Cihannüma: Tarih ve Coğrafya Araştırmaları Dergisi

23-43

Authors: Stefania Costache

The life and political career of Manuk Mirzayan (d. 1817), the Armenian money-lender and acolyte of Mustapha Pasha Bairaktar, the ayan of Ruscuk, presents a good case of study of a Ottoman-Russian middleman of the early 19th century Balkans. As a product of the complicated internal and international problems of the Ottoman Balkans, he aptly managed to survive amongst the conflict between two empires and even benefited from the international conflicts as a middleman. By tracing his activities from Ruscuk to Bessarabia, this paper argues that Manuk’s decisions can be considered as strategies to improve his status and secure his life in an environment about which he could only speculate but which clearly favored agents who could cater to the competing interests of different empires and political factions.

71-94

Authors: Can Nacar

Mersin was a small village in the mid-19th century. However, within about fifty years, it became an important Eastern Mediterranean port city. By the early 20th century, its population had reached 15,000, volume of trade had multiplied, and transportation infrastructure had been improved. As an outcome these developments, wealth began to pour in Mersin. However, at the same time, the city began to witness disputes over the distribution of wealth. This study examines one such dispute that erupted in the summer of 1905 and involved the owners of boat companies, their workers, and artisans who were ferrying cargoes between the piers and ships anchored offshore. It sheds some important light on how claims for a greater share of the pie fostered conflicts, and alliances between people from different social classes in Mersin.

109-122

Authors: Filiz Tütüncü Çağlar

The history of Ottoman archaeology is yet to be written. The existing scholarship is lacking an exhaustive account on the subject and is in need of a critical outlook to the current discourse. There is ample literature taken into account by Turkish historians on the history of the Ottoman Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümayun) with a particular focus on the period following Osman Hamdi Bey’s appointment as director of the museum in 1881. Turkish archaeologists, on the other hand, have remained remote to the early history of archaeology prior to the Republican era due to practical and ideological reasons. As a result, the field has been dominated by historians, whose approaches and areas of interest greatly differ from those of archaeologists. The concentration of historiographical interest on Osman Hamdi Bey and his role in the protection of antiquities lying in the Ottoman territory has overshadowed the merits and contributions of other pioneering figures in the field, most of whom with more in-depth knowledge and substantial technical expertise on archaeology. This paper aims to draw attention to the major issues prevalent in the Turkish historiography of Ottoman archaeology and calls for expanding the sources and areas of study in the field. Writing the disciplinary history of archaeology in Turkey is not an easy task; it requires language skills – the majority of the archival sources are in Ottoman Turkish, familiarity with historical methodology as well as a good understanding of archaeological method and theory. Thus, it is essential to engage archaeologists in the field and integrate different strands of evidence obtained from both literary and archaeological sources in order to produce an accurate narrative of the history of Ottoman archaeology.

173-182

Authors: Gürol Pehlivan

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