Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform

By Merih Erol

A study of the musical discourse among Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christians during a complicated time for them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During the late Ottoman period (1856–1922), a time of contestation about imperial policy toward minority groups, music helped the Ottoman Greeks in Istanbul define themselves as a distinct cultural group. A part of the largest non-Muslim minority within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, the Greek Orthodox educated elite engaged in heated discussions about their cultural identity, Byzantine heritage, and prospects for the future, at the heart of which were debates about the place of traditional liturgical music in a community that was confronting modernity and westernization. Merih Erol draws on archival evidence from ecclesiastical and lay sources dealing with understandings of Byzantine music and history, forms of religious chanting, the life stories of individual cantors, and other popular and scholarly sources of the period. Audio examples keyed to the text are available online.

“Merih Erol’s careful examination of the prominent church cantors of this period, their opinions on Byzantine, Ottoman and European musics as well as their relationship with both the Patriarchate and wealthy Greeks of Istanbul presents a detailed picture of a community trying to define their national identity during a transition. . . . Her study is unique and detailed, and her call to pluralism is timely.” —Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, author of The Musician Mehters

“Overall, the book impresses me as a sophisticated work that avoids the standard nationalist views on the history of the Ottoman Greeks.” —Risto Pekka Pennanen, University of Tampere, Finland

“This book is a great contribution to the fields of historical ethnomusicology, religious studies, ethnic studies, and Ottoman and Greek studies. It offers timely research during a critical period for ethnic minorities in the Middle East in general and Christians in particular as they undergo persecution and forced migration.” —Journal of the American Academy of Religion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253018427

Book preview

GREEK ORTHODOX MUSIC IN OTTOMAN ISTANBUL

Ethnomusicology Multimedia (EM) is a collaborative publishing program, developed with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to identify and publish first books in ethnomusicology, accompanied by supplemental audiovisual materials online at www.ethnomultimedia.org.

A collaboration of the presses at Indiana and Temple universities, EM is an innovative, entrepreneurial, and cooperative effort to expand publishing opportunities for emerging scholars in ethnomusicology and to increase audience reach by using common resources available to the presses through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Each press acquires and develops EM books according to its own profile and editorial criteria.

EM’s most innovative features are its web-based components, which include a password-protected Annotation Management System (AMS) where authors can upload peer-reviewed audio, video, and static image content for editing and annotation and key the selections to corresponding references in their texts; a public site for viewing the web content, www.ethnomultimedia.org, with links to publishers’ websites for information about the accompanying books; and the Avalon Media System, which hosts video and audio content for the website. The AMS and website were designed and built by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University. Avalon was designed and built by the libraries at Indiana University and Northwestern University with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Indiana University Libraries hosts the website and the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) provides archiving and preservation services for the EM online content.

GREEK ORTHODOX MUSIC IN OTTOMAN ISTANBUL

Nation and Community in the Era of Reform

Merih Erol

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2015 by Merih Erol

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-01833-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-253-01842-7 (ebook)

1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15

To my dear parents

And in memory of Vangelis Kechriotis

(1969–2015)

Contents

Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series Preface

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on Pronunciation and Transliteration

Introduction

1   The City’s Greek Orthodox: An Overview

2   Liturgical Music and the Middle Class

3   Confronting the Musical Past

4   The Music Debate and Tradition

5   Music and National Identity

6   Singing and Political Allegiance

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series Preface

Guide to Online Media Examples

Each of the audio, video, or still-image media examples listed below is associated with specific passages in this book, and each example has been assigned a unique Persistent Uniform Resource Locator, or PURL. The PURL identifies a specific audio, video, or still-image media example on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website, www.ethnomultimedia.org. Within the text of the book, a PURL number in parentheses functions like a citation and immediately follows the text to which it refers (e.g., PURL 3.1). The numbers following the acronym PURL refer to the chapter in which the media example is found and the number of PURLs contained in that chapter. For example, PURL 3.1 refers to the first media example found in chapter 3, PURL 3.2 refers to the second media example found in chapter 3, and so on.

To access all media associated with this book, readers must first create a free account by going to the Ethnomusicology Multimedia Project website www.ethnomultimedia.org and clicking the Sign In link. Readers will be required to read and electronically sign an End Users License Agreement (EULA) the first time they access a media example on the website. After logging in to the site, there are two ways to access and play back audio, video, or still-image media examples. In the Search field, enter the name of the author to be taken to a web page with information about the book and the author as well as a playlist of all media examples associated with the book. To access a specific media example, in the Search field enter the six-digit PURL identifier of the example (the six digits located at the end of the full PURL address below). The reader will be taken to the web page containing that media example, as well as to a playlist of all the other media examples related to the book. Readers of the electronic edition of this book will simply click on the PURL address for each media example; once they have logged in to www.ethnomultimedia.org, this live link will take them directly to the media example on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

List of PURLs

Chapter 2

PURL 2.1 | Αnastaseōs ēmera. (78 RPM Orfeon-Odeon [1914–1926]. Byzantine Music. The Protopsaltis of the Holy Great Church of Christ Iakovos Nafpliotis. Research and texts by Prof. Dr. Antonios E. Alygizakes. Istanbul: Kalan Müzik, 2008.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910298

PURL 2.2 | Hüseyni ağır semai, composed by Zakharia Hanende (eighteenth century). (Hanende Zaharya. En Chordais Music Ensemble. Istanbul: Kalan Müzik, 2005.) Live recording at the Athens Concert Hall in 2000. http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910299

PURL 2.3 | Tēn Pagkosmion Doxan (Hymn at the Glory of the stichēra of Vespers in the 1st ēchos), composed by Zakharia Hanende. (Hanende Zaharya. En Chordais Music Ensemble. Istanbul: Kalan Müzik, 2005.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910300

Chapter 3

PURL 3.1 | Hymne Chrétienne d’Oxyrhynchus (Egypte). Hymn to Trinity from the 3rd/4th c. AD. (Musique de la Grèce Antique. Burbank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1979.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910305

Chapter 4

PURL 4.1 | Kratēma, ēchos 4th legetos, composed by Petros Peloponnesios (1730–1778). (Petros Peloponnesios. Thessaloniki: Music Ensemble En Chordais, 2005.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910301

Chapter 5

PURL 5.1 | Oti sōtēra etekes, ēchos barus. Kratēma from Hymn to the Virgin Mary of Petros Bereketis. (Μνημεία Εκκλησιαστικής Μουσικής. 3 Θεοτόκε Παρθένε. Πέτρου Μπερεκέτη [Monuments of ecclesiastical music: 3 Theotoke Parthene of Petros Bereketis]. Chanted by Thrasuboulos Stanitsas, Research by Manolis K. Hatziyakoumis. Athens: Research and Publications Center, 2001.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910302

PURL 5.2 | Axion estin (enarmonion). (78 RPM Orfeon-Odeon [1914–1926]. Byzantine Music. The Protopsaltis of the Holy Great Church of Christ Iakovos Nafpliotis. Research and texts by Prof. Dr. Antonios E. Alygizakes. Istanbul: Kalan Müzik, 2008.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910303

PURL 5.3 | 1er Hymne Delphique à Apollon. (Musique de la Grèce Antique. Burbank, CA: Harmonia Mundi, 1979.) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910304

PURL 5.4 | "Apopsi ta mesanychta" (Tonight at midnight), song from Sinasos, in the album Songs of Cappadocia, Friends of the M.F.A., Center for Asia Minor Studies, 2002, sung by Anastasia Chourmouziadē, recorded in 1930. (This song is included in Georgios D. Pachtikos’s folk-song collection 260 Δημώδη Ελληνικά Άσματα από του στόματος του Ελληνικού Λαού της Μικράς Ασίας, Θράκης, Μακεδονίας, Ηπείρου και Αλβανίας, Ελλάδος, Κρήτης, νήσων του Αιγαίου, Κύπρου και των παραλίων της Προποντίδος συλλεγέντα και παρασημανθέντα [1888–1904] [260 Greek folk songs from the mouth of the Greek folk of Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and Albania, Greece, Crete, the Aegean Islands, Cyprus, and the coasts of Marmara, collected and notated, 1888–1904].) http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/em/Erol/910306

Preface

IN SEPTEMBER 2000, when I assumed the role of translator between the Greek oud player Christos Tsiamoulēs and the Turkish kanun player Göksel Baktagir, who was my kanun teacher, I had no idea this would be the beginning of a dilettante’s curiosity about Greek music that would gradually turn into passion for a research topic. Tsiamoulēs was visiting Istanbul with a group of nearly twenty students of the music school of Patras, all of whom were excited about visiting Kōnstantinoupolē, the City whose privileged place in the memory of Greeks is beyond doubt. The students’ appetite for musical scores, CDs, and the diverse instruments of what was called in Greece paradosiakē mousikē (traditional music) was impressive. At that time, I did not speak a word of Greek; I was translating from Turkish to English and back again between the two musicians who wanted to collaborate for a future concert.

The next spring, the friendships established during this first encounter took me to Athens. This book contains much of the inspiration and enthusiasm fueled by the overwhelming impressions of that first visit, in addition to what I learned from hours spent in various libraries and archives. The first Greek Orthodox service I attended was the liturgy on Holy Thursday at the small eleventh-century Byzantine church Kapnikareas at the center of Athens. No less of a milestone was my joy and pride in learning the Greek alphabet by doing the playful exercise of transliterating Ottoman Turkish maqam names written in Greek characters as I struggled to read the recently published books on traditional music. The magical atmosphere of musical gatherings at friends’ houses or in the familiar taverns of Athens or, later, in Rethymno during my Erasmus year in Crete, renewed my passion for my topic more than reading any book could have done. Any moments of pessimism and feelings of defeat I had during my research and writing were dissipated by the thought that the publication of this book would be the best thank you to my friends who had nurtured me with music, ideas, and encouragement to pursue the difficult topic that I, a foreigner and a Turk, had chosen. I’m sure my interest in this subject seemed incomprehensible to most of them.

This book is a response to a set of practices in the history of the Turkish Republic whose aim has been to create a society with a singular identity (Sunni Muslim and Turkish) and a monolithic culture. These practices had tragic results for the Greek Orthodox population and for other non-Muslim and non-Turkish groups. In the process that began with the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, and especially in the period between 1955 and 1974, thousands of Greek Orthodox had to depart from Turkey, leaving behind what is today a very small community in Istanbul. On another level, this study is timely in these days when the Turkish public has animatedly been discussing its Ottoman past. Under the shadow of nostalgic discourses that unabashedly evoke Ottoman tolerance toward the non-Muslims who lived in the empire, the Janus-faced and inconsistent attitude toward the Christian past history of the land continues. Exploring the contested territory of national identity formation and the complex identities of Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christians in the nineteenth century through the prism of music, this book is a call for a pluralistic society and, more precisely, aims at increasing sensibility both in regard to the issues of ethnic and religious identity in Turkey and to the Christian heritage of the country.

Istanbul

April 18, 2015

Acknowledgments

THE WRITING AND publication of this book have been possible thanks to the support of many colleagues, friends, and institutions. The Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation made possible my first long-term stay and research in Greece, in 2004–2005. I want to thank Maria Pagoni at Foreigners’ Fellowships Programme for her unforgettable kindness and helpfulness. Most important, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for sponsoring the publication of this book. I especially thank Fannie Papathanou and Stella Tatsi for their extreme helpfulness along the way.

Also, my heartfelt thanks go to ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey) for sponsoring my research in Turkey and Greece.

Professor Edhem Eldem has eagerly supported this project from the beginning and has been superbly responsive whenever I needed his support for furthering my research. Several dear colleagues and professors read and commented on earlier drafts. In this regard, I would like to thank Vangelis Kechriotis, Ahmet Ersoy, Christoph K. Neumann, and Katy Romanou. Professor Romanou also deserves sincere thanks for her enormous generosity in providing me with exceptional material from her own library. If I should thank anyone wholeheartedly for inspiring me to make music the object of my historical investigation and engagement, and to bridge amateur musicianship and musicology, it is certainly Cem Behar. Also, I am indebted to Chryssi Sidiropoulou, with whom I enjoyed learning modern Greek.

During the first stage of research that has gone into this book, the faculty members of the History and Archaeology Department of the University of Crete made my stay on their wonderful island and my intellectual development at the university a truly fruitful and unforgettable experience. I am especially indebted to Antonis Anastasopoulos, Efi Avdela, Christos Hadziiossif, Giannis Kokkinakis, Christos Loukos, Socrates Petmezas, and Vasiliki Seirinidou for their valuable comments. I want to offer my warm thanks also to the personnel of the Library of the University of Crete, especially to Eleni Kovaiou and Kostas Papadakis for their prompt help every time I looked for a source in the Closed Access Collections Department. At various stages of my research and travels to Greece, I asked advice from Sia Anagnostopoulou, Stavros Anestidis, Haris Exertzoglou, Christina Koulouri, and Dimitrios Stamatopoulos, whom I remember with gratitude. I have benefited much from Antonis Liakos’s intellectual input, counsel, and encouragement.

During the course of this project I received generous financial support from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), thanks to which I spent the year 2007–2008 in Berlin and continued my research under the supervision of the late Holm Sundhaussen, director of the East European Institute at the Free University, to whom I owe sincere thanks for his hospitality and help. I am indebted to Miltos Pechlivanos for allowing me to attend and present my work at his Modern Greek seminar at the Free University. I had an amazingly fruitful year of research and writing at the program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University in 2011–2012. I am truly obliged to the director of the program, Dimitri H. Gondicas. Parts of the initial draft of this book were read and commented on by Peter Brown and Molly Greene, to whom I owe warm and heartfelt thanks. I am indebted to the Center for European Studies at Harvard University for its hospitality and for giving me the opportunity to discuss my project with valuable colleagues. I also extend my sincere thanks to Michael Herzfeld for his generous support, the CES director, Grzegorz Ekiert, and the executive director, Elaine Papoulias. I enjoyed discussions with Patrice Higonnet, Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels, Jörn Leonhard, Manuel Schramm, and Franziska Torma. I found a genuine critic and a rare office mate and friend in Franziska Torma.

This book is the product of extensive research carried out in numerous libraries and archives. The staff at the library of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, particularly Kosta Çıkar, the late Megas Oikonomos Nikolaos Petropellis, Yorgo Benlisoy, and Yannis Stavridis deserve my genuine thanks. During the course of the project, I visited and did research at the Gennadios Library in Athens more than once, finding each time the same responsive and helpful atmosphere. The density and variety of material used in this book required a search not only in public libraries and archives but also in specialized institutions and bookstores, personal archives, and recording companies. In Athens and Istanbul, I enjoyed the sincere help of Markos Dragoumis, director of the Musical Folklore Archives of the Center for Asia Minor Studies; Stephanie Merakos, director of the Music Library of Greece Lilian Voudouri, The Friends of Music Society, Athens; Hasan Saltık, founder of Kalan Müzik; and Lampros Kostakiotis, owner of Koultoura Publications. In this regard, I am also greatly thankful to Antonios Chatzopoulos, Stelyo Berber, Cemal Ünlü, Bülent Aksoy, Manolis K. Hatziyakoumis, Maria Barbaki, and the late Lukourgos Angelopoulos for their generosity, counsel, and company.

This book could not have been possible without friends who introduced me to contemporary musical life in Greece and the friendships that nurtured my love for and engagement with music and also the continuing rapprochement between the peoples of Greece and Turkey, which I follow with extreme delight and happiness. The fruits of those friendships and the delightfully shared moments of music are in this book. I am grateful to Ourania Liarmakopoulou and her family, Fotini Louka, Sophia Kompotiati, Marios Papakyriacou, and Panagiotis Poulos.

Regarding the book’s publication, I especially thank Mollie K. Ables and Rebecca J. Tolen at Indiana University Press, and John Donohue at Westchester Publishing Services.

Finally, I am thankful to my parents, whose support has been invaluable for the completion of this project.

Parts of this study have been published previously as journal articles: Surveillance, Urban Governance, and Legitimacy in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Spying on Music and Entertainment during the Hamidian Regime (1876–1909), Urban History 40, no. 4 (2013): 706–725 (Cambridge University Press), and The ‘Musical Question’ and the Educated Elite of the Greek Orthodox Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Constantinople, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 32 (2014): 133–163 (Johns Hopkins University Press).

A Note on Pronunciation and Transliteration

In transliterating Greek-script terms, I have rendered Greek characters and the sounds they denote as follows:

Β, β sounds like the English v: transliterated as b

Γ, γ¹ sounds like the silent g in Turkish or the English y: transliterated as g

Ε, ε sounds like the English a: transliterated as e

Θ, θ sounds like the English th: transliterated as th

Η, η sounds like the English e: transliterated as ē

Ξ, ξ sounds like the English ks in exercise: transliterated as x

Υ, υ sounds like the English e: transliterated as u, y

Φ, φ sounds like the English f: transliterated as ph

Χ, χ sounds like the English h: transliterated as ch, kh

Ψ, ψ sounds like the English ps: transliterated as ps

Ω, ω² sounds like the English o: transliterated as ō

Ευ, ευ sounds like the English av in severe: transliterated as ev

Μπ, μπ sounds like the English b: transliterated as b

Ου, ου sounds like the English u in put: transliterated as ou

Ά sounds like uh in understand: transliterated as ha (hence, Άγιος is transliterated as Hagios)

GREEK ORTHODOX MUSIC IN OTTOMAN ISTANBUL

Introduction

IN THE 1990S, Turkish society began to face the ruptures and shifts in its own past, as witnessed by an explosion of cultural productions that celebrated the linguistic and cultural differences within the country.¹ In the press and other media, the public’s interest turned to Turkey’s pre–nation-state past, more precisely to the pluralistic image of the multiethnic and multiconfessional Ottoman society. An important dimension of this revival of interest was the public representation of Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish populations, which became emblematic of a selective nostalgia for the city’s past cosmopolitanism.² Concomitantly, the proliferation of family histories and personal narratives in the public domain presented challenges to national identification practices and national historiography.³ In the course of the last decade, memories of landscapes and neighboring practices in Istanbul among both the majority and minority individuals took on a kind of authority, obscuring other, alternative narratives of history.⁴

A significant aspect of this remembering was the new attention devoted to the lost sounds of those neighbors. For example, Greek rebetika and Jewish maftirim music found a new audience in 1990s Turkey beyond their own traumatized communities.⁵ A historical-sociological analysis of music and sound can help us grasp an alternative and nuanced version of the official history. Sound, due to its abstract and ineffable quality, interacts with human imagination and memory in different ways than do other media—for instance, landscape, which, as Amy Mills has observed, thanks to its materiality, appears neutral and objective and is taken as a mere trace of history.⁶ The listener construes the ideas that sounds represent through the mediation of culture. In the recent and ongoing reinvention of sounds of the past in the whole eastern Mediterranean, including Turkey and Greece but not exclusive to them, lies a search for new bases for constructing identities.⁷ Interestingly, the dominant mode of this recovery has turned out be the study of individual musicians. Philip V. Bohlman has named the phenomenon the power of the singular voice, which draws us to the area between myth and history, to what he has called "the musical lieux de mémoire that are neither minority nor majority, the traces of neither the colonized nor the hegemonic colonizers."⁸

This book had its origins in its author’s participation in the musical dialogue between Turkey and Greece in the early 2000s. It is not possible to replicate the sounds of nineteenth-century Constantinople/Istanbul completely, but by investigating the ideas and discourses surrounding the musical practices of the time, we can gain a sense of the soundscapes of late Ottoman Istanbul. By extension, we can incorporate music and sound into the cultural history of the Ottoman Empire.

Diversity within Diversity: The Greek Orthodox Community of Istanbul

Istanbulite Greek Orthodox showed great diversity in terms of their migration histories, their linguistic, socioeconomic, and cultural differences, and their subject status and nationalities. A prominent group were the Phanariots (or neo-Phanariots as they came to be called, referring to their reconsolidation of power after their persecution during the Greek Revolt of 1821), who traced their origins back to the Byzantine Empire. Influential as they were in the inner politics of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the members of this group also acted as governors of Ottoman lands and as high-ranking officials. Their presence in Istanbul in some cases went back several centuries; most of the relative newcomers originated from an Ottoman province in Europe.⁹ With the Ottoman Empire’s integration into European trade networks in the nineteenth century, the city welcomed Greek merchant families from Europe and Russia. In the 1840s and later, migration from other parts of the empire brought the inhabitants of Rumelia and the Aegean Islands to Istanbul, where they settled at the margins of the city. New immigrant subgroups clustered around their parish churches, often sponsored by the well-to-do of those communities, as exemplified by the churches of Panagia Kaphatianē and Hagios Iōannēs tōn Chiōn in Galata, which were predominantly attended by migrants from Chios.

The Greek Orthodox population in Istanbul, as elsewhere in the empire, was diverse also in terms of legal status and national belonging. While the majority were Ottoman subjects, some were Hellenic subjects or were granted protection by various European states. Language was another dividing factor. In this book, I avoid using the term Greeks in referring to the ethnic-religious group under scrutiny, as not all Orthodox Christians spoke Greek, and, more important, the awareness and expression of an ethnic identity developed over time, and confession was a more significant identity marker than nationality for most of the nineteenth century. As Ottoman subjects were grouped according to confession, a common Christian Orthodoxy subsumed the Bulgarian, Vlach-, Armenian-, and Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians (Karamanlides) under the term Rum millet (millet is the term used for the ethnic-religious community in the Ottoman Empire). Linguistic diversity, besides having more obvious consequences related to the perception of ethnicity, certainly had implications for social identity. Istanbulite Rum may have also seen themselves as different from or privileged with respect to their coreligionists who lived in other parts of the empire. Today’s Istanbulite Rum use self-designations and discourses of social distinction based on the urban-rural division,¹⁰ and some of the divisions of social stratification and cultural clash in the nineteenth century may have had to do with a urban-rural divide as well.

The historian Gerasimos Augustinos identified three complementary worlds of identity through which the Ottoman Greek Orthodox defined themselves until around the end of the eighteenth century: the community, which denoted a circumscribed world centered on notions such as locality and customs; the broader world of the confessional community, or the Rum millet; and the (intellectually) more dynamic world of urban Hellenic culture, which largely interacted with ideas from the West.¹¹ As Augustinos eloquently noted, the founding of the Hellenic nation-state broached a new world of identity that encompassed all three previous realms of identity in a new formulation. With the onset of nationalism, and even more with the founding of a nation-state that spoke for the nation, the traditional religion- and ethnicity-based solidarities were enormously transformed.

It would be misleading, then, to imagine nineteenth-century Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox community as a unified, monolithic collectivity whose members’ solidarity and familiarity with each other can be taken for granted. Because of their socioeconomically differentiated cultural practices and consumption choices, the Greek Orthodox had diverse everyday life experiences and worldviews. Especially among the upper classes, a cosmopolitan common culture acted as a catalyst for class formation that eventually transcended traditional solidarities of a religious or ethnic nature.¹²

The chronological focus of this book begins around the time of the Reform Edict promulgated in 1856, when the administration of the Rum millet underwent significant changes and major shifts occurred in the power relations within the Greek Orthodox community. By promulgating the edict, the Ottoman government reassured the Great Powers that it would pursue the reforms that had begun with the Tanzimat (Turkish for reorganization or ordering). The term refers to the period of reforms in the Ottoman Empire (1839–1876, collectively known as the Tanzimat) in 1839 regarding the equality of its subjects beyond ethnic and religious divisions. The Tanzimat statesmen had envisioned a reform of unprecedented scope that would bring forth a new order, with its ambitious project of centralization, bureaucratization, and modernization of the administration of various domains, such as justice, finance, and conscription. The changes in the realm of millet administration were translated as the redefinition of the concept of millet and the boundaries of the ethnic-religious community. The change in the ideals and concepts of governance and the reorganization of the Ottoman non-Muslim communities were closely linked with the empire’s changing position in European diplomacy, its new geopolitical alliances, and the emergence of new groups who benefited from the socioeconomic change that came along with the empire’s integration into large European–Mediterranean trade networks.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the evolving social and economic constitution of the Ottoman port cities led to the appearance of new institutions in public life and to the modernization of those cities and their inhabitants.¹³ The process through which new government buildings, places of worship, cultural associations, piers, parks, and squares were constructed provides us with clues about the notions of urban governance, the competing social groups, and the use and aesthetics of the city spaces. As music performance and hearing are embedded in space and require a space in order to be fully realized, space will be part of my analysis of musical discourse in this book.

By the 1860s, ethnic separatist movements and anti-Greek sentiment among the Balkan (Slav) Orthodox began challenging the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarchate in Istanbul. Greek musical discourse will be analyzed in this study over the span of roughly sixty years, beginning in the 1860s and concluding at a conventional historiographical frontier in 1922, the end of the Greek-Turkish War. In accord with the Lausanne Convention of the Lausanne Treaty, signed on January 30, 1923, around a half-million Muslims of Greece were exchanged for up to 1.2 million Orthodox Christians of Turkey. Even though the Orthodox Christians of Istanbul and the islands of Gökçeada/Imbros and Bozcaada/Tenedos were exempted from the population exchange, contrary to the treaty over ten thousand Orthodox Christians were also expelled from Istanbul.¹⁴ In the Turkish Republic, the major communities of non-Muslims gave up their communal privileges to become equal citizens, yet the new terminology designated them as minorities, a legal status defined on the basis of religion. The fact that immediately after the war the Turkish delegation at the international convention demanded the deportation of the Patriarchate shows how precarious the future might have seemed to Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox population.¹⁵

The calamities of the twentieth century erased the marks of a long-existing and significant Greek Orthodox presence in Istanbul. Between 1844 and 1856, the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul increased from roughly 21 to 25 percent of the city’s population, which remained until 1880 predominantly non-Muslim.¹⁶ A population estimate for 1897 based on ethnic distribution counted Greeks as 236,000 constituting a significant portion of the 1,059,000 inhabitants of the city.¹⁷ Despite significant differences between Ottoman scholars’ assessments of the Muslim population around 1900, by 1906 the Greek Orthodox with respect to the Muslim population was represented by the ratio of two to five, constituting one-fifth of Istanbul’s population. For the 1910s, notwithstanding some variations, the results of different censuses roughly agree that Greeks who lived in Istanbul and its environs were 242,000 to 319,000.¹⁸

The Greek Orthodox were mainly concentrated in the European commercial quarters of Istanbul—namely, Galata, Beyoğlu, Pera (Stavrodromi), and Tatavla. In 1849, 6,000 Greeks constituted almost one-fifth of the population of Pera, which was between 28,000 and 30,000.¹⁹ It is hard to determine the exact distribution rates of Greeks within Istanbul’s geography. According to the Greek census of 1910–1912, Greeks who resided in the Pera, Galata, and Tatavla districts numbered 128,412 and hence constituted 40 percent of all the Greeks living in the city of Istanbul.²⁰ This high rate should be taken with some caution given that, as one study for the 1880s stated, only 12 percent of Istanbul’s Greeks resided in Galata as compared to 20 percent of its Armenians and half of its Jews who lived in the district.²¹ Another Istanbul neighborhood with a significant Greek population was Fener (Phanar) across the Golden Horn, whose Greeks clustered around the Patriarchate and the Great School of the Nation/Megalē tou Genous Scholē. Located along the Sea of Marmara, the districts of Samatya (Psōmatheia) and Kumkapı (Kontoskali) had large concentrations of Karamanli (Turcophone) Greeks. Outside the Byzantine walls, down the Marmara shore, through Bakırköy (Makrichori) and Yeşilköy (San Stefano) to Lake Çekmece and Çatalca, there were sizeable Greek communities. Along the Bosphorus, the biggest centers of Greek Orthodox population were Arnavutköy (Mega Revma), Yeniköy (Neochōri), Tarabya (Therapia), and Büyükdere (Bathurruax).

The increase in trade and economic ties with Europe following the Anglo-Turkish Commercial Treaty of 1838 produced emigration to Istanbul from the rural interior and other areas. In the 1840s and 1850s (and even before), there was significant Greek emigration to the Ottoman capital from the Anatolian interior, as well as from Epirus, the Aegean Islands, and the Kingdom of Greece.²² According to the 1885 census report, only one-fourth of the Muslim, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox males then living in the city had been born there.²³ An important group of migrants were seasonal workers. In an exemplary fashion, in the 1880s the number of male workers from the Ionian Islands (Heptanisa) in shipping trade was so high that this created a big gap between the numbers of men and women in the Greek population of Galata.²⁴

Music: A Common Language

For musicians who lived in the Ottoman ecumene, music was a system of knowledge with its own rules—ilm-i musıki (the science of music), as they commonly called it. As recounted by Phanariot Demetrius Cantemir, the son of the prince of Moldavia, Constantine Cantemir, who came to Istanbul in 1688, the Ottoman musical scene showed great diversity in terms of the ethnic, confessional, and social origins of its practitioners. Ottoman Muslim functionaries, Mevlevi dervishes, members of the Phanariot nobility, and artisans of various ethnic origins practiced music together and instructed each other.²⁵

What the late musicologist Eugenia Popescu-Judetz called musical acculturation intensified in the first half of the nineteenth century with attempts to create new musical notations that were the revised versions of older neumatic systems.²⁶ These innovations cannot be attributed to particular individuals or ethnic-religious groups. For example, the inventor of a new system of notation, the Armenian church musician Hampartzum Limondjian, not only practiced Armenian religious music, but was also well versed in melodies and rhythms of Arab-Persian-Ottoman music and mastered Byzantine music and notation as well.²⁷ Likewise, the Metropolitan of Bursa Chrysanthos from Madytos/Eceabat, who is credited with inventing a system of notation—almost simultaneously with Hampartzum—to facilitate the instruction and practice of Greek Orthodox liturgical music, according to some nineteenth-century sources, besides his erudition in European music, also played the ney, the primary instrument of Ottoman Sufi music.²⁸ The archivist of the Patriarchate and eminent Istanbulite intellectual Manouēl Gedeōn tells us that at family gatherings and celebrations, both oriental melodies (Turkish songs) and Orthodox religious chants were performed, due to their shared quality of being familiar to the ears of the past generations of Istanbulite Greeks.²⁹ Arguably, the simple principles of Chrysanthos’s new notation had made it easier for the Greek Orthodox musicians to write and learn the Turkish songs based on the maqam system. In the bilingual and bi-musical song anthologies published by the Karamanli Greeks of Anatolia, Turkish melodies were transcribed in the reformed Byzantine notation, and Turkish texts were printed in Greek script.³⁰

The music debate examined in this book spilled over into the twentieth century, pursued by eminent cantors who continued their singing careers in Istanbul, Athens, or Salonika. Ecclesiastical music’s historical origins, the issue of notation, and the intervals and problems of intonation were fervently discussed among experts on church music. Of course, the age-old debate over polyphonic liturgical music remained a subject of dispute. In the 1920s, the chief cantors at the Patriarchate were still debating the possibility of the harmonization of church hymns without any change in their modal qualities. Eventually, in Istanbul, signed on December 12, 1922, the memorandum prepared and sent by the Ecclesiastical Musical Society of Constantinople to Patriarch Meletios IV condemned the almost ten-year trial of European polyphony in liturgical music.³¹ The results of the polemics were far from being painless for some church musicians; the Lambadarios (chief of the left choir) of the Patriarchate Evstathios Vingopoulos fought hard against the attempts to introduce polyphonic music to Greek Orthodox churches, whose impassioned reaction, though, was punished by Patriarch Meletios IV, who dismissed him from his position.³²

The demographic and psychological plight that Istanbulite Greek Orthodox musicians suffered in the aftermath of 1922 is best demonstrated by the following two examples. Basileios Kamarados was first cantor at the Church of Hagios Dimitrios in Tatavla. In 1922, he had to leave for Greece. As the tragic story goes, Kamarados hanged himself in the church where he was employed in Athens, probably due to the unbearable frustrations of refugee life and expatriation.³³ Cantors losing their jobs because of their Greek citizenship was not uncommon. Due to a law issued in 1924, foreign citizens could not be employed at the Patriarchate, which obligated the Protopsaltis Iakōbos Nafpliōtēs (a Greek citizen) to resign from his position, to which, however, he could return in 1926.³⁴

Music: East and West

The abolition of Ottoman military music along with the janissary corps in 1826 and its replacement by Western music have traditionally been seen as the beginning of unfavorable conditions for the existence of Ottoman music. By the term Ottoman music I refer to the music (based on eastern maqams and rhythms) that prevailed in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire beginning from the sixteenth century. In the following decades, the musical life of the court would change drastically, with important consequences for the patronage of music and, relatedly, its compositional forms, rhythmic structure, and repertoire.³⁵ Crucial to the musical debates examined in this book, similarly to other Ottoman elite groups, the Greek Orthodox urban upper and middle classes embraced Western music as an emblem of their own modernity, the practice and