Miray Cakiroglu | Non Muslim Property, Historical Demand, and the Rum Community in Turkey

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The starting point for my research was the concept of historical demand. To do this, the traces I would follow would be property. In this case, it is the collectively owned property of non-Muslim foundations. I stick with the Turkish term Rum, for what is generally referred to as the Greek-Orthodox population of Istanbul. I do this to distinguish one of the communities native to Istanbul from Greeks from Greece who may be living in Istanbul. I wanted to give the central place to these material signposts and look at the dynamics around them. I wanted to see how Istanbul looks from the perspective of a dwindling community and how the city insinuates into the lives of this community of what is today around 2000 people. I knew it would also direct me to other people, such as lawyers, journalists, and artists. 

            One of the first things that was explicitly clear to me was the problem of demography. It was among the first things I heard during my exchanges in Istanbul. I have imagined it viscerally: a handful of people and the weight of the historical pull of the term Rumness. I do not dissociate our lived present from historical temporalities that are in place. My whole research is motivated by taking a fresh look at continuities. I conceived of the community as more extensive than it is, as I wanted to see the community with the urban contours of the city around them. That is why property became such a proper vantage point for me: seeing properties that do not belong to the community foundations today as part of the wider urban Istanbul that envelops the community today. The question of demography immediately raised the following for me: How does a community envisage the future when it is drastically dwindling? 

            Mainly, my focus is on an Istanbul that is no longer there. Some “ruin.” I was intent on a methodology that involved looking so closely that the scene begins to take a particular form. I was inspired by the method of a movie that uses a cinematographic approach. I wanted to repeat it in my ethnographic methodology, approaching the city without taking its present forms for granted. I set out to follow the heartbeat of a Rum Istanbul. One site for me became the Greek language classroom. 

            What comes into view when we regard a post-imperial city as a ruin? I was living in Istanbul, nearing the May elections, with an eye on Rum Istanbul. Disastrous earthquakes hit southern Turkey in the middle of the fieldwork period. When a civil initiative called for a gathering for mourning, it brought together those in the city and those who fled the region in the earthquake’s aftermath. It also had further meaning because it was hosted in a Rum space and incorporated the mourning rituals of Orthodox Christians from the Antakya region, which suffered the most drastic loss. Suddenly, the conceptual tool of the ruin had taken on a very painful, visceral meaning.

      The term Rum is a word that derives from the word Roman, with a reference to the Eastern Roman Empire. The term’s scope is restricted to describe mainly the Greek-speaking Orthodox citizens of Turkey in Istanbul. Still, Rum used not to be an ethnic but a geographical signifier before the predominant nationalisms in the region made it very difficult to imagine Ottoman sultans considered themselves Romans, too. Arabic-speaking Orthodox from the earthquake-struck Antakya region also refer to themselves as Rum. Quite a few Christian Antakya locals I talked to took the pains to explain to me they, too, used to have sermons in Greek. As the language spoken among the community, Arabic took over in time to replace Greek, they explain, but that does not make them any less Rum; they only happen to be praying in Arabic. Younger people, on the other hand, prefer the Arab-Orthodox as their ethnoreligious identity instead of embracing Rum as an umbrella term.

            The Orthodox community’s foundations, like those in Istanbul, own properties, which provide the singular source of income to support the shared spaces of the Orthodox community and their activities. Like them, they have also been embroiled in the legislation regulating property ownership as institutions that emerged in an imperial context and had to be redefined in a largely mono-ethnic state. Thus, I have reoriented my research to examine how existing property relations might be redefined in the aftermath of a significant loss.