The Loss of the Greek Literary Society of Istanbul, the Syllogos, and Mapping as a Counter-Act

Abstract

The destruction and erasure of the non-Muslim presence in the urban fabric of Istanbul over the last century or more occurred at various levels, ranging from the departure or expulsion of individuals to the destruction of buildings and neighborhoods and the dismantling of institutional bodies. This process, involving a multitude of actors operating at different scales, was largely driven by a common underlying motive: the desire to create a nation-state with a homogeneous national identity and culture, one defined by a single language, a single religion, and Turkified economic systems. Several factors intensified the push for homogeneous populations on both shores of the Aegean, including the rising nationalist ambitions of Turks and Greeks after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the decade of wars from the 1910s to early 1920s, the Allied occupation of Istanbul following World War I, and the anti-minority policies of the period’s new nation-states. Collectively, these factors led to the transformation and homogenization of urban Istanbul’s economic, cultural, and intellectual landscapes. An illustrative example of this transformation is the Greek Literary Society of Istanbul (Ὁ ἐν Κωνσταντινουπόλει Ἑλληνικὸς Φιλολογικὸς Σύλλογος), known as the Syllogos (1861–1923). The Syllogos’s closure by the new republican administration in response to nationalist tensions, along with the confiscation of its properties, building, archive, and library, marked an early watershed in the erasure of Istanbul’s non-Muslim—particularly Greek Orthodox—presence. This essay outlines this erasure and proposes a counter-effort to preserve the Syllogos’s legacy within modern scholarship.