David Selim Sayers

In the midst of the daily toil for food and shelter, the struggle for survival and their daily bread, in indescribably harsh conditions, the Turkish-speaking Anatolian refugees penned poetry whose inner depths portray it all. The death of loved ones during the flight from their native lands, tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria that wiped out many people sheltering in the swamplands, the hunger, the search for shelter, land and a day's wages; the inability of the ill-prepared Greek state to deal with such misery, the political conflicts and passions they observe in bewilderment, ignorant of politicized life; the savage exploitation of the poor and the persecuted by the wealthy opportunist, the daily confrontations and the fierce clashes with the natives over the sharing of the paltry resources, the scurrilous attacks, the local community's suspicion and scornful behaviour towards the refugee, made manifoldin the case of the Turkish-speaking refugee. The collection and publication of these unknown Karamanlidika verses on refugeeism is first and foremost a tribute to their memory.

Amansız koşullarda, başını sokacak bir yer ve karnını doyuracak bir lokma bulma mücadelesiyle geçen gündelik hay huyun ortasında, Türkçe konuşan Anadolulu Ortodoksların kaleme aldığı bu şiirler söz konusu koşulları derinlemesine tasvir eder: Göç yolunda yakınlarını kaybetmeleri, Yunanistan'da sığındıkları bataklıklarla çevrili arazilerde nüfusun büyük bölümünü kırıp geçiren verem, tifo ve sıtma; yiyecek bir lokma için verilen mücadeleler; üstüne muhacirler için doğru düzgün hiçbir hazırlık yapmamış Yunan devletinin, dağ başlarında veya kuş uçmaz kervan geçmez bataklık düzlüklerde kendi başlarına bıraktığı bu insanların seyirci olduğu siyasi çatışmalar ve ihtiraslar; görevlerini yapması gerekirken umursamazlık ve mantıksızlığa boğulmuş hükümet görevlileri; yoksulların vahşice sömürülmesine karşılık, zenginlerin ayrıcalıklı muamele görmeleri; zaten kıt olan kaynakların paylaşımı için yerli halk ile muhacirler arasında çıkan ölümüne çatışmalar, yerlilerin tahkir edici saldırıları ve muhacirlere karşı şüpheci ve tepeden bakan tavırları, Türkçe konuşan Anadolulu Ortodoksların maruz kaldığı pek çok şey arasında ilk akla gelenlerdir. Unutulmuş Karamanlıca şiirleri derleyen bu eser, geri dönüşü olmayan bir gurbete gönderilmiş muhacirlerin bu kubbede kalan hoş sedaları değildir sadece, her şeyden önce onların hatırasına bir saygı ifadesidir.

The Tıflî stories are a corpus of prose fiction produced in the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and often regarded as the main precursor of the Ottoman novel. At a time when Ottoman high literature consisted almost exclusively of epic or mystical poetry, the Tıflî stories depicted the mundane adventures of everyday characters in the actual setting of Istanbul. Remarkably, they introduced techniques of literary realism into Ottoman fiction independently of similar techniques being developed in Western literature.

The book serves two purposes: firstly, it offers a close literary analysis of the stories, establishing the textual evidence that enables us to view them as a genre. Secondly, through a careful application of historical process tracing, it maps each story onto its historical context, demonstrating how changes in the genre go hand in hand with the transformation of Ottoman society from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Containing scholarly analysis as well as transliterations of the stories themselves, Tıflî Hikâyeleri is the first book-length academic study on the genre, and the first work to enable easy access to the primary texts for contemporary audiences and scholars alike.

The sociosexual world of the premodern Middle East has been studied through a variety of sources ranging from legal documents to shadow theater. Most such sources are either prescriptive or transgressive: they uphold or subvert a normative framework, telling us more about the framework itself than about how it was inhabited by subjects in everyday life. This study introduces the Tıfli stories as a descriptive source that transcends the prescriptive–transgressive dichotomy. An Ottoman-Turkish genre of prose fiction produced at least from the 18th to the 20th century, the Tıfli stories were a protorealist form of “pulp fiction.” Where most sources sought to stabilize specific sociosexual roles, the Tıfli stories explored the ambiguities inherent in these roles. This study employs the Tıfli stories to interrogate understandings of the Ottoman sociosexual world that rely strongly on normative sources and to stage an approximation of how norms were negotiated in practice.

How may one define the literature produced by writers of Turkish origin living in Germany? Is it possible to subsume the works in question under such convenient labels as "German literature", "Turkish literature", or "migrant literature"? These debatable questions form the basis of the current investigation. Many are the ways in which this literature has been categorized, and here we will trace these classifications one by one, trying to determine to what extent they do justice to the phenomenon they seek to explain. Starting from the specific examples of writers who trace their roots to Turkey but choose to live and write in Germany, we will reach more general questions: which criteria may form a useful basis for the categorization of literary works? To what extent can any category claim to be all-encompassing? Last but not least, do attempts to classify literary works along, say, national lines, actually add to or subtract from our understanding of them? The picture that will emerge is one of many layers, which any one label signifying either identity or difference is insufficiently capable of accounting for. In fact, the difficulties one faces in trying to define this particular collection of works indicate that even such seemingly clear-cut labels as "German literature" and "Turkish literature" are in need of thorough questioning and revision.

The Leta’ifname is one of the stories counted among the literary corpus known as the “Tıfli stories” in Turkish literary studies. Most of the Tıfli stories were published in book form in the second half of the 19th century.

This article starts out by making some general observations on the relationship between the Tıfli stories and the meddah tradition of oral storytelling. Then, a summary of the Leta’ifname’s frame story as well as the names and the contexts of narration of the 11 interior stories encompassed by the frame story are provided. Departing from the influence of the narrator, audience and context on the text of these stories, an evaluation is made regarding the differences in the narrators’ use of language and the content and length of the stories. In conclusion, it is maintained that the Leta’ifname presents a prime example for Bakhtinian concepts such as polyphony and heteroglossia.

On August 17, 1999, the Izmit region of Turkey suffered an earthquake that claimed the lives of anywhere between twenty thousand and forty thousand people. This paper examines the reaction of the Turkish Islamist press to the catastrophe. By compiling and evaluating all earthquake-related material published by the three Islamist daily newspapers Yeni Şafak, Milli Gazete, and Akit over the course of one month following the disaster, the paper maps out the theodicy presented by these publications, i.e., the way in which they offer a theological explanation for the undeniable suffering caused by the event.

The paper goes on to map the newspapers’ theological position onto earthquake-related passages from the Qur’an itself. It emerges that the punishment narrative favored by the newspapers—the people have strayed from the path of religion and are being punished—indeed finds support in the Qur’an. However, the Qur’an also proposes alternative interpretations of natural disasters, focusing on divine mercy rather than wrath, presenting them as warnings or even value-neutral “tests” rather than punishments. Such Qur’anic pronouncements, however, are much less favored by the Turkish Islamist newspapers than those supporting the punishment narrative.

To account for the newspapers’ preferred interpretation, the paper presents a brief history of secularism in Turkey. Further, it conducts a month-long analysis of Cumhuriyet, a staunchly secularist Turkish daily newspaper, focusing on articles that were published in response to Islamist papers’ interpretations of the earthquake. The emerging picture suggests that the Islamist papers’ preference of the punishment narrative is fueled by the intense polarization of secularist and Islamist public opinion in Turkey, as well as the concomitant tensions and ambiguities that complicate Turkish Muslims’ Islamic identity.

This beautiful object is perhaps best described as a coffee table book dressed as an affordable paperback. Its crisp, shiny paper, vivid illustrations, and gener- ous usage of white space all serve to highlight seven narratives from traditional Anatolia—four devoted to the folk poets Yunus Emre, Pir Sultan Abdal, Köroğlu, and Karacaoğlan, and three featuring popular folk tales.

Research on the Ottoman Empire is a broad field full of intersections: between men, women, and youths; between poetic expression and political action; between languages, cultures, and religions; between peace, war, and genocide; between past and present—and last but not least, from an academic perspective, between history and literature. This six-week international lecture series at the University of Vienna brings together scholars from Turkey, Greece, France, Germany, and Austria to survey this broad field in all its richness and in light of the most current research questions. As its theoretical leitmotiv, the series takes the literary (re-) production of the historical, or the question how history is created, preserved and reinvented by literary means.

Die Forschung zum Osmanischen Reich ist ein weites Feld voller Schnittstellen: zwischen Männern, Frauen und Jünglingen, zwischen poetischem Ausdruck und politischem Handeln, zwischen Sprachen, Kulturen und Religionen, zwischen Frieden, Krieg und Völkermord, zwischen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart—und nicht zuletzt, aus akademischer Sicht, zwischen Geschichte und Literatur. Diese sechswöchige internationale Vortragsreihe an der Universität Wien bringt Forscher aus der Türkei, Griechenland, Frankreich, Deutschland und Österreich zusammen, um diesem weiten Feld in all seinem Reichtum und mit Bezug auf die aktuellsten Forschungsfragen zu begegnen. Als theoretisches Leitmotiv dient dabei die literarische (Re-) Produktion des Historischen oder die Frage, wie Geschichte auf literarische Wege erschaffen, erhalten und wiedererfunden wird.

I will be teaching two undergraduate courses at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul this summer (2016):

POLS 314.01: Politics and Cinema
TKL 382.01: Gender in Ottoman Prose Literature

Please contact me for full syllabi.

Poster design by Evrim Emir-Sayers.

I will be teaching two undergraduate courses at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul this summer (2016):

POLS 314.01: Politics and Cinema
TKL 382.01: Gender in Ottoman Prose Literature

Please contact me for full syllabi.

Poster design by Evrim Emir-Sayers.