What makes a person Turkish or Greek? Is it the land where they were born? The language they speak? The religion they practice? The state of which they are a citizen? Or the community to which they feel they belong? From today's perspective, many people might regard these as questions with straightforward answers. Yet, for many people living during the final century of the Ottoman Empire, categories such as territory, language, religion, citizenship, and communal belonging we

Following military defeats in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire modeled its institutions on Europe, making Western music a cultural extension of its modernization program. The musical transformation within the palace went beyond merely adopting new instruments, notation systems, or compositional forms. The Ottoman dynasty engaged in a multi-layered network of relationships involving European composers, virtuosos, opera institutions, music publishers, aristocratic patrons,

Introduction With a settlement history spanning more than 2,500 years, Stratonikeia is one of the rare places where the Carian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Beylik, Ottoman, and Republican periods can all be traced within the same geographical setting. The significance of Stratonikeia lies not merely in the succession of civilizations that once inhabited the site, but in the remarkable way the traces they left behind continue to coexist and interact within the same landscap

Introduction Few cities in world history have been claimed with such persistence, intensity, and moral conviction as Constantinople. Across centuries, the city has stood at the intersection of empire, religion, and civilizational identity. It has been imagined not merely as a strategic location, but as a symbolic center whose possession confers historical legitimacy. These symbolic meanings did not remain abstract. They were repeatedly translated into political claims. In the

For over four centuries, the Ottoman Empire governed population movement as a routine component of administrative order. Warfare, fiscal extraction, frontier security, environmental pressures, and centralized planning continuously displaced and recombined populations across Anatolia, the Balkans, the Black Sea steppe, and the Caucasus. In this context, mobility functioned not as an exceptional disruption but as a regular instrument of imperial governance . Through sustained

Abstract This article examines the major population movements that reshaped Anatolia and Rumelia between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on the political and institutional context outlined in Ottomans and Karamanids , it analyzes the long-term repercussions of Ottoman expansion, the application and evolution of forced relocation (sürgün), the demographic effects of the Celâlî rebellions, migrations driven by Ottoman–Safavid frontier dynamics, and the large-

Folk literature and music represent one side of the Ottoman society’s cultural life. The daily life of the rural population, its poverty,...