Merih Erol. Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform .

Abstract

Merih Erol’s Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform explores the interrelationship between ecclesiastical music and Greek communal identity during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on debates within the Istanbulite Greek elite about the nature, history, and practice of Orthodox music, the book discusses the place of a distinct cultural sphere in the self-perception and (re)constitution of an ethno-religious community. Erol takes up that issue in conjuncture with the complex processes of modernization and nationalization, from the promulgation of a landmark reform edict (Islahat Fermanι) in 1856 to the final collapse of the Ottoman state by 1922. Our knowledge of Ottoman Christians remains limited and has usually been obscured by ideological biases. Thanks, however, to a relatively new line of scholarship that has gained ground since the 1980s within the “imagined communities” paradigm, we not only know much more about the formation and experiences of the empire’s “non-Muslim” communities, we also think about them in a more critical and comparative fashion. Erol’s elegantly written and lucid examination of Greek music is a most welcome contribution to this recent line of thinking and writing on ethno-religious groups in modernizing empires. What is particularly original about this book is that while historians of Ottoman non-Muslims tend to focus directly on politics, society, or economy, Erol looks at entangled matters of community and nation from the prism of music, a specific cultural domain that is concomitantly formative and reflective of political, ideological, and social relations.