The Graeco-Roman Ottoman Empire
As with nations, cities ‘forget’ as much as they ‘remember’. In Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk pens an affectionate portrait of the city of his childhood and its amnesias:
Like most Istanbul Turks, I had little interest in Byzantium as a child.
I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts running through the city, with Hagia Sophia and the red brick churches. To me, these were the remains of an age so distant that there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. People like me were, after all, the first generation of a new civilization that had replaced them... As for the Byzantines, they had vanished into thin air soon after the conquest [of 1453], or so I was led to believe. No one told me it was their grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren who ran the shoe stores, the patisseries and haberdashery shops of Beyoglu.11Pamuk then writes frankly about the anti-Greek pogrom of 1955 that terrorised the whole city and prompted the exodus of much of its 250,000-strong Greek community. For years later, his family recalled stories of the violence: the mere fact these had to be ‘family’ stories suggested Istanbul had created another site of amnesia. As for the more distant pasts, the city of his youth was one that was adapting consciously to a new political order and to a national identity, hence the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire by necessity had to be extensively excised from memory. Byzantium, however, was literally forgotten because, from a Turkish perspective, there was very little worth remembering, except for the mere fact that the city had to be seized from others. Much as birds are living reminders of the dinosaurs that once ruled the earth, Pamuk discerned a similarly surprising link between the Istanbul Greeks and the extinct Byzantines who made the city the object of the world’s desire: the imperial city par excellence.12
To identify an ethnic group, however, is to disclose a problem.
Pamuk was born into a world of nation-states that only a generation beforehand had been composed of empires. And like nations, these empires also demanded allegiances from subjects, shaping subject identities and their destinies. The nationalistic priorities of post-Ottoman nations have almost completely obscured that fact. Indeed throughout the Balkans and much of the Middle East the empire is only ‘remembered’ as a curse that had to be lifted.13 In Greek national lore, the Tourkokratia (Turkish occupation) is deemed a term synonymous with ‘slavery’ and has been popularly used to excuse the most lingering manifestations of backwardness in Greek life. All Greek schoolchildren have been taught that the ‘400 years of slavery’ were years of barbarous oppression for which nothing redeemable could be said.14 Until relatively recently Greek academic historians concurred. The Ottoman Empire was deemed irrelevant to historical analysis except when it came to such themes as oppression and crimes against humanity. Otherwise the Ottoman period was not regarded as worthy of serious attention.15 As such blind spots have been identified, historians are now beginning to ask new questions. Were the Greeks of Pamuk’s youth simply the progeny of the Byzantine Greeks, or were they recreated by the Ottoman Empire? And how ‘Greek’ could the Ottoman Greeks be? To what extent could the Istanbul Greeks be called an ethnic group?To such questions one can only offer complicated answers, although clues are often found in names. In Turkish the Greeks were known as ‘Romans’—Rum, Rumlar—which testifies to the fact that Byzantium was the East Roman Empire, which represented the continuation of the empire founded by Augustus Caesar, and whose people identified as ‘Romans’ long after the Ottoman conquests. Even in 1453 the term Roman had significant symbolic capital. When Mehmet the Conqueror claimed the city he also claimed the mantle of imperial Rome. A student of Byzantine and Ottoman history will also know, however, that ‘Roman/Rum’ was more a religious than an ethnic category.
In the eastern Mediterranean the term had long since come to signify Eastern Orthodox Christianity: Muslims used it to refer to a particular denomination not to be confused with Armenian and Catholic Christianities. The conquest of the Byzantine/Roman Empire by the Ottoman Turks was read by both conquerors and conquered as a struggle between two religiously defined communities that also coexisted as two distinct communities (millets'). The bandit-warriors who fought for Greek Independence in 1821 perceived their struggle as one between Christians against Muslim overlords. At the time these Orthodox Christians identified as Romeii (pronounced Rom-e-ii) or Romioi (pronounced Rom-y-ii), and only later did they adopt the term ‘Greeks’ (Hellenes in Greek). Subsequent generations of the liberated Greek nation came to the understanding that they were once Romioi but were then ‘reawakened’ to the fact that they were Hellenes.16Of course, from an analytical perspective the idea of ethnic descent, whereby the coherence of a cultural group can remain unbroken over many centuries, is deeply problematic at best. An imperial capital like Istanbul, which always attracted swarms of
merchants and migrants, changed its demographic composition many times over. Many Greeks living in the city in 1955 may well have had some genetic links with those who survived the conquest of 1453, although it is evidently the case that, over time, Greek immigrants from different parts of the Ottoman Empire had regularly replenished the population.17 It is also clear that non-Greek-speaking immigrants who happened to be Orthodox Christian often became Greek. Upwardly mobile Orthodox Christians were usually educated in Greek, adopted a Greek name, and in many cases joined the city’s Greek ‘Phanariot’ elite associated with important Ottoman state offices.18 These Greeks also identified closely with Classical Greece, but being Greek to them was a matter of education.19 As one Dionysios Photeinos put it in a book published in 1818—1819:
For I call not them Greeks who are born in Greece, but those who have transferred the Grecian learning and Institutions to themselves.
It is justly said by Isocrates in one of his Panegyricks [sic], I’d rather call them Grecians, who are Partakers of our Discipline, than those who only share with us the same common birth and nature.20In each case, however, Greekness appears as an essentialised, unchanging entity, and the Ottomans seem irrelevant. The fact is that Greeks had been gradually brought under Turkish/Ottoman authority since 1071: Anatolia was completely ruled by Turkish rulers by 1340, and mainland Greece by 1461. Group identities could not have been unchanging over such long periods: hence ‘Romans’ c. 1461 bore little resemblance to ‘Romans’ c. 1900, let alone c. 1955.21 Rather, the Ottoman Empire provided a new context within which peoples of many faiths and many more vernaculars experienced new histories and were therefore being remade. Historians habitually distort that complexity by using standard conceptual categories, such as Turks, Greeks, Jews, Arabs and Armenians, when in fact the cultural profile was at the same time more simple and much more complicated: ‘simple’ to the extent that standard confessional categories (Muslim, Eastern/Greek Orthodox Christian, Armenian Christian, Jew) were unquestionably the primary identities within Islamic empires; ‘complicated’ because there were numerous other cultural boundaries that meant a great deal at the local level, none of which corresponded neatly with Western ethnic ascriptions. Thus, ‘Greeks’ (i.e., Romans) referred to many kinds of Greek Orthodox peoples who spoke dialects of Greek, Vlach (Balkan romance language), Albanian, Turkish, Arabic and, until the early nineteenth centuries, Serb- and Bulgarian-speaking peoples. Moreover, as most Ottomanists nowadays accept, cultural communities within the Ottoman world need to be understood as entities that are not as distinctive or bounded as we assume from the vantage point of ‘our national present’.22 Indeed within empires and other multi-ethnic systems, identity boundaries tended to shift depending on circumstance and need. Empires were contact zones that authorities sought to control through cultural classification, but which actually facilitated routine exchange, crossover and hybridity. Moreover, classifications altered with the shifting fortunes of empire. Thus, non-Muslims were barred from state offices in the ‘classical’ period of Ottoman rule (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), when a powerful and confident empire could assert itself more strictly as an ‘Islamic’ polity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as the Ottomans were forced to adjust to a world order dominated by European power and commerce, Greek talents in diplomacy and finance were too valuable to ignore, hence the ruling system was adjusted to bring talented Greeks into the ruling order.23