The Muslim and the Christian in Balkan Narratives CLSL O4001 (3 points) Boğaziçi/Columbia University Summer Program 2015 , June-August 2015

Professor Valentina Izmirlieva E-mail: [email protected] TA Irina Denishchenko [email protected]

Bulletin Description This course will explore the Ottoman legacy of Muslim-Christian entanglement in the through the dynamic between this region and the imperial city of Istanbul. We will examine how various ethnic groups of Christians and Muslims in the Balkans saw the city—real and imaginary—and projected onto it hopes, fears, conflicts, and ambitions, radically rewriting in the process the city’s own complex history. We will explore further how these communities were represented in the Ottoman metropolis, in the palace, the Janissary corps, the ulema, and the Patriarchates, and how they lived in it as bureaucrats and concubines, monks, merchants, and martyrs.

In the aftermath of the Empire’s collapse, both the Balkan nation states and the Republic of Turkey produced overtly negative master narratives about their Ottoman legacy by aggressively erasing and revising collective memory and aspects of the material culture that supported it. The course invites students on an adventure in cultural archeology. We will read not only a variety of competing narratives, including powerful literary interventions, that help restore the multi-vocality of historical memory, but also read Istanbul itself as an intricate narrative of Muslim-Christian conflict, cooperation, and creative compromise. Designed to be taught at the Columbia Global Center in Istanbul, the course allows students to engage directly with the city, taking advantage of its fantastic cultural and educational resources, while engaging in a dialogue with students and scholars from our partner institutions on some of the most politically volatile challenges for global cooperation today.

Full Course Description This course aims to familiarize students with a variety of “narratives” that reflect on the complex history of interreligious violence and neighborliness in Istanbul and the Balkans, probing the entire range of narrative possibilities for representing Muslim-Christian encounters across Balkan Ottoman and modern history and encouraging a conversation about these encounters outside the dominant paradigms of “conflict studies” and “the clash of civilizations.” To this end, we will attempt to complement the hermeneutical approach to texts with a social analysis of contexts in order to explore how lived experiences of Muslim-Christian coexistence clash with conceptual categories and habits of thought and shape the ways the two religious communities think of themselves and of each other. Methodologically, the course is concerned with the factors that shape the stories we—as individuals and communities—tell each other and ourselves, and with the ways stories shape us as individuals and communities. The course examines how social (ethnic, religious, political) groups exchange stories and make sense of the stories they receive, and how, in the process, they themselves undergo transformation, how they change as a result of their narrative exchanges. We will define “narrative” broadly and explore creative storytelling across media and genres: fictional and non-fictional, historiography and hagiography, cinematic narratives, travel guides, news reports and TV series, and the stories told by icons, paintings, and photographs. Work with such a broad spectrum of narratives will challenge students to explore the limitations and complementarity of verbal and visual representation, to probe the slippery distinction between fact and fiction, and to rethink how we read and use narrative in our personal, professional, and political lives. The course is open to students from both Columbia University and Boğaziçi University and is addressed primarily to acollege student audience. It fulfills Columbia’s Global Core requirement as well as an undergraduate major/concentration requirement in Slavic Studies and Hellenic Studies. Offered as a W4000 level course, it also reaches out to a broader student audience of graduate students, including M.A. and Ph.D. students in Slavic literature and culture, Comparative Literature, History, Religion, and Political Science, including M.A. students at the Harriman Institute. It will be taught in Istanbul, at Boğaziçi University in conjunction with Columbia Global Center in Istnabul, as a summer course of seven weeks, in two two-hour seminars per week.

Organization: This course will be taught in Istanbul, at Boğaziçi University in conjucntion with Columbia Global Center in Istanbul, as a summer course of seven weeks, in two two-hour seminars per week, and is open to both Columbia and Boğaziçi students.

It is part of the summer program “Balkan Transcultural Studies.” Students are accepted to the program on a competitive basis. All Columbia students who are enrolled in this course are required to enroll also in its companion course, “Balkan Cultural Controversies: History and Theory,” taught by Professor Alexander Kiossev, Sofia University. This requirement does not apply to Boğaziçi students.

Columbia students who wish to continue working on their term projects and develop them into a senior thesis, an MA thesis, or a part of their Ph. D. dissertation can enroll into independent studies with the instructor for additional 2 points.

Requirements and evaluation: Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation (20%) and portfolio assessment (80%). Class participation includes attendance to all classes and to tours and events outside of the classroom. We take attendance, so please do come and come on time.

The portfolio, submitted at the end of Week 7, consists of the collated written responses for the course, an analysis of the Cityskape visual documentation project, and the final iteration of the multiple-stage term project, as explained below: • The weekly written responses (20%) are due each Sunday 8pm. Responses are expected to address the readings for the forthcoming week, including questions about issues that students wish to clarify. The length of each response should be between 200 and 400 words and it should be emailed directly to the instructor. • Cumulative visual documentation of a particular neighborhood of Istanbul created through Cityscype (10%). Students are invited to create maps of their discoveries of/in the city by posting photographs and annotations online and analyzing their significance. These maps are expected to feed into the students’ term projects. • Multiple-stage term project (50%) on a topic related to the class material and selected in conference with the instructor. The projects can be done in teams of two, but students are strongly encouraged to develop their project individually and collaborate (especially at stage 2 and 3) with a particular cultural institution in Istanbul. The project includes the following stages: 1) Proposal (one paragraph) due at the beginning of Week 2 (10%); 2) Written report on research (2-3 pages) due at the end of Week 3 (10%); 3) Detailed proposal (up to 3 pages) due at the end of Week 5 (10%) and work-shopped in class Week 6; 4) Class presentation at the student symposium at the end of Week 7 and submitted for evaluation in a text form (20%). The term projects of the graduate students in the course are expected to have complexity and originality appropriate to their level of study.

Academic Integrity:

Scholarship, by its very nature, is a collaborative process, with ideas and insights building one upon the other. Collaborative scholarship requires the study of others’ work, the free discussion of such work, and the explicit acknowledgement of those ideas in any work that informs our own. This exchange of ideas relies upon a mutual trust that sources, opinions, facts and insights will be properly noted and carefully credited.

As students, you must be responsible for the full citation of others’ ideas in all your projects. You must be scrupulously honest in your academic exchanges and always submit your own work for evaluation, not the work of another student, scholar, or agent. Plagiarism is a serious offence and will result in failure to complete the course. If you are concerned about whether you have cited sources properly, please consult the instructor before turning in your assignment.

Readings:

1. The four novels that will be discussed in Weeks 4-6 should be purchased either through BOOKCULTURE or through another vendor. Students are encouraged to begin reading them before their trip to Istanbul, in preparation for the course. • IVO ANDRIĆ, THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). • ISMAIL KADARE, THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE (New York: Arcade, 1997). • ISMAIL KADARE, THE PALACE OF DREAMS, (New York: Arcade, 1998). • ORHAN PAMUK, THE WHITE CASTLE (New York Vintage International, 1998). 2. Another book that I recommend as a preparatory reading for the course is: • PHILIP MANSEL, CONSTANTINOPLE: CITY OF THE WORLD’S DESIRE, 1453-1924 (London, 1995). 3. All other course readings will be made available in a digital format through COURSEWORKS.

SYLLABUS

PART ONE: Crisscrossing Ottoman Histories

WEEK 1: The City and the Balkans

CLASS 1: Istanbul/Constantinople/Tsarigrad and Its Balkan “Hinterland”—An Introduction

Topics for discussion: Christianity and Islam in the Balkans. The “Ottoman Legacy” and the Muslim-Christian dynamic. The tourkokratia (“Turkish Yoke”) trope and its political utility, and the modern Turkish master plot of the Ottoman past. The city—real and imaginary—as the center of gravity of Balkan narratives: a narrative locus, a narrative lens, a narrative point of view. Reading about Istanbul in Istanbul. Reading the city itself as a narrative about Muslim-Christian conflict and inter-communality. Reading Istanbul as cultural archeologists: the city as a patchwork of highlights and erasures of the history of Christian-Muslim interaction in the Balkans.

Readings: Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” in Carl L. Brown, ed. The Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 45-77. Fariba Zarinebaf, “Istanbul in the Tulip Age,” in her Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 11-34.

CLASS 2: The Constitutive Event: The “” or the “Conquest of Istanbul”? (The class will be conducted at the Fatih Mosque Complex)

Topics for discussion: The long-lasting repercussions of this pivotal event for the city and the Balkans, as for Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. The trauma of “losing” Constantinople (the Christian “New Rome): laments, prophecies, the rhetoric of the “New Constantinople” and the “Third Rome” and its consequences for the Balkan Orthodox. Introducing two central themes for the course: “conversion” (reorientation, Islamization, the twinning of identities) and “contestation” (resistance, the production of conflicting/contesting narratives).

Texts for discussion: • , THE FALL OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, tr. from Greek by Marios Philippides (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980): 19-95. • TURSUN BEG, THE HISTORY OF , tr. from Ottoman Turkish by Halil İnalcık and Rhoads Murphey (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978) (short excerpt) • NESTOR-ISKANDER, “TALE OF THE CAPTURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE,” tr. from Old Church Slavonic, Bonnie G. Smith et. al., Sources of Crossroads and Cultures, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillian, 2012), 14- 17.

Assignments: • scheduled interviews with the instructor to discuss topics for the turn project • first weekly response (for week 2) due on Sunday 8pm. • proposal (one paragraph) for the term paper due before class 1 Week 2.

WEEK 2: Paths of Conversion—Balkan Presence in the Imperial City

CLASS 1: The Palace and the Harem (The class will be conducted at Topkapı Palace)

Topics for discussion: Forceful and voluntary conversion. Border-crossing and hybrid identities. Former Christians in high places: Grand Viziers from the Balkan lands (focus on Sokollu Mehmed Pasha). The making the sultan’s harem: Balkan wives and concubines; Balkan fantasies of the harem—how are they distinct from the Western Orientalist fantasies? What drives the phenomenal popularity of the Magnificent Century across the Balkans?

Text for discussion: • MAGNIFICENT CENTURY [PRIMETIME TURKISH TV SERIES, 2011], episode 1, season 1

Readings: Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem, Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): “Myths and Realities of the Harem” (3-14); “The Imperial Harem as an Institution,” (113-51). Suraiya Faroqhi, “Images of the World and the Time,” and “Borders and Those Who Cross Them,” in her Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 61-100.

Suggested further readings: • Elif Batuman, “Ottomania,” The New Yorker Feb 17-24, 2014: 50-58. • “Turks Bewitch the Balkans with their Addictive Soaps,” Balkan Insight, May 1, 2013 http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/turks-bewitch-the-balkans-with-their-addictive-soaps • “Soap Opera Diplomacy: Turkish TV in Greece,” Record, February 12, 2013 http://www.newsrecord.co/soap- opera-diplomacy-turkish-tv-in-greece/

CLASS 2: The Janissaries

Topics for discussion: Forceful conversion and the devşirme. The rise and fall of the Janissary corps. Memoirs of a Jannisary and the text’s authenticity. The thorny question of sources: narratives, the culture of story-telling, historical sources, the “usable past,” and the “fiction of factual representation.” Patterns of Islamization in the Balkans; apostasy and crypto-Christianity; Christian neo-martyrs and “voluntary martyrdom.” What kind of source is Christian hagiography?

Text for discussion: • KONSTANTIN MIHAILOVIC, MEMOIRS OF A JANISSARY, tr. Benjamin Stolz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1975), chapters 38-48. • MEHMED RIZA“A JENISSARY BALLAD FROM THE 1703 REBELLION,” tr. by Fariba Zarinebaf, 183- 86. • “LIFE AND SUFFERING OF THE VENERABLE MARTYR IGNATIUS THE NEW, WHO DIED A MARTYR’S DEATH IN CONSTANTINOPLE ON OCTOBER 8, 1814,” tr. from the Greek edition in B. Mathainou, Ho Megas Sinaksariostis (Athens, 1950), vo. 1, 151-60.

Readings: V. L. Ménage, “Some Notes on the Devshirme,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 29 (1966) 1: 64-78. Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), “Introduction,” 1-23; “Everyday Communal Politics of Coexistence and Orthodox Christian Martyrdom,” 143-64. Fariba Zarinebaf, “Istanbul between Two Rebellions,” in her Crime and Punishment in Istanbul, 1700-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 51-69.

WEEK 3: Christians in Ottoman Istanbul

CLASS 1: Istanbul—Urban Texture, Religious Fabric (This session will take place in the historic district of Fener and will include a tour of the Greek Patriarchate)

Topics for discussion: The Ottoman millet system and the Eastern Orthodox (rum millet). The unifying function of Ottoman identity (Osmanlilik). Muslim-Christian convivencia or conviniencia? Orthodox life in the city: The Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople. The phanariots and their role in the process of national secession.

Texts for discussion: • “SUBMISSION TO THE POWERS THAT BE: THE ‘PATERNAL EXHORTATION’ OF PATRIARCH ANTHIMOS OF JERUSALEM” (Constantinople, 1798), in Richard Clogg, ed. The Movement for Greek Independence 1770-1821: A Collection of Documents (London: Macmillan, 1976), 52-55. • “PHANARIOT INTRIGUE IN CONSTANTINOPLE: THE KAPIKHYASI” (1826) in Clogg, The Movement for Greek Independence, 56-64. • STEPHANOS VOGORIDES, “APOLOGIA” (1852), in Christine Phillliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 1-4. • “THE HOLY SYNOD ANATHEMATISES THE PHILIKI ETAIRIA” (March 1921) in Clogg, The Movement for Greek Independence, 206-8. • “OTTOMAN REPRISALS: THE EXECUTION OF THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH GIRGORIOS V, EASTER SUNDAY, 1821,” in Clogg, The Movement for Greek Independence, 203-6.

Readings: Richard Clogg, “The Greek Millet in the Ottoman Empire,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis eds., (New York, 1982), 1: 185-207. Kemal Karpat, “Ottoman Views and Policies Towards the Orthodox Christian Church,” in Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2002), 586-610. Evangelia Balta, “The Perception and Use of Religious Otherness in the Ottoman Empire: Zimmi-Rums and Muslim Turks,” in The Greek World Under Ottoman and Western Domination 15th-19th Centuries, eds. Paschalis Kitromilides and Dimitris Arvanitakis (Athens, 2008), 40-47. Nicholas Doumanis, “Intercommunality, Everyday Life, and Social Memory,” in his Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-14.]

CLASS 2: The Orthodox Slavs and the City: Merchants, Migrants, Pilgrims

Topics for discussion: Trading and working in Istanbul—a gendered experience. “Tsarigrad” as a traditional Orthodox pilgrim center and a stop on the way to Jerusalem. The case of the Christian hajjis: Balkan Christian adaptations of the Muslim Hajj and their social utility. The Christian family hajj. Religious creativity and cultural hybridization.

Texts for discussion: • MIKHAIL MADZHAROV, MEMOIRS, unpublished translation from Bulgarian by V. Izmirlieva, 52 p.

Readings: Valentina Izmirlieva, “Christian Hajjis—The Other Orthodox Pilgrims to Jerusalem,” Slavic Review 73, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 322-46. Valentina Izmirlieva, “The Title Hajji and the Ottoman Vocabulary of Pilgrimage,” in Eastern Orthodox Pilgrimage, ed. Chris Chulos [129-236], Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 28/29 (Minneapolis, MN, 2012-2013): 137-67. Boyko Penchev, “Tsarigrad/Istanbul/Constantinople and the Construction of the Bulgarian National Identity,” History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, vol. 2: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, John Benjamin, ed. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2006), 390-412.

Assignments: Written report on research of the term paper due on Saturday, Week 3.

PART TWO: Literary Interventions

WEEK 4: Bridges and Barriers

Topics for discussion: The bridge metaphor: the Balkans—a bridge or a barrier; Istanbul as a bridge between East and West. Bosnia, “the lion that guards the gate of Istanbul.” Devşirme revisited; the real and the fictional Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic (Sokollu Mehmed Pasha), the Grand Vizier from Bosnia (1564-79). Bridging Istanbul with its Balkan outposts; bridges and barriers in Muslim-Christian interactions in the Balkans. Contesting the bridge metaphor: whose is this bridge?

Texts for discussion: • IVO ANDRIĆ, THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA, tr. from Serbo-Croatian by Lovette Edwards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 314 p. • IVO ANDRIĆ, THE BRIDGE ON THE ŽEPA, tr. From Serbo/Croatian by Svetozar Koljević, Yugoslav Short Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 41-48. • ISMAIL KADARE, THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE, tr. from Albanian by John Hodgson (New York: Arcade, 1997), 184 p.

WEEK 5: Archives, Memories, and the “Usable Past”

Topics for discussion: Memory, forgetting, misremembering: dreams as documents. Istanbul’s changeable past: history as fiction and fiction as history. Metahistory. The archive as a literary and ideological trope; archives—real and imaginary— as sites of intervention, transgression, and creativity; Istanbul’s Ottoman material culture as an archive.

Texts for discussion: • ISMAIL KADARE, THE PALACE OF DREAMS, tr. from Albanian by Jusuf Vrioni (New York: Arcade, 1998), 203 p. • ISMAIL KADARE, THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE (revisited)

Assignments: • Detailed research proposal for the term project (up to 3 pages) is due on Saturday, Week 5. The proposals will be work-shopped in class during Week 6.

WEEK 6: Hybrid Identities, Hybrid Genres

Topics for discussion: “Becoming Turk”: Conversion, Islamization, Turkification, Secularization. The religious and cultural “other” as mirror/the mirror as metaphor of self-knowledge. Mirrors and mysticism: the Beloved/Friend, the Sufi legacy, Pamuk’s hüzün (defined as a symptom of Istanbul’s rupture with its Ottoman legacy), and his secular mysticism. Twinning identities, entanglement, and hybridity. The White Castle as a literary intervention into the Turkish “master narrative” of the Ottoman past. Istanbul’s Ottoman legacy: a narrative space of re-negotiation, contestation, and dissidence.

Texts for discussion: • ORHAN PAMUK, THE WHITE CASTLE, tr. from Turkish by Victoria Holbrook (New York Vintage International, 1998), 161 p. • ORHAN PAMUK, ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY tr. from Turkish by Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage International, 2006), chapters “Conquest or Decline? The Turkification of Constantinople” (170-75), “Religion” (176-88), and “Hüzün” (90-107).

WEEK 7: My Neighbor/My Enemy, or the Ottoman Legacy Revisited

CLASS 1: Clash of Civilizations or Clash of Narratives?

Topics for Discussion: Intercommunality, contested inheritance, and the Balkan Ottoman legacy. Inter-religious violence and its alternatives—for the Balkans and for the modern global society.

Text for discussion: • WHOSE IS THIS SONG (documentary film; director ADELA PEEVA, Bulgaria, 2003)

Readings: • Samuel Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations” Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) 3: 22-49 http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/Huntington_Clash.pdf. • Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance” The Nation (October 22, 2001) http://www.thenation.com/article/clash-ignorance

CLASS 2: Student Symposium

Presentation of term projects. Discussant: Professor Cleo Protokhristova, University of Plovdiv (Bulgaria).

Assignments: • Complete portfolios are due on Friday 5p.

Additional Course-Related Events:

1. WEEK 3 Professor Marina Koztamani, University of Peloponnese (Greece), and the artist Antonio Panagopoulos based in Athens will lead the class into a visual interactive experiment focused on the multilingual/multivocal/ multireligious aspects of Ottoman memory in Istanbul. The event will take place at the Galata Greek School (Adhocracy), one of the venues of the Istanbul Biennial.

2. WEEK 4 Columbia Global Centers-Turkey, in conjunction with the Summer Program of Balkan Transcultural Studies, will host the second installment of the Dual Forum Istanbul and the Modern Slavic Woman: Mobility and Cosmopolitanism with Professor Türkan Olcay, Istanbul University, and Professor Izmirlieva. The first part of the Forum took place at Columbia University in March 2016.