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 inner
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
Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History Page 1