Abstract
From the point of view of the interdisciplinary field of Modern Greek Studies, the Introduction places the study in relation to the frameworks of cultural memory studies. The Introduction introduces readers to the significance of the Ottoman legacy in the Modern Greek cultural tradition. It refers to the various discourses regarding Greek national narratives that prevail and discourses that challenge such traditional narratives. Phenomena such as history wars and the idea of seeing history from the perspective of the other are discussed and particular terminology relating to the Ottoman legacy such as neo-Ottomanism and cosmopolitanism is introduced.
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- 1.
Irini Kakoulidou is also a PhD fellow in Islamic Studies at University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
- 2.
Quote from online petition created by Irini Kakoulidou, February 2016, https://secure.avaaz.org/el/petition/Facebook_Bring_back_online_the_group_Save_the_Ottoman_monuments_in_Greece/?pv=15 (accessed 14 November 2017).
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Sixty-seven per cent are active members according to Facebook statistics.
- 5.
Numbers are drawn from Facebook statistics posted by Irini Kakoulidou on 15 November.
- 6.
Kakoulidou (2017) and personal communication, 14 November 2017.
- 7.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/hagia-yorgi-opens-after-three-year-restoration-122735 (accessed 20 November 2017).
- 8.
Irini Kakoulidou, Facebook group—The Ottoman Monuments of Greece, 20 November 2017.
- 9.
The Directorate under the Greek Ministry of Culture that deals with monuments of the period is indicatively called the Directorate of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Antiquities.
- 10.
As an interdisciplinary field memory studies has had its own journal since 2008 (Memory Studies published by SAGE publications). In 2016, the Memory Studies Association was founded and has since held two international conferences (Amsterdam, 3–5 December 2016 and Copenhagen, 14–16 December 2017).
- 11.
I am well aware that this position of mine is the privilege of the researcher because my own identity is not involved in the processes I examine, and I have deep respect for the actors in the field of narrative negotiation for whom important aspects of meaningful existence and recognition may be at stake.
- 12.
For example, Georgis Yatromanolakis’ Ιστορία [History] (1982) and Rea Galanaki’s Ο βίος του Ισμαήλ Φερίκ Πασά: spina nel cuore [The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha: Spina nel Cuore] (1989) are densely written short novels in the historiographic metafictional mode that are not easy reading.
- 13.
Much has been written about the construction of Greek national identity as a direct product of hegemonic European cultural politics, a relationship that Michael Herzfeld has termed ‘crypto-colonial’; see, for example, Herzfeld (2002). On Greece’s cultural relationship with Europe, see, for example, a variety of papers in Carabott (1995) and Featherstone (2014).
- 14.
‘Lost homelands’ is the well-known term in Greek (χαμένες πατρίδες) for areas which were not included in the modern Greek state after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire; areas where Greek-speaking Orthodox communities lived and were subsequently expelled, thus losing their homeland. Another term is ‘unforgettable homelands’ (αλησμόνητες πατρίδες).
- 15.
http://refreshfkth.blogspot.dk/2012/10/together-not-by-luck-aspects-of-balkan.html (accessed 28 March 2017); http://northaegeannarratives.org (accessed 28 March 2017).
- 16.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of immigrants came to Greece from the Black Sea region of former Soviet republics. They came from areas where Greek communities have existed since the expeditions of Alexander the Great, but primarily since the more recent thriving Greek merchant communities of the Ottoman Empire. The migrants were called ‘Rosso-pontii’, denoting their combined descent from Russia and the Pontos (Greek for the Black Sea). The culture and language of these Pontic Greek communities display features of ancient Greek language and culture, and this link made the official Greek society welcome the migrants as lost sons and daughters who could express the authentic, original, quintessential (ancient) Greek culture. Therefore, migrants from the region who could prove their Greek descent were granted Greek citizenship and offered integration classes in Greek language since few of the immigrants had any knowledge of Greek—and if they had, it was the Pontic dialect which is very far from the Greek spoken in Greece today. The role as exemplar ‘aboriginal’ Greeks was of course a heavy task to lift, and the experience of most of these former Soviet citizens was that of being looked down on for their poverty, their lack of education, and their ‘foreign’ looks—an experience much like that of the first people in modern times to be called Greeks by European Philhellenes, who expected to find in the ancient Greek lands the revived Socrates, Praxiteles, and Euripides but found illiterate peasants with Oriental clothes and habits.
- 17.
That Maria Repousi and the way she forwards her perception of Greek history and national myths is a controversial issue is obvious from this comment in the English version of the conservative intellectual daily Kathimerini by the chief editor Alexis Papachelas: http://www.ekathimerini.com/134174/article/ekathimerini/comment/respecting-history (accessed 26 April 2017). Papachelas advocates a moderate discourse about Greek history willing to scrutinize historical taboos without provoking Greek people’s sensibility to their national pride contained in history.
- 18.
This incident is referred in an article in the Greek centre-left newspaper To Vima: http://www.tovima.gr/world/article/?aid=504788 (accessed 3 July 2017).
- 19.
The ‘neo-Ottoman’ cultural trend is of course very different in Greece and Turkey since, in Greece, the cultural nostalgia is directed towards Greek/Christian Ottoman culture—and lost homelands—while in Turkey, the nostalgia is associated with Turkish/Muslim Ottoman culture and Turkish/Ottoman control over many geographical areas and various peoples in the regions of Southeast Europe and the Middle East.
- 20.
In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the national elections with a programme that challenged Kemalism and for the first time in modern Turkey’s history introduced the ideology of Islamism.
- 21.
The Justice and Development Party and President Erdogan have introduced Ottoman Turkish as a compulsory school subject and the 2013 Gezi Park controversy had to do with Erdogan’s plans for reconstruction of the Ottoman Military Barracks. Also, celebrations related to Ottoman anniversaries such as the 1453 conquest of Constantinople have become all the more pompous during Erdogan’s reign. For more on the Ottomanization of Turkish public space, see Mills (2011).
- 22.
Ongur (2015) provides an excellent introduction to different interpretations and agendas of Ottomanism in Turkey.
- 23.
Imarets were Islamic soup kitchens often associated with mosques and caretaking functions for elderly or sick people, or travellers’ lodgings and in some cases learning institutions. They are known from the fourteenth century as institutions of Islam, but during the nineteenth century their role as a unifying factor of Ottomanization was enforced by (1) the Tanzimat reforms, (2) new ideas about how to care for the poor, and (3) the increasingly widespread phenomenon of dislocation due to wars and loss of territory (Singer 2012). In Greece today, the most well-known (remnants of) imarets are the Imarets of Arta and Kavala. The Imaret of Kavala has also played a role in recent Greek literary works on cultural and religious coexistence in Ottoman times (Grigoriadis 1998; Axiotis 1999).
- 24.
http://smyrnadocumentary.org/?lang=en&cat=1 (accessed 19 May 2014).
- 25.
The US edition of the book has a different subtitle without reference to tolerance: ‘The Destruction of a Christian City in the Islamic World’ (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
- 26.
In recent years, the Ottoman Empire has increasingly attracted the attention of historians, sociologists, and other history-making institutions (as reflected in documentary films, museums, art, and other forms of media) as a multi-cultural empire and perhaps exemplary society for developing tolerance and cosmopolitanism. The cross-disciplinary research network https://ottomancosmopolitanism.wordpress.com (accessed 6 April 2017) with the international conference ‘Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories’ (Birbeck College, 26–27 June 2014) can be seen as a prime example of this new ‘paradigm’.
- 27.
http://www.tovima.gr/world/article/?aid=542936 (accessed 5 October 2016).
- 28.
- 29.
http://www.thessalonikiartsandculture.gr/blog/texnopersona/ti-apeginan-ta-eksairetika-othomanika-mnimeia-stin-ellada-argyris-bakirtzis#.U3yD9vl_tIE (accessed 21 May 2014); http://www.gnomiartas.gr/afierwmata/item/6368-imaret-artas (accessed 21 May 2014); http://www.peartas.gov.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=431:2013-09-24-11-32-08&catid=36:2011-05-31-05-48-28&Itemid=4 (accessed 21 May 2014).
- 30.
For a critical comment on the phenomenon that is closely related to the rise of the AKP and Recep Tayip Erdogan, see http://www.agos.com.tr/en/article/15450/ottoman-nostalgia (accessed 20 April 2017).
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Willert, T.S. (2019). Introduction: The New Ottoman Greece—A Heritage in Search of Identity and Inheritors. In: The New Ottoman Greece in History and Fiction. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93849-3_1
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