Visualizing Local Christian Communities in Muslim Cosmopolitan Istanbul in the 19th and 20th Centuries

FAIN: RZ-292650-23

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Christine M. Philliou (Project Director: November 2022 to present)

Preparation of a website that will reconstruct Orthodox Christian communities in late Ottoman Istanbul between 1821 and 1923. (36 months)

We seek NEH funding to develop an expansive and scholarly, public-facing website, in order to build new structures of knowledge and raise public awareness about Istanbul and its constituent Orthodox Christian communities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on but also bridging fragmented secondary scholarship of the last generation (in Greek, Turkish, French, as well as English), we are using a wide array of archival sources to carry out a systematic and comprehensive, granular reconstruction of the demography and topography of the Greek Orthodox communities of late Ottoman Istanbul (1821-1923). In doing so, we will be collaborating to produce articles, podcast interviews and ongoing blog posts, ArcGIS storymaps, relational databases and virtual as well as in-person exhibitions that grow out of the website, to write that group back into the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, modern Greece and into the comparative study of urban spaces in this region.