Interventions to Istanbul Studies II, Introduction | Restoring the Fabric: Giving Voice to Istanbul’s Rum Community

Year 2024, Volume: 6, 103 - 105, 31.12.2024

Koray Durak

https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2024.7

Abstract

Sir Steven Runciman, the eminent English Byzantinist who taught at Istanbul University between 1942 and 1945, observed that Turkish authorities discouraged members of minority communities —Greeks, Armenians, and Jews—from attending his Byzantine history classes. Interestingly, however, Runciman noted that these authorities had no objections to these “minority races” participating in his classes on Byzantine art and archaeology. Runciman’s observation offers a compelling glimpse of the regime of knowledge that excluded Istanbul’s Greek-speaking community, the Rum, from studying Byzantine history. Moreover, our current academic ignorance of the exclusionary practice he describes speaks volumes about the “narrative frameworks and cognitive paradigms” that shape us, conditioning us to overlook the experiences of individuals and communities marginalized outside Turkey’s dominant groups. As part of the YILLIK dossier series Interventions to Istanbul Studies, which addresses “the legacies of various exclusionary and discriminatory practices/approaches” in Istanbul studies, the six essays collected in this dossier deal with the theme of erasure surrounding the Greek-speaking community of Istanbul over the past two centuries. They uncover silenced voices within Ottoman registers from the nineteenth century, the memoirs of an early twentieth-century businessman, and the archives of the organizing committee of the Tenth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, held in Istanbul in 1955. Their research also examines the records of the Greek Literary Society of Istanbul during the foundation of the Republic and the personal recollections of intellectuals from the 1950s.

Keywords

MECLİS, Istanbul Studies, Ottoman Studies, Byzantine Studies

References

• Steven Runciman, A Traveller’s Alphabet: Partial Memoirs Runciman. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.