The Southeast Passage: Recent Episodes
Andreas Guidi
With Milena Methodieva hosted by Andreas Guidi and Jovo Miladinovic for a joint release with Ottoman History Podcast The Aladja Mosque in Plovdiv, early 20th century (Wikimedia Commons) In 1878, following the Congress of Berlin, Bulgaria became a de facto independent principality. Not anymore under Ottoman rule, the Muslims of Bulgaria navigated…
With Nadège Ragaru Marco Behar: “Their Last Way” (from the Series “Past”, detail, 1958), Courtesy of the Bulgarian National Gallery, Sofia. Since the immediate aftermath of the end of World War II, a narrative concerning the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from deportation and genocide has nurtured the self-representation of the governments in…
With Ümit Kurt Hosted by Zeynep Ertuğrul and Andreas Guidi A prominent Armenian family deported and perished in 1915. Source: Mihran Minassian Private Collection. The Armenian community of Aintab, nowadays Gaziantep, was among the most flourishing of Ottoman Anatolia. The Armenian Genocide not only brought an end to the community’s coexistence with the…
With Gaëlle Fisher At the crossroad of Bukovinans Street and Radauti Street, Stuttgart. Courtesy of Gaelle Fisher. Before World War II, Bukovina was a region marked by multiconfessional coexistence and ruled by the Habsburg Empire (1774-1918) and then by Romania (1918-1940). Two among Bukovina’s population groups, the “ethnic” Germans and the Askhenazi Jews, left…
with Paolo Fonzi A 1941 cartoon from the newspaper “The Manchester Dispatch”, mocking Mussolini’s dependency on Hitler to defeat Greece In the spring of 1941, after a brief war ending in an embarrassing retreat for Italy one year earlier, Mussolini’s troops supported by Nazi Germany occupied various regions of Greece. In Fascist Italy’s vision…
with Christine Philliou hosted by Zeynep Ertugrul and Jovo Miladinovic Portrait of Refik Halit Karay in Aleppo (1928). Courtesy of the Taha Toros Archive Refik Halid Karay was a satirical writer whose life can help us rethink the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. After 1908, Refik Halid opposed the…
with Malte Fuhrmann hosted by Andreas Guidi and Zeynep Ertugrul for a joint release with Ottoman History Podcast (Steamers, row and sailing boats on the Istanbul Golden Horn, ca. 1890. Courtesy of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul) At the turn of the twentieth century, Ottoman port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were sites of…
with Martin Rempe A military band from Germany, 1913 (Wikimedia Commons) A few countries can boast a musical heritage comparable to Germany’s. Yet, this tradition was made possible by rank-and-file musicians, whose position in society was far from stable and acknowledged. In this episode, we discuss a history of music in Germany “from below”. Applying…
with Alan Mikhail Sultan Selim I and Piri Reis’s world map (1513) – collage based on Wikimedia commons The Ottoman Empire was a key force in the making of the early modern world. Growing from a regional to a global player and to the most powerful Muslim empire at the turn of the 16th…
with Jasmin Daam, Esther Möller, Cyrus Schayegh, and Selim Deringil a joint release with Ottoman History Podcast Swimming at the Corniche of Beirut, in the background: the Hôtel Saint-Georges, 1930s. © Fonds photographique René Zuber. Modern Mediterranean history and Middle Eastern history rarely dialogue with each other. Whereas European ideas and practices of and in…
with Leon Saltiel Transport of Jews from the Ghetto in the Eastern part of Thessaloniki to the Baron Hirsch transit camp, via Egnatia street, April 9, 1943. The Jews can be seen in between two columns of onlookers who were watching the scene. The photo was taken from a balcony, where one can also see…
with Sina Steglich J. W. M. Turner, Rain, steam, and speed (1844, Wikimedia Commons) In the 19th century, technological innovations brought about new conceptions of time. The idea of modernity redefined the contemporaries’ relationship with the past. State institutions began a systematic reorganization of their archives, which started to function as the main repository of…
with Nathalie Clayer, Fabio Giomi, and Emmanuel Szurek SPECIAL EPISODE IN COOPERATION WITH “OTTOMAN HISTORY PODCAST”
Gabriel Doyle is a Ph.D. student in History at the Cetobac / EHESS in Paris. His research focuses on the spatial and material implications of diplomatic, missionary and philanthropic activity in late Ottoman Istanbul. His wider interests include global history, urban studies and social anthropology. Born in Paris from Australian parents, he likes to…
with M’hamed Oualdi & Hayri Gökşin Özkoray SPECIAL EPISODE IN COOPERATION WITH “OTTOMAN HISTORY PODCAST” Joseph taken out of the well by Madianite merchants before getting sold into slavery. Ḳalender Paşa (compilator), Fālnāme, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi [TSMK], Hazine, ms. n° 1703 (detail). The Ottoman Mediterranean represented a space in which slave trade flourished. This phenomenon developed from…
with Dennis Dierks The first header of the magazine Bosanska Vila, 1885 The process of nation building inside and outside the Balkans is one of the most studied phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this episode, we discuss the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Habsburg rule (1878-1918) with a particular focus…
Agustín Cosovschi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of San Martín (Buenos Aires). His interests include Eastern European history and culture, intellectual history and political theory. @cosovschi Masha Gessen Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous…
With Marie Bossaert Portrait of an old Turk. Photograph by the Italian geographer Lamberto Vannutelli, 1904. (source Società Geografica Italiana) In this episode, we discuss the emergence and the development of Oriental and Turkish studies in post-unification Italy. Studying this process requires a reflection on State and nation-building through the construction of the infrastructure necessary for the production…
with Klaus Buchenau The building of the Ministry of Justice, Terazije Square, Belgrade (source Wikimedia commons) Historians can offer a perspective on corruption that goes beyond a normative and simplistic dimension. Approaching past discourses and events related to corruption allows to underline the transformation of its connotation through different periods and different socio-political systems.…
With Erik-Jan Zürcher SPECIAL EPISODE IN COOPERATION WITH “OTTOMAN HISTORY PODCAST” Cover of the revue published in French“La Turquie Kamaliste” used in 1935 and 1936 In this episode, we discuss the emergence of the Turkish nationalist movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the establishment of a sovereign Republic of Turkey in…
with İşil Erdinç Workers of the DİSK Confederation at the Gezi Park protests. The tag says “Tayyip, this is the beginning of the end” Since 2002, when the Party of Development and Justice (AKP) seized power in Turkey, the relationship between state institutions and unions has changed toward polarization and fragmentation. The increasing interference…
with Milica Popović and Jovana Papović Street protests in Belgrade, April 2017 (Photo: Ne Davimo Beograd, Facebook) On 2 April 2017 Alexander Vučić became President of Serbia, winning the first round of the elections, obtaining a score of 55%, and leading in all districts of the country. The public perception and representation of Vučić…
with Norah Benarrosh-Orsoni Travellers and drivers during a break on the road from Montreuil to Arad After 1989, Romania’s economy and its labor market experienced dramatic changes. One of the most common strategies to survive in a state of precariousness was emigration abroad. In this episode, we discuss two case studies based on based…
with Ali Yaycioglu Fethiye Mosque and Ali Pasha’s tomb, Ioannina (Greece) Ottoman Studies offer several unexplored fields of research for the perspectives introduced by the so called “spatial turn” in historiography. “Space” can be investigated as a constituive element in an abstract imaginary of power and agency, but also as a repository which engenders…
with Ana Kladnik The new town center of Velenje, early 1960s (Velenje Museum) After 1945, Yugoslavia aimed at fostering its industrial infrastructure by bringing factories closer to the sites where natural resources were abundant. The “new town” of Velenje in Slovenia was planned in this context in order to provide good housing for the coal…
Hosted by Andreas Guidi and Aurélie Perrier, edited by Chris Gratien SPECIAL EPISODE IN FRENCH IN COOPERATION WITH “OTTOMAN HISTORY PODCAST” (Series “Tout/MO”) “The Rebirth of the Ottoman Empire”, litograph by Sotirios Christidis, ca. 1909 (Source: Wikimedia Commons) ENG: By reframing the discourse on history and identity, the Revolution of 1908 and the Young…
with Iva Lucic Street scene from 1960s Sarajevo. (Photo: FORTEPAN/ Romák Evá) The “long 1960s” represent a vibrant decade for debates on state reconfiguration in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Inside the Communist Party, voices for decentralization gained the overhand in 1964 and eventually led to the new constitution of 1974, which granted more power…
with Elif Becan An example of Tabiiyet Beyannamesi (citizenship certificate) of a Muslim family from today Provadia, Bulgaria, arriving in Turkey in 1934 The repatriation of Muslim refugees from the lost territories in the Balkans to Anatolia became an urgent issue for Ottoman territorial and settlement policies since the war against the Russian Empire in…
with Nathalie Clayer and Fabio Giomi The workshop “Islam in the Balkans”, held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris in December 2016 was dedicated to the memory of Alexandre Popovic (1931-2014), “Sasha” for his colleagues and friends. The conference gathered twenty-two scholars organised in four panels and a…
with Francesca Rolandi Cover of “Arena – Yugoslav magazine of cinema, television and theatre” featuring the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, 07.06.1959. During the 1950s and 1960s, Socialist Yugoslavia experienced an opening up to cultural products from Western Europe and the United States. Due to geographic proximity, Italian pop culture propagated by television, cinema, radio…
with Maurus Reinkowski A cartoon from “The Daily Express”, 27.09.1922, just a few days after the Great Fire of Smyrna and one month before the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire The current conflicts and humanitarian crisis in states like Syria and Iraq have raised the question of a dissolving political order in the Middle…
with Dobrinka Parusheva The Bulgarian Council of Ministers in 1897, with Nayden Benev (first on the left side) and prime-minister Constantin Stoilov (in the middle). They married two cousins, were partners in the law office, and provide an illustrative case of patron-clients relationship with Stoilov being the patron Most of Southeast European states such as…
with Fernando Zamola (Victoria Matteucci, “Zastave”, 2012) A discussion on nationalism, loyalties in flux and state formation. The Croatian question was one of the most debated issues in the process of reorganization and devolution of state power in the Habsburg Monarchy in the late 19th and early 20th century. We approach it by…
with Nicole Immig In this installment we approach the strategies of integration and mobility of Muslims after the end of Ottoman rule in Thessaly and Arta. The shift from imperial to national province implied new challenges and costraints for the Muslim population that has left only a few traces in those areas. However, these territories…
with Dana Dolghin The episode discusses selective memory, forgetting and official memory narratives of communism in Romania. It is in particularly concerned with memory narratives and induced forgetting that occur at the intersection of European memory canons, post-1989 state biography and more recent transnational readings of transitional justice and reconciliation. Although Dana’s research…
with Srdjan Radovic With the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the governments of the emerging states were concerned about how to reshape a collective identification which was distinctive and – although to different degrees – in contrast with the socialist past. In this framework, changes in toponymy were carried out…
with Janis Nalbadidacis Torture was a central element in both the Greek and the Argentine dictatorships. In this context, specific institutions which epitomized the regimes’ policy of violence were established. In Athens, this function was fulfilled by the headquarters of the Police (in Bouboulina and later in Mesogeiou Street), whereas in Buenos Aires torture…
The International Conference “Early Cinema in the Balkans and the Near East – Beginnings to Interwar Period” took place from the 5th to the 7th of June in Athens at the Central Building of the National and Kapodistrian University. Among the organisers were Maria Chalkou from the editorial board ofthe journal filmicon, Canan Balan…
with Fabio Giomi Muslim women’s streetwear from the interwar period, Sarajevo Since the mid 19th century, the fate of Bosnian Muslims became a subject of interest for both western academics and politicians. Some emphasized the radical otherness of Islam and considered Muslims as intrinsically “Asian” and “non-European”. Others focused on the Bosnian Muslims’ Slavic…
with Konrad Petrovszky The first page of ” Vivlion istorikon periechon en synopsei diaforous kai eksochous istorias…” by the cronichler Dorotheos, 1631. (link to the digitalized source) Especially when it comes to intellectual history, the Ottoman period in Southeastern Europe has been subject to much dispute and biased interpretations. Whereas some have considered it a…