[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Workshop: March 25, 2011

[Dimitri H. Gondicas]

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Program in Hellenic Studies

Workshop


Community and Migration

on the Two Shores of the Aegean

at the Turn of the Twentieth Century



Vangelis Kechriotis

ekechrio at princeton.edu<mailto:ekechrio at princeton.edu>

Boğaziçi University

Visiting Fellow, Program in Hellenic Studies



This paper, outcome of a much broader study on the cultural and political representations within the Greek-Orthodox communities of the late Ottoman Empire, addresses the issue of urban integration of ethnically diverse populations from different geographical origins of Asia Minor/Anatolia. These populations were involved in proliferating cultural and social networks, in a process of migration first to İzmir/Smyrna and then, occasionally, from there to Athens, where opportunities of education and social mobility promised 'a better future.'  As a result of this process, it will be argued that the very concept of 'community' needs to be problematized, since its demographic and ethnic composition continually fluctuated. At the same time, community administration functioned as a major tool of acculturation, despite its pledge to multiple loyalties. From the point of view of the wider Mediterranean context, on the other hand, it is precisely such inter-regional networks as the ones established by the Greek-Orthodox communities across the Ottoman Empire and the Hellenic state as well as the political circumstances shaping them that tended to reproduce a common space and promote discourses that merged notions of locality, nationalism and imperial ideology.



Vangelis Kechriotis is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, where he is also sponsored by the Onassis Foundation. He earned his Ph.D. in Turkish Studies, University of Leiden (2005). His research interests focus on late Ottoman imperial ideology; political and cultural history, Christians and Jewish communities, and nationalism in the Balkans.  Together with Ahmet Ersoy and Maciej Gorny, he is the co-editor of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945): Texts and Commentaries. Vol. 3: Modernism, Part I. The creation of the nation state; Part II. Representations of national culture (Budapest: CEU Press, 2010); with Lorans Tanatar-Baruch, co-editor of the volume Economy and Society on both shores of the Aegean (Athens, ALPHA Bank Economic History series: 2010); and with Malte Fuhrmann, co-editor of the special issue "The Late Ottoman Port Cities and Their Inhabitants: Subjectivity, Urbanity, and Conflicting Orders", Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. 24/ 2, December 2009.
Friday, March 25, 2011
1:30 p.m.
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
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