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Viticulture has historically been an important part of the social and economic life in the Mediterranean, while wine is reckoned among the oldest documented trades. The aim of the study is to record, evaluate and analyze spatial data from historical sources in order to gain insights into the dynamics of the viticultural landscape from the beginning of the Ottoman period to the present day. The study was based on (a) three historical maps published in 1885, 1942 and 1969, (b) records from historical surveys—two from the Ottoman period (1572 fiscal survey, 1832/33 property survey) and the British agricultural census of 1931, (c) present-day records from the vineyard survey of 2009 carried out by the Republic of Cyprus. In the beginning of the study period the center of viticulture was well established within the area of the southern and eastern slopes of Troodos massif. The vineyards expanded mainly around the same growing area until WW2 when they gradually began to be relocated in southwest direction to lower altitudes. This long-term trajectory of spatial patterns was driven by external demand for the product but also by the interplay of environmental, topographic and cultural factors, as well as by the state’s policy framework which largely reflected long-term Mediterranean-wide patterns.

The article reports on the Economy, Environment and Landscape in the Cypriot longe durée project which combines Venetian, Ottoman and British-period censuses and cartographic sources using historical geographic information system (HGIS) tools to examine the interaction between humans and nature on the island. Topics covered include the members of the research team, the main historical sources examined in the project and the advantage of using HGIS to visualize data.

The "President's Note" provides a brief summary of recent news and updates from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA). The note mentions that time-sensitive information is shared with members through email and H-Turk, the association's H-Net network. The note also highlights the various awards and prizes presented at the annual meeting, including the OTSA Undergraduate Scholarship, the OTSA Graduate Student Paper Prize, the OTSA Vangelis Kechriotis Memorial Travel Grant, the OTSA Digital Ottoman and Turkish Studies Award, the OTSA Article Prize, and the OTSA Book Prize. The winners of each award are listed, along with a description of their work. The note concludes with information about the OTSA elections, by-laws amendment referendum results, and acknowledgments to Princeton and Stanford universities and Miletos, Inc. for their support. [Extracted from the article]

Can emancipatory, decolonial histories of science be extracted from objects collected from—or made visible to history by—the archives of colonialism? To answer this question, this essay presents the case study of a rhinoceros horn amulet (qarn al-khartit), an ethnographic object collected by the British anthropologist Winifred Blackman during her fieldwork in Egypt in the late 1920s. Markedly decentering the traditional colonial history of how the rhinoceros horn was collected and displayed as an object in European museums, the essay follows the trail of the rhinoceros horn back to the site of its collection in Egypt to reveal a strikingly different story: one of non-Western histories of science/magic/medicine, gender, race, and enslavement, all set against the backdrop of Egypt's imperial pursuits in East Africa. The essay proposes the method of decolonial materialism to "read" objects, like the rhinoceros horn, as archives of scientific knowledge otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viticulture has historically been an important part of the social and economic life in the Mediterranean, while wine is reckoned among the oldest documented trades. The aim of the study is to record, evaluate and analyze spatial data from historical sources in order to gain insights into the dynamics of the viticultural landscape from the beginning of the Ottoman period to the present day. The study was based on (a) three historical maps published in 1885, 1942 and 1969, (b) records from historical surveys—two from the Ottoman period (1572 fiscal survey, 1832/33 property survey) and the British agricultural census of 1931, (c) present-day records from the vineyard survey of 2009 carried out by the Republic of Cyprus. In the beginning of the study period the center of viticulture was well established within the area of the southern and eastern slopes of Troodos massif. The vineyards expanded mainly around the same growing area until WW2 when they gradually began to be relocated in southwest direction to lower altitudes. This long-term trajectory of spatial patterns was driven by external demand for the product but also by the interplay of environmental, topographic and cultural factors, as well as by the state's policy framework which largely reflected long-term Mediterranean-wide patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article focuses on the documentary The Songs of Fire by Nikos Koundouros (1975). Shot immediately after the fall of the military dictatorship (1967–74) in Greece, it exhumes the elation of three public concerts and demonstrations, capturing the enthusiasm for the return to democracy expressed through singing and chanting. The article focuses on the ways in which popular songs became the vehicles of the popular demand for democracy during the early transition to democracy. It shows how the film was crucial in establishing a narrative of resistance in collective memory that was centred on singing and listening, investigating the ways in which this sonic narrative, performed collectively and publicly, also betrays a latent reaction to a brutal regime fought by the few. It argues that collective singing seems to merge in memory with the 'singing resistance' performed individually and in secret during the dictatorship. Extended back in time, this sonic narrative registers an unconscious desire to repress the fact that large parts of society had remained silent during the regime's seven-year rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that MapOE employed a deep data approach to map the Ottoman Epirus with reference to Albanian ruler Tepedelenli Ali Pasha and the regional order he established using his personal archive and the Ottoman probate records compiled upon his execution. Topics covered include the achievements of Ali Pasha, the creation of a historical gazetteer of the Ottoman Empire and the development of geographic information system-maps to examine the topography of the Ottoman Empire.

The article presents several announcements from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA), as of September 2022, including the winners of OTSA Awards and Prizes in 2022, including Michael Aboutboul, Faisal Husain and Murat Metinsoy, the outgoing members of the board, namely, Asli Bâli, Shirine Hamadeh and Sahika Karatepe, and the OTSA 2022 election results and the new executive director, James Ryan.

This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct "European" and "Islamic" archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct "Islamic archivality," when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of "Islam" (and, indeed "Europe") as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing "Islam" as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of "European," and "non-European," "centralized" and "decentralized" archives, and "original" and "copy," as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Phanariots — Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century — were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the text — which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition — the article examines the Phanariots' liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the sedentarization of transhumants in northern Greece within the context of the political, legal, social, and economic transformation of the region that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Based on a wide range of primary sources, this research conducts a chronological survey of the local actors, events, and institutions with reference to a broader political and economic context. It emphasizes that, in the first half of the century, a provincial-elite regime and imperial policies did not create substantial change in transhumance. In the 1860s, however, economic transformations at both imperial and global levels did accelerate change in the region's land and labour regimes. In response, regional landholders began to institute sedentarization, adopting various legal and economic means based on strategies including negotiation, persuasion, and compulsion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore ways in which Byzantine symbols, ideas, and practices constituted a transcultural 'language' of communication for groups of Christians in Ottoman-ruled Cyprus in the seventeenth century. Aspects of this koine are sometimes visible in the contacts between Cypriot Christians and Western Europeans (mainly Catholics, but also Lutherans) outside Cyprus, and perhaps also in the interaction between Cypriot Christians and Muslims. The Byzantine koine indicates a process of interaction between Greek and non-Greek cultural agents, through which new and mutually understandable forms of Byzantine culture emerged. By concentrating on the micro-region of seventeenth-century Cyprus and its plurality of 'micro-Christendoms' (per Peter Brown) this paper wishes to shed light on little-known aspects of the appropriation of Byzantine culture (mainly church culture) and ideology in the post-Byzantine Eastern Mediterranean and early modern Europe in general, helping us to understand more comprehensively phenomena of identity formation, conflict, and coexistence in multi-faith societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the seventeenth century, Ottoman jurists repeatedly tried to stop Muslims from stating that they "belonged to the religion of Abraham." A century earlier, however, the expression had been a core part of the new confessional identity of the empire's Muslims. This article explores how the phrase changed from an attestation of faith to a sign of heresy through a study of a short pamphlet by Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā Efendi. Minḳārīzāde argued that the use of the phrase is not permissible and addressed his arguments not to learned scholars, but to the semi-educated. I argue that Minḳārīzāde's pamphlet provides a glimpse into "vernacular legalism" in action in the Ottoman Empire, that is, how semi-educated audiences received and understood legal debates and subsequently turned law into a space of popular politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Ottoman cities long have been recognized as sites of significant ethnic and religious heterogeneity, very little scholarship exists that documents or analyzes patterns of residential sorting, be it segregation, the physical separation of groups from each other in the urban landscape, or its opposite, integration. GIS mapping of the Ottoman censuses of Jerusalem illuminates these urban patterns and reveals the importance of scale when considering this question. Even the most "integrated" neighborhood on the aggregate level reveals "segregated" zones of clustering and concentration at the smaller scales of quadrant, street, and building. At the same time, the proximity and exposure of residents to each other reveals how very porous boundaries were in the neighborhood. In order to understand how and why the city developed such a complex spatial pattern, qualitative sources like newspapers, memoirs, and court records are a necessary supplement to demographic records. This approach allows for a comprehensive outlining of the economic, legal, religious, and cultural factors and forces contributing to both segregation and integration in an Ottoman city. It also points to a multidisciplinary reconstruction of the social space of an historic neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From what I have understood, the islands are the Aegean islands, or the so-called "Archipelago" or "Greek islands", and Cyprus, along with the frontier on the Ionian Sea. Are we to understand as methodology the three main trends that Hadjikyriacou brings out from the field of island studies: 1) islands have to be studied on their "own terms", 2) islands are microcosms that can provide insights into larger processes, 3) islandness is the condition of being an island. What is interesting to point out is that the introvert and extrovert approaches usually relate to two categories of islands: on the one hand, introvert islands that communicated usually within their maritime regions using small coastal craft; and on the other hand, maritime islands with important deep-sea-going fleets involved in long-haul trade within and beyond the Eastern and Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic. He is the only author in the book who discusses the way to study an island, taking into consideration maritime historiography, and it is interesting that he does so for an island regarded as a "non-island", the Peloponnese. [Extracted from the article]

This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolving role of the Ottoman navy in the mid-eighteenth century in protecting Ottoman seas from maritime violence. Despite enjoying a general peace with its European neighbors, merchant shipping in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and coastal settlements were frequently subject to seaborne violence from European privateers, Maltese corsairs, and domestic pirates. Based on extensive research in the Ottoman archives, this article analyzes the development of the policy of protection (muḥāfaẓa) through defensive naval patrols, which occurred in conjunction with a strengthening of coastal fortifications and the implementation of innovative legal measures. The aims of this protective policy were to protect domestic and international trade, and to demonstrate imperial authority in Ottoman waters both in response to a demand for protection from subjects in the provinces from local and foreign violence, and as part of strengthening and consolidating Ottoman maritime territoriality in the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the polarization, still common in accounts of Ottoman Cyprus and elsewhere, of an oppressed, isolated peasantry and the power and connectedness of the elite. By integrating archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence, it examines the specific mechanisms of production, exchange and movement across the Cypriot landscape. The patterns of activities of the peasantry show not just a deep rooting in their community landscape but also a striking mobility and agency: they had a significant ability to negotiate, participate and protest in the distributed power system of the Ottoman empire, and show intense movement and widespread connections across the island and beyond. The elite participated in a series of regional and Mediterranean-wide networks, and had many opportunities to increase their wealth, political power and social position. But they were also deeply embedded in agricultural production and in the land. The landscape of Ottoman Cyprus, then, is characterized by intense interaction at all levels, by a highly connected peasantry as much as by a localized elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has two main aims. First, it aims to challenge the widespread narrative in Cyprus studies that presents ethnic identities as historically inevitable and natural. Rather, identities need to be conceptualized as socially constructed. The second aim of this article is to problematize the argument that ethnic or national groups are homogenous actors. It underlines the need to deconstruct these supposedly unitary actors by making use of a class-based conceptualization of the state. By using such a conceptualization, the article will focus on the period between 1878 and 1974. It will start with a concrete analysis of the class structure in the Cypriot society and then will trace how different classes in both communities positioned themselves vis-à-vis political structures of power and how these positionings paved the way to the division of the island. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to examine centre-periphery relations and issues of state control in Ottoman provinces in the seventeenth century, as these are reflected in the case of Mehmed Ağa Boyacıoğlu in Ottoman Cyprus. Mehmed Ağa Boyacıoğlu rose to prominence in the 1680s and dominated the island for a period of five to seven years, until 1690. His behaviour and actions, and the way the Sublime Porte dealt with them, represent a useful example of how power was negotiated between the centre and the periphery. Moreover, it demonstrates how rebellion terminology had a particular meaning for contemporary historians and officials, but must be used with caution by the analysts of today. This paper focuses on our handling of this phenomenon, and initiates a discussion on terminology and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The holiness of sacred spaces is expressed through the creative synthesis and performance of different symbolic or iconic elements. This article concentrates on the medieval church of Ayios Iakovos in Nicosia, Cyprus. Dedicated to Saint James the Persian, the church became, by the 1600s, a shared shrine for Christians of different denominations (Orthodox, Maronites, and Latins) and Muslims. The aim of this article is to investigate in an interdisciplinary way the formation, adaptation, and negotiation of insular religious identities in relation to Ayios Iakovos' hierotopy, official and popular religious practices, and the appropriation of Byzantine culture. The components in the creation of this sacred space reflect long-term contact between Cyprus and Greater Syria, constructing an inclusive religious environment with its own insular characteristics. It will be argued that these characteristics were shaped by global, regional, and local developments, including trade, pilgrimage, war, and environmental changes. Being in dialogue with recent scholarship on mixed sacred sites, this case study stresses the importance of interconnectivity and mobility in the creation of shared places of worship. It also shows that phenomena of religious co-existence and syncretism do not always result in homogenisation but maintain distinct group identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life and work of female thinkers within the Greek cultural space in the beginning of the nineteenth century (1800–1832) allows a contextualization of the intellectual developments of the time surrounding the Greek revolution. By translating philosophical texts and pedagogical works, writing memoirs, and engaging in philhellenic activities, women of the upper classes who self-identified as Greek created spaces where they could participate politically. Examining their textual and non-textual attempts to do so, we gain a broader understanding of the societal and material restrictions they faced and their strategies to negotiate and navigate them. We also gain insight into the intellectual genealogy of the Greek Revolution as a pluralistic phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The table of contents for the volume 1 issue of "Turkish Historical Review" is presented.

The article offers information on the conference titled "Ottoman Topologies: A Spatial Experience in an Early Modern Empire and Beyond" that was held in Stanford University on May 16-17, 2014. Topics discussed include engagement of Ottoman men and women with the diverse regions, climates and peoples that made up the Ottoman political order, culture of medieval Anatolian residents and physical elements of medieval Anatolia.