1922: In the Wake of the Death of an Empire: The archival journey of entrenched post-Ottoman minorities
Workshop for scholars and archivists
This workshop, with its driving theme, is the second major event of a five-year project entitled 1922: In the Wake of the Death of an Empire: Political Transitions and Minority Strategies of Entrenchment in the Eastern Mediterranean which is funded by the École française d’Athènes, the CNRS-IHMC, and Koç University and run by Angelos Dalachanis (CNRS-IHMC) and Alexis Rappas (Koç University).
How does one apprehend the lives of Eastern Mediterranean minorities who managed, or were allowed to stay where they resided despite the upheavals brought by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? On the face of it, the task might appear easier than the one facing scholars of actively persecuted populations. Traumatic events like the massacres and expulsions of Muslim and Christian populations from the Balkans and Anatolia that have marked the abolition of the Sultanate never say their name -often given to them subsequently by historians or activists- in the written record. The latter’s destruction was often indeed planned, an integral part of the nationalistic demographic engineering at work in these events. By contrast “minorities,” as were sometimes designated after the Great War ethnically distinct groups allowed to remain in the successor states of the Ottoman empire, are much more visible in the archive. Indeed, official concerns regarding their size, wealth, activities, and indeed loyalty, meant that they were constantly surveilled. In this sense, the written record contributed very much to fabricating minorities, namely discrete, legible, and ultimately controllable groups. This was not a uniquely top-down process, however. Minority groups themselves, using the official channels of communication available to them, and performing -sometimes tactically- the social function they had been ascribed as a strategy of survival in their interactions with state authorities or official and unofficial third parties, participated in the entrenchment of their identity.