Athens-Asini Publications recently announced the publication of Christine Philliou’s and Elias Kolovos’s Naming Non-Muslims: A Guide to Reading Greek, Armenian and Jewish Male Names in Ottoman Sources.
This important book is a reference work intended as a resource for researchers working with Ottoman sources on non-Muslim communities — Armenians, Greeks, Slavs and Jews. The main body consists of separate lists of Greek (primarily Greek Orthodox, including some Slavic names), Armenian and Jewish/Hebrew names. For each entry, the Ottoman spelling is followed by a transliteration into Latin characters, the standard form of the name in its source language (Greek, Slavic, Armenian, or Hebrew), commentary on the name’s meaning and variants and relevant bibliographical references.
The impetus for the book was the widespread misspelling, misreading and consequent misidentification of non-Muslim names in Ottoman sources by researchers unfamiliar with the languages from which those names originated. The authors maintain that accurately identifying and spelling the names of non-Muslims is a key prerequisite for understanding who they were as unique individuals rather than reducing them to nameless members of religious or ethnic communities. The lists are preceded by an introduction by Philliou and a preface by Kolovos, which discuss the value of Ottoman population registers for the study of Armenians, Greeks and Jews in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and emphasize the importance of reading their names accurately.
According to Philliou and Kolovos, one of the greatest obstacles to researching and writing the history of Armenians and other non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire is the difficulty of deciphering their names in Ottoman Turkish, which was itself written in Arabic script. The spelling of non-Arabic names was often improvised within a writing system not designed to represent them. As a result, unless a researcher already has some idea of what a particular name might be, it can be extremely difficult — and sometimes impossible — to identify it correctly. Most Turkish scholars today do not know Armenian, let alone Greek or Hebrew, while non-Turkish scholars may know one of these languages in addition to Turkish, but very few researchers possess expertise in all of them.
“We used a particular population register from 1821 to compile our list of names, focusing on the Bazaar of Istanbul’s Old City, where we found thousands of Armenians, who had by far the largest presence among the three non-Muslim groups,” the authors explain. “This alone provides grounds for further fascinating research on Armenians in the Ottoman capital as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
The book includes an extensive list of the historical names of Armenian, Greek and Jewish individuals who lived quite literally alongside one another in the khans of Ottoman Istanbul and in Galata, Yeniköy, Emirgan and Boyacıköy — all areas surveyed in the unique 1821 register studied by the authors. These individuals brought with them naming practices from across the provinces of the Ottoman Empire while simultaneously interacting with and influencing one another through everyday life, including, potentially, in their naming practices. In this sense, the names recorded in the register provide not only a practical tool for identifying individuals in Ottoman sources but also an important point of departure for investigating migration, community formation, cultural interaction and everyday life in nineteenth-century Istanbul.
