Orthodox Christians And Muslims In Cappadocia

This book traces the history of everyday relations of Greek-Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Cappadocia, an Ottoman countryside inhabited by various ethno-religious groups, either sharing the same settlements, or living in neighbouring villages. Based on Ottoman state archives, testimonies collected by the Centre of Asia Minor Studies, and various pre-1923 hand-written and printed sources mostly in Ottoman- and Karamanli-Turkish, and Greek, the study covers the period from 1839 to 1923 and proposes an anthropological perspective on everyday cross-religious interactions. It focuses on questions such as identification and mapping of communities, sharing of space and resources, use of languages, and religiosity in the context of conversions and of shared sacred spaces and beliefs to investigate everyday realities of a multireligious rural society which disappeared with the fall of the Empire.

Cappadocia was a place of co-habitation of Christians and Muslims, until the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange (1923) terminated the Christian presence in the region. Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing on history, political science and anthropology, this study investigates the relationship between tolerance, co-habitation, and nationalism. Concentrating particularly on Orthodox-Muslim and Orthodox-Protestant practices of living together in Cappadocia during the last fifty years of the Ottoman Empire, it responds to the prevailing romanticism about the Ottoman way of handling diversity. The study also analyses the transformation of the social identity of Cappadocian Orthodox Christians from Christians to Greeks, through various mechanisms including the endeavour of the elite to utilise education and the press, and through nationalist antagonism during the long war of 1912 to 1922.

A collection of papers presented at the Orthodox -- Muslim dialogue held at Holy Cross.

The two authors have been travelling around Cappadocia since 1986 and by now have found another home in the pottery town of Avanos. They are fascinated by the archaic landscape: semi-desert, semi-oasis, almost paradise-looking green valleys surrounded by fairy-like rock formations. For milleniums, people have lived here in comfortable cave dwellings. The early Christians took refuge in the secluded beauty of Cappadocia, decorating their cave churches with valuable frescoes and making church history. For centuries, Christians and Muslims lived side by side by the foot of the almost 4000 m high Erciyes volcano in one of the most fantastic erosion landscapes on earth. Cappadocia - a region where you can still feel like an explorer - provided you are courious enough. Wherever you go, you can feel history here. This guide provides a wealth of information, and many a little story will put you in the right mood for the enchanting cultural landscape. You will also find all the important travel tips for Turkey and Cappadocia, walks with detailed descriptions, a short dictionary of all the necessary vocabulary and more than 100 photos and 30 local area maps.

It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly 2 million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were of the 'wrong' religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world statesmen hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean feel about this exercise in ethnic engineering? Bruce Clark's fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.

Orthodox Christians, as well as other non-Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, have long been treated as insular and homogenous entities, distinctly different and separate from the rest of the Ottoman world. Despite this view prevailing in mainstream historiography, some scholars have suggested recently that non-Muslim life was not as monolithic and rigid as is often supposed. In an endeavour to understand the ties among Christians within the administrative, social and economic structures of the imperial and Orthodox Christian worlds, Ayşe Ozil engages in a rarely undertaken comparative analysis of Ottoman, Greek and European archival sources. Using the hitherto under-explored region of Hüdavendigar in the heartland of the empire as a case study, she questions commonplace assumptions about the meaning of ethno-religious community within a Middle Eastern imperial framework. Offering a more nuanced investigation of Ottoman Christians by connecting Ottoman and Greek history, which are often treated in isolation from one another, this work sheds new light on communal existence.

This book is dedicated to Claudia Römer and brings together 33 contributions spanning a period from the 15th to the 20th century and covering the wide range of topics with which the honouree is engaged. The volume is divided into six parts that present current research on language, literature, and style as well as newer approaches and perspectives in dealing with sources and terminologies. Aspects such as conquest, administration, and financing of provinces are found as well as problems of endowments and the circulation of goods in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Another main topic is dedicated to minorities and their role and situation in various provinces and cities of the Ottoman Empire, as represented by various sources. But also topics like conversion, morality and control are illuminated. Finally, the volume provides an insight into the late Ottoman and early republican period, in which some previously unpublished sources (such as travel letters, memoirs) are presented and (re)discussed. The book is not only aimed at scholars and students of the Ottoman Empire; the thematic range is also of interest to linguists, historians, and cultural historians.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople -- Introduction -- The Byzantine period (324-1453) -- The period of the Ottoman Empire (1453-1923) -- The period of the Turkish Republic (1923) until the present day -- Conclusion -- 3 The development of the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church -- Introduction -- The Church of Greece during the apostolic era (49/50-732/733) -- The modern historical period (1833) of the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church until the present day -- Conclusion -- 4 Modern historical context of the States of Greece and Turkey as it relates to the minority question -- Introduction -- The Muslim minority of Western Thrace and other minority communities in present-day Greece -- The legal status of Islam in Greece -- The Greek Orthodox minority of Turkey -- Conclusion -- 5 Methodology -- Introduction -- Design -- Rationale of the chosen geographical areas -- Researcher's narration -- Informants -- Procedures -- Apparatus -- Ethics -- Results and analysis -- Correlations -- Discussion -- Limitations of the study -- Further studies -- Conclusion -- 6 Conclusions -- Appendices -- Appendix 1: Patriarchal and Synodal Tome of the Proclamation of the Autocephalous Church of Greece -- Appendix 2: Declaration of the Independence of the Church of Greece -- Bibliography -- Index