul. He was promoted to general, in December 1913 and in February 1914 he became the minister of navy. Soon after the Ottoman Empire entered the war in November 1914, Cemal Pasha also accepted the posts of military commander and governor in Greater Syria. Known for his rigid policies towards Arab nationalists and Zionists during his posting in Greater Syria, Cemal Pasha and his role in the Armenian genocide has always remained an issue of contention. There are important accounts of Cemal’s activity, particularly during WWI, which have found him to have had no active role in the deportation and extermination of Armenians – here differing from the other two pillars of the CUP, Enver and Talat. On the contrary, such accounts argue that he extended a helping hand to Armenians in so far as his authority and power would allow, and that he even faced off against members of the central government in Istanbul and the CUP head office to do so. This paper will question that argument, examining the politics of Cemal Pasha during the war based on the memoirs of survived Armenians.