Diverging realities of a Christian vakıf, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the adaptation of the Christian monastic foundations to the Islamic vakıf and to demonstrate the often flexible and equivocal way the term vakıf was applied by the Orthodox monks and the state officials in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The question of the Christian vakıf is important, since a significant part of the agricultural property of many Orthodox monasteries in the Greek lands was vakıf, owned since the Byzantine period and acknowledged as such by the Ottomans, or property acquired during the Ottoman period and characterized as vakıf through the legal procedure or perceived as such by the monks themselves. The article also refers to the importance of the study in a comparative perspective of Greek monastic documents issued in the Ottoman period, since they may contribute to a better understanding of the Ottoman landholding reality.