Ottoman History Podcast - Ottoman Istanbul After Dark

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

with Avner Wishnitzer hosted by Sam Dolbee | What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark (also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as Gece Çökerken). He explains how the night was a time for sleep, rest, devotion, sex, crime, drinking, and even revolt. He also talks about the challenges of past sensory states, the influence of the late Walter Andrews on his work, and, finally, the relationship between his work as a historian and his work as an activist.    « Click for More »

I feel I feel that this this world is is encouraging alienation and I seek something else and I think this is something that I find in in some of these Sufi texts. And I don't like much of what I read there. It's not like I'm, you know. But there's something about being together. First of all, being rather than doing. And then being together and interacting meaningfully.

This coming of souls together. Not in order to achieve anything other than just being together. So, yeah, I find the night conducive to this kind of intimacy or closeness. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. And that person talking about the power of the night was Avner Vishnitzer. My name is Avner Vishnitzer. I'm a historian of the late Ottoman period. I teach at Tel Aviv University. In this episode, we speak about Avner's recent book, As Night Falls, 18th Century Ottoman Cities After Dark, with Cambridge

University Press. The book asks what the night meant for various groups, ranging from workers to Bektashi Sufis to Janissaries, and follows them as they use the night to pray, plot, drink, have sex, and sleep, among other things. plot, drink, have sex, and sleep, among other things. In closing, we talk about the influence of the late Walter Andrews on Avner's scholarship, as well as the relationship between Avner's life as a historian and his life as an activist working to end the Israeli occupation. Stay with us. Stay with us.

I work mostly on things that are not necessarily seen or obvious, but when you scratch the surface a little bit, you find that they are very important or even crucial in shaping social and economic, political and cultural dynamics. My first book was about time and the way it is constructed by society and in turn shapes political and historical processes. I later worked on things like mustaches and boredom and, again, things that are, in my view, very crucial in human lives, like the way we carry ourselves, perform social roles, what we do when we have nothing to do and how does that tie into social hierarchies? What is indolence, and how is boredom dangerous to those hierarchies? My second book, of course, was about nighttime, which once again is something that we may take for granted, but in fact has had a tremendous impact on human societies. And it still does, despite artificial illumination and the hyper-illuminated world we live in. It still matters.

I love that description of being interested in these things that are at once mundane, everyday, but also very profound and very important. Of course, I believe mustaches are very important. You don't need to sell me on that. How do you find these topics? Is it something you are wondering about? You know, what does it mean to have a mustache? Or what does it mean to be bored? Or is it something you find in sources? I don't know if As Night Falls has a story like this of where you ask this deceptively simple question of what does night mean? The intersection of issues that concern me as a citizen of the present, issues that I find important for current, you know, for present societies. And then the things that

I find in the sources as I read and usually look for other things. So for example, the 24-7 society, this huge pressure we are under constantly to produce this do-do-do ideology, this pejorative approaches towards not doing, towards simply being. All of these things got me thinking about time back when I was starting my work on my dissertation. And you can see already the connections to things like boredom and laziness and not doing and nighttime. It's this incursion of this ultra capitalist mentality that constant sense of guilt when you're, producers or consumers. These are things that are of paramount importance in thinking about our world today. This is what sent me on my way in this project, in a world that is really hyper-illuminated.

What does it mean to live in a society that is much darker than what we are used to? Because we take light for granted, almost like the air we breathe. and the ways that ideas of productivity, ideas of constantly doing things have invaded some of the most intimate parts of our lives and the most intimate spaces of our lives. I want to get into the book more specifically in a second, but I was wondering if we could dwell in the present or the more recent past. Do you have memories or experiences of the nighttime that you've ever felt like offered an alternative to this constantly illuminated present? Is there some sort of personal experience that you feel like you've had that's closer to what you're describing about 18th century Istanbul in this book? Growing up in a kibbutz, I worked nights in the field. When I was 17 or 18, I spent quite a few nights out

in the field. So a lot of the spraying, all those terrible chemicals we are filling our fruit with, I was the one who had to spray them on the trees. And because it's cooler during the night and there's no wind where you know, I grew up, you would do it at nighttime. And then unfortunately, as a soldier, I spent many nights out. Yeah. That's that's another experience of Yeah, much, much darker environments that kind of sunk in, I guess. I really tried to recreate experiences. So literally made my little experiments with going about in darkness. with going about in darkness. So my kids are really irritated because I still turn off many of the lights today.

But when I really try to keep my home dark and see what it feels like to navigate, but by now so much light comes in through the windows that it's not nearly as dark as people had to work with back in the 18th century. But at least, you know, it made me more aware of the way the senses work. So I couldn't really rely on those old memories. Now I try to experiment a little bit and use a bit of imagination to pose questions, because I believe imagination is crucial when it a fuller picture. And then, you know, starting from there with questions about, you know, what's going on, you know, so this woman in Jerusalem says she

reached out for the lantern, what kind of lantern was it? Who had lanterns? Who could afford it? Was it olive oil or or sesame oil? You know, things like that. The book is about nighttime from a variety of perspectives. And we'll get into some of those in both Istanbul and also Jerusalem in the long 18th century. So of course, there's variation between these places and over time. But maybe to start, could you give us just a general sense of what nighttime looked like in general in these places? And you started off by giving us a sense of how much that is different from the present. But what are those aspects in the past that are distinctive? So first of all, it seems obvious that it was dark. I'm saying it seems obvious, but when you start to think about the consequences of this deep darkness,

darkness that we don't really know anymore in urban environments in so-called developed countries, You realize that it really touched on almost every aspect of life, from the time people go to sleep, what they are able to do when they are at home after darkness has descended, who can be out in the street, what would it take to navigate the street? What are the arrangements of public orders and how to circumvent them if you're interested in that? So this darkness is, you know, we can just give it this title and stop at that. But I think this is just the beginning of the investigation. And I try to understand what it means to live under these conditions. So that's one thing, very dark, very quiet. And again, this is something that it may seem, it may be taken for granted, but when you think about it a little bit longer, you realize that this quiet, first of all, is something that we don't really know in urban societies,

because we have cars and, you know, refrigerators and, you know, all kinds of what we call white noise. All of these things do not exist before we have fossil energy driven machines that can work around the clock. So people and animals, they doze off and it's very quiet, which makes specific sounds become very, very prominent. They kind of dominate the night soundscape. So, you know, for example, the muezzin calling for the night prayer, So, you know, for example, the muezzin calling for the night prayer, or if dogs suddenly start barking as they would, then you can hear it for long distances. Or when somebody starts shouting fire, you know, yang gun war, then it spreads easily in this very quiet environment. And also, if you want to sneak out, you need to be aware that you might be heard, not just seen. Darkness and silence, but both, as I try to show, are not complete. It's a matter of, for example, your access to light, which is differential.

So some people can allow themselves more light and therefore to stay awake later and do all kinds of things from reading to partying. And noise can also be differential, the extent to which you can isolate yourself. So if you live in one of those bachelor inns, you share a room. Your sleep cannot be as quiet as if you had your own house or your own room. So all of these things are relative and have to do with social hierarchies. Those hierarchies don't go to sleep ever. I just wanted to interject here to emphasize this point that you make a number of times in the book and you just made now that we think darkness and light are about sight. But as you mentioned, it's also about sound. It's also about these other senses that become important in the absence of light? It's not just that the world around us changes when night falls. It's that our sensorium is shifting in order to adjust.

And so hearing becomes much more important. But hearing is different from seeing. more important, but hearing is different from seeing. And therefore, for example, I can hear a sound that I cannot verify its origin, and that might frighten me, okay, because we rely on sight so much. So these kind of things are significant for all kinds of nighttime fears, for example, and then all kinds of recipes, quote unquote, to deal with those fears from lullabies to kinds of prayers and, you know, nighttime prayers and so on. Just one more thing, I mentioned darkness and silence, we should also throw in sleep, because most people go to sleep at night. And this too has significance for the way the city works.

So, for example, if you have systems of public order that are based on collective gaze, for example, the collective gaze of the neighborhood or the guild, and now all eyes are shut or most eyes are shut, and now all eyes are shut or most eyes are shut, then this may open opportunities for some and introduce dangers to others. So these things are also something that we should calculate in the fact that there are few people, but there are still people around. Not everybody goes to sleep. And this too has, you know, still today is related to

a social class. So who has to work at night? So yeah, just wanted to add that one. Yeah. So maybe picking up on that point about social hierarchy, never going to sleep. Could you talk about a few examples of how we can see maybe class and gender shaping what people's experience of the nighttime are? You know, if we take sleep as an example, it is true still today. And it was certainly true in the Ottoman world. So everything from having a place to sleep, and not everybody had it, all the way to sleep hardware. So do you have a mattress? What kind of mattress? Do you have a net against mosquitoes that can really, really be unsettling and damage your sleep? Can you sleep on the roof? Men could, women less so,

the roof, men could, women less so, or at least they were. So in the heat of summer in the Levant, when mostly men would go up to the roof, women not always could do it because of concerns about family honour. Things like work that I mentioned, some people had to work very often migrants to the city. So for example, we know about the workers in Hamams, Nina Ergin wrote about it. They are from the, you know, from the Ubin underclass, many of them Albanians, and some of them are forced to work as sex workers at night. Fishermen, nightguards, many of them newcomers to the city, not the fishermen, but nightguards, people that work in alcohol selling sectors, all kinds of bars and mehanes that mostly operate at night. And it's a huge, huge industry in Istanbul, with probably 1000s of people working and working at night is uncomfortable, and very often morally questionable. So the people who do it are often those who have no other choice so these are just a few examples

but and and also as i mentioned access to light so it's not just the amount of light it's also the quality of of light because today we think about light as something that is almost abstract. You know, it's abstracted from its sources and it flows seamlessly into our lamps. But back in the day, it was either candles or kinds of oil lanterns. And then the material itself mattered so for example bee wax candles were much brighter than candles made from animal fat and they also gutted less and they smelled much better so how much light you could afford and what was the quality of that light determined what you could do after darkness.

I was expecting the taverns. I think I was a little more surprised by the hammams. And one of my favorite details from the book was this fact that at some points, moving around without a lantern in Istanbul at night resulted in people being arrested because it was suspicious. And then they would be locked up and put to work in a bathhouse. So this is something that Nuri Ergin

brings in his work on the Belediye. But there are also earlier sources that refer to this practice. And it's really a practice of imposing visibility, as I see it, because this is what you should be doing. If you roam the streets at night, you should be marking yourself. Those lanterns were, especially the cheaper ones, were not very good for seeing, but they were crucial for being seen. And if the patrol arrested you without one, the assumption was that you were trying to hide yourself, and therefore that you are up to no good. And so locking you up in the hammam for night in the furnace, so feeding the fire, would get you extremely dirty.

And then by the time you would leave in the morning, you would be all marked up with soot. And anybody who sees you would immediately know that you've been out at night without a lantern. ability of people to sneak through those networks of surveillance that are based on the collective sensorium of, for example, neighborhood communities. So that is just one of these mechanisms. So that's a really kind of direct example of how the nighttime shapes what people do and what people are made to do.

What I also like about the book is how you're really attentive to the cultural meanings of night. And I was really interested in how you treated the intersection of nighttime, light, and various religious groups. So Bektashis, Alevis, Sabbateans, and how people libel them. Could you talk about how night functions in terms of these groups? That's a big question because we can discuss it from the perspective of the out-group of the majority society and the way the association of these non-Orthodox groups with darkness allows to denigrate them and marginalize them. But we can also discuss the way these groups actually use the night and light at night, artificial light at night, for their own practices and even, I would say, sense of self,

collective self. So I'll start with the first perspective. For example, with the Bektashis, we have this notion of taking out the candle, which is a kind of label that was thrown around to undermine or marginalize the non-Orthodox Jews, Jews, I'm saying, non-Orthodox groups, Sufi groups like Riktashis and others, Kizilbash.

Basically, it was said, and we find it in many different sources, that these people, you know, these people, they assemble at night, and they do their thing, their religious practices, and then at some point, they snuff out the candles, and basically they have an orgy. And these descriptions of what happens out there at night when nobody can see, both used hegemonic actors to, as I said, to marginalize them. But these descriptions are also, there is something voyeuristic about them. They allow people to fantasize and they serve this role of expressing what is usually repressed. So they kind of function in this dual role.

kind of function in this dual role. But for these groups, indeed, the night served as a very important interval, not in any means for orgies, but for all kinds of religious or spiritual practices. And the basic idea was that keeping awake at night, the kind of reversal that allows you to get closer with God, basically. When everybody else, all those spiritually common people, unaware, they're sleeping their sleep of unawareness, sleep of neglect, while we, the enlightened ones, you know, we spend the night praying. And, you know, there's a lot of poetry written about these nighttime vigils. Usually, they present this in the terms of the medleys of Boom Companions assemblies. And on the other hand, those parties are described in poetry in the same terms as those vigils, thus allowing people to

imagine these parties in spiritual terms. So it's not just that these groups are associated with the night by their rivals. It's meant something for them, although something very different. It was the time for spiritual pursuits away from the open eye of majority society. You write that one way we could describe the relationship of authorities to the nighttime is productive neglect. Can you talk about what you mean by that? We might think that because of darkness, because the collective sensorium is asleep and, you know, data public order relied so much on that collective sensorium, then the authorities or communities would be completely oblivious or unaware of what's happening in the dark streets.

And as I tried to show, there's actually quite a lot happening with almost 600 mehannes and other kinds of bars towards the end of the 18th century. And most of them are open mostly at night. But it turns out that people knew and so the night was an interval of deniability. It's not that people didn't see, it's that both communities and the authorities chose to turn a blind eye because it's easier not to see or to ignore infringes on public order and morality when they happen at night. And so under the cover of darkness, we have this huge scene of drinking, prostitution, gambling. And this, of course, serves thousands of people, you know,

in terms of livelihood. You just do the math. We have 600 drinking institutions and actually much, much more than that because these are just the listed ones. And then people working in these institutions, serving people, sex, working in the sex industry. This is livelihood. For the authorities, this is a source of revenue. And it's a big source of revenue. And we see in the correspondence from the late 18th and early 19th century that they are reluctant to give that up. So every once in a while there would be a more pious sultan or a sultan that is really keen on

enforcing stricter order at night and try to shut down all those establishments. But really, very often they would open up again. And people are saying, you know, officials say openly, we need this money. And the tax revenues from those mehanes, from those bars, is just one thing. those mehanes, from those bars, is just one thing. I mean, you can also think about fines imposed on people that do all kinds of things that they shouldn't be doing at night. And you can also think about bribery. So money that is paid by these very establishments to keep on going when they're not supposed to, to sell alcohol when they're not supposed to. And there was actually a name for this bribe called Bizi Golme,

meaning don't see us money, literally. Act as if you don't see us. So this is what I mean by productive neglect. I mean that it allowed a whole economy to go on as if it didn't. And different actors benefited. It's not that everybody benefited. For example, neighborhood communities might not want a mei hane in the neighborhood. You know, kind of a nimby, 18th century nimby, you know, and then they go to court

and ask for a brothel or a bar to be shut down. But the numbers are just huge. So it's very significant for the, you know, the economy of the city, for the leisure landscape of the city. So this is a way that we can see how this book is doing so many things, social, cultural, but this is also about political history. This is also about political economy. And these tax revenues that are generated by nighttime activities that maybe the authorities look the other way on, but appreciate getting

the tax revenue. This is an example of this kind of mutual reliance between authorities and these nighttime activities. But what you go into toward the end of the book in part two are more explicit ways that night time provides a structure for revolt so first with the patrona halil uprising in 1730 and then subsequently with salim the third mahmoud the second crackdown and then ultimately disbanding of the janissaries could you talk about how night time functions in in these contexts contexts as a threat to authority? As I said earlier, the elites had much easier access to light at night, and they demonstrated power, especially sultans from the early 18th century onwards, sought, like their European peers, to associate themselves with the ability to turn night into day.

It was, of course, more an aspiration than a reality, but we see a lot of these light demonstrations, fireworks, you know, parties illuminated by thousands of candles and lanterns and so on and so forth. Janissaries, on their hand, were of much humbler social background and had limited access to illumination. And they were probably much more comfortable in the dark. And we see that whenever there is a Janissary rebellion building, it happens at night.

And then if it matures, it would be at morning that they would take to the Et medani, to the square, and then you would have open rebellion. So this was part of their protocols of rebellion. They used the night for all kinds of subversive activities from, for example, inscribing Janissary symbols on houses and shops to intimidate or to demonstrate their power. Arson, putting out leaflets, all of these things, you know, they use the night as cover. and, as I said, in organizing open rebellions. The court on its side, especially towards the end of the 18th century and early 19th century,

when the tension is building against the background of the new model army of Sultan Selim III and then Mahmud II, we see this kind of subversive activity intensifying. And the court on its side tries to, at several occasions, to shut down nightlife in which the the janissaries were very very prominent um so this is this is this goes on on the streets but and in terms of of discourse we see that the court is trying to associate the sultan with uh light is a light dispenser. And this also manifests itself materially. So this practice of lighting up the minarets and using all kinds of fire inscriptions, not just doing Ramadan, of course,

Mahia is the best known example, but also doing celebrations that are related to the dynasty. So, you know, birthdays of princes and so on. So, this attempt to project light, both physically and figuratively, through text is something that we see throughout the 18th century. And by the time we get to the last Janissary Rebellion, we see that the Janissaries are identified in texts produced in court with darkness. The Janissaries, the Bektashis, all of these non-Orthodox groups Raktashis, you know, all of these non-Orthodox groups that were tolerated up until the end of the 18th century, they are now forces of darkness, quite literally so. I mean, they identify,

they are associated with darkness, and therefore you get a struggle that is depicted by the court in terms of light against darkness. And when you present things in this way, there's only one thing that can happen. And that is, you know, the eradication of the forces of darkness. And indeed, once the Janissaries were gone, we begin to see slowly the lighting of streets. And in the 50s and 60s, this intensifies, we see different organization of the night policing and other things that show that there's a different way of organizing public order at night. It has to be colonized in a way by the authority of the sultan. Something we've touched on a few times is poetry. It's a really important source that you're relying on for this book. This book is also dedicated to Walter Andrews, of course, the revered scholar of Ottoman poetry.

Could you talk about his influence on you and your approach in this book? Oh, yeah, Walter was, I mean, he had tremendous effect on my scholarship. I knew nothing about poetry. I know very little now, but before I met with him and studied with him, I really knew nothing about it. And he opened this window to this textual ocean and gave me at least rudimentary tools to navigate it. And it was with him and with Selim Kourou, I'm also grateful to Selim, that I began reading poetry in general and poetry general and poetry about nighttime in particular, and about, you know, metaphors of light. But beyond that, Walter insisted that poetry is not necessarily good to know what actually happened, but it's great to understand how people perceived what was happening. So, of course, like any other source, we need to know the limitations of poetry and the tropes and the way particular traditions shape various genres but when I think when when when doing the work properly it really opens venue

to to people's emotions or emotional scripts to use another term that Walter used a lot and and aspirations and many other things that are very hard to reach using other sources. Could you imagine what this book would be without those sources of poetry? I mean, there are court records in here, there are Ottoman archival sources, there are lots of chronicles. But how do you see poetry changing it? In a sense, it's, and I'm using, I think I'm using Ottoman terms here.

It's the soul of the book in many ways. It is where you can connect to, for example, the aesthetics of nighttime as perceived by contemporaries. And as I tried to show, much of it was not limited to the elite. I think, yeah, it allows us to at least partly reconstruct the way people experienced and thought and felt during nighttime and sometimes about nighttime. So obviously these traditions in turn shape those, you know, we don't treat these sources naively as if they are, you know, just transparent expressions of ingrained emotions. No, but as we know, literary traditions, certainly poetry in the Ottoman world,

script emotions and modes of thought. And this is why they are so important. They're not just windows opening into the past. They are active agents in the past. So Avner, in addition to being a scholar, you're also an activist. You're a founder of Combatants for Peace. There was a famous photo of you from September of 2021, as you were detained and blindfolded by Israeli soldiers for delivering water to Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills. Do you see a connection between your work as a historian and your work as an activist?

I usually try to maintain boundaries between my work as a scholar and my activism, which is an important part of my life for 20, more than 20 years now, in Combatants for Peace working against Israeli apartheid in the West Bank. And because as an activist, I am deeply and emotionally involved in what's going on. And as a historian, I want to be an observer that two, I don't know, aspects of my life. Now, obviously, these boundaries are artificial, and they are superficial, because just like with borders, you know, underlying them is a terrain and a subterrain that is really me. But still, I think it's helpful also in my teaching

to be able to keep that distance so as to be able to look with open eyes and open ears at people that maybe in my activism I would be in conflict with and I want to understand them. So that's about the boundaries. But from this, you can hear the the mutual relations because i you know on another level i try to bring my abilities to listen closely to all kinds of people and to imagine myself in the shoes of others to the extent that I am able to do it, to my activism. The other way around, I mean, the fact that

I was a soldier and then refused to serve in the occupied territories and became an activist, working closely with Palestinians who had themselves been involved in the armed struggle against Israel. This is what Combatants for Peace is about. So, you know, looking at realities from different perspectives, looking at realities from different perspectives. What I was, what I am now, what my Palestinian partners are now, what they used to be. This is a very challenging experience, but it gets you very accustomed to thinking from different perspectives on anything that happens and there's there's much going on so yeah this is a little bit about the boundaries but also how

the two two aspects related i can probably say a lot more about it, but let's keep it at that. Thanks so much, Avner. Thank you. You've been wonderful. Seriously. That's Avner Vishnitzer. His book, As Night Falls, is available now from Cambridge University Press. Of course, as always, you can find more information about the book, as well as a bibliography of relevant works, on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's it for this episode. Until next time, take care.