Ottoman History Podcast - The Tanzimat in Ottoman Cappadocia

Episode Date: December 3, 2017

Episode 339 with Aylin de Tapia hosted by Susanna Ferguson, Seçil Yilmaz and Ella Fratantuono Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, we consider the story of the Tanzimat reforms from the perspective of rural Cappadocia, a region in central Anatolia now famous as a tourist destination. In the nineteenth century, Cappadocia was home not only to the Muslim subjects who made up the majority of Anatolia's population but to a large population of Orthodox Christians as well. How did these communities experience the Tanzimat period and how did their relationships to each other and to the state change between 1839 and the demise of the Ottoman Empire? « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. We're recording today from Okmedana, Istanbul, with co-hosts Satchel Yilmaz and Ella Fradantuano. In previous episodes of this podcast, we've talked with guests about how the Tanzimat reforms of the 19th century reshaped the dynamics of high politics, Ottoman administration, and everyday life for different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups across the empire. linguistic groups across the empire. But the transformations of the Tanzimat era varied widely, not only between Istanbul and the Ottoman provinces, but also between rural and urban communities. Today, we move to central Anatolia, to the region of Cappadocia, to think about how rural populations experienced the Tanzimat and the many changes it wrought. We'll explore Cappadocia and trace the shifting relationships between the Orthodox Christians and Muslims who lived there from the beginning of the Reform era in 1839 to the demise of the

Ottoman Empire. So joining us on the podcast today to discuss her fascinating research on this subject is Aylan de Tapia. Welcome to the podcast, Aylan. Hello. Aylan received her doctoral degree in 2016 from Boazici University in Istanbul and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her dissertation is entitled Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Cappadocia, Intercommunal Relations in an Ottoman Rural Context, 1839-1923. Aylin is currently an archivist at the Boğaziçi University Archive and Documentation Center and an associate researcher at the Institut Français des Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul. Aylin will also be continuing her postdoctoral studies at the University of Aix-Marseille beginning this October. So congratulations, Aylin. Thank you very much.

So for many of our listeners, Cappadocia may be better known as a tourist destination than a subject of research. But Aileen, in your study, you reveal the rich social history of the region that brings together different linguistic, ethnic and religious groups who all live together in Cappadocian villages for a time. So I want to start by asking you to describe for us what did Cappadocia mean or refer to in the 19th century? And who were the different communities who lived there? Actually, one of the first questions that I began to explore at the beginning of my research was the concept of Cappadocia itself, because it was not something that you can, even today, define very easily. So I needed to define the borders of this geographical region to be able to have the limits of which villages I will study and which one will remain outside my research. And actually,

it was not so easy affair. So today, for instance, we all know Cappadocia, as you said, as a touristic place, as the place of the fairy chimneys, of the underground cities, of Byzantine churches, Repustrian churches especially. But as I said, even today, this area has no clear definition, no administrative definition, for instance. We have the border of the site defined by the UNESCO around Gureme, but actually Cappadocia is far larger than this small geographical area. And in the 19th century, we have the same problem because there was no Cappadocia region in the

Ottoman Empire. Before 1864, this area was part of the Eyalet of Karaman, but after the reform of the provinces in 1864, it was cut between the Vilayet of Kayseri on the eastern side and the Vilayet of Konya on the western side. And when you look at the administrative border established by the Orthodox Church itself, you have the same problem because you had several dioceses which organized the region. Actually, two main dioceses.

One for the western side, which was a diocese of Iconium, Conia, and the other one, diocese of Caesarea. And the borders of the Vilayet and of the dioceses are not the same. For instance, at the center of this region, you have the Nefshir, Urgup, and the village surrounding them. They belong to one vilayet, but to the other dioceses. So the definition of these places, which ones I want to study, which ones I want not to study, is not possible from the administrative borders.

And actually, for the orthodox side, another difficulty is that there was a third diocese which entered in this area in the late 80s, early 19th century, which was the diocese of Haldia, so the region of today, Gumusane, where actually the rooms of the region was working in mines. And after the clothing of the mines of the region of Gimushane, they went to other region of Anatolia to find other places to work. So they settled in a tourist area and their diocese continued to control them. So you mentioned the community of the room, right,

which are the Orthodox Christians who lived in the area. What were some of the other communities that were living in the villages, you know, in and around Cappadocia? Yes, the Orthodox Christians of the room were about, it depends on the period, for the beginning and the end of the period, we have not the same population, of course. But we can say about 20% of the total population of the region that I define as Cappadocia,

which is that I can border as the region between Aksaray, Nide, Kayseri and Nefsehir. If you want to give a geographical definition, it's the south of the Kvillermak river, the west of the RGS mount, the north of the Taurus chain and the east of the salt lake or Tuzgul. So for this region, it's not very easy to give clear numbers, clear statistics because we have different

administration entities so it's not the totality of the diocese of iconium for instance or not the totality of the vilayet of konya so it's very difficult to have the precise number as for many places in the ottoman empire the demography is always a problem. But approximately, the Greeks or the Rums were about 20%. The majority of the population, of the local population, was actually Muslim in the towns as well as in the villages. And you have also quite important, but limited to the Kayseri region, you have the Armenian communities. And I used to wrote and to say

that Cappadocia is actually the end of the Rum or the Greek Anatolia because after Cappadocia in the eastern part, you have no more so many villages, Rum villages. And it's the beginning of the Armenian Anatolia because in Kayseri begins the very big concentration of Armenian communities. So these are kind of fascinating terms

that we might not be familiar with today, the idea of a room Anatolia or an Armenian Anatolia. Can you tell us a little bit about how those communities define themselves? Obviously, you know, religion was a question. Was there also a question of language? Were there kind of nascent ethnic identities? What made somebody a room, for example? The religion, of course, because in the Ottoman Empire, everyone is defined by his religion. But it's not the only way to define the room of Anatolia because one of the most important specificities of this specific region

is that many of the majority of these room communities were Turkish-speaking. It's the people that we call the so-called Karaman people. But it's not the whole population, the whole room population of the region. You have some villages with Greek dialects, so it's not the Greek spoken in Istanbul or in Izmir. They are actually different dialects according to each village. So you have sometimes three or four villages

speaking the same dialects, and 10 or 20 kilometers further, another dialect, Greek dialect. So the language is also a marker of identity in this region. And actually what I wanted to explore at the beginning of my PhD was, is religion the only way to make community? Is religion the only way to make community? And if we add language, do these two identifiers enough to understand the way to make community?

And that's why I tried to add a third factor, which was more the geographical one, the local one. So being the member of this village, of this other village, can be maybe more important than being a Greek or being a Muslim. And especially in Cappadocia, you have many, many villages with mixed population. So, as you say, Tanzimat had a very important impact on the ways in which state functioned and state institutions functioned and basically shaping the ways in which different communities interacted with each other. in the history of this particular region,

it's not the only historical event happening, especially considering the Orthodox Christian communities and Greek population living in the Ottoman Empire, and a young and a very energetic Greek nation is also in the making in the mainland Greece. How did this particular political event, combined with the Tanzimans reforms affected what you're actually studying, like local life and interaction between communities in Cappadocia at this particular moment? In fact, the fact that Cappadocia was quite isolated from the border,

the Aegean border from Greece, from the centers of the Ottoman Empire, has a particular impact on the way these historical events impacted the region. For instance, maybe it's not directly linked to the Tanzimat, but in a way yes. The economical issue is a very central question to understand how the local population

were connected to the outside world if you want. You are in a region which is far away from the sea. Later when the railway will begin to be built in the Ottoman Empire, it will stop before the entrance of Cappadocia and it will go outside Cappadocia. So all the region remained quite isolated from economical exchanges, from the sea, and also from the political events which occurred outside the region. So I think that people were aware of what happened outside, but the consequences on their way of life did not always happen at the time when the event occurred.

So you have a kind of deleted consequences on this population. So for instance, in the war of independence of Greece had a major impact on the people living in the region of Izmir, of the Aegean islands on the Aegean coast, but not so many, had not so many consequences on the Cappadocian ones. For the Tanzimat, for instance, I dealt with economical issues, but educational issues is also an important example. Thanks to the Tanzimat, but also because Greece had become an independent state, the education issue became a very important question in Cappadocia. Because from Greece and from Istanbul, the movement that we will call the Hellenization movement,

the Megalithia in Greece, which began to be the base of the Greek nationalism, all this issue will take place in the education. In some villages, for instance in Sinassos, the first school was created in 1870, which is a very early period. For the other places, it's later in the century, but it's thanks to the Tanzimat because of the education reform,

but it's also thanks to the evolution of the Greek nationalism on the other side. So in a question like education, you can see the consequences of these two historical events in Cappadocia, but it occurred, as I said, decades after, actually. So one of the things that's fascinating about this research is that by looking at these villages, as you said, that are kind of far from the Aegean coast,

this is a very different geography than we're used to working with thinking about questions about the room community for example is that you really ask us to rethink what it is that makes a community whether it's language whether it's religion whether it's some combination of those or other factors and also how we should think about space outside of the kind of nationalist narratives that would have us see for example Greece and Turkey as separate so I'm hoping you could just tell us a little bit about those interventions yes actually I wanted to think the space together with the community because in the Ottoman historiography we always deal with the religious communities, so the Miletirum, the Armenians, the Muslims, the Jewish communities, but I wanted to look at other kinds of making community.

And the case of Cappadocia was particularly interesting because we had the religious mixture on Mixity, but also the linguistical one in a quite clear area, so quite concentrated area. That's why I wanted to begin this research

with a mapping of all these criteria and all these communities. The first thing that I searched in the archives, in the Karaman-Indika publication, was which community lived in which place and to make some hypotheses about the potential connections that you have between the language and the way to be a community or the religion and the way to be a community or the space and the way to be a community.

There were three main criteria in my research, the region, the language, and the geography, if you want. In the conceptual or theoretical background, it was a bit difficult at the beginning to find how I will be able to deal with these three kinds of communities. Sometimes it's mixed up, the same community has the same religion and the same language, sometimes it has not. So it was quite difficult, also because many words such as the word community

has, especially in Ottoman historiography, a specific meaning. So when you say community, you think first religious community generally in the Ottoman context. So I found another word. I'm not sure that it's the best one. But to deal with the geographical one, I decided to use the term collectivity.

To collect, to have everything together. The linguistic aspect actually, after some research, went to the background because I thought that you have Karaman, so Turkish-speaking communities, but actually with the education process that we mentioned earlier,

many of them, even if they did not change their native tongue, were able to speak Greek or at least to understand Greek. In communities where I live together, Greek-speaking communities, Christian communities and Muslims, generally the Muslims were able to understand Greek because they lived together with the Greeks from their birth.

So it was quite normal to be able to understand and to speak at least a bit the language of the other. So this bilinguality of this rural people, because we always speak about the intellectuals who are able to speak French, German, Turkish, Greek, Armenian, et cetera, but actually even in this kind of rural areas where so many different communities,

so many different linguistical groups are living together, people also, even if they are not able to read any one of these languages, they are able to speak sometimes one, two, three of them. So the linguistic aspect that I consider as the main criteria at the beginning of my research became a secondary criteria when I compared it with the geographical one. So you found that people inhabiting the same space, who lived in the same town and who knew each other from birth

actually constituted a collectivity despite the fact that perhaps they were stronger or less strong in particular languages, that they did have a kind of language of coexistence. Yes, you have a... When I mapped these communities, I saw that there were some combination of criteria.

So, for instance, when you look at the map, you see that the mixed villages, so the villages with Greek, with room and with Muslim population, are mostly villages of Turkey-speaking Greek room communities. And the villages where people are speaking the Greek dialect, and the villages where people are speaking the Greek dialect more often are homogeneous villages, even if you have some exceptions of course. So, this linguistic and geographical criteria are superimposed or combined together. Actually, this collectivity, as I said, so the geographical community, can be stronger in some places and weaker in other ones.

For instance, in the area of Güzel-Yurt, at that time Galverie, and the other mixed villages in the area, these collectivities were quite strong. the area. These collectivities were quite strong. For instance, you can see very frequent cases of shared worship places. Is that just by chance? I mean, do you have, did you sort of see any patterns or trends that you could pull out? I don't think that it's only chance. And I think that it's a combination of many many different reasons which can be even the quality of the soil

for instance because you are in a region of quite dry region in places where the life is easier it's also easier to coexist with the others which can be Muslims or Greeks so it's not because your neighbors is muslim that you will not have exchange with it and and it is not because it is a room

that you have you will have exchange with with him so it's difficult to to make aogue or a list of the criteria of the factors of this coexistence actually but it's in some place it will be uh the the quality of the of the soil in other places maybe something else so it's it's i think that you have no one one possible response so i didn't um so this concept of tolerance versus coexistence you have a very like nice section in your introduction where you discuss how an ottoman historian who is working on different communities and living together should deal with and you're also very massively showing us that there's actually limits of imagining the Ottoman societies in terms of like coexistence it's not an easy terminology it's not an easy conceptualization especially

in the context of 19th century so I would like to just bring in the way that you discussed this in in your own context in the context of Cappadocia this is still a very important historiographical question for many Ottoman historians so what's your formula when I worked on all this theoretical background they had they were there were so many words to to speak about coexistence you have the word tolerance you have the coexistence. You have the word tolerance, you have the word coexistence, but you have also words like cohabitation, co-presence, for instance.

So at the end, you have to choose one of them to speak about it. I've made the choice rather to use coexistence rather than tolerance, for instance, because especially in the Ottoman historiography and even in other regions of the world, I think about the medieval Spain, for instance, where you have also this question of the relations

between the Muslims, the Arabic Muslims and the Spanish people. The word tolerance is often thought of as something coming from the top, so as if dominating people, governing people, were tolerating the other ones or were protecting the other ones, in the case of the Islamic empire, for instance. So it's something which comes from unequal relations between the different groups, especially the religious groups.

In the case of coexistence, I thought that it was closer to an anthropological approach. So it has not the negative sense that you can find if you think about tolerance. In the case of coexistence, you have two groups who are with the other one. It looks like more, I will say, objective maybe to begin to work on this issue. Right. And another thing that actually comes out that this is not necessarily like a Muslim-Christian relationship,

but there are also, within the room community, there was like a whole context of coexistence, linguistically and education-wise. Yes, actually, when I talk about communities for defining the religious ones and collectivities for defining the geographical ones, coexistence can happen between communities but also between collectivities so two neighboring villages

will coexist in the way to share for instance the pasture lands for instance so it's also a way of coexisting and the both both villages can be from the same religious group, so both Greek or both Muslim. So coexistence was a word which was quite useful to work on all this kind of intergroup relations. And also between Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking Christians, for instance, also between Armenians

and Rums, even if it was not at the center of my research, the Armenians, especially because you have, as I said at the beginning, only Armenians mostly in the Kayseri region and not so many in the other places of Cappadocia.

But for instance, in this mapping issue, which is a bit obsessional, I found many Greek or Rum Muslim villages, mixed villages, but only one or two, if I remember, Rum Armenian villages. Sometimes in the very close area Muslim villages, mixed villages, but only one or two, if I remember, room Armenian villages. Sometimes in the very close area around Kayseri,

we have also big villages, Kasaba, which were inhabited by Muslims, room and Armenians. It was also a possibility. And Catholics and Protestants in the case of Talas, which was a center of the American, but also French Catholic and Protestant missionaries. I think that if there are so many villages inhabited by Muslims and Rums, and so few villages inhabited by Armenians and Rums,

maybe it's because it was easier to coexist with them with Muslim neighbors than with Armenian neighbors it's it's only an apotheosis in hypothesis but it can be a reason of the special location of the communities so Island migration has come up a couple of times during our discussion so far and particularly we know we notice sort of tremendous amounts of emigration from the region during the period. I think one fact you include in your dissertation is perhaps 40% of the male population of Kayseri had emigrated out of the region at that time. So I wonder if you could talk a bit about how migration itself was a factor of these Tanzimat changes, but also how migration

and migrants themselves were contributing to sort of the changes in coexistence and collectivity that you discuss in the rest of your dissertation. Actually, I think that migration has always been a central issue for everywhere in the world, and especially in the Ottoman Empire. For instance, when you look at the Karaman population, the word Karaman itself has been used for the first time, in the German version, by a German traveler who saw people that he thought they were coming from Karaman but in Istanbul

so it was a community of Turkey speaking Orthodox Christians living in Istanbul and he called them Karaman because he thought that they came from Karaman and it was in the 16th century so and actually this population was certainly a part of the migrants from Karaman Eyaleti and especially from Cappadocia. So, migration has always been a part of the life of these people, I think. But it's sure that during the Tanzimat, thanks to some of the reforms made during the Tanzimat, also because of some difficulties that people experienced at that time, migration became a very massive movement, especially among the Rum and the Armenian communities of Cappadocia.

The difficulties that I mentioned earlier are mainly the economical ones, the fact that the region remained quite isolated from the other from the economical networks so people are not so many work to do in there in the area especially people working from trade because the normal roads were cancelled because of the development of boats or railways in the 19th century and especially in the second part of the development of boats or railways. In the 19th century, and especially in the second part of the 19th century, this migration issue became really a massive one. And when I say massive one, it's because in some of the villages, inhabited by the rooms especially, around the 80s, 70s,

you had no more men living in the villages because everyone every man working in istanbul or in other places outside the village and outside cappadocia so the main place of immigration was istanbul but you had also people migrated to izmir, to coastal towns such as Mersin, which became an important center at that time, Adana, Samsun on the Black Sea side, and always also outside Anatolia, at least, Cairo, Alexandria, to Greece in Athens, to Europe, to the United States, etc. So all these people who had emigrated from Cappadocia

organized themselves in order to set up a kind of networks of migrants. And I always make the comparison with the Turks people, the Turks who emigrated to Germany, for instance, in the 1960s, 70s, etc. The organization is quite similar. And they called also these networks, in Karaman Turkish, they called them Hemseri networks, Adelfotis in the Greek version. So it was kind of networks of compatriotism.

So people coming from the same villages organized its own network in immigration. And these networks have been very important for the development of education, of the schools, the opening of the schools in Cappadocia, but also for all kinds of developments of the villages of education, of the schools, the opening of the schools in Cappadocia, but also for all kinds of developments of the villages of origin, so the building of the church, of the new church, the building of schools, of hammams, of libraries sometimes. So it was at the very base of many changes in Cappadocia. And these changes had many consequences

on local room populations, those who remained in Cappadocia, but also on their Muslim neighbors because all the life was reorganized around this issue of migration since room men were away. So the families need people to work on their lands, for instance, so they employed Muslims or they shared the crops

with the Muslim neighbors who work on the lands, etc. So all the life was reorganized according to this migration issue. Can I just ask you, just quickly, why was it that the room men were so much more likely to migrate than the Muslim men? You mentioned that there were networks that were set up so it was obviously easier but were there also kind of like push factors? It was a question that I asked myself many times actually and it's quite interesting because it's the same for the Armenians. The Armenian men went to immigrate,

immigrated from the region of Kayseri, but the Muslim, not so much. So I frequently ask myself why the Muslim did not go because they saw that the Greeks won in some places such as Sinasos for instance Mustafa Pasha

the immigration process made the the room community very wealthy and they had also they were also Muslims in this village and they saw that you can earn

much money in immigration. So why did they not go like the room? I'm not sure to find the answer. Actually, one of the main archives, primary sources I used to work on this question of why the Muslims did not emigrate was the oral traditional archives of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, which is

I think that it's important now to speak about because it was one of the main archives I used during all my research. This archive is a collection of testimonies collected in Greece from the 1930s to the 1970s with Greek people who left Anatolia

and especially Cappadocia with the exchange of population. And this migration issue was one of the questions which was asked to them systematically. And many of these informants of this room, men or women who live in Cappadocia at that time, regularly say that we migrated, but the Muslims did not. It is something that comes back regularly in these archives.

In a few cases, a few examples, you have someone who explained that one of his Muslim neighbors tried to migrate too and became a very wealthy man in Istanbul, for instance. But they talk about these Muslim migrants as if they were exceptions, actually. The difficulty is that these archives are produced

only from the room side, so you have not the equivalence on the Muslim side or Turkish side. When you look at the Ottoman archives, it's quite difficult to have a clear image of the Muslim migration. So it's quite difficult to have the equivalent on the other side. Is that that these people did not migrate

or only did not appear in the archives? It's quite difficult actually to say. But it remains an open question actually. only did not appear in the archives, it's quite difficult actually to say. But it remains an open question actually. Now that you've brought up the oral histories archive in Athens, I think it would be useful to just kind of reflect on the ways in which the population exchange, sort of the end of your dissertation, created major changes among these communities or collectivities

and within Cappadocia as a region itself. So where did these communities end up after the 1920s? Where we expect to find sort of the old Karamanlas now? And how did this sort of rupture become represented, again, in the landscape of Cappadocia itself either then or now? After the exchange of population, it's quite different from one place to the other. For instance, one of the communities that I mentioned earlier,

from the village of Gelveri, today Güzeljurt, has left Turkey and settled in Greece altogether. So you have now and it's the case for many other villages from Cappadocia but also from other parts of Anatolia, you have Gelveri in Anatolia

and Nea Kavali in Greece for instance. So many of these villages have maintained their community in Greece, but other ones have been spread through Greece, in Athens, in different districts of Athens. But when you look at the oral traditional archives, generally the member of the Center of Asia Minor Studies

who went to the interview, precise at the beginning of each archive, that he went to this district of Athens, for example, of this other one. And you have generally often the same names of districts which appear. So there was certainly a kind of recreation of the former community.

So today, by talking about the history of Muslims and Orthodox Christians and others in 19th century Cappadocia, we really opened up the questions of what makes a community, what makes a space, and what makes a history, right? I mean, this piece about thinking about what archives are available, what kinds of communities are constituted in an archive, and what kinds of communities are not, is also I think a really fascinating question, you know, to leave our listeners with as we close this episode. So Aylin, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you too. And thank you also to Ella and Satchel, my co-hosts. We've covered a

lot of material here today. Obviously there's a lot more to be said, So we encourage our listeners to keep their eyes out for the publication of Aylan's dissertation as a book, which we are hoping to see in the near future. And also to check out the bibliography that we will post on our website, www.adaminhistorypodcast.com. You can also check out the website for other episodes that historicize common markers of identity and belonging in the history of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. And please, as always, feel free to join us on Facebook, where we stay in touch with our community of now over 30,000 followers, and post news about upcoming series and episodes. That's all for this episode. Until next time, take care.