Philliou: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present

Tags: turkey, europe, ottoman, Post-Ottoman Near East

Talks about the Ottoman legacy of the Balkans and the Middle East via Mursus Pasha and his patron

• booming business of land deeds of families in Greece written in Ottoman
• Talks about the status of dragomans - a translater/interpreter/political analyst all combined into one

Concludes talking about how the legacy of Ottoman Turkish archives has only just begun to be researched, does recent neo-Ottoman and Turkey/Greek detant revolve around parallel national imaginations?

Mursus Pasha

• Ambassador to the Kingdom of Greece, then Switzerland, then London
• Married the daughter of Stephanos Vogorides
  • Both were in the circles of the imperial ottoman court
  • Vogorides was the nominal prince of a small island
  • Engaged in weekly correspondence between 1830’s-1850’s
  • both engaged in promulgation of the tanzimat
• Spoke Greek, didn’t quite master Ottoman Turkish
  • Greek was the language of the Orthodox Christian Church, and largest non-Muslim group in the empire
• Nation of greece was the first independent successor-state to the Ottoman empire