HIST 5519 Greek Orthodox Communities of the Ottoman Empire

A graduate seminar on the long entanglement of Anatolia's Orthodox Christian communities with their Muslim neighbors and Ottoman rulers, from the Seljuk arrival through the 1923 population exchange, less a survey of "minorities" than a close reading of how these communities lived, wrote, worshipped, and were eventually unmade. You'll work directly with primary sources, including Karamanlidika literature, British consular Blue Books, and German ethnographic studies, give presentations, and produce a research paper suitable for the Bilkent graduate symposium. It pairs well with late-Ottoman and refugee/memory studies coursework, and matters because the questions it asks, about coexistence, displacement, and how communities are remembered, remain unresolved.