Ottoman Istanbul After Dark

with Avner Wishnitzer

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark (also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as Gece Çökerken). He explains how the night was a time for sleep, rest, devotion, sex, crime, drinking, and even revolt. He also talks about the challenges of past sensory states, the influence of the late Walter Andrews on his work, and, finally, the relationship between his work as a historian and his work as an activist.   

Click for RSS Feed

What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark (also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as Gece Çökerken). He explains how the night was a time for sleep, rest, devotion, sex, crime, drinking, and even revolt. He also talks about the challenges of past sensory states, the influence of the late Walter Andrews on his work, and, finally, the relationship between his work as a historian and his work as an activist.   

Contributor Bios

Avner Wishnitzer is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His work focuses mainly on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire. He is the author of Reading Clocks Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a history of Ottoman imagination in the long nineteenth century and his historical novel, New Order (in Hebrew), is coming out now.

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press.

.

Credits

Episode No. 556

Release Date: 12 December 2023
Recording location: Nashville and Tel Aviv

Sound production by Sam Dolbee

Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Big Road of Burravoe," "Chiaroscuro"

Images and bibliography courtesy of Avner Wishnitzer

Note: This interview was recorded before October 7th. For more on Avner's activism since then, please see the piece he has co-written with Combatants for Peace co-founder Sulaiman Khatib in The New York Times and their interview with Democracy Now

Further Listening

	Nurçin İleri	263 8/26/16	Osmanlı İstanbul'unda Gece ve Sokaklar
	Kathryn Babayan	458 4/8/20	Being Urban and Urbane in Safavid Iran
	Ali Yaycıoğlu	275 10/24/16	The Ottoman Empire in the Age of Revolutions
	Baki Tezcan	300 2/17/17	Rethinking 'Decline' in the Second Ottoman Empire
	Gwendolyn Collaço	262 8/25/16	Festivals and the Waterfront in 18th Century Istanbul

Images

Armenians playing cards in candlelight, Istanbul, 1730s.  Work by the Flemish artist Jean Baptiste Vanmour. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

A man and a young boy caught in bed. From Ḫamse-i ͑At ¯aʾ¯ı. Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.666, 56a

A neighborhood raid; from Zenannâme, by Enderuni Fazil (1755–1810). Courtesy of İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi (TY 5502/148a)

Keeping awake in a Sufi Vigil. From Ignatius Mouradgea D'Ohsson, Tableau général de l'empire othoman (Paris: Didot Pere et Fils, 1824)

Istanbul in Moonlight, by the Ottoman Armenian Miğirdiç Civanyan (1906-1848).

Ortaköy mosque at night - Tahsin Siret Bey (1875-1938).

firework display, from Surname-i Vehbi. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University (1990.15861)

Select Bibliography

Allen, Jonathan Parkes. “Up All Night Out of Love for the Prophet: Devotion, Sanctity, and Ritual Innovation in the Ottoman Arab Lands, 1500-1620.” Journal of Islamic Studies 30, no. 3 (2019): 303–37.

Ekirch, A. Roger. “The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?” Past & Present 226, no. 1 (2015): 149–92.

Ekirch, A. Roger. At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. New York: Norton, 2005.

Faroqhi, Suraiya. “Fireworks in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” In Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz, 181–94. Turnhout, 2014.

İleri, Nurçin. “A Nocturnal History of Fin de Siecle Istanbul.” Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University, 2015.

Kafadar, Cemal. “How Dark Is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul.” In Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Arzu Ozturkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz, 243–69. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2014.

Karateke, Hakan. “Illuminating Ottoman Ceremonial.” In God Is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth: Light in Islamic Art and Culture, edited by Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, 282–307. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015.

Koslofsky, Craig. Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

MacArthur-Seal, Daniel-Joseph. “Intoxication and Imperialism: Nightlife in Occupied Istanbul, 1918–23.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 2 (2017): 299–313.

Schlör, Joachim. Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840-1930. London: Reaktion, 1998.
Steger, Brigitte, and Lodewijk Brunt. Night-Time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life. London: Routledge, 2003.

Wishnitzer, Avner. “Early to Bed: Sleep, Artificial Light, and Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul.” In Enlightened Nightscapes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021.

Wishnitzer, Avner. “Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 2 (2017): 245–61.

Wishnitzer, Avner. “Kerosene Nights: Light and Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Jerusalem.” Past & Present 248, no. 1 (2020): 165–207.

Woodall, G. Carole. “Decadent Nights: A Cocaine Filled Reading of 1920s Post-Ottoman Istanbul.” In Mediterranean Encounters in the City: Frameworks of Mediation between East and West, North and South, edited by Michela Ardizzoni and Valerio Ferme, 17–36. Lanham, 2015.

Yaşa, Fırat. “Moonstruck: Viewing the Moon in the Ottoman World of the Seventeenth Century.” Medieval History Journal 22, no. 2 (2019): 343–66.