Worship, Festivals and Pilgrimage in Ottoman Life

Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious calendars organized weekly gatherings, fasts, feasts, burial and pilgrimage across Ottoman lands. In Istanbul, the empire’s capital in present-day Turkey, an eighteenth-century Ramadan shows how officials announced a lunar month and coordinated shared observances. In Jerusalem, in the southern Levant, a declaration of 1852 regulated when Christian communities could worship at the Holy Sepulchre and how their rites moved through its rooms.

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Daily prayers and the lunar calendar

Muslims prayed five times each day, at intervals set by the sun. Before prayer, worshippers washed and faced the qibla, the direction of Mecca. At the weekly Friday gathering, an imam, or prayer leader, led congregational prayer and delivered a sermon in the mosque. Smaller mosques brought these routines into neighbourhoods, while major Friday mosques served larger congregations.

In eighteenth-century Istanbul, officials fixed the public start of Ramadan through reports of the new crescent. Observers watched from high places near the end of the preceding month and sent sightings, supported by witnesses, to the city judge. He reported to the chief religious jurist, who passed the decision through the grand vizier, the chief minister, to the sultan, the Ottoman ruler. Once the sultan authorized the announcement, mosque callers were told to light the lamps and declare the fast. If no crescent appeared on the twenty-ninth evening, the month ended after thirty days and Ramadan began the next day. The same lunar calendar caused Ramadan to move through the solar seasons over successive years.

Ramadan meals and festival observance

Fasting shifted household meals to before dawn and after sunset. The sunset meal, iftar, could bring relatives and neighbours to a household table. A study of eighteenth-century Istanbul records describes hosts opening their homes according to their means; the mansions of officials also laid tables for poorer visitors as well as invited guests. At the grand vizier’s residence, a sequence of iftar dinners ran through much of Ramadan, with officials, scholars and military officers invited on different nights. The order of invitations turned the meal into a recurring public calendar as well as a domestic one.

When Ramadan ended, Eid al-Fitr brought a morning prayer and public greetings. On its eve, the Arife Divanı, a palace council, included readings from the Qur’an, Islam’s scripture. Imams and preachers read passages and received gifts. The next morning, officials greeted the grand vizier and sultan in rank order between dawn prayer and the Eid prayer.

Christian worship at shared holy places

Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre was a Christian pilgrimage destination shared by Latin Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic and Syrian communities. An Ottoman declaration of 8 February 1852 confirmed the Status Quo, an arrangement governing ownership and use within the major sanctuaries. At the Holy Sepulchre it assigned particular spaces and set the times, duration and routes of services, including whether worship used singing or reading. Each community followed its own liturgical calendar, and a change required the consent of the communities using the church.

The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, a Catholic institution, describes its community’s inherited rights there as including First Vespers, evening prayers before a feast, Matins, early morning prayers, Mass, processions and blessings with incense. The arrangement made a pilgrimage visit part of a schedule shared with other Christian rites, tying worship to specific rooms and routes inside the sanctuary.

Jewish Sabbath, study and community care

In Ottoman Salonica, now Thessaloniki in Greece, Jewish communal life centered on synagogues, schools and local courts. Sabbath, the weekly Jewish day of rest, shaped communal prayer. In the early sixteenth century, Rabbi Jacob ibn Ḥabib described congregations praying in synagogues located in courtyards and private houses when they lacked permission to dedicate buildings permanently. Historian Joseph R. Hacker describes communities organized around their synagogues, where members joined group activities and their children studied; charitable societies supported people in need, and a burial society interred the dead in a communal plot. He also records some Jews visiting coffeehouses on the Sabbath in Istanbul and Cairo, Egypt, drinking coffee and smoking tobacco despite rabbinic criticism.

Salonica had become a major center of Jewish religious education by the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Talmud Tora HaGadol, the community’s central school for Jewish children, and local yeshivas, schools for advanced religious study, continued to draw students from other Ottoman regions and Europe. A 2023 study by İhsan Turhan describes students in yeshivas studying in pairs: they tested opposing interpretations through discussion and used that exchange to reach another reading. Eighteenth-century conflict and disasters weakened Salonica’s trade, while nineteenth-century Alliance Israélite Universelle schools introduced modern European-style education.

Burial, remembrance and paid work

Muslim burial in eighteenth-century Istanbul depended on cemetery space, skilled labor and priced materials. A 1514 Istanbul record lists a shroud, a washer and a water-pourer among the costs of preparing a body. A 1705 court register for Üsküdar, across the Bosporus from Istanbul’s old city, recorded grave dimensions and digging fees, as well as boards, coffins, washing boards and grave markers. Listed coffin prices varied by size and wood: a small cypress coffin with its lid and washing board cost one kuruş, an Ottoman currency unit, while the largest listed cypress coffin cost six. These prices made the work of carpenters, grave diggers and stonecutters part of the recorded cost of burial.

Cemeteries also required regular care. In Beşiktaş, the foundation of Sinan Pasha Mosque paid two akçe, Ottoman silver coins, per day for cemetery cleaning in 1729. The Kara Mustafa Pasha foundation paid three akçe daily for cleaning nearby graves in 1765. These payments show how remembrance depended on ongoing work after the burial itself. Jewish burial societies provided a separate community service in the cities described by Hacker.

Pilgrimage and the surre procession

The hajj is the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in western Arabia. Pilgrims circled the Kaaba sanctuary, walked between Safa and Marwa, stood in prayer at Arafat, spent the night at Muzdalifa and performed rites at Mina. Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, fell during the Mina days.

Before the annual hajj, Ottoman rulers sent a surre, a collection of money, gold and other gifts, to residents of Mecca and Medina in western Arabia. After the holy cities came under Ottoman rule in 1517, the annual dispatch became a regular court ceremony. The official responsible for it, the surre emini, oversaw security along the way and distribution at the destination. In Istanbul, the sultan presented the official with purses and registers, and a decorated mahmil, a pyramidal frame carried on a camel, accompanied the procession. Crowds watched it cross from the capital to Üsküdar, where the send-off and return drew public attention.

Damascus, in present-day Syria, gathered pilgrims arriving from several Ottoman regions before they continued overland toward Mecca and Medina. The surre procession connected this religious calendar with the longer journey. After an overland convoy was attacked near Payas in 1863, the dispatch from Istanbul shifted to sea transport in 1864: it sailed to Beirut, then continued by land through Damascus toward the holy cities. The Hijaz Railway replaced the long overland leg from 1908.