Anatolia ‘before the nation’

William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr - Hürriyet daily news

‘Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia’ by Nicholas Doumanis  (Oxford University Press, $65, 272 pages)


People love to be nostalgic about the halcyon age of Ottoman coexistence. Referring misty eyed to the long-lost time of inter-communal harmony has become one of the clichés of writing about the region once ruled by the Ottomans. Nicholas Doumanis’ “Before the Nation” takes as its bedrock the Archive of Oral Tradition, a collection of thousands of interviews conducted from the 1930s to the early 70s with Greek refugees who left Asia Minor in the early years of the 20th century. The interviewees were hugely nostalgic for the religiously mixed life they left behind, and this nostalgia is shared by Doumanis, which accounts for both his book’s strength and its weakness.....

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