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This chapter presents an account of the construction of the national resistance movement led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in 1919. It locates the origins of this armed movement during the First World War with the formation of the Ottoman clandestine service, the Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa). In particular, this chapter explores the roles played by North Caucasian gangs and gangsters who comprised the core of both the Ottoman clandestine service and the National Forces (Kuva-yı Milliye) under Mustafa Kemal. The South Marmara's ‘culture of paramilitarism’ is critical in understanding the historical context out of which these gangs (or çetes) emerged. Despite some initial success achieved in raising recruits and fielding an army against the Greek invasion of 1919, the reliance of the National Forces upon paramilitary gangs in the South Marmara proved troublesome as the Turkish War of Independence enter into its first year.

This chapter looks at a unique instance of the survival on a large scale of a type of everyday writing usually lost in its entirety, or at best preserved only in isolated places: the informal inscription, or graffito. It reports a remarkable discovery made in the winter of 2003 of a body of writing that stood in a public place and, in a sense, was written on stone, but which has little in common with most monumental epigraphy. The chapter notes that this find is the graffiti of the basement level of the basilica in the agora of Smyrna, modern Izmir. It further reports that the ground level of the basilica and the east and west ends of the basement level were excavated before the Second World War by Selâhattin Kantar, then director of the Izmir Museum, and Fritz Milner of the German Archaeological Institute, and published by Kantar after the war in collaboration with the German archaeologist Rudolf Naumann.

This chapter elaborates upon Judeo-Muslim interdependence and a sense of common destiny. During the late nineteenth century, Jews constituted the single largest ethno-religious group in Salonica and a smaller but active minority in Izmir. The chapter discusses Ottoman patriotism and loyalty, explaining the motives behind Jewish support for Ottoman Muslims in the context of the empire's war with Greece in 1897, and suggests that many Jews, as an expression of their commitment to the empire, went so far as to identify with Islam itself during this period. This pattern of Jewish allegiance to multilingual and multireligious empires can be found elsewhere and is perhaps most notable in the Hapsburg context. Under the late Ottoman state as well, Jews sometimes even surpassed Muslims in their exuberance for imperial causes.

A new manner of social contestation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century appeared in Ottoman cities, particularly the capital, Istanbul, and port cities such as Salonica, Izmir, Alexandria, Beirut, and Tunis. This chapter is concerned with workers' dissemination of radicalism, mostly among themselves but also to other segments of the populations of Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. Just as Alexandria, Cairo, and Beirut were poles of attraction for radical intellectual networks, they were also sites of convergence and intersection for a multiplicity of labor traditions and workers' networks of contestation. The tactic of the history of national labor movements in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth from a global perspective—indeed, the movement of capital, labor, and information and the establishment of internationalist workers' associations—meant that the history of workers in one locality was much more connected to other localities and global affairs, both formally and informally.

The chapter offers a wide array of cultural phenomena to include Ladino, Turkish, and aspects of early modernization. Yet the main concern here is with the influence of Ottoman Turkish musicians and theatrical performers on Izmir's Jewry in the final decades of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

From a Mediterranean perspective, the First World War was only part of a sequence of crises that marked the death throes of the Ottoman Empire: the loss of Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, the Dodecanese, then the war itself with the loss of Palestine to British control, soon followed by a French mandate in Syria. All these changes had consequences, sometimes drastic, in the port cities where different ethnic and religious groups had coexisted over the centuries, notably Salonika, Smyrna, Alexandria and Jaffa. At the end of the war, the Ottoman heartlands were carved up between the victorious powers, and even Constantinople swarmed with British soldiers. The sultan was immobilized politically, providing plenty of opportunities for the Turkish radicals, in particular Mustafa Kemal, who had acquitted himself with great distinction fighting at Gallipoli. Allied mistrust of the Turks was compounded by public feeling: the mass deportation of the Armenians in spring and summer 1915 aroused horror among American diplomats based in Constantinople and Smyrna. Marched across the Anatolian highlands in searing heat, with harsh taskmasters forcing them on, men, women and children collapsed and died, or were killed for fun, while the Ottoman government made noises about the treasonable plots that were said to be festering among the Armenians. The intention was to ‘exterminate all males under fifty’. The worry among Greeks, Jews and foreign merchants was that the ‘purification’ of Anatolia would not be confined to persecution of the Armenians. In its last days, the Ottoman government had turned its back on the old ideal of coexistence. In Turkey too, as the radical Young Turks often revealed, powerful nationalist sentiment was overwhelming the tolerance of past times. Smyrna survived the war physically intact, with most of its population protected from persecution, partly because its vali, or governor, Rahmi Bey, was sceptical about the Turkish alliance with Germany and Austria, and understood that the prosperity of his city depended on its mixed population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, European merchants and Turks. When he was ordered to deliver the Armenians to the Ottoman authorities, he temporized, though he had to despatch about a hundred ‘disreputables’ to an uncertain fate.

Chapter 1 opens with the proclamation of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 and concludes with the empire’s dramatic defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–1878). While the constitution reinforced a vision of civic Ottomanism predicated on the idea that all imperial citizens were equal, the war brought non-Muslims in the empire one of the first opportunities to put their newfound citizenship into practice. Throughout the conflict, Ottoman Jewish leaders encouraged their flock to support the empire’s cause by encouraging Jewish men to sign up for the army. Putting both the interests and the laws of their country above all else, Jewish community leaders initiated a process that—taken to an extreme—had the potential to diminish their hold on the audience they addressed and attempted to lead.

Chapter 2 analyzes Ottoman Jews’ participation in two different commemorations of the year 1492. In the first case, Jews decided to treat the four-hundredth anniversary of their ancestors’ expulsion from Spain as a cause for patriotic celebration, transforming it into a holiday marking their arrival in Ottoman lands. This celebration served a dual purpose. Its architects hoped to encourage Ottoman Jews to honor their state and to persuade the sultan to offer safe haven to Jews fleeing persecution in their own day. The second commemorative event featured in this chapter honored a journey to different shores in 1492. This was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. As Jewish merchants crossed the Atlantic to represent their state in Chicago, Ottoman Jewish journalists sought to instill in their readers a sense of pride in their coreligionists’ activities abroad and to reflect on what it meant to call their empire home.

As their patriotic project matured, Jewish communal elites came to realize the potentially unsettling consequences that patriotism could entail. Chapter 3 examines this process by exploring Ottoman Jews’ responses to two moments of heightened tension and politicized violence—the massacres of Armenians in Istanbul in 1896 and the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897. It argues that Jewish elites’ strategies of self-representation during this period attest to their ability and willingness to work within a framework of politicized Islam. Because they did so precisely as the relationship between the Sublime Porte and its Armenian and Greek Orthodox citizens grew increasingly strained, however, new rifts developed between Ottoman Jews and their Christian neighbors, some of which would prove long-lasting.

This chapter explores heritage landscapes through the lens of extractive economies and jurisdiction of forests and archaeological zones. This new body politic rallies around economic profit that is bolstered by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, which enhance opportunities for social mobility and higher standards of living. Case studies explore the industries of marble and gold in the context of intangible and tangible heritage. Willful ignorance gives tacit approval for continued environmental degradation and erasure of archaeological heritage under the rhetoric of economic security. The evidence is contemporary, drawing from international fairs, ethnographic research, and the bureaucracies of heritage statecraft.

From the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) to the urban and rural planning of Le Corbusier and his colleagues, governments explored modernist templates and programs of social engineering, such as those presented in the Russian five-year plans and the United States Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). In this chapter, I investigate interwar and Cold War heritage through the lens of Izmir’s Kültürpark and the technopolitics of the Aegean-TVA. Grafted onto the face of the Gediz basin, the industrial heritage of the Demirköprü hydroelectric dam and irrigation infrastructure represents a window into the strategic nature of US foreign assistance to Turkey. Pivotal figures such as Ismet Inönü, Fezvi Lufti Karaosmanoğlu and Süleyman Demirel are discussed, as is the American consulting firm Tippetts, Abbett, McCarthy, and Stratton (TAMS).

This final chapter provides a reflection of the book. I bring together the key threads from each of the chapters to explore the contemporary context of heritage within the scope of ongoing development, from highways to solar fields. Among my primary points is that development and heritage have become increasingly entangled, yet heritage remains the underdog in this game. The scale of development reflects Turkey’s shifting position in the global landscape, particularly balancing EU agendas with those of Asia and the Middle East. Archaeology has a vexed position within these development schemes, and the practice of US citizens conducting archaeology in Turkey has become increasingly precarious. This is in part due to the entrenched position of the US Department of State not to support archaeological research linked to fieldwork. My goal here is to balance a summary of the book with some of these new themes.