Download PDF | Women in the Ottoman Balkans, Gender Culture and History, Edited by mila Buturovié and Irvin Cemil Schick, I.B. Tauris Publishers (2007).
385 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Amila Buturovié and Irvin Cemil Schick
Since the early twentieth century, the word “Balkan” has become a common metaphor to describe chaotic and disorderly political behavior, social turmoil, and the absence of a civilized code of conduct.' Derived from a Turkish word that referred to the mountain chain stretching longitudinally through the peninsula,” the term “Balkan” and its various derivatives—” Balkanization,” “Balkan ghosts,” “Balkan hatreds”—have gained strong currency in political, popular, and academic discourses alike, to signify abject political and social fragmentation.
Commonly described as nationalist zealots endowed with pathologically long memories,’ the peoples of the Balkans entered modern history from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire; at least in the opinion of some European observers, however, they have never managed to live up to recognized standards of civilized behavior. Instead, they have continued their tribulations in no less petty and hideous ways than were deemed characteristic of the Ottoman era. The end of communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, accompanied by violence and bloodshed in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, only reinforced this popular image.
Yet the Balkan region also constitutes a historical reality composed of rich and complex experiences of religious and ethnic diversity, and centuries of peaceful coexistence among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. From the Middle Ages, when most of the Balkan peoples belonged to what Dimitri Obolensky has called the Byzantine Commonwealth,* to the Ottoman period and beyond, the region was characterized by multifaceted forms of religious and cultural admixing and interaction. While western Europe exhausted itself through long years of bloody religious wars and atrocities that—ultimately—brought about a well-demarcated cartography of national identity, the religious diversity of the Balkans was only enriched under the Ottoman imperial umbrella, and in ways that defy simple analysis and representation.
Historically, then, the Ottoman period has played a crucial role in the religious and cultural diversification of the Balkans. The fall of the medieval Balkan states was a gradual process spread over several waves of invasion and consolidation of new forms of governance, between the late fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. No single state was strong enough to halt the advancing Ottoman armies, particularly given that the latter had acted several times as mercenary allies in the internecine wars that had led to political divisions, deteriorating living conditions, and general economic instability in the region. After conquering Edirne (Adrianople) in 1361, the Ottomans pushed further into the Balkans in several successive military campaigns: Serbia was defeated in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo, and was eventually annexed in 1459; Bulgaria was conquered in 1396, and Wallachia soon thereafter; Bosnia fell in 1463, followed by Albania, Greece, and a number of Aegean islands during the next few decades. The apex of Ottoman expansion came by the mid-sixteenth century with the conquest of Transylvania, a large part of Hungary, and Slavonia.
Ottoman dominion profoundly impacted all facets of life. The patterns of change that accompanied the course of Ottomanization can be traced through a number of processes, including conversion and the administrative subdivision of the population along religious lines. However, conversion was neither steady nor uniform, and involved not only the adoption of Islam, but intra-Christian conversions as well. Most importantly, Islamization was not a ubiquitous phenomenon: except for some concentrated pockets, Muslims remained a minority in the region at large. The largest Muslim communities were formed in Bosnia, Albania, Bulgaria, and western Thrace. Moreover, in the aftermath of the 1492 Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, many Sephardic Jews were welcomed—at the invitation of the Sultan—into this already religiously diverse area, and were resettled in such cities as Salonika and Sarajevo.
In administering their new subjects, the Ottomans relied on some existing structures and practices inherited from Byzantium, but they also introduced new ones, notably the millet system of semi-autonomous religious communities. Scholarly opinions differ as to the origins, span, and institutional makeup of this system, but it is widely held that—as far as the imperial court was concerned—the millets gradually became the main sources of group identity for the subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The heads of the millets were state functionaries appointed by the Sultan and given significant ecclesiastical, fiscal, and legal control over their constituent populations.°
Traditional scholarship has understood the millet system as a rigid and static structure characterized by fixed and impermeable lines of demarcation that disallowed contact and interaction between different communities. It is only recently that careful studies of this institution have begun to expose its inner workings in a more nuanced manner, notably revealing its porousness and fluidity. Challenging the long-held assumption that people acted uniformly as a group and in accordance with their institutionally prescribed status, recent studies have demonstrated more fully and in greater detail that inter-millet relations were dominated by both mutual tensions and shared interests—economic, social, gender, regional, and so on—that often blurred the spaces of exchange among religious groups, and collectively constituted much more complex forms of identification and social cohesion.
These new and compelling findings have led to a more subtle understanding of religion and ethnicity in the Ottoman Balkans. They have also prompted scholars to trace social patterns of behavior not just in the official policies and institutions of the Ottoman government, but in everyday practices as well. After all, most inhabitants of the Balkans, like most people everywhere else, adhered to cultural practices and values that evolved over time rather than to unchanging structures and norms imposed by the ruler—whoever he might have been. At the same time, to assume that official and popular practices were completely separate and fully differentiated would be to obscure the fact that it is precisely through the negotiation of these two that codes of behavior were formed, and values were sustained. Within such historical conditions, the role of women, conventionally relegated to the private sphere and thus deemed non-canonical and irrelevant to history-making, needs to be reevaluated and fully included in a corrective reexamination of inter-communal relations in the context of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Ottoman Balkans.
The present volume aims precisely at contributing to this growing scholarly sensibility by highlighting the role of women in the processes of cultural and social interaction, and in communal practices of both inclusion and exclusion. Envisioned in interdisciplinary terms, the volume does not single out gender at the expense of other relevant analytical categories such as class, culture, ethnicity, nationhood, and religion. Rather, it weaves them together in the context of diverse 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 visa-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.
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 Solié writes of the lyrical portrayal of interfaith romance in the works of the Croatian poet Luka Botié, and irvin 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 Buturovic 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 Zeéevic¢ 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 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 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 FrenchCircassian epistolary author Mlle Aissé. 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 Solié in “Women in Ottoman Bosnia as seen through the Eyes of Luka Boti¢, 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, Boti¢ 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. Botic’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 Buturovic’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 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 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 Zeéevic in “Missing Husbands, Waiting Wives, Bosnian Muftis: 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, Zeéevic 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, Irvin 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 deeplyengrained 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.
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