Alparslan Episode 27 English Subtitles
Migrations affected population distribution throughout Ottoman history. These movements of peoples occurred for a host of reasons, economic as well as political. Among migrations for economic opportunity can be counted those to coastal Izmir by Ottoman subjects from interior regions and from the nearby islands in the Aegean Sea. There, and at Beirut, Alexandria, and Salonica, the new arrivals joined migrants from across the Mediterranean world – Malta, Greece, Italy, and France.
Thanks to them, the port cities developed a cosmopolitan, multi-lingual “Levantine” culture, more a part of the general Mediterranean world as a whole than the Ottoman Empire in particular. Generally, economic migration to urban centers was a normal and important feature of Ottoman life. Workers often traveled vast distances to work in cities and, after several or more years, returned home, as did, for example, the masons and other construction workers who built the great imperial mosques of Istanbul during the sixteenth and later centuries.
Also, to build railroads in the Balkan, Anatolian, and Arab provinces during the later nineteenth century, workers by the thousands came from afar as well as from nearby areas. And, in patterns that date back centuries and continued until the end of the empire, men trudged on foot for months from humble villages in eastern Anatolia to work as porters and stevedores in far away Istanbul, there setting up communal bachelor quarters. Others came from central and north Anatolian towns to serve as the capital’s tailors or laundrymen.
Like the porters, these remained for several years and were replaced by others from the same village. In the nineteenth century, ethnic Croats and Montenegrins traveled from their northwest Balkan homes to the
coalmines at Zonguldak on the Black Sea, bringing along their long traditions of mining skills, and often settling permanently in the region. In common with economically driven migrations, those for political
reasons often were dramatic and still affect the area today.
Take, for example, the demographic impact of the Habsburg–Ottoman wars, dating from the late seventeenth century and continuing into the eighteenth century. To escape the fighting, Orthodox Serbs migrated from their homes around Kossovo (southern modern-day Yugoslavia) in an intermittent stream northward. Until then, the Kossovo area had been heavily Serb but after they left, Albanians gradually migrated in, filling the empty
spaces. Some Serbs moved into eastern Bosnia, where, consequently, a Muslim majority gave way to an important Christian presence.
Other Serbs continued north and crossed over into the Habsburg lands, for example, after the Ottoman victories in the 1736–1739 war. Here, then, is the Ottoman background to the Bosnian and Kossovo crises of the 1990s.
Many of the other politically compelled migrations elsewhere in the Ottoman world were different in their origins and vastly greater in magnitude. These were triggered by two sets of events.
In the first, Czarist Russia conquered Muslim states around the northern and eastern Black Sea littoral; the Crimean khanate was among them but there were many others. In the second, the Russian and Habsburg states annexed Ottoman territories or promoted the formation of independent states in the western Black Sea littoral and in the Balkan peninsula overall. As these processes unfolded, some Muslim residents fled, not wishing to live under the domination of new masters. Many more, however, suffered forcible expulsion by the Czars and the governments of the newly independent states.
For both, the Muslims were enemies, undesirable “others,” to be removed by whatever means necessary. As a result, Muslim refugees began flooding into the Ottoman world in huge numbers, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Between 1783 and 1913, an estimated 5–7 million refugees, at least 3.8 million of whom were Russian subjects, poured into the shrinking Ottoman state. For example, between 1770 and 1784, some 200,000
Crimean Tatars fled to the Dobruja, the delta of the Danube.
Still more fled during the period around World War I; in 1921, for example, up to 100,000 refugees overwhelmed Istanbul, most of them from Russia. Many refugees fled once, then again, settling elsewhere in the Ottoman Balkans, only to leave again when that area became independent. Another example: some 2 million people left the Caucasus region, for destinations in the Ottoman Balkans (some 12,000 at Sofia alone), Anatolia, and Syria.
The refugees either went voluntarily or by government design, for example, to populate the frontiers or the empty lands along the new railroads.
In 1878 alone, at least 25,000 Circassians arrived in south Syria and another 20,000 came to the areas around Aleppo. In Anatolia, the government settled refugees, often with incentives, to people the areas along the
developing Anatolian railroad. These refugees endured enormous sufferings: perhaps one-fifth of the Caucasian migrants died on the journey of malnutrition and disease.
Alparslan Episode 27 English Subtitles
