Karamanlidika Literary Production in the Mid-nineteenth Century

Abstract

Up until the beginning of the twentieth century when various nation-states were founded on the empire’s shrinking territories, the Ottoman Empire could be described as a multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural society. One segment of this multicultural society was Turcophone Orthodox Christians of Anatolia, also known as Karamanlides or Karamanli, 1 living mostly in the interiors of Asia Minor in the wider Cappadocia region. The language of this community was Turkish and the written language was called Karamanlidika (Karamanlıca in Turkish), which was Turkish in Greek script. 2 Karamanlidika was one of many other hybrid languages in the empire—that is, languages and scripts intermingled in various combinations, such as Armeno-Turkish, Greek in the Arabic alphabet (Al-Jamiado), Greek in the Hebrew alphabet, and so on. 3 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, newspapers and periodicals circulating in various languages and alphabets became one of the fundamental tools and arenas of expression of ideas as well as literary production, 4 especially due to serialized novels and short stories. 5 This was also relevant for the Turkophone Orthodox Christians of the empire. Literary activities of the community were bounded by a couple of historical and social developments in the mid-nineteenth century. As Stefo Benlisoy puts forward in one of his articles, due to the increased educational and professional opportunities emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, a local, non-cleric, intellectual stratum composed of professionals like lawyers, doctors, teachers, and even state officers had emerged among the Turkophone Orthodox Anatolians, who created for themselves tools of expressions such as the press. 6 In the same period, the fact that they were Turcophones started to be problematized and treated as an anomaly by the ecclesiastic and secular Greek leadership and so the identity of Anatolian Orthodox Christians was called into question. This was also due to Balkan nationalisms that introduced language as the most important “objective” criterion in determining nationhood. 7 Turcophony began to be associated with the name Karamanli and being “uncivilized,” “uneducated,” and “rude,” 8 which affected also the discourse on literary production. Throughout the nineteenth century, there was also a flow of immigration from Orthodox settlements of Cappadocia to places of economic opportunity like Istanbul and Izmir, where the newcomers continued to be in touch with the central Anatolian homeland and the local notables, especially with the help of the associations founded in large cities 9 that focused on the welfare and enlightenment of the remaining people in the hometowns. This strong tie between the urban centers and the hometowns in Cappadocia had a direct effect on the literary production in Karamanlidika in terms of the language and the circulation of the novels.