The Istanbul Experience of Ilias Makridis, 1901–1912

Year 2024, Volume: 6, 119 - 125, 31.12.2024

Paul Magdalino

https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2024.9

Abstract

Ilias Makridis (1888–1977) was a talented and resourceful businessman from the Pontos who lived and worked through the wars, massacres, and population movements that convulsed northeastern Anatolia and the Eastern Black Sea area from 1914 to 1922, before migrating to Greece in 1923. His life was probably more than averagely eventful, even by the standards of those turbulent times, but what makes it remarkable is the extraordinary clarity of detail in which he remembered and recorded it. His “Memoirs of the Adventurous Life of Ilias Makridis,” handwritten on 1,453 A4 pages of impeccable katharevousa Greek, are a unique and original witness to the life and diaspora of the sultan’s Greek subjects at the end of Ottoman rule and in the transition to the Turkish Republic. They are most valuable for their recollections of Ilias’s hometown, the small city of Ordu (Greek Kotyora) between Samsun and Trabzon. However, Ilias spent several formative and impressionable years in Istanbul, and in the sixty-one pages (pp. 10–61, 90–100) he devotes to the experience, he conveys a vivid sense of what life was like in the Greek community of Ottoman Constantinople at the height of its prosperity.

Keywords

MECLİS, Turkish Republic, Diaspora, Ilias Makridis, Ottoman Istanbul, Greek Community

Thanks

Ilias Makridis was the great-uncle of the distinguished Byzantinist Dr. Ruth Macrides (d. April 27, 2019). The manuscript is in the possession of Ruth’s brother Michael, who generously provided me with a copy.

References

• No bibliography is available.