Methodologies
The Rum Neighborhood Project was one of the first projects conceived in the Istanpolis Collaborative. In our first collection of scholarly articles, published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (Vol. 9) “Rum Geographies,” we featured an article by Eva Achladi entitled “Rum Communities of Istanbul in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Historical Survey” which laid out the framework of κοινότητες or communes established by the Rum community in the 1850s and 1860s. Using that list of official communes we set about working with Berkeley undergraduate research apprentices to generate historical profiles for each one. This project serves to build a series of profiles of the historic Greek Orthodox communities of Istanbul detailing the neighborhood’s founding, history, and evolution over time focusing on the social and economic circumstances and cultures of its inhabitants. These profiles were researched and compiled by UC Berkeley undergraduates with the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) using a combination of both physical and digital English, Turkish, Greek, and Armenian sources.
Reflecting the diverse and complicated nature of the history of Istanbul’s Orthodox inhabitants, this project faces a few difficulties. Given a variation in size - some neighborhoods have many parish churches while others may only have one - and importance of the neighborhoods, there is a clear difference in the amount of material available for the profiles with some profiles being decidedly smaller and restricted in their survey. Additionally, due to the overlap between formal administrative communities and informal flexible neighborhood borders, there is often a lack of clarity of where one neighborhood ends and another starts. This is further complicated by modern districting that has sometimes combined two distinct neighborhoods into a single modern municipal entity. While attempts to create clear borders were made, many of the profiles may contain overlaps between institutions such as churches or schools.
Framework
The term “Rum” refers to the descendents of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) or the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century it became a more specific term, for example, excluding Bulgarian speaking Christians in the Balkans that created their own church in the 1870s. It thus began to be associated more strongly with a specifically Greek tradition within the upper hierarchies of the church and among Rum elites.
A Greek Orthodox presence in the city was nearly continuous before and after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Despite this fact, a constant pattern of migration made it so that there was not necessarily a continuation of the same families and individuals before and after the conquest. Though the original Greek Orthodox population of the city fled during the conquest, Mehmet II’s repopulation of the city brought in migrants from across the empire and even old residents through a forced relocation policy that attempted to renew the population of the devastated and desolate city. These Greeks were relocated to specific districts along the Marmara Sea within the land walls and especially along the Golden Horn. In later centuries a significant Greek population would settle along the Bosphorus and on the Princes’ Islands. Migration from the Greek mainland and islands would also continue into the 20th century. Though one might think otherwise, despite Greek independence in 1830, there was no mass migration to the Greek state. On the contrary, Greek migration to the Ottoman Empire, especially its port cities, remained steady, if not increasing throughout the 19th century.
While Istanbul was divided into mahalle or neighborhoods along religious lines, in the later eras of the empire, a new administrative system framework called the millet system was established. The Millet system granted non-muslim communities a degree of autonomy and self-governance in the matters concerning their community. For the Greeks, each parish complied with the decrees of the Patriarchate who served as both a spiritual authority and the sole means of contact to the Ottoman government. Throughout the Empire’s long duree, nearly 50 administrative communes were established each with its own distinct way of life. While some grew out of existing Byzantine churches and neighborhoods predating the Ottoman Empire, churches were being built into the 20th century as the city expanded spreading out along the shores of the Bosphorus. Each neighborhood is associated with different waves of migration from other parts of the empire and even from within the city itself. Even with established neighborhoods, their boundaries were porous and constantly in flux responding to changes in the city’s environment in the form of fires, epidemics, administrative reforms, economic dynamics, and the ever-expanding borders of the city swallowing up villages along the coast of the Bosphorus.
For the Orthodox Greek communities, the smallest unit of analysis is the parish, an ecclesiastic unit centered around a single church. These parishes either became their own communes or fused with nearby parishes to form a large administrative unit. For the most part neighborhoods and communes will be used interchangeably throughout this project but the term commune refers to the clearly delineated administrative unit while neighborhoods are much more flexible and relative units that often include other religious groups within the same space. Many of these ecclesiastical-administrative were formally established and codified in the early 1860s. Beginning in the mid-19th century in the context of empire-wide modernizing policies called the Tanzimat Reforms, a restructuring of the administration of these communities took place where each commune codified and published their historical customs and statutes including regulations for guilds, schools, or charitable societies.
Further Readings:
Rum Communities of Istanbul in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries : A Historical Survey, Evangelia Achladi
Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia, Ayse Ozil
Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, Chapter 4: Maintaining Empire: An Expression of Tolerance, Karen Barkey
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society Volume 2, Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis
A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum, Cemal Kafadar