Introduction: Rum Geographies

When the board of the then Turkish Studies Association (TSA) discussed extensively, and then voted to add "Ottoman" to the name of the organization in 2014, it seemed like a straightforward, and perhaps even logical move to most of us. More and more of the organization's membership were scholars researching aspects of Ottoman history that diverged from the dominant Turkish nationalist narrative, and from the Turkish-dominated military-fiscal core of the empire's history. While "decentering" the word "Turkish" in the name of the organization may or may not have reflected the past historical and political reality of the Ottoman Empire, it made sense given where studies of that empire were heading. Turning TSA into OTSA seemed like the best way to include the growing number of scholars working on non-Muslim, non-Turkish communities within and connected to the Ottoman Empire, and relevant to the formation and development of modern Turkey.

As we have seen in the past ten years, however, the addition of "Ottoman" has also meant new kinds of challenges to us as historians in exploring the possibilities and limitations of studying Ottoman history in the twenty-first century, and in our reading of the historiography that had been generated in earlier eras, particularly by Turkish historians. Specifically, adding the word "Ottoman" has prompted a reckoning with the politics of history, recognition, and remembrance of the Armenian Genocide, and of the extent to which that series of events has shaped Turkish historiography since, and even modern historiography of earlier eras of Ottoman history. To what extent should the exclusionary practices of the Unionist, and then Turkish national regime in the first half of the twentieth century be held up to scrutiny in defining the very parameters of Turkish studies, and to what extent should we accept the parameters of the Turkish nation and its history that were set by nationalists themselves? This is still, I think we would all agree, an open question in our field and in our organization.

With this collection of four articles, entitled "Rum Geographies," I would like to direct attention to a different kind of shift, also occasioned by the addition of the word "Ottoman" to the name of our professional organization and to the title of this journal. Namely, I am referring to the ways Rum—Greek Orthodox Christian—communities were, and were not, part of Ottoman history, and to the question of what it means to be part of a history or an empire. Our colleagues such as Stephane Yerasimos, Evangelia Balta, Meropi Anastassiadou, Dimitris Stamatopoulos, Ayşe Ozil, Ünver Rüstem, and others have brought to light some of the ways that Rum subjects engaged with Ottoman administration, legal life, and even mosque architecture. Johann Strauss has looked at multilingualism, including Greek and Ottoman languages and literatures. In my own work, I have tried to elucidate the complex predicament of the Rum elite of Phanariots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who engaged in policy-making and administration at the highest levels of Ottoman governance even in the absence of an institutional sanction or formal share in sovereignty. More recently, in 2020 I initiated along with several colleagues a collaborative digital humanities project, which has since developed into a website and multiple projects, all with the goal of a granular reconstruction of the social and demographic history of Rum communities of Istanbul between 1821 and 1923. The present collection of articles is one of the first fruits of that collaboration, which we have named "İstanpolis" (see istanpolis.org for more).

In the course of developing the İstanpolis collaborative, we discovered that Ottoman studies as a field has yet to acknowledge or even begin to reckon with the deeper consequences of including Rum (and by extension other non-dominant groups) in Ottoman history. By this I mean we have not even begun to tap into the vast store of knowledge—or its implications—that has been produced in the Greek language regarding the built environment, ecclesiastical history and politics, and Rum communities and experiences– knowledge produced, consumed, and circulated by Rum and by Greek nationals in the nineteenth century and...