Ottoman Studies, in particular what we might call ‘hard-core’ or ‘archive-based’ Ottoman Studies with its considerable emphasis on Ottoman palaeography, Ottoman diplomatics and/or the cataloguing and editing of archival holdings (not necessarily as an end in itself but a first step towards advancing document-based studies on Ottoman history and culture) is a field that has come under considerable strain in recent years across (most of) Europe. This prompts the following question: Will the subject as we have known it still be able to reproduce itself in future?

Consider this: how many universities remain where at the Master's level students have sufficiently high standards of Ottoman Turkish (together with ‘auxiliary’ Arabic and Persian) for mastering handwritten sources composed in the principal chancery scripts employed by the various departments of the central bureaucracy, fiscal, military and ‘civil’? And how many universities remain which succeed in qualifying their leavers to the degree of enabling them to carry out independent research in Ottoman archival holdings in preparation for their doctoral theses? Let me simply contend that fewer and fewer universities remain across Europe which are still able and willing to make their PhD candidates reach this level of palaeographic expertise – in my opinion the sine qua non for safeguarding the field’s reproductive capacity as well as the competitiveness of its young doctores in the international job market (in the United States, in Israel and in Turkey for instance ‘hard-core’ research in matters Ottoman is still going strong). To identify the reason(s) for the continuing squeeze solely with the Bologna process would be wrong, if only because the so-called Bologna process, much to the detriment of its original intention (to consolidate the European area of higher education by, I quote, ‘taking full respect of the diversity of cultures, languages, national education systems and of university autonomy’) in some European countries has been turned into something of a perversion of the original aims as formulated towards the end of the Declaration's preamble, but it has undoubtedly played a part in that it helped turn universities progressively into institutions offering training rather than education, based less on the ideal of (autonomous) scholarship than on usefulness and employability. This may all be very well for some students (and their parents, if not ‘the public’ at large), but Ottoman Studies, and in particular its ‘hard-core’ sub-species, appears to face an uncertain future even in countries where it used to flourish in several locations at the same time. Take Germany for example: Here, some thirty or forty years ago, Ottoman handwritten sources (not all documents but manuscripts as well) used to be read in class, with aspects of Ottoman palaeography and diplomatics on offer from time to time, at several universities in the country, particularly at places such as Hamburg and Berlin, Heidelberg and Freiburg, Bamberg and Munich. By contrast, at the time of writing, reference to any (postgraduate) teaching on the basis of Ottoman handwritten material could no longer be found in about half of the universities just mentioned.

Even in Germany considerable holdings exist of original Ottoman documents, among which the largest and most compact archive of an Ottoman official is housed in the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe and known as Das Archiv des Bosniaken ʿOsmân Paša. Consisting of eighty individual items, it was published in 1931 and 1932 by Franz Babinger.Footnote ¹ Yet other European countries, in particular those formerly under Ottoman rule, are blessed with far larger archival holdings from the Ottoman period, first and foremost Bulgaria, whose Ottoman collections have been well known and studied ever since the opening years of the twentieth century, if not earlier.Footnote ² Greece, by contrast, despite its rich possessions of Byzantine documents kept in the monastic archives on Mount Athos which had been noted by visitors from as early as 1726,Footnote ³ was still in 1955 described as almost completely devoid of any local holdings of Ottoman archival sources.Footnote ⁴ However, one of the first Byzantinists to refer to an Ottoman imperial decree from Mount Athos (in Greek) bearing the Sultanic cipher (of Bayezid I, reigned 1389–1402) was Stéphane Binon, whose arguably non-expert representation of the tuğra in question prompted the famous Austrian historian and SOAS-based Ottomanist Paul Wittek (1894–1978) to attempt a reconstruction of its original form.Footnote ⁵

If the image of Greece (beyond Mount Athos) as a blank patch on the map of Ottoman archival holdings (and, by extension, Ottoman archival studies) was to last into the late 1960s (an image that had reputedly long been upheld even by Franz Babinger and Paul Wittek),Footnote ⁶ this was to change soon, and to change fundamentally. The following is a brief, if by necessity incomplete, account of the ensuing momentous change which culminated in what I call the Rethymno success story brought about by Vassilis Demetriades and Elizabeth Zachariadou at the University of Crete and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FO.R.T.H. Of course, other renowned researchers, from precursors like Michalis Sakellariou and Apostolos Vakalopoulos through Nikos Svoronos to Spyros Asdrachas (to mention but a few) have contributed greatly to bringing Ottoman Studies in Greece to worldwide recognition, facilitated by publishing (some of) their research results in a ‘western’ language. Yet they worked, or have been working, on primarily Greek sources; only Nikolaos S. Stavrinidis and I. K. Vasdravellis (together with his team of collaborators) also published Ottoman Turkish material in a systematic way. Comprehensive bibliographical surveys on the history as well as current research in the field of Ottoman Studies in Greece, continuously updated by Evangelia Balta (herself a ‘hard-core’ Ottomanist and defterologist), and on archival material in Greece, testify to this.Footnote ⁷ And far from being restricted to Rethymno, Ottoman Studies is a subject spread far and wide across the whole of Greece today, much of it of the ‘archive-based’ type: from Corfu (Sophia Laiou) in the north-west to Komotini (Georgios Salakidis) and Mytilini (Eleni Gara) in the east of the country, and from Thessaloniki (Phokion Kotzageorgis and Dimitris Papastamatiou) and Kozani (Costas Kampouridis) in Northern Greece to Athens (Evangelia Balta, Paraskevas Konortas and Emilie Themopoulou). But only Rethymno has two institutions which co-operate closely, even though institutionally distinct, and which together are lucky enough today to boast three ‘hard-core’ Ottomanists (Antonis Anastasopoulos, Elias Kolovos and Marinos Sariyannis) working side-by-side under what amounts to an interlinked two-fold (institutional) roof – something unique not only for Greece, but continental Europe at large (with the possible exception of Paris), and a concentration of expertise uniquely suited to build upon the achievements of the founder generation represented by John C. Alexander (Yannis Alexandropoulos), Vassilis Demetriades and Elizabeth Zachariadou. The present contribution is an attempt to sketch the origins, development and achievements of this unique set-up which not only marks a complete turn-around from the 1960s when students from Greece had to study abroad in order to qualify in Ottoman Studies, but a foundation that has finally and forcefully put Greece on the map of Ottoman (archive-based) Studies worldwide, if not at its forefront.

Perhaps it could be said that the Cretan success story began in two distinguished academic institutions renowned for their Turkish/Ottoman expertise. At Columbia University, Tibor Halasi-Kun was supervising a promising doctoral candidate from Greece, Yannis Alexandropoulos (John C. Alexander), and at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Paul Wittek had attracted around him a number of talents, among them two doctoral students, again from Greece: Vassilis Demetriades and Elizabeth Zachariadou, both sent abroad by their tutors to engage in Turkish Studies, the latter on a grant from the then Royal Research Foundation (today National Hellenic Research Foundation). Vassilis Demetriades, after his return from London, was to become the director of the Historical Archives of Northern Greece (today Historical Archives of Macedonia) in Thessaloniki, and John Alexander, after returning to Greece in the mid-1970s, spent some time at the National Hellenic Foundation for Scientific Research before joining the teaching staff of Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) in the mid-1980s. Elizabeth Zachariadou, before returning to Greece, spent many years in Canada, having married, in 1966, the Paris-trained Nikos Oikonomides (1934–2000), who held the chair of Byzantine History at Montreal University for twenty years, from 1969 until 1989. After the University of Crete (UOC) had formally been established in 1973 (and began functioning in 1977–8), with the Department of History and Archaeology starting to admit students in the academic year 1983–4, Ottoman history came to be taught in the Section of Oriental and African Studies, one of the four divisions established in the Department from the outset, with Arabic and African history also taught on a regular basis until the early to mid-1990s. At about the same time as the UOC Department of History and Archaeology, the so-called Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas (FO.R.T.H.) was established in 1983, representing six individual research institutes, of which most are based in Heraklion, Crete, one of them, the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS, founded in 1985), in Rethymno. It is this institutional assemblage which was to provide the initial framework for the developments of the future.

Vassilis Demetriades, while still in charge of the Historical Archive of Macedonia (where at the time he was good-humouredly hosting a young German post-doc from Munich who was eager to collect material for his habilitation work from the vast array of late nineteenth-century Ottoman tax records housed there before emigrating to Birmingham), took up his position as a full professor at the UOC Department of History and Archaeology in 1984, several months before his colleague Elizabeth Zachariadou was to join him at the University of Crete in 1985. In 1987 they jointly founded the Programme of Turkish Studies at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FO.R.T.H., with the principal aim of promoting research into Ottoman history and of training young Ottomanists. For the latter purpose, a special Postgraduate Programme in Turcology was established by them in 1988, the first of its kind in Greece, run by the Institute for Mediterranean Studies until 1993. From the academic year 1993–4 when it became possible by law for Greek universities to establish MA programmes, it was officially run exclusively by the UOC Department of History and Archaeology, even though informally it benefited considerably from substantial contributions by the IMS. In 2004 the UOC and the Foundation for Research and Technology formalized their cooperation in running the Programme (ratified by the Ministry of Education in 2005), marking the final stage in the realization of its founders’ plans: The work of Demetriades and Zachariadou ‘has been pioneering in many respects. Establishing a fully-fledged programme of Ottoman history teaching at the undergraduate level plus Ottoman palaeography and Modern Turkish at the postgraduate level at a time when nothing similar existed in Greek universities and there was still strong prejudice against the usefulness of Ottoman history, was one of these pioneering moves – and quite a daring one.’Footnote ⁸ Proving that Ottoman Studies in Crete had come of age by the early 1990s and was on a par with the best in the field internationally, Elizabeth Zachariadou singlehandedly inaugurated the ‘Halcyon Days in Crete’ Symposia series, starting with ‘Halcyon Days in Crete I: The Ottoman Emirate (1300–1389)’ held in Rethymno from 11 to 13 January 1991 and followed by ‘Halcyon Days in Crete II: The Via Egnatia Under Ottoman Rule’ (Rethymno, 9–11 January 1994), with the third symposium devoted to ‘Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire’ (Rethymno, 10–12 January 1997). By this time, while some young talented students still went abroad to complete their doctoral degrees, others were already obtaining academic supervision of the highest standard in Greece: Antonis Anastasopoulos, who graduated from the Department of History and Archaeology at Athens University, completed, under the supervision of İ. Metin Kunt of Cambridge University, both his MPhil thesis on ‘The Judicial System in Ottoman Greece, 1600–1800’ (1994) and his PhD (1999) with a thesis entitled ‘Imperial Institutions and Local Communities: Ottoman Karaferye, 1758–1774’, while Elias Kolovos, having graduated from the Department of History and Archaeology at Aristotle University (Thessaloniki), completed, under the academic supervision of John Alexander, his doctoral dissertation entitled (in English translation) ‘Peasants and Monks in Ottoman Chalkidiki (15th-16th c.): Aspects of Economic and Social Life in the Countryside and the Monastery of Xeropotamou’ (2000). Marinos Sariyannis, who also graduated from Aristotle University with a PhD in Ottoman History (2005) entitled ‘Marginal Groups and Behaviours in Ottoman Istanbul, 16^th-18^th Centuries’, was also supervised by John Alexander. In fact, John must be credited with having provided most Ottomanist positions in Greece with the successful candidate: Elias and Marinos now in Rethymno, Sophia Laiou now in Corfu, Phokion Kotzageorgis and Dimitris Papastamatiou both in Thessaloniki. The secret behind this extraordinary achievement is reported (by one of his former pupils) to have been his gift to enthral, coupled with an improvising style of teaching and welcoming accessibility, sometimes supported by his natural generosity in sharing a bottle or two of red wine with his colleagues and students. He clearly also had the gift of spotting talent!

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, both Vassilis Demetriades and Elizabeth Zachariadou had retired (in 1998). Would the groundwork laid by them hold? Vassilis Demetriades, perhaps best known internationally for his ground-breaking study on the origins of the devshirme,Footnote ⁹ and Elizabeth Zachariadou, the specialist on the beylik (Turcoman ‘principality’) period and pioneer who, already in the early 1960s when the world still thought of Greece as devoid of any substantial Ottoman archival material, had discovered, and started to research,Footnote ¹⁰ the Ottoman holdings (consisting of more than 1,300 individual documents, including the copy of a firman of Mehmed the Conqueror from 1454) in the archive of St John’s monastery at PatmosFootnote ¹¹– how would it be possible to keep up the momentum without them? In fact, the transition didn’t take place without them at all, as Vassilis Demetriades went on teaching at the postgraduate programme until 2003 and Elizabeth Zachariadou continued to work regularly at the Institute – eventually (in 2007) to be appointed, together with Vassilis Demetriades, Honorary Researchers of FO.R.T.H. in recognition of their achievements. Yet a transition it was, with fresh talents taking charge.

Antonis Anastasopoulos, having taught at the UOC Department of History and Archaeology from 1999, was appointed lecturer there in 2001 and assistant professor in 2007. While in Rethymno, his research initially focused on the Islamic tombstones of Rethymno (of which almost 400 have been recorded; a project later extended to those of Heraklion and Chania) for which a database was to be created through the webpage ‘Digital Crete’, a project of IMS/FO.R.T.H. Between 2005 and 2009 he served on the Management Committee of the European research network COST (A36 ‘Tributary Empires Compared: Romans, Mughals and Ottomans in the Pre-Industrial World’). Antonis Anastasopoulos has been tenured as an assistant professor at the Department since 2011. Elias Kolovos, after teaching at the Department in 2001–2, was taking part in a project under the supervision of Elizabeth Zachariadou translating into Greek the judicial registers in the Ottoman Archive of Heraklion, while also working as a researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies from 2002 with a project on the Island of Andros under Ottoman Rule, co-funded by the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS) and the Kaireios Library of Andros, followed by work on the ‘Digital Crete’ project (see above) from 2004. After 2009, he was responsible for implementing the IMS research project ‘Ottoman Sources for the Early Modern History of Lefkada’, funded by Lefkada prefecture, as part of the Turkish Studies programme. He is currently tenured assistant professor of Ottoman History at the UOC Department of History and Archaeology. Marinos Sariyannis came to Crete in 2005, where he has been taking part in editing the judicial registers from Ottoman Heraklion under the supervision of Elizabeth Zachariadou. His research focused on Crete and other parts of the Aegean, such as Ayvalik and Samos (under various external research projects in which he was involved), while in 2009 he joined the Lefkada project. He also developed a research interest in Ottoman political thought, and in 2014–15 directed the OTTPOL project entitled ‘A History of Early Modern Ottoman Political Thought, 15^th to Early 19^th Centuries’, carried out by IMS/FO.R.T.H. under the Greek ‘Education and Lifelong Learning’ programme.Footnote ¹² He is now Principal Researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FO.R.T.H., and coordinator of the Programme in Ottoman Studies (known until 2014 as the Programme in Turkish Studies).Footnote ¹³

While many departments offering Ottoman Studies in Western Europe, not least in Germany, regrettably appear to have lost over the last three to four decades the diplomatic and palaeographic expertise necessary for researching and editing Ottoman archival material, as well as, even more pressingly, the impetus and means to train their students in the ‘arts’ of deciphering Ottoman chancery scripts employed in the several departments of the central bureaucracy as well as those used in the Empire’s provincial offices (leaving aside for the moment the epigraphic skills necessary for reading an inscription on an Ottoman tombstone or the legend of an Ottoman coin), Greece, and in particular Rethymno, has stemmed the tide. With the combined force of the UOC Department of History and Archaeology and FO.R.T.H.’s Institute for Mediterranean Studies, bridged by the Programme in Turkish Studies and, more particularly, the existence of an experienced and committed research team in charge of the Programme of Postgraduate Studies in Turcology, Rethymno has what other departments can only dream of: a triumvirate of talent operating in an institutional framework comprising University and Research Foundation, that is not only complementary in terms of each colleague’s own specialty (thematic, methodological and chronological) within the field of Ottoman History, but also homogeneous in terms of experience: All three have extensively worked on Ottoman archival sources from Turkey and Greece and have been involved in publishing Ottoman archival sources. Yet despite their extensive diplomatic, palaeographic and, last not least, epigraphic skills which they acquired in the process of long years of focused project work, all three have been trained and graduated in (Ottoman) History – a combination which used to be quite rare in the field, at least in Central Europe where many Ottomanists of the post-war generation were (Islamic) philologists by training, less often historians. For the Rethymno students this means that they get the best of both worlds: Instruction in Ottoman History presented by trained historians employing a wide range of methodology, perspectives and source materials, of a more general or more specific character and content as the case may be, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate seminars of which some focus explicitly on sources of Ottoman History. Aspects of Ottoman and Turkish history have in addition repeatedly been taught by specialists from outside Crete on fixed-term contracts, such as Emilie Themopoulou (Athens) in the 1990s, Eleni Gara (2002–3, now at the University of the Aegean), Marios Hajianastasis (2004–5, now at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, as successor to Rhoads Murphey) and Alexandros Lamprou (2009–11, now at Ankara University). Since 2014 (to run till 2016) the IMS has been hosting a Marie Curie Fellow, Antonis Hadjikyriacou, who is carrying out research on the project ‘MEDINS: Mediterranean Insularities and “Miniature Continents”: Space, Landscape and Agriculture in Early Modern Cyprus and Crete’. Modern Turkish, also the principal linguistic avenue into Ottoman Turkish, has been taught by Gülsün Aksoy-Ayvali through contracts with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies from the late 1980s until 2002, when she became instructor in Modern Turkish at the UOC School of Letters. Not only has she laid the linguistic basis for numerous under- and postgraduate Ottoman History students, but her contribution to ongoing research and the publishing of conference proceedings has also been significant.

Since the Programme of Postgraduate Studies in Turcology was first launched in 1988, a total of thirty-three students graduated from it, with only a small number of students being admitted every two years. Two PhDs have been completed so far, one (by Antonis Xanthynakis) with a thesis on the reign of Murad II supervised by Elizabeth Zachariadou (2003), the other (by Yannis Spyropoulos) with a dissertation on the janissary corps of Crete from the mid-eighteenth century to 1826, under the supervision of Antonis Anastasopoulos (2014). Even for a research centre of international importance, the combined library holdings on the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey of the UOC and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS) are significant. With part of the library of emeritus professor Victor Ménage purchased for Rethymno upon his retirement to lay a unique foundation, it can now claim to be the bibliographically most up-to-date place in Greece regarding Ottoman history, not least because Metin Kunt donated his considerable personal library holdings, both from Istanbul and Cambridge, to the UOC Library. The Institute does not keep any original archival sources from the Ottoman period, but holds microfilm collections of the Ottoman holdings in several Athonite monasteries, of the Ottoman archives in Veroia and Thessaloniki, and of the Turkish Archive of Chania (predominantly from the later part of the 19^th century). Part of these archives are now also digitized and made available online by the archives in question.Footnote ¹⁴

Coming to Rethymno therefore has a special appeal to Ottomanist researchers from all over the world, and here they know how to attract them: in addition to the Halcyon Days in Crete Symposia already mentioned,Footnote ¹⁵ the Department of History and Archaeology organized an international conference from 13 to 14 December 2003 entitled ‘The Ottoman Empire and the Rise of Balkan Nationalisms, 1789–1832’, which resulted in a volume edited by Antonis Anastasopoulos and Elias Kolovos.Footnote ¹⁶ From 2 to 4 November 2007 the Institute for Mediterranean Studies organized, in association with the UOC Department of History and Archaeology, an international conference in the context of COST Action A36: ‘Tributary Empires Compared: Romans, Mughals and Ottomans in the pre-industrial world from antiquity till the transition to modernity’,Footnote ¹⁷ entitled ‘War, Armies and Empires’. Also, from 17 to 19 December 2009, the Department of History and Archaeology organized a conference on Monasteries, Economy and Politics from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era, which resulted in a volume with the same title.Footnote ¹⁸

Significantly, from 27 June to 1 July 2012, the Department of History and Archaeology and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies co-organized the 20th international Symposium of the Comité International pour les Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes, having been approached by the CIÉPO president to come to the rescue at short notice after the prospective organizer had withdrawn. This symposium (for which more than 450 applications were submitted) was not only efficiently organized and ably assisted by a number of younger researchers, including Katerina Stathi, whose managerial skills can only be admired, but became a model for subsequent CIÉPO venues in a number of respects. Its proceedings were published in a volume edited by Marinos Sariyannis with the collaboration of Gülsün Aksoy-Ayvali, Marina Demetriadou, Yannis Spyropoulos, Katerina Stathi and Yorgos Vidras, Antonis Anastasopoulos and Elias Kolovos.Footnote ¹⁹ For Rethymno to have hosted an international conference of the size and complexity of a CIÉPO symposium, which would normally need to be organized in a country's capital city, was an achievement of major significance and is proof of the fact that Rethymno has developed an academic infrastructure in the field of Ottoman (archive-based) Studies whose size and quality few, if any, principal universities in Europe can match.

It is to be hoped that what has been achieved in Rethymnon will not be compromised by present or future austerity measures, because too much has been achieved which the country (and the field of Ottoman Studies internationally) simply cannot afford to lose. A Centre of Excellence devoted to the study of the Greek lands under Ottoman rule (a crucial but little-known period in the long history of that country), established not somewhere like Berlin, Paris or London, but in Greece herself, staffed by Greek scholars, is an asset the country must treasure. I stress this not because I believe, for example, that only Germans can, and should, research German history, or that only Greek scholars are able, and deserve, to study Greek history. Far from it: history needs to draw on a plurality of sources, methods and perspectives if it wants to be internationally competitive rather than being merely Nationalgeschichte. But I believe that it is of considerable importance for a country to be able to demonstrate that, after a period during which promising candidates had to go abroad for their qualifications, staff can now be recruited from candidates trained ‘at home’ thanks to the excellence of some of its own institutions. This is where the Rethymno Centre of Excellence comes in again: before long it will be providing universities with highly qualified candidates not only in Greece but elsewhere too, thus ‘exporting’ Greek talent abroad, a process that seems to have already begun. It will be an attractive destination for many an Ottomanist not only from Greece, but from Europe at large, not least because of its library holdings, which have been generously enlarged by donations from abroad.

Germany, while still struggling on the federal level to develop a concept for the future of its so-called ‘Kleine Fächer’ (‘small subjects’)Footnote ²⁰ which, by topic, are often continent-embracing disciplines, yet as a rule staffed at no more than a minimum level, would be well advised to take account of examples like Rethymno as a twenty-first-century model of how to ensure that the subject in question, in Rethymno's case archive-based Ottoman Studies, can adequately reproduce itself and even engage in academic export.