The Karamanli Alexander
My interest in Karamanlidika studies began with a family question. For some time, my cousin Onur Ertur and I have been trying to trace the history of one of our ancestors, Konyali Hacı Mehmet Efendi. From the information available to us, we estimate that he moved from Konya to Edirne sometime around the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century. Konya lies within the broader central Anatolian geography that figures prominently in the history of the Karamanlis and Karamanlidika. Who was he, where had he come from, and what exactly did the designation Konyali signify?
The last question soon proved much more difficult than the first two.
The deeper one goes into the history of the Karamanlis, the more difficult it becomes to fit the people of the Ottoman Empire into the categories through which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries taught us to understand nationality. Language, religion, alphabet, geography and political belonging did not necessarily coincide. One of the most striking demonstrations of this historical complexity is Karamanlidika: Turkish texts written in the Greek alphabet, produced principally for the Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire.
My encounter with the work of Evangelia Balta came as something of a revelation. What initially attracts attention as Turkish written in Greek characters soon opens a window onto the cultural history of the Ottoman Empire.
I subsequently made Karamanlidika part of our discussion of Rebetiko on the YouTube program Kafa Kafaya. Music, language, migration, religion and urban experience crossed the political boundaries that later histories often imposed retrospectively upon them.
Since then, I have become alert to almost anything concerning Karamanlidika. It was thanks to my friend Athos Charalambous that I encountered Artemis Papatheodorou's recently published article, “A Greco-Turkish Alexander the Great: The Karamanli Phyllada from 1843.”
Papatheodorou's study deserves particular attention. Her subject is a remarkable 336-page book published in Constantinople in 1843: a Turkish translation, printed in Greek characters, of the Greek Phyllada tou Megalexandrou, a popular account of the life and adventures of Alexander the Great.
Papatheodorou asks where this “Karamanli Alexander” came from, which Alexander tradition it belonged to, who translated and published it, how closely its translator followed his source, who was expected to read it and, ultimately, what cultural and moral purpose the book was intended to serve.
At the center of her investigation stands a bookseller, bookbinder, publisher and translator from Ankara named Agapios Papazoglou.
Karamanlidika and the Problem of Categories
“Karamanlidika” refers broadly to manuscripts and printed works in Turkish written with Greek characters. The corpus includes religious books, secular literature, newspapers, periodicals, educational works, medical publications, translations and community documents. The history of Karamanlidika printing extends back centuries, although sustained publication developed particularly from the eighteenth century onward.
The Turkish-speaking Orthodox populations of Anatolia inhabited a cultural environment in which Turkish could be the language of everyday communication, Greek characters could be used for written Turkish, and Orthodox Christianity provided an important framework of communal affiliation. Their literary world could simultaneously contain Orthodox religious texts, Greek literary traditions and stories circulating widely in Turkish-speaking Ottoman society.
Balta's work is especially revealing in this respect. Turkish-speaking Orthodox readers were not confined to texts originating in Greek. Popular narratives such as Köroğlu, Aşık Garip, Şah İsmail and the stories of Nasreddin Hoca also entered the Karamanlidika world. The relevant cultural landscape was therefore neither exclusively “Greek” nor exclusively “Turkish” in the meanings these terms later acquired.
Karamanlidika studies belong simultaneously to Ottoman history, Greek and Turkish literary history, translation studies, book history, the history of Christianity in Anatolia, sociolinguistics and the history of nationalism.
One particularly revealing work is Evangelinos Misailidis' Temaşa-i Dünya ve Cefakâr u Cefakeş, published in four volumes in 1871–1872. Misailidis transformed his source through changes of language, setting, narrative structure and the incorporation of material drawn from Ottoman oral and written traditions. Temaşa-i Dünya consequently demonstrates precisely what makes Karamanlidika important: translation could also be appropriation, transformation and cultural production.
The nineteenth-century Karamanlidika corpus also reveals a gradual broadening of reading interests. Balta's bibliographical work shows that during the decade 1841–1850 secular publications exceeded religious ones for the first time, with twelve secular works against nine religious publications. The Karamanli reader was increasingly being addressed not only as a Christian requiring religious instruction but also as a reader interested in literature, knowledge, entertainment and the wider world.
It is at precisely this historical juncture that Papatheodorou places the book she studies. The Karamanli Alexander appeared in 1843, within the first decade in which secular Karamanlidika publications had begun to outnumber religious ones. Alexander's arrival in Karamanlidika was part of a larger transformation of the printed material available to Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians.
What Papatheodorou does is to present a case study in how a literary tradition moves between languages.
Artemis Papatheodorou's Alexander
Papatheodorou's approach begins much earlier than 1843. To understand what Papazoglou translated, she first has to establish the genealogy of the text itself. This takes the reader back to the vast tradition conventionally known as the Alexander Romance: fictionalised compilations of Alexander's life and deeds that developed in Greek in the centuries following his death in 323 BC.
Papatheodorou asks which Alexander reached the Turkish-speaking Orthodox reader of 1843.
The textual history is long and complicated. Different recensions of the Alexander Romance circulated and were repeatedly reworked. One branch eventually contributed to the Greek popular tradition from which the Phyllada tou Megalexandrou emerged. Papatheodorou follows this transmission in order to identify the literary ancestry of Papazoglou's translation.
This textual genealogy matters because Alexander had long ceased to belong exclusively to the history of ancient Macedonia. The literary Alexander travelled far beyond the territories conquered by the historical king. As the stories migrated, different societies appropriated him, changed him and sometimes transformed his religion, ancestry and moral purpose.
Papatheodorou places the Karamanli Alexander within a much wider comparative geography of Alexander traditions. Her analysis ranges beyond Greek and Ottoman literature to demonstrate how extraordinarily adaptable the figure had become.
The question facing her is consequently not simply how Alexander was translated into Turkish. It is which of these many Alexanders Papazoglou chose to translate. Her answer is one of the most important findings of the article.
A Bookseller from Ankara
Agapios Papazoglou was originally from Ankara but lived in Constantinople, where he operated a bookbinding business at Sümbüllü Han near the Grand Bazaar. He also sold books, notebooks and other stationery.
Papatheodorou's reconstruction of his activities is important because it restores the material infrastructure behind Karamanlidika culture. Books do not circulate through ideas alone. They require translators, printers, financiers, binders, sellers and readers. Papazoglou occupied several of these positions simultaneously.
The surviving pages of the 1843 publication itself allow Papatheodorou to recover something of this commercial world. In 1843–1844, customers visiting Papazoglou's establishment at Sümbüllü Han could obtain not only the Alexander volume but other Karamanlidika books and pamphlets, many of them religious. Papatheodorou even compares this mixture of bookbinding, bookselling and stationery with the economics of nineteenth-century bookselling elsewhere: a specialist bookseller could rarely depend on the sale of new books alone.
Papazoglou's publishing activities were not confined to Alexander. Among the secular works associated with him were Pythia (Athens, 1840), Collection of Various Dialogues (Athens, 1840), Masaliye Hekayetir (Athens, 1840; again in 1867), İrfan-name (Constantinople, 1846) and Holera Risalesi (1848). He also published the religious İbadetname in Constantinople in 1844. Balta has also drawn attention to the İrfan-name, which brought moral tales and translated European material into the Karamanlidika reading world.
Papatheodorou's reconstruction consequently allows Papazoglou to emerge as something more interesting than a translator. He belonged to the infrastructure through which ideas circulated. He bound books. He sold them. He published them. He translated them. In 1843, he made an extraordinary choice. He gave Turkish-speaking Orthodox readers Alexander the Great.
Which Alexander?
There was, of course, no single Alexander by the nineteenth century. The historical Alexander died in 323 BC. The literary Alexander continued travelling for more than two millennia. The collection conventionally called the Alexander Romance developed through successive Greek recensions and subsequently travelled through numerous languages and religious environments. As it travelled, Alexander was repeatedly reconstructed according to the moral, political and theological needs of different communities.
In Persian and Islamic traditions, Alexander could become Iskandar or İskender and acquire characteristics very different from those found in Greek traditions. In the Malay Archipelago, the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain transformed him into a Muslim ruler and warrior of the faith. The narrative's negative representation of Buddhism was meaningful in a society in which Islam was expanding in an environment where Buddhism had previously been influential.
This comparative dimension in Papatheodorou's article is crucial. The Malay example demonstrates what could happen when Alexander entered a new religious and linguistic environment: the receiving culture could substantially remake him. He could become Muslim, acquire a different genealogy and fight the religious enemies relevant to his new audience. The Ottoman world likewise possessed its own rich İskender tradition.
At this point, Papatheodorou considers whether the 1843 book might represent an Anatolian variation involving intertextual borrowing between the Ottoman Turkish and Karamanli Alexander traditions. Might Papazoglou have borrowed from Ottoman Turkish İskendername traditions while translating the Greek material? Given that Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Anatolia demonstrably shared elements of local culture, the possibility cannot simply be dismissed in advance.
Her conclusion is striking. The Karamanli Alexander appears to derive essentially from the Greek tradition, and specifically from the Phyllada. There is no persuasive evidence that Papazoglou constructed his Alexander through significant borrowing from the Ottoman Turkish Alexander tradition.
Papazoglou apparently did not take an Ottoman Turkish İskendername and reproduce it for Orthodox readers in Greek letters. Papatheodorou's textual comparison, building also on Sfoini's earlier analysis, indicates instead that his source was the Greek Phyllada tou Megalexandrou, itself descended from the Greek Alexander Romance tradition. Papazoglou translated the Phyllada into Turkish.
His Alexander was not the Islamised Alexander found in some eastern traditions. Nor did he acquire the Persian royal genealogy found in Persian Alexander literature. Papazoglou retained the principal characteristics of the Greek Phyllada, while simplifying some passages, expanding others and occasionally reorganising chapter divisions and titles. The Greek genealogy of the narrative remained intact while its presentation was adjusted for another readership.
Its literary genealogy is Greek. Its language is Turkish. Its alphabet is Greek. Its place of publication is Ottoman Constantinople. Its principal readership is Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christian. Its protagonist belongs to a literary tradition that had already circulated across much of Eurasia.
Translation as Cultural Choice
Translation is never merely the mechanical replacement of words in one language with words in another.
Papazoglou's decision tells us something about the community he imagined as his readership. The Phyllada was popular among Ottoman Greeks. By translating it into Turkish in Greek characters, Papazoglou made that literary tradition available to Orthodox Christians who participated in the same religious and, to varying degrees, cultural universe but did not necessarily possess sufficient Greek to read the original comfortably.
Here again Papatheodorou moves beyond textual comparison and asks who actually received the book. The 1843 edition contains information concerning its subscribers, allowing her to reconstruct something of the social geography of its circulation. More than 1,000 copies were pre-ordered, with subscribers concentrated especially in Cappadocia.
Papatheodorou then asks a further question: why Alexander?
The book had a didactic purpose. Alexander was presented not merely as an entertaining conqueror but as a repository of virtues. Papatheodorou places this dimension within a broader culture of moral improvement and enlightenment. The classical formula historia magistra vitae (history as the teacher of life) captures part of this function. Reading about exemplary lives was expected to improve the reader.
An earlier Karamanlidika translation makes this sense of collective affiliation particularly visible. In the preface to a Karamanlidika edition of Aristotle's Physiognomics published in Constantinople in 1819, Anastasios Karakioulafis of Kayseri referred to Hellas as his “most beloved homeland” while addressing Turkish-speaking Orthodox readers.
Papatheodorou reads Papazoglou's project within this broader educational environment. The choice of Alexander was not culturally neutral. The hero's virtues could be offered to readers as examples to imitate. The book sought to make its audience better people and better Christians and, through individual improvement, contribute to the advancement of the community.
Papatheodorou connects his publishing project both to the continuing influence of the Hellenic Enlightenment among Ottoman Orthodox Christians and to the reformist atmosphere associated with the Tanzimat.
The Hellenic Enlightenment is often treated as ending with the establishment of the Greek state. Papatheodorou cautions against applying that chronology too rigidly to Ottoman Greeks. Among Orthodox populations remaining within the Ottoman Empire, educational and intellectual currents associated with enlightenment continued well into the nineteenth century.
At the same time, the Tanzimat opened another discourse of reform, rationalisation and progress within the Ottoman political environment. Karamanlidika publishing developed amid both processes.
The later Karamanli periodical Mekteb'ül Fennuni Maşrıki (the “School of Oriental Knowledge”), published in Smyrna in 1849–1850, is another manifestation of this appetite for knowledge and education. Papazoglou's 1843 Alexander thus belongs to a broader intellectual environment rather than standing as an isolated literary experiment.
Were These Really Two Separate Worlds?
Karamanlidika is often described as a bridge between Greek and Turkish cultures. Balta herself has repeatedly emphasised the interactions among the literary and publishing cultures of the Ottoman Empire.
Papatheodorou's formulation is particularly evocative. The Turkish-speaking Orthodox were capable of bridging the Turkish- and Greek-speaking worlds, and the Karamanli Alexander itself embodied that capacity. It was, in her formulation, essentially the Phyllada tou Megalexandrou in Greco-Turkish translation, Greek in script and Turkish in language.
Modern nationalism has profoundly influenced the categories through which Ottoman history is subsequently read. Once Greek and Turkish became powerful national classifications, it became tempting to search backwards for their earlier boundaries. Language, religion, alphabet and ethnicity were progressively expected to line up.
Karamanlidika presents a problem for this retrospective order.
A Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christian reading Alexander in Turkish written with Greek letters may appear “hybrid” to us because we have inherited categories according to which Turkish language, Greek alphabet and Orthodox religion seemingly belong to different national containers. But there is no reason to assume that the nineteenth-century reader experienced the combination with the same sense of contradiction.
Karamanlidika readers could encounter the Greek Alexander while also knowing Köroğlu, Aşık Garip, Şah İsmail and Nasreddin Hoca. Misailidis could take a Greek novel and rewrite it through Ottoman settings, expressions, anecdotes and folklore. Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Cappadocia could participate in some of the same local customs and celebrations. These were not populations living in hermetically sealed cultural systems.
Significantly, Papatheodorou herself tests the possibility of interaction with the Ottoman Turkish Alexander tradition. Her conclusion that Papazoglou's text does not display significant dependence on that tradition therefore should not be interpreted as evidence that the communities themselves existed in cultural isolation.
Papazoglou's Alexander and the Ottoman Cultural World
Papatheodorou concludes that the 1843 Karamanli Alexander belongs overwhelmingly to the Greek Alexander tradition rather than to the Ottoman Turkish İskender tradition.
Papazoglou's book demonstrates that cultural transmission cannot be reconstructed simply by following languages. If we followed Turkish alone, the book might be incorporated into a history of Turkish literature. If we followed the alphabet, it would move towards Greek bibliography. If we followed religion, it would belong to Ottoman Orthodox history. If we followed its literary genealogy, it would become part of the reception history of the Greek Alexander Romance. If we followed its place of production and readership, it would belong squarely within nineteenth-century Ottoman social history.
All these descriptions are correct. None is sufficient.
Papatheodorou's contribution is valuable. She moves across these classifications. She combines the history of the Alexander tradition with Karamanlidika bibliography, textual comparison, biography, the material history of bookselling and evidence about readership. The 1843 volume consequently becomes evidence about the cultural life of a community.
Karamanlidika studies force us to study the relationships among categories.
Alexander himself is unusually appropriate for such a literature. Few historical figures have crossed as many linguistic, religious and geographical boundaries. Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Syriac, Persian, Arabic, Ottoman and Malay traditions repeatedly appropriated him. Alexander conquered territories during his lifetime. After his death, stories about Alexander conquered cultural worlds that the historical Macedonian never reached.
Papatheodorou begins her conclusion with essentially this paradox. Alexander did not conquer the whole world historically, but his literary legacy reached extraordinarily distant parts of it. From the Malay Archipelago to Ottoman Anatolia and the Balkans, communities repeatedly encountered and reconstructed him.
Unlike the Muslim Alexander of the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, Papazoglou's Alexander did not need to change religion to enter another linguistic world. The literary tradition remained substantially Greek while its language became Turkish.
Beyond Greek and Turkish
What began for me with Konyali Hacı Mehmet Efendi has developed into a much larger historical question.
If we begin with the assumption that every historical population must ultimately be assigned to one modern national category, we risk misunderstanding the past through anachronism. Karamanlidika studies ask us to reconstruct the combinations of language, religion, locality, literacy and communal affiliation that existed before nationalism reorganised many of those relationships.
Temaşa-i Dünya demonstrates this through fiction. Balta's bibliographical work demonstrates it through the extraordinary range of Karamanlidika publishing. Papatheodorou now demonstrates it through Alexander the Great.
Her contribution is important. By reconstructing its textual genealogy, identifying its relationship with the Greek Phyllada, examining Papazoglou's interventions as translator, asking whether the Ottoman Turkish Alexander tradition influenced it, reconstructing its readership and placing its moral purpose within the intellectual environment of the Hellenic Enlightenment and Tanzimat, she has recovered an unusually revealing episode of Ottoman cultural history.
An Ankara-born bookseller, Agapios Papazoglou, working near the Grand Bazaar in Constantinople took a Greek popular account of a Macedonian conqueror, translated it into Turkish, printed the Turkish in Greek characters and sold it to an overwhelmingly Orthodox readership extending deep into Anatolia.
Greek literature did not necessarily require the Greek language. Turkish did not necessarily indicate Muslim readership. Greek characters did not necessarily indicate a Greek-language text. Orthodox communal affiliation did not prevent participation in a Turkish-speaking cultural environment. Translation did not necessarily mean moving a story from one neatly bounded national culture into another.
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