Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

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by Amila Buturovic




  WOMEN IN THE

  OTTOMAN BALKANS

  AMILA BUTUROVIƍ

  AND

  ƞ RVƞ N CEMƞ L SCHICK

  Editors

  Tauris Academic Studies

  WOMEN IN THE

  OTTOMAN BALKANS

  Three women from the province of Salonika in Macedonia. From left to right: Jewish,

  Christian (Bulgar from Prilip), and Muslim. Photograph by Pascal Sébah. Osman Hamdi

  and Marie de Launay, Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873. Ouvrage publié

  sous le patronage de la Commission impériale ottomane pour l’Exposition universelle de

  Vienne (Constantinople: Imprimerie du “Levant Times & Shipping Gazette,” 1873).

  WOMEN IN THE

  OTTOMAN BALKANS

  Gender, Culture and History

  Edited by

  AMILA BUTUROVIĆ

  AND

  İRVİN CEMİL SCHICK

  Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

  6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

  www.ibtauris.com

  In the United States of America and Canada

  distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

  Copyright © Amila Buturoviæ and Ýrvin Cemil Schick, 2007

  The right of Amila Buturović and İrvin Cemil Schick to be identified as the editors of this work has

  been asserted by the editors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not

  be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

  any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written

  permission of the publisher.

  Library of Ottoman Studies 15

  ISBN: 978 1 84511 505 0

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available.

  Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd

  from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the editors.

  CONTENTS

  List of illustrations

  vii

  Introduction

  1

  Amila Buturoviæ and Ýrvin Cemil Schick

  1. Eastern Concubines, Western Mistresses: Prévost’s Histoire

  11

  d’une Grecque moderne

  Olga Augustinos

  2. Persecution and Perfidy: Women’s and Men’s Worldviews in

  45

  Pontic Greek Folktales

  Patricia Fann Bouteneff

  3. Love and/or Death? Women and Conflict Resolution in

  73

  theTraditional Bosnian Ballad

  Amila Buturoviæ

  4. Women Founders of Pious Endowments in Ottoman Bosnia

  99

  Kerima Filan

  5. Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in

  127

  the Context of Social and Ethnic Strife

  Gila Hadar

  6. Judicial Treatment of the Matrimonial Problems of Christian

  153

  Women in Rumeli During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth

  Centuries

  Svetlana Ivanova

  7. Women, Fashion, and Europeanization: The Romanian

  201

  Principalities, 1750–1830

  Angela Jianu

  8. The Role of Women in Southeast European Vampire Belief

  231

  Peter Mario Kreuter

  9. Christian Women in an Ottoman World: Interpersonal and

  243

  Family Cases Brought Before the Shari‘a Courts During the

  Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cases Involving the

  Greek Community)

  Sophia Laiou

  10. Christian Maidens, Turkish Ravishers: The Sexualization of

  273

  National Conflict in the Late Ottoman Period

  Ýrvin Cemil Schick

  11. Women in Ottoman Bosnia as Seen Through the Eyes of Luka

  307

  Botiæ, a Christian Poet

  Mirna Šoliæ

  12. Missing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Mufti s: Fatwa

  335

  Texts and the Interpretation of Gendered Presences and

  Absences in Late Ottoman Bosnia

  Selma Zeèeviæ

  List of Contributors

  361

  Index

  365

  vi

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Three women from the province of Salonika in Macedonia. From

  Frontispiece

  left to right: Jewish, Christian (Bulgar from Prilip), and Muslim.

  Photograph by Pascal Sébah. Osman Hamdi and Marie de Launay,

  Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873. Ouvrage publié sous

  le patronage de la Commission impériale ottomane pour l’Exposition

  universelle de Vienne (Constantinople: Imprimerie du “Levant Times

  & Shipping Gazette,” 1873).

  Figure 5.1 A tobacco processing factory at the beginning of the

  131

  twentieth century. Beth Hatefutsoth, Photography Archives, Tel Aviv.

  Greece, Salonika, 322/111.47.

  Figure 5.2 Six young women picking tobacco leaves under the

  132

  supervision of the husband of one of them and his brother, c. 1920.

  Courtesy of the Mattaraso Family, Haifa.

  Figure 5.3 Prostitutes in the Bara (Vardar district). Detail of an

  141

  anonymous postcard from the collection of Flor Safan Eskaloni.

  Figure 7.1 Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait of the Moldavian

  207

  Princess Ecaterina Mavrocordat. Red and black chalk, 1742–43.

  Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

  Figure 7.2 Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait d’une jeune femme

  208

  en costume turc assise sur un divan (presumed portrait of Mary

  Gunning, Countess of Coventry). Pastel on parchment, c. 1750.

  Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, 1930–2. Photography: Bettina

  Jacot-Descombes.

  Figure 7.3 Charles Doussault, A Soirée in Iaºi. Lithograph, from the

  212

  Album Moldo-Valaque ou guide politique à travers les Principautés

  du Danube (Paris: l’Illustration, 1848).

  Figure 7.4 Mihail Töpler, Portrait of a woman. Oil on canvas,

  215

  unsigned, undated. The National Museum of Art of Romania,

  Bucharest, 3439. The sitter is dressed in a rich and hybrid mix of

  West-European “Empire” dress and Oriental accessories (e.g. the

  small, flat bonnet adorned with jewels), and with the eyebrows joined

  at the middle, in accordance with the cosmetic conventions of the day.

  Figure 10.1 Top: Henri Charles Loeillot, Jeune grecque sauvée de

  275

  l’esclavage des Turcs. Lithograph. Combats pour l’indépendance

  grecque, No. 13. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Bottom: Gottfried

  Sieben. Lithograph. Archibald Smith [pseud.], Balk
angreuel (Vienna:

  Gesellschaft österreichischer Bibliophilen [i.e. C.W. Stern], 1909).

  Figure 10.2 Left: Public viewing of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave

  276

  (1844). Engraving by R. Thew. Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 1857.

  Right: Risqué photograph, c. 1925. Private collection.

  Figure 10.3 Left: “From Serbo-Turkish war scenes: Circassians

  276

  caught abducting Bulgarian maidens.” Leipziger illustrierte

  Zeitschrift, 1876. Right: “They advanced, their arms shiveringly

  crossed over their chests, their back upright, their croup taut,”

  illustration by Georges Topfer for a sado-masochistic setting of the

  Armenian deportations. B. Dagirian, La troublante odyssée d’une

  caravane (Paris: Librairie Franco-Anglaise, [1930]).

  Figure 10.4 Eugène Delacroix, Le massacre de Scio [The massacre

  287

  of Chios] (1824). Photoengraving after the original at the Musée du

  Louvre, Paris.

  Figure 10.5 Jaroslav Èermák’s Razzia de bachi-bouzoucks dans un

  288

  village chrétien de l’Herzégovine (Turquie) [Raid of the baþýbozuk

  in a Christian Village of Herzegovina (Turkey)] (1861). Dahesh

  Museum of Art, New York, 2000.19.

  Figure 10.6 Gottfried Sieben, lithograph. Archibald Smith [pseud.],

  292

  Balkangreuel (Vienna: Gesellschaft österreichischer Bibliophilen

  [i.e. C.W. Stern], 1909).

  Figure 10.7 Greek and Bulgarian nationalists respectively rescuing

  297

  Crete-as-woman and Macedonia-as-woman from Turkey-as-harem.

  Cartoon published in the Bohemian paper Humoristické Listy

  (20 March 1897). John Grand-Carteret, La Crète devant l’image:

  150 reproductions de caricatures grecques, françaises, allemandes,

  anglaises, autrichiennes, hongroises, bohémiennes, danoises,

  espagnoles, italiennes, russes, suisses, américaines (Paris: Société

  française d’Éditions d’Art L.-Henry May, [1897]).

  viii

  IntroductIon

  Amila Buturoviæ and Ýrvin Cemil Schick

  Since the early twentieth century, the word “Balkan” has become a common

  metaphor to describe chaotic and disorderly political behavior, social turmoil,

  and the absence of a civilized code of conduct.1 Derived from a Turkish word that

  referred to the mountain chain stretching longitudinally through the peninsula,2

  the term “Balkan” and its various derivatives—”Balkanization,” “Balkan ghosts,”

  “Balkan hatreds”—have gained strong currency in political, popular, and academic

  discourses alike, to signify abject political and social fragmentation.

  Commonly described as nationalist zealots endowed with pathologically long

  memories,3 the peoples of the Balkans entered modern history from the ashes of

  the Ottoman Empire; at least in the opinion of some European observers, however,

  they have never managed to live up to recognized standards of civilized behavior.

  Instead, they have continued their tribulations in no less petty and hideous ways

  than were deemed characteristic of the Ottoman era. The end of communism and

  the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, accompanied by violence and bloodshed in

  Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, only reinforced this popular image.

  Yet the Balkan region also constitutes a historical reality composed of rich and

  complex experiences of religious and ethnic diversity, and centuries of peaceful

  coexistence among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. From the Middle Ages, when

  most of the Balkan peoples belonged to what Dimitri Obolensky has called

  the Byzantine Commonwealth,4 to the Ottoman period and beyond, the region

  was characterized by multifaceted forms of religious and cultural admixing and

  interaction. While western Europe exhausted itself through long years of bloody

  religious wars and atrocities that—ultimately—brought about a well-demarcated

  cartography of national identity, the religious diversity of the Balkans was only

  enriched under the Ottoman imperial umbrella, and in ways that defy simple

  analysis and representation.

  Historically, then, the Ottoman period has played a crucial role in the religious

  and cultural diversification of the Balkans. The fall of the medieval Balkan states

  2

  Women In the ottoman Balkans

  was a gradual process spread over several waves of invasion and consolidation

  of new forms of governance, between the late fourteenth and the sixteenth

  centuries. No single state was strong enough to halt the advancing Ottoman

  armies, particularly given that the latter had acted several times as mercenary

  allies in the internecine wars that had led to political divisions, deteriorating

  living conditions, and general economic instability in the region. After conquering

  Edirne (Adrianople) in 1361, the Ottomans pushed further into the Balkans in

  several successive military campaigns: Serbia was defeated in 1389 at the Battle

  of Kosovo, and was eventually annexed in 1459; Bulgaria was conquered in

  1396, and Wallachia soon thereafter; Bosnia fell in 1463, followed by Albania,

  Greece, and a number of Aegean islands during the next few decades. The apex

  of Ottoman expansion came by the mid-sixteenth century with the conquest of

  Transylvania, a large part of Hungary, and Slavonia.

  Ottoman dominion profoundly impacted all facets of life. The patterns of

  change that accompanied the course of Ottomanization can be traced through

  a number of processes, including conversion and the administrative subdivision

  of the population along religious lines. However, conversion was neither steady

  nor uniform, and involved not only the adoption of Islam, but intra-Christian

  conversions as well. Most importantly, Islamization was not a ubiquitous

  phenomenon: except for some concentrated pockets, Muslims remained a

  minority in the region at large. The largest Muslim communities were formed

  in Bosnia, Albania, Bulgaria, and western Thrace. Moreover, in the aftermath

  of the 1492 Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain and Portugal,

  many Sephardic Jews were welcomed—at the invitation of the Sultan—into this

  already religiously diverse area, and were resettled in such cities as Salonika and

  Sarajevo.

  In administering their new subjects, the Ottomans relied on some existing

  structures and practices inherited from Byzantium, but they also introduced new

  ones, notably the millet system of semi-autonomous religious communities.

  Scholarly opinions differ as to the origins, span, and institutional makeup of this

  system, but it is widely held that—as far as the imperial court was concerned—the

  millets gradually became the main sources of group identity for the subjects of the

  Ottoman Empire. The heads of the millet s were state functionaries appointed by

  the Sultan and given significant ecclesiastical, fiscal, and legal control over their

  constituent populations.5

  Traditional scholarship has understood the millet system as a rigid and static

  structure characterized by fixed and impermeable lines of demarcation that

  disallowed contact and interaction between different communities. It is only

  recently that careful studies of this institution have begun to expose its innerr />
  workings in a more nuanced manner, notably revealing its porousness and

  fluidity. Challenging the long-held assumption that people acted uniformly as a

  group and in accordance with their institutionally prescribed status, recent studies

  have demonstrated more fully and in greater detail that inter- millet relations

  were dominated by both mutual tensions and shared interests—economic, social,

  ButurovIæ and schIck, IntroductIon

  3

  gender, regional, and so on—that often blurred the spaces of exchange among

  religious groups, and collectively constituted much more complex forms of

  identification and social cohesion.

  These new and compelling findings have led to a more subtle understanding of

  religion and ethnicity in the Ottoman Balkans. They have also prompted scholars

  to trace social patterns of behavior not just in the official policies and institutions

  of the Ottoman government, but in everyday practices as well. After all, most

  inhabitants of the Balkans, like most people everywhere else, adhered to cultural

  practices and values that evolved over time rather than to unchanging structures

  and norms imposed by the ruler—whoever he might have been. At the same

  time, to assume that official and popular practices were completely separate and

  fully differentiated would be to obscure the fact that it is precisely through the

  negotiation of these two that codes of behavior were formed, and values were

  sustained. Within such historical conditions, the role of women, conventionally

  relegated to the private sphere and thus deemed non-canonical and irrelevant

  to history-making, needs to be reevaluated and fully included in a corrective

  reexamination of inter-communal relations in the context of the multi-ethnic and

  multi-confessional Ottoman Balkans.

  ***

  The present volume aims precisely at contributing to this growing scholarly

  sensibility by highlighting the role of women in the processes of cultural and

  social interaction, and in communal practices of both inclusion and exclusion.

  Envisioned in interdisciplinary terms, the volume does not single out gender at

  the expense of other relevant analytical categories such as class, culture, ethnicity,

  nationhood, and religion. Rather, it weaves them together in the context of diverse

 

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