TY  - JOUR
T1  - Interventions to Istanbul Studies II, Introduction | Restoring the Fabric: Giving Voice to Istanbul’s Rum Community
AU  - Durak, Koray
PY  - 2024
DA  - December
Y2  - 2024
DO  - 10.53979/yillik.2024.7
JF  - YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies
JO  - YILLIK
PB  - Suna ve İnan Kıraç Vakfı Kültür ve Sanat İşletmesi
WT  - DergiPark
SN  - 2687-5012
SP  - 103
EP  - 105
VL  - 6
LA  - en
AB  - 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.
KW  - MECLİS
KW  - Istanbul Studies
KW  - Ottoman Studies
KW  - Byzantine Studies
CR  - Steven Runciman, A Traveller’s Alphabet: Partial Memoirs Runciman. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2024.7
L1  - https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/4478008
ER  -