Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
Page 2
subjects—law, religion, economics, literature, public and private life, politics and
nation-building—and draws upon multiple fields and disciplines. Recognizing the
diversity of ethnic and religious groups in the Ottoman Balkans, contributors to
the volume seek to address questions of acculturation across religious and ethnic
boundaries as they inflected gender relations and the daily lives of women.
To this end, individual contributions assess practices of which women were the
principal subjects or objects, cementing existing values or negotiating change vis-
à-vis their immediate surroundings and overarching institutions. This represents
a move towards a broader understanding of women’s participation in all facets
of social life, examining their modes of empowerment and disempowerment, of
self-affirmation and self-denial, and investigating the fora through which they
could—and did—allow their voices to be heard. Whatever their status, the women
of the Ottoman Balkans played important roles in both stabilizing and changing
the region’s historical landscape.
While the scope of this volume is by no means exhaustive, the sources examined
by its various contributors are inevitably multiple and diverse, coming not just
from Ottoman administrative and court records, but also from local traditions
(both written and oral), ecclesiastical archives, and national historiographies.
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Women In the ottoman Balkans
Contributors have approached the women under study from very diverse analytical
perspectives, and yet there are distinct common threads that run through and link
together even seemingly disparate contributions. For this reason, the editors have
chosen not to attempt a generic grouping of the essays—under such headings, say,
as “the law,” “literature,” “religion,” and so forth; instead, readers are encouraged
to explore common links and trajectories based upon methodological, theoretical,
thematic, and historical considerations.
For example, where Olga Augustinos describes the fictional Christianization
and westernization of a former Ottoman slave transposed to France in a novel
by the Abbé Prévost, Angela Jianu emphasizes the historical role of upper-class
Romanian women in the development of consumer practices that strengthened
ties with western Europe and promoted a new, proto-national identity, while
Patricia Fann Bouteneff stresses the function of folktales in underscoring not only
gender difference but also Pontic identity in Balkanic exile. Where Mirna Šoliæ
writes of the lyrical portrayal of interfaith romance in the works of the Croatian
poet Luka Botiæ, and Ýrvin Cemil Schick of inter-ethnic sexual violence as a
metaphor for national conflict, Sophia Laiou and Svetlana Ivanova highlight the
lived reality of matrimonial relationships across ethnic and religious boundaries
in Greek- and Bulgarian-speaking communities, respectively. Where Peter Mario
Kreuter focuses on women’s practical duties as protectors of the community
against demons and revenants, and Amila Buturoviæ on the role prescribed for
them in Bosnian ballads as the ultimate resolvers of social conflicts arising from
men’s class-transgressive behavior, Gila Hadar highlights the political activism
and organized resistance of working-class Jewish women in Salonika. Where,
finally, Kerima Filan describes women’s active role in upholding the Muslim
community by establishing charitable foundations and endowing mosques and
schools, Selma Zeèeviæ stresses their pragmatism and readiness to seek the most
advantageous interpretation of Islamic law in dealing with the vexing problem of
what to do about a long-missing husband.
The criss-crossing and interlocking conversations that take place among
the many interlocutors comprising this volume underscore the fallacy of the
dichotomy of fact and discourse, and point to the urgent necessity of giving a
more dialogical orientation to the study of Ottoman history. Certainly a material
reality exists independently of human perception, but just as certainly that material
reality is not comprehensible to the human beings that experience it outside of
their cognitive categories, significational practices, and discursive networks.
The men and women who worked in factories, went to court, and partook in all
manners of social, economic, and political activities were not distinct from those
who sang ballads and told tales about ill-fated romances across intercommunal
boundaries, nor from those who turned to those same ballads and tales for comfort
when transplanted to an alien land as a result of the tragic wars and population
movements that brought so much misery to the region, particularly in the twilight
of the age of empires. Of course no single scholar can be expected to address all
these angles at once, but there is much to be gained from interdisciplinary meetings
ButurovIæ and schIck, IntroductIon
5
of the minds in which the products of different approaches and methodologies are
allowed to intermingle and to jointly create a whole that is greater than the sum of
its parts. That is precisely the goal of this volume.
***
Several papers examine how literary texts treat the dynamics of gender relations,
encounters with otherness, and the expectations and responsibilities associated
with such encounters. In “Eastern Concubines, Western Mistresses: Prévost’s
Histoire d’une Grecque moderne,” Olga Augustinos looks at the life of Théophé,
the heroine of Prévost’s novel, said to have been modeled on the real-life French-
Circassian epistolary author Mlle Aïssé. From the author’s perspective, Théophé
was subjected to two modes of othering: as a harem concubine, and as a Greek
woman. She thus epitomized the continuous tension between the construction of
the ideal “western” woman, as shaped by eighteenth-century French culture, and
her “eastern” counterpart and antithesis. The process of Théophé’s “liberation”
from the harem, and her subsequent exposure to westernization under the tutelage
of a French diplomat who certainly had his own cultural and sexual agenda, only
reinforced her otherness, raising fundamental questions about the markers and
limits of alterity, and whether or not it can ever be transcended.
Similar questions are raised by Mirna Šoliæ in “Women in Ottoman Bosnia as
seen through the Eyes of Luka Botiæ, a Christian Poet.” Standing outside of the
Ottoman geographical space though at its very threshold, and deeply invested in
the Croatian movement of national awakening, Botiæ revived themes recorded
in folk poetry about Muslim-Christian romantic encounters. He fashioned new
forms of representation for the Ottoman ethos and for inter-religious relations,
while simultaneously giving folk poetry a whole new role in the formation of
Croatian national culture. Botiæ’s poetry thus posited women as participants in
romantic escapades, but it also helped the reader understand better the politics of
cultural differentiation in this zone of heightened contact between Catholic Croats
and Muslim Bosnians, especially as rendered into the emerging national canon.
Two essays focus on folk material in an effort to uncover the role of women
in either the transmission and safeguarding, or the negotiation and subversion,
of societal norms. Amila Buturoviæ’s “Love and/or Death? Women and
Conflict Resolution in the Traditional Bosnian Ballad” addresses the range of
responsibilities shouldered by women for the preservation of the norms established
by patriarchy. In the world of traditional Bosnian ballads, women regulated codes
of behavior often to their own detriment. The representation of women was never
singular; rather, recognizing their membership in and loyalty to class, generation,
marital status, and other social categories, the ballad contrasted their romantic
pragmaticism against their men’s passive sentimentality which threatened the
stability of the social order.
Gender-differentiation in the narration of folktales is the focus of Patricia Fann
Bouteneff’s “Persecution and Perfidy: Women’s and Men’s Worldviews in Pontic
Greek Folktales.” In stories collected after the mass resettlement of Pontic Greeks
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Women In the ottoman Balkans
following the tragic population exchange between Greece and Turkey, narrators
nostalgically reflected on their homeland, community life, and the challenges posed
by exile. Bouteneff highlights these tales’ poignant expression of a self-identity
that defied the official, undifferentiated definition of Greekness; she shows that,
given Pontic Greeks’ cultural isolation both before and after relocation, folktales
remained an important medium for negotiating gender relations and registering
differences between men’s and women’s life experiences.
Folk culture is also the focus of Peter Mario Kreuter’s “The Role of Women
in Southeast European Vampire Belief,” which focuses on popular stories and
reported incidents relating to vampirism as recorded by Austro-Hungarian
emissaries, particularly to Romania and Serbia. While later mainstream fiction
has tended to focus on male vampires and their female victims, Kreuter’s sources
reveal a wide range of roles ascribed to women in folk beliefs about the undead.
Ultimately, however, it was their function in carrying out proper burial rituals and
thus attending to the dead in ways that would safeguard the entire community
against their eventual return that accorded women their centrality. In this respect,
they were empowered, through ritual practices, to protect their village against
alien impostors—vampires—in historical times of continuous political intrusion
by aliens of a different kind, first Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian.
Indeed, a number of essays indicate that the empowerment of Balkan women
during the Ottoman period was not limited solely to the sphere of private, everyday
life. On the contrary, women also found important venues for self-affirmation
through public institutions. Ottoman rule engendered new subjectivities that
sometimes came in the form of subversion and resistance, and other times
appropriation and participation. In “Women as Founders of Pious Endowments
in Bosnia,” Kerima Filan examines the involvement of Bosnian women in the
construction and administration of public space. Ottoman women could legally
own property and freely dispose of it. While they could not personally participate
in the actions of the political and religious elites, they did make full use of the rights
and privileges accorded them by law to exert indirect but significant, influence on
society, notably by designating their property as pious endowments—schools,
hospitals, dervish lodges, houses of worship, etc.—and thus controlling their
function and operation for decades to come.
Another mode of self-affirmation came in the form of resistance to and
subversion of local norms. Sophia Laiou’s “Christian Women in an Ottoman
World: Interpersonal and Family Cases Brought Before the Shari‘a Courts” reveals
Greek women’s ability and willingness to reach beyond their own communities’
ecclesiastical and lay institutions when they deemed their interests better served
by appearing before Muslim authorities. Court documents reveal that women often
had considerable knowledge of their legal options across different legal-religious
systems when confronted with specific personal and communal situations, and
thus sheds light upon the breadth of the alternatives available to them.
The personal empowerment conferred to women by their appearance before a
judge to claim legal rights denied by family members and/or community norms
ButurovIæ and schIck, IntroductIon
7
is also addressed by Svetlana Ivanova in “Judicial Treatment of the Matrimonial
Problems of Christian Women in Rumeli during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries.” Through an examination of Islamic court records as well as Orthodox
church documents in Bulgaria, Ivanova determines that Christian women
displayed a certain awareness of their legal options as they sought to overcome
adversity or vulnerability within their own communities, sometimes resorting to
Ottoman authorities in the hope that they would be less influenced by the local
balance of power, and therefore more objective and just.
Women’s understanding of their legal rights and their readiness, when
necessary, to claim those rights before a judge is also addressed by Selma Zeèeviæ
in “Missing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Mufti s: Fatwa Texts and the
Interpretation of Gendered Presences and Absences in Late Ottoman Bosnia.”
Focusing on husbands who either deserted their wives or failed to return to them
for reasons beyond their control—and on their wives’ subsequent efforts to rebuild
their lives and redefine their domestic functions and responsibilities—as reflected
in the opinions of the Bosnian jurist Ahmed of Mostar, Zeèeviæ discusses the legal
framework that governed such cases under various schools of law, particularly
the dominant Hanafi school, and shows that both judges and petitioners could
be flexible and creative in seeking a just resolution to the hardships faced by
women.
If some women pursued their rights in court, others took to the streets. Gila
Hadar’s “Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context
of Social and Ethnic Strife” focuses on women’s transgression of traditional norms
in favor not only of labor force participation, but indeed of active involvement
within the workers’ movement. Set against a backdrop of developing capitalism,
national awakening, and rising socialist militancy, Hadar shows that delineations
of gender, class, and ethnicity crossed, merged, and even conflicted with one
another as women broke out of the domestic sphere and into the public arena,
taking part in the momentous events and social struggles of their time.
The gradual process of de-Ottomanization, accompanied by daunting changes
in the political fabric of the Balkans, occasioned new modes of cultural and social
engagement for women. Angela Jianu’s “Women, Fashion, and Europeanization:
The Romanian Principalities, 1750–1830” examines the shifts in fashion and
consumption patterns north of the Danube by focusing on both Western
European
perceptions of Romanians and the ways in which Romanian women used clothes,
fashion accessories, household items, and luxury imports to express a new
identity. Problematizing the conventional East-West dichotomy, the simultaneous
presence of Ottoman, Russian, and French influences in Romania serves as the
backdrop against which consumer practices by elite women patterned new norms
of femininity, bourgeois individualism, and national culture.
By contrast, Ýrvin Cemil Schick’s “Christian Maidens, Turkish Ravishers:
The Sexualization of National Conflict in the Late Ottoman Period” discusses
women’s bodies as symbolic sites of Turkish violence against subject populations.
War as sexual conquest—a trope widely used in art and literature and deeply
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Women In the ottoman Balkans
engrained in the European collective memory—was a powerful discursive tool
for mobilizing public opinion in support of independence movements struggling
against Ottoman rule. Blended with orientalist motifs such as Asiatic despotism,
gender and sexual stereotypes were deployed with great political efficacy in the
works of Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, and other, less prominent, writers and artists,
influencing the course of events not only then but even today.
***
The picture emerging from this collection of essays is one of fluid identities
and porous ethno-religious boundaries, of authorities at times coercive and at
times pragmatic, of women often oppressed but aware of and willing to demand
their legal rights, of jurists trying to balance divine law with the imperatives of
a multi-confessional empire, of gender roles extending far beyond the traditional
public/private dichotomy. Women in the Ottoman Balkans were founders of pious
endowments, labor organizers, and conspicuous consumers of western luxury
goods; they were lovers, wives, castaways, divorcées, and widows, symbols and
agents, the subjects of ballads and the narrators of folk tales, victims of communal
oppression and protectors of their communities against supernatural forces. For
too long, history plain and simple has meant the history of men; it is high time to
view the history of women as history plain and simple.
Notes