Ottoman Chios: Levantine-Catholic Communities in the late 18th and early 19th centuries

The thesis examines the historical environment which shape the Catholic spaces and Catholic community of Chios Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A series of trans-national and local dynamics in this period including the Russian-Ottoman Wars, French Revolution, Greek War of Independence transformed the established norms in the Aegean geography. The thesis delves into the role and witnesses of different historical actors such as Catholic missionaries, outsider elites (voyvodas), travelers, Orthodox and Catholic islanders in this changing environment. It is significant to understand these transformations in Chios to frame the intercommunal relations and communal identities in a place where the Byzantine (Orthodox), Genoese (Catholic), Ottoman (Islamic) pasts create a palimpsest. This historical diversity allowed the existence of more diverse and rich identities as well as the spatial and cultural co-existence of different communities thanks to porous borders. In that regard, the thesis scrutinizes Ottoman State Archive Documents, Catholic missionary reports, traveler accounts, memoirs as well as visual sources to historicize the island and islanders whose networks and connections reaching far-corners of Levant, Black Sea Basin, and the Western Mediterranean ports.