Ottoman Port Cities of the Modern Mediterranean | Malte Fuhrmann

Ottoman History Podcast

E500 | At the turn of the twentieth century, Ottoman port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were sites of vibrant cultural encounters. While infrastructural innovations at docks and quays reshaped the urban waterfront, the inhabitants of Izmir, Istanbul, and Salonica engaged with new forms of entertainment arriving from Europe. Operas, balls, and beerhouses changed the way people mingled and interpreted coexistence and diversity in their urban environment. Migrants from Europe and from the hinterlands of major port cities created an original form of Ottoman Mediterranean modernity. This cosmopolitan urban culture was alluring and festive but also had its discontents, who denounced it as decadent and servile to European imperialism. Exploring the everyday life of late Ottoman port cities reveals an effervescent lapse of time in which notions such as modernity, Europe, empire, and nation could be experienced in manifold ways, before the major conflicts of the twentieth century gave a fatal blow to Mediterranean urban diversity. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/04/ports.html Malte Fuhrmann is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin specializing in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, and Southeast Europe. Besides Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020) he has published numerous articles, edited volumes, and monographs, including Konstantinopel – Istanbul. Stadt der Sultane und Rebellen (Constantinople – Istanbul: City of Sultans and Rebels), Frankfurt (M.): Fischer 2019, and The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, London: Routledge 2011, a volume edited together with Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi, Florian Riedler. Malte is currently working on a comparison of development discourse in modern Bulgaria and Turkey. Andreas Guidi is Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz, Germany. After his joint Ph.D. at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, he is preparing a monograph tentatively entitled “Youth between Empires: Generations, Fascist Colonialism, and the post-Ottoman Mediterranean in Rhodes”. His post-doc project investigates how smugglers and illegal trade contributed to constructing a transnational modern Mediterranean. Zeynep Ertuğrul is a PhD student at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is working on a dissertation project entitled “Preaching the Republic: The Spokespeople of the Single-Party Regime in Turkey.” CREDITS Episode No. 500 Release Date: 1 April 2021 Recording Location: Berlin Audio editing by Zeynep Ertuğrul and Andreas Guidi Music: Turku - "Bir demet Yasemen"; Maria Papagika - "Ti se melei esenane" Audio elements: "A quiet seaside seagulls distant", "Waves at the edge of Bosphorus", "Bbc News Sound Effects Tape (Old) - boat - ships sirens", "A night in Athens". Images and bibliography courtesy of Malte Fuhrmann available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/04/ports.html