This is a platform and network hub for historical studies about the Greek Orthodox communities of late Ottoman Istanbul/Constantinople (c. 1821-1923). Here you will find links to the latest scholarship, memoirs, and primary source documents, as well as discussion and emerging scholarship about the many layers of community--legal, administrative, and ecclesiastical, but also social, cultural, and political--in which the Greek Orthodox of The City of the long nineteenth century were involved. Data projects about the historical demography, residential and migration patterns, and professional and class identities of Rum residents will be displayed here. While this site serves as a clearinghouse and an incubator for data, mapping, and other Digital Humanities and conventional scholarly projects related to the Greek Orthodox of Istanbul, it is meant to connect up to the many other projects underway that map the many other communities in the same urban space. It is also meant to make accessible the wealth of knowledge in Greek-language histories of the constituent parish and neighborhood communities of the city, and to bring those together with Ottoman state archival materials, to work toward a three-dimensional understanding of what community meant, and how it worked, and changed, for Greek Orthodox Christians in the final century of the Ottoman Empire. We are open to considering new proposals for subgroups/research teams on relevant topics, so please contact us with your ideas!
Further Resources for Research on Constantinopolitan Greeks
Christine Philliou
Christine Philliou, Professor in the Department of History at University of California Berkeley and Director of the Modern Greek/Hellenic Studies and Turkish, Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies (TOPOS) programs there, specializes in the connected histories of the Balkans and Middle East since the 17th century, focusing particularly on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has worked, and is interested more broadly in comparative empires and in interfaces between cultures and histories in Europe and the Middle East. Her books, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), and Turkey: A Past Against History (2021), have been translated into both Greek and Turkish, and she has published widely in scholarly journals as well as in broader forums such as PublicBooks and Jadaliyya.
Firuzan Melike Sümertaş
Firuzan Melike Sümertaş is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at University of California Berkeley and Assist. Prof. in the Department of Interior Design at Istanbul Kent University. Her research focuses on the urban/architectural/visual culture of the late Ottoman Empire and its capital city Istanbul, with a particular interest in the Greek-Orthodox community. She holds a PhD. in History from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and B.Arch and M.A degrees from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Department of Architecture, and Program in Architectural History. Besides IstanΠόλις, she collaborates with Namık Erkal, Haris Theodorelis Rigas and ANAMED at Koç University, Istanbul under the project entitled “Phanariot Materialities.”
Panagiotis Poulos
Panagiotis C. Poulos is Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He studied ethnomusicology with a focus on the musical traditions of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), where he also completed his doctoral dissertation on Ottoman classical music, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. His research centers on the musical traditions of the Islamic world, the cultural history of late Ottoman and Turkish music and arts, and the history of everyday life in Ottoman cities. Panagiotis C. Poulos is one of the founding members of the research team sonorCities, which has been funded by the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation for the project Learning Culture through City Soundscapes. He is co-editor of Ottoman Intimacies, Balkan Musical Realities (2013, Finnish Institute at Athens) and author of Music in the Islamic World: Sources, Perspectives, Practices (e-book, 2015, Hellenic Academic Libraries Link). In 2013 he was awarded an honorable mention Ömer Lütfi Barkan Award by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for his article Rethinking Orality in Turkish Classical Music: A Genealogy of Contemporary Musical Assemblages (MEJC 4, 2011). His current research project is entitled Intercommunal musical geographies of late Ottoman Istanbul, funded by the Hellenic Foundation of Research and Innovation.
