Focusing on the years between 1895 and 1897, this article reconstructs what happened after the arrival of Young Turk revolutionaries into the cities of the Danubian hinterland, particularly centering on Rusçuk (Ruse in today’s Bulgaria). In tracing the footsteps of İbrahim Temo and Mustafa Ragıp, two self-exiled figures from İstanbul, this study captures a particular moment when the Danubian cities became the hotbed of transnational radicalism, as a number of assassination plots began to be hatched by Muslim revolutionaries. A well-connected port city serviced by regular steamship links, Rusçuk was where professional revolutionaries met with the local Muslims, much to the ire of Ottoman diplomats in the region. In capturing their encounters, the goal is to point to the significance of Young Turk activities in the Balkans before the turn of the century, a phase which remains understudied in the existing literature. By focusing on a secondary port city that became home to failed assassination plots, this article also seeks to contribute to ongoing discussion in global history that warns against narratives of unhindered globalization. In studying fin-de-siecle radicalization, I hope to contribute to these debates by reflecting upon the limits of globalization as a productive field of historical inquiry.

Focusing on the long aftermath of the July Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, this article examines the intellectual and popular climate of protest in the context of a crisis of sovereignty over Crete. Keeping the geographical focus on İstanbul and on the regions receiving tens of thousands of civilians displaced from this Mediterranean island around the turn of the twentieth century, I discuss how multiple segments of a refugee population animated a mass protest movement. Pursuing a multi-class perspective, the article demonstrates how the mobilization of the displaced rested on the actions of mutually reinforcing social clusters: an upper-class cohort of Cretans based in İstanbul and more numerous but equally vocal underprivileged groups from the provinces. Approaching displacement as a condition that generates not only victimhood but also impetus for collective action, I argue that the displaced Cretans became the leading agents of mass politics in the post-revolutionary Empire.

Late Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

This article contributes to our understanding of the links between forced exile, refugee trauma, and antiquities. It zooms in to the case of the Ottoman Greek refugees who fled to Greece in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the defeat of the Greek army by the Turkish National Movement forces in 1922. It critically discusses memories of ordinary people from Lithri (ancient Erythrai, modern-day Ildırı), Nymphaio (near ancient Sardeis, modern-day Kemalpaşa), and Ayasolouk (ancient Ephesus, modern-day Selçuk). It also looks at aspects of the literary world of Smyrna-born poet and Nobel Laureate George Seferis. It is argued that, for these refugees, antiquities served as conduits, symbols, metaphors, and allegories for expressing the trauma linked to their state of uprootedness and forced exile. The refugees in question employed reverse “rescue archaeologies,” where it was for antiquities to salvage refugees rather than the other way round. The main primary material consulted consists of refugee testimonies from the Oral Tradition Archive of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies and Seferis’s diary. The approach is interdisciplinary and, besides Ottoman Greek history, draws on cultural geography, anthropology, archaeology as well as broader discussions in memory studies and critical heritage studies.

This article investigates the Ottoman Greek Orthodox internal exiles, focusing on the deportees’ experiences and the intricacies of their agency during the Great War (1914–18). It does so by examining deportees’ understudied ego-documents, taken either from the collections of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens or from family archives. Organized into labor-battalions or housed in open internment camps in town quarters, the inland exiles were deported to secure the rear front and homogenize the country, but their deportation was characterized by local influences and inconsistencies. Several of the Greek Orthodox exiles managed to survive and maintain their cultural ties by exploiting such inconsistencies, either by selling their skills or by resisting exile through solidarity, desertion, and resistance.

Approximately 70,000 people were displaced from Greece to Turkey and the Middle East during World War II. Following a presentation of the geography, statistics, and timeframe of the displacement, and Turkey’s interwar demographic policies, the article studies Turkey’s management of this refugee movement. Based on Greek, Turkish, and British archival material, the article argues that Turkish wartime refugee policy took shape in the intersection of two occasionally contradictory attributes. On the one hand, there were the state’s demographic desiderata and policies that differentiated incoming refugees on account of their ethnic and religious identities. On the other, Turkey’s reaction was necessarily conditioned by the military, political, and diplomatic conjuncture of the war. It was this conditionality that explains the inconsistences and shifts in refugee management and its rationale during the war, for instance, the differentiation in the treatment of Jewish and Christian refugees, but also in the management of Greek Muslims in 1941–1942 and in 1944–1945.