Ottoman Legacies in Institutions and Everyday Life

From the Ottoman Empire’s emergence in Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, around 1300 until its sultanate, government under a sultan, was abolished in 1922, institutions, homes, texts and social practices changed with new rulers and technologies. A foundation ministry gathered previously separate endowments, Safranbolu’s caravan town adapted to railways and tourism, and the Turkish Republic reorganized both public administration and the written alphabet.

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Endowments and public services

A waqf, or Islamic endowment, dedicated property and its income to a specified charitable or public purpose. The founder’s deed set conditions for its use, while a trustee managed the asset and a supervisor could oversee the work. Sultan Mahmud II created the Evkaf-ı Hümayun Nezareti, the Imperial Ministry of Foundations, in 1826 to bring royal and related endowments under more centralized administration. The new ministry accumulated institutions in stages: palace gatekeepers’ foundations joined in 1828, other palace offices in 1830 and Istanbul judicial foundations in 1831. Within five years, 632 foundations had been added. A water administration overseeing streams in Istanbul, Üsküdar and Galata entered the ministry in 1836.

The ministry also separated tasks into offices. One prepared legal and administrative records, another managed leases and tax contracts, and a third received revenue and paid expenses. The change therefore involved paperwork, rental income and disbursements as well as ownership. The 1826 ministry was followed by the Ankara Şer‘iyye ve Evkaf Vekâleti, established in 1921. On 3 March 1924, that successor was abolished and the foundations office became a General Directorate under the prime minister.

Homes in a caravan town

Safranbolu, in northern Turkey, became an important caravan station by the thirteenth century and flourished as a trading centre in the seventeenth. Çukur, the bazaar quarter, had wooden houses and workshops around its market. Kıranköy, formerly home to the town’s non-Muslim population, had stone houses above street-level shops. Bağlar instead held detached houses in large gardens, used as summer residences.

The town’s houses used local timber, stone and infill, with many rooms linked by a hall called a sofa. Built-in cupboards, fireplaces, shelves and benches served daily room use, while street-facing walls had few or no windows. This settlement and house pattern forms part of Safranbolu’s Ottoman architecture. When railways displaced much caravan traffic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the town lost a major commercial role. Later, tourism converted some historic houses into hotels and restaurants; renovations kept the townscape while changing interiors to suit new use.

Coffeehouses and hospitality

Coffee reached Istanbul, in present-day Turkey, around the middle of the sixteenth century. The historian İdris Bostan reports that Ottoman writers dated the city’s first coffeehouses to either 1553 or 1555. These gathering places became settings for conversation and the sharing of news; scholars also met for learned discussion. Their activity drew attention from authorities. In the 1560s, closure orders targeted coffeehouses in cities including Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Eyüp and Istanbul. Some legal critics objected to games such as backgammon and chess and to patrons neglecting prayer, while Bostanzade Mehmed Efendi, the Şeyhülislam or chief Ottoman religious jurist, argued in a 1592 opinion that coffee itself was not intoxicating and was permissible.

A present-day UNESCO description of Turkish coffee explains one familiar preparation: roast and grind the beans finely, add coffee, cold water and sometimes sugar to a small pot, then heat it slowly until foam forms. It is poured into small cups, usually with a glass of water. Families pass the preparation on through observation, and coffee accompanies engagement visits and holidays as well as everyday conversation. People may also read patterns in the grounds left in a cup. UNESCO inscribed this living practice in 2013; it describes contemporary heritage, while sixteenth-century records document the earlier spread of coffeehouses.

Poetry, printing and the written language

The sixteenth-century poet Fuzuli, active in the Iraq region, wrote in Turkish, Persian and Arabic. His Turkish divan, or collected poems, includes 302 gazels, lyric poems often built around a repeated rhyme. Hundreds of manuscript copies survive, and the collection has appeared in more than fifty printed editions in cities including Tabriz, Baku, Cairo and Istanbul. Later poets repeatedly wrote nazire, or poems modeled on his verses.

Ottoman Turkish served as a written language from the thirteenth century into the early twentieth. It retained Turkish grammar while incorporating many Arabic and Persian words, and scribes wrote it in an Arabic-based script. In 1726 Ibrahim Muteferrika argued that printing could make books cheaper and support education. With formal authorization in 1727, he and Mehmed Said began a Turkish-language press. Its first book, Vankulu’s Arabic dictionary in Turkish translation, was completed in 1729. A later inventory records four presses for books, two for maps and five workers, including the Jewish type founder Yona. Typical print runs were about 500 copies, with some titles reaching 1,000 or 1,200.

On 1 November 1928, the Turkish Republic adopted a Latin-based alphabet in place of the Arabic-based script previously used for Turkish. Older Ottoman works remained in their original script, while new editions and transcriptions supplied routes for readers who had not learned it.

Mevlevi ceremony after the lodge closures

The Mevlevi Sema is a devotional ceremony associated with the order established in Konya, in central Turkey, after the death of poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi in 1273. Musicians perform a repertoire in four sections with a singer, a reed-flute player, a kettledrummer and a cymbal player. Whirling dancers turn on the left foot while the right foot propels the body around. Training in a mevlevihane, or lodge, could last 1,001 days; novices learned ethics and beliefs through prayer, religious music, poetry and dance. After training, they returned to work and family life while remaining members of the order.

The Turkish Republic closed all Mevlevi lodges in 1925. Public performances were permitted again in the 1950s, and restrictions eased further in the 1990s. UNESCO inscribed the ceremony in 2008, but its account also notes that some modern performances are shortened or staged for tourists rather than held in a lodge’s devotional and residential setting.