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Session Submission Summary

Contested Legacies of Post-Ottoman Liberation in the Balkans

Thu, November 21, 4:00 to 5:45pm EST (4:00 to 5:45pm EST), Boston Marriott Copley Place, Floor: 3rd Floor, Berkeley

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel brings together a set of papers that reflect on the legacy of post-Ottoman liberation. Focusing on the processes involved in the transition from empire to nation-state, this panel will explore how questions of economic and legal jurisdiction, customs, and border control in the face of population movement evolved into major debates in the Ottoman Empire’s successor states. In his paper, Lukas Tsiptsios discusses how the inheritance of Ottoman debt in successor states produced a set of debates about the nature of sovereignty. Adopting a new chronology on the question of transition, Tsiptsios will trace the negotiation process, which, as he will show, started years before the Treaty of Lausanne and remained open-ended even after its ratification. Dimitris Mitsopoulos, employing examples from Greece and Yugoslavia, adopts an alternative lens and explores how the two states attempted to deal with problems of illegal border crossings and smuggling. Mitsopoulos will highlight how Ottoman practices of border control endured through time and were coopted by the nation-states that emerged in the Ottoman Empire’s place. In the eastern Balkans, similar questions emerged in relation to Black Sea border crossings and the arrival of thousands of White Russian civilian refugees and military émigrés. The Black Sea evolved into a porous border, generating debates about its management in the face of entangled imperial collapses. In her paper, Charis Marantzidou will analyze this problem by discussing the Bulgarian response to the population arrivals from Southern Russia after the Bolshevik Victory and Allied-occupied Constantinople.

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