Phanariot Materialities: Domestic Architecture, Urban Culture, and Social Mobility

The International Symposium “Phanariot Materialities: Domestic Architecture, Urban Culture, and Social Mobility” is part of an overarching three-year research program with the same title and focuses on the material and social history of the Phanariots. These Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, Istanbul-based mercantile elites attained prominence in the Ottoman administration by serving as imperial dragomans and rulers of Moldavia (Boğdan) and Wallachia (Eflak) under Ottoman suzerainty. While nationalist historiographical traditions have often criticized the Phanariots as disloyal and “materialistic,” it is telling that their actual material culture and milieu has not been soberly appraised. 

Recent scholarship has effectively challenged the conventional definition of the Phanariots as an exclusively elite group by underlining its extensive, highly stratified, and polysemous character. As an Ottoman “network of power,” the Phanariots may be studied through the lens of a specifically spatial framework: one that starts from their residences on the Phanar waterfront in the northwestern part of the walled city and the Bosphorus and extends throughout the Mediterranean, the Danubian principalities, and other major urban centers. The wide geographical reach of this vast political, religious, intellectual, and economic network, together with the remarkable social and physical mobility of the Phanariots, requires an appropriate research focus that builds on collaborations across a variety of disciplines and national historiographies. Therefore, this symposium facilitates an interdisciplinary discussion on Phanariot material culture, with a particular focus on residential architecture, urbanism, family and households, communalities, neighborhoods, domesticity, etiquette, and performativity. By bringing together an array of scholars from Turkey, Greece, Romania, and beyond, we hope to approach the Phanar not only as an urban neighborhood or ecclesiastical center but also as the heart of a spatial network extending far beyond Istanbul or even the former Ottoman territories.  

The symposium’s time frame consists of the “long” eighteenth century, a period from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The mid-seventeenth century marks a major turning point for the history of the Ottoman Empire and Moldo-Wallachia, as well as the city of Istanbul. Half a century after the transfer of the Patriarchate to the Petrion Castle on the Golden Horn, Phanar had already emerged as the educational and cultural center of the Greek Orthodox population in the Ottoman Empire and a mercantile elite neighborhood when, for the first time, semi-masonry houses started to appear on the waterfront, with some of them belonging to Moldo-Wallachian notable families. Greek mercantile elites began to rise in the Ottoman state apparatus as personal physicians of viziers and as dragomans. Former Byzantine, Moldo-Wallachian, and newly emerging Greek-Orthodox elites converged over political alliances and intermarriage, culminating in the Danubian hospodariats. The mid-nineteenth century, in turn, marked the terminus of these developments. While the 1821 Greek War of Independence led to the fall from grace of the Phanariots, the Crimean War and the Paris Congress brought about the end of Ottoman suzerainty over Moldavia and Wallachia. The so-called Neo-Phanariots began to move away from Phanar, since the neighborhood had been irreversibly deprived of its former elite character and settlement patterns. For our purposes, therefore, the long eighteenth century may be studied as a period of Phanariot ascendency, as reflected and observable in a refined, complex, and multilayered material culture. 

Conveners: Namık Günay Erkal, Firuzan Melike Sümertaş, Haris Theodorelis-Rigas

The symposium, organised in collaboration with Meşher and Sismanoglio Megaro, will be held hybrid in ANAMED Auditorium and on zoom, and is open to general participation.

To participate in the online sessions via Zoom, please click the Zoom Registration button above.

No registration is required for physical participation in the symposium.

The language of the proceedings is English and simultaneous interpretation will be provided in Turkish.