Ottoman Istanbul After Dark

I feel I feel that this world is encouraging alienation and I seek something else and I think this is something that I find in some of these Sufi texts and I don't like much of what I read there, it's not like I'm, you know, but there's something about being together, first of all being rather than doing and then being together and interacting meaningfully this coming of souls together, not in order to achieve anything other than just being together. So yeah, I find the night conducive to this kind of intimacy or closeness. It's the Ottoman history podcast, I'm Sam Dolby and that person talking about the power of the night was Avner Vishnitzer. My name is Avner Vishnitzer, I'm a historian of the late Ottoman period I teach at Tel Aviv University. In this episode we speak about Avner's recent book As Night Falls, 18th century Ottoman Cities After Dark, with Cambridge University Press. The book asks what the night meant for various groups ranging from workers to Biktashi Sufis to Janissaries and follows them as they use the night to pray, plot, drink, have sex and sleep, among other things. In closing, we talk about the influence of the late Walter Andrews on Avner's scholarship as well as the relationship between Avner's life as a historian and his life as an activist working to end the Israeli occupation. Stay with us. I work mostly on things that are not necessarily seen or obvious, but when you scratch the surface a little bit you find that they are very important, even crucial in shaping social and economic, political and cultural dynamics. My first book was about time and the way it is constructed by society and in turn shapes political and historical processes and later worked on things like mass stashes and boredom and again things that are in my view very crucial in human lives, like the way we carry ourselves, perform social roles, what we do when we have nothing to do and how does that time to social hierarchies, what is indolence and how is boredom dangerous to those hierarchies. My second book of course was about nighttime, which once again is something that we may take or granted, but in fact has and had has had a tremendous impact on human societies and it still does despite artificial illumination and the hyper illuminated world we live in. It still matters. I love that description of being interested in these things that are at once mundane every day but also very profound and very important. Of course I believe mass stashes are very important, you don't need to sell me on that. How do you find these topics? Is it something you are wondering about? What does it mean to have a mustache or what does it mean to be bored or is it something you find in sources? I don't know if as night falls has a story like this where you ask this deceptively simple question of what does night mean? The intersection of issues that concern me as citizen of the present, issues that I find important for current you know for present societies and then the things that I find in the sources as I read and usually look for other things. So for example the 24/7 society this huge pressure we are under constant to produce this do do do ideology this pejorative approaches towards not doing what's simply being all of these things got me thinking about time back when I was starting my work on my dissertation and you can see already the connections to things like boredom and laziness and not doing and nighttime it's this incursion of this ultra capitalist mentality that in a sense infiltrates our bedrooms by now. So it's it's being constantly online fearing missing out conflating work with leisure carrying that constant sense of guilt when you're not producing or consuming. So we are in a sense reduced to these to either of these role producers or consumers these are things that are of power not importance in thinking about our world today. This is what sent me on my way in this project in a world that is that is really hyper illuminated what does it mean to live in a society that is much darker than what we are used to because we take light for granted almost like the air we breathe. I really like this point about how so many of these questions are guided by reckoning with the capitalist present and the ways that ideas of productivity ideas of constantly doing things have invaded some of the most intimate parts of our lives and the most intimate spaces of our lives. I want to get into the book more specifically in a second but I was wondering if we could dwell in the present or the more recent past do you have memories or experiences of the night time that you've ever felt like offered an alternative to this constantly illuminated present? Is there some sort of personal experience that you feel like you've had that's closer to what you're describing about 18th century Istanbul in this book? Growing up in a kibbutz I worked nights in the field and I was 17 or 18 I spent quite a few nights out in the fields so a lot of the spraying all those terrible chemicals we are filling up through it with I was the one who had to spray them on the trees and because it's cooler doing the night and there's no wind where you know I grew up you would do it at night time. And then unfortunately as a soldier I spent many nights out and that's another experience of yeah much much darker environments that kind of sunk in I guess. I really try to recreate experiences so literally made my little experiments with going about in darkness so my kids are really irritated because I still turn off many of the lights today but when I really try to keep my home dark and see you know what it feels like to navigate but by now so much light comes out of the wind comes in through the windows so it's not nearly as dark as people had to work with when you know back in the 18th century but at least you know it made me more aware of the way the senses work. So I couldn't really rely on those old memories now I tried to experiment a little bit and use a bit of imagination to pose questions because I believe imagination is crucial when it is when it is consciously used not for answers but for questions you know reading the sources and then trying to imagine what was going on there see what I am missing in the source for a full picture and then you know starting from there with questions about you know what's going on you know so this woman in Jerusalem says she reached out for the lantern what kind of lantern was it who had lanterns who could afford it was it olive oil or sesame oil you know things like that. The book is about nighttime from a variety of perspectives and what we'll get into some of those in both Istanbul and also Jerusalem in the long 18th century so of course there's variation between these places and over time but maybe to start could you give us just a general sense of what nighttime looked like in general in these places and you know you started off by giving us a sense of how much that is different from the present but what are those aspects in the past that are distinctive. So first of all it seems obvious that it was dark I'm saying it seems obvious but when you start to think about the consequences of this deep darkness darkness that we don't really know anymore in an urban environment in so-called developed countries. You realize that it really touched on almost every aspect of life from the time people go to sleep, what they are able to do when they are home after darkness has descended, who can be out in the street, what would it take to navigate the street, what are the arrangements of public orders and how to circumvent them if you're interested in that. So this darkness is you know we can we can just give it this title and stop at that but I think this is just the beginning of the investigation and I try to understand what it means to leave under these conditions so that's one thing very dark, very quiet and again this is something that it may seem maybe taken for granted but when you think about it a little bit longer you realize that this quiet first of all is something that we don't really know in urban societies because we have cars and refrigerators and all kinds of what we call white noise. All of these things do not exist before we have fossil energy driven machines that can work around the clock so people and animals they dose off and it's very quiet which makes specific sounds become very very prominent they they kind of dominate the night at soundscape so with you know for example the muazine calling for the night prayer or if dogs suddenly start barking as they would then you can hear it for long distances or when somebody starts shouting fire you know Janganvar then it spreads easily in this very quiet environment and also if you want to sneak out you need to be aware that you might be heard not just seen darkness and silence but both as I try to show are not complete it's a matter of for example your access to light which is differential so some people can allow themselves more light and therefore to stay away later and do all kinds of things from reading to parting and noise can also be differential the extent to which you can isolate yourself so if you live in a in a one of those bachelor's ins you share your sleep is not cannot be as quiet as if you had your own house or your own room so all of these things are relative and have to do with with social hierarchies those hierarchies don't go to sleep ever I just wanted to interject here to emphasize this point that you make a number of times in the book and you just made now that we think darkness and light are about sight but as as you mentioned it's also about sound it's also about these other senses that become important in the absence of light it's not just that the world around us changes when or night falls it's that our synonym is shifting in order to adjust and so hearing becomes much more important but hearing is different from seeing and therefore for example I can hear a sound that I cannot verify its origin and that might frighten me okay because we rely on on sight so much so these kind of things you know are significant for all kinds of nighttime fears for example and then all kinds of recipes quote unquote to deal with those fears from lullabies to kinds of prayers and you know nighttime prayers and so on just one more thing I mentioned darkness and silence we should also throw in sleep because most people go to sleep at night and these two has significance for the way the city works so for example if you have systems of public order that are based on collective gaze for example the collective gaze of the neighborhood or the gill and now all eyes are shot or most eyes are shot then this may open opportunities for some and introduce dangers to others so these things are also something that we should calculate in the fact that there are few people but there's still people around not everybody goes to sleep and these two has you know still today is related to a social class so who has to work at night so yeah just wanted to add that one yeah so maybe picking up on that point about social hierarchy never going to sleep could you talk about a few examples of how we can see maybe class and gender shaping what people's experience of the nighttime or you know if we take sleep as an example it is true still today and it was certainly true in in the Ottoman world so everything from having a place to sleep and not everybody had it all the way to sleep hardware so do you have a mattress what kind of mattress do you have a net against mosquitoes that can really really be unsettling and and and damage your sleep can you sleep on the roof men could women less so or at least they were so in the heat of summer in the Levant when most mostly men would go up to the roof women not always could do it because of concerns about quote-unquote family honour things like work that I mentioned some people had to work very often migrants to the city so for example we know about the workers in Hamams in Iirgin wrote about it they are from the you know from the Uben underclass many of them Albanians and some of them are forced to work as sex workers at night fishermen night guards many of them newcomers to the city not the fishermen but night guards people that work in alcohol selling sectors or kinds of bars and mayhaan is that mostly operate at night and it's a huge huge industry in Istanbul with probably thousands of people working and working at night is uncomfortable and very often morally questionable so the people who do it are often those who have no other choice so these are just a few examples but and also as I mentioned access to light so it's not just the amount of light it's also the quality of light because today we think about light as something that is almost abstract you know it's it's abstracted from its sources and it flows seamlessly into our lamps but back in the day it was either candles or kinds of oil lanterns and then the material itself mattered so for example Iraq's candles were much brighter than candles made from animal fat and they also gutted less and they smelled much better so how much light you could afford and what was the quality of that light determined what you could do after darkness I was expecting the taverns I think I was a little more surprised by the hamams and one of my favorite details from the book was this fact that at some points moving around without a lantern in Istanbul at night resulted in people being arrested because it was suspicious and then they would be locked up and put to work in a bathhouse so this is something that Nuri Ergin brings in his work on the Belediye but there are also so earlier sources that refer to this practice and it's really a practice of imposing visibility as I see it because this is what you should be doing if you roam the streets at night you should be marking yourself those lanterns were especially the cheaper ones were not very good for seeing but they were crucial for being seen and if the patrol arrested you without one the assumption was that you were trying to hide yourself and therefore that you are up to no good and so the locking you up in the hamam for night in the in the furnace so feeding the fire would get you extremely dirty and then by the time you would leave in the morning you would be all marked up with with sooth and anybody who sees you would immediately know that you've been out at night without lantern and this is just one of the practices that we see used by the authorities or by communities to impose visibility to try to cope with the ability of people to sneak through those networks of surveillance that are based on you know on the collective sensorium of for example neighborhood communities so that is just one one of these mechanisms so that's a really kind of direct example of how the nighttime shapes what what people do and what people are made to do what I also like about the book is how you're really attentive to the cultural meanings of of night and I was really interested in how you treated the intersection of nighttime light and various religious groups so Bektashi's Alevi's saboteons and how people libel them could you talk about how night functions in terms of these groups that's that's a big question because we can discuss it from the perspective of the out group of the majority society and the way the the association of these non orthodox groups with darkness allows to denigrate them marginalize them but we can also discuss the way these groups actually use the night and light at night artificial light at night for their own practices and even I would say sense of self collective self so I'll start with the first perspective for example with the Bektashi's we have this notion of taking at the candle which is a kind of a libel that that was thrown around to undermine or marginalize the non orthodox Jews Jews I'm saying non orthodox groups a Sufi groups like Bektashi's and others Kizelbash basically it was said and we find it in many different sources that these people you know these people they assemble at night and they do their thing their their religious practices and then at some point they snuff the candles and basically they have an orgy and these descriptions of you know what happens out there in at night when nobody can see are both used hegemonic actors to as I said to marginalize them but these descriptions are also there is something voyeuristic about them they allow people to fantasize and they serve this this role of expressing what is usually repressed so they they kind of function in the stool role but for these groups indeed the night served as a very important interval not in any means for orgies but for all kinds of religious or spiritual practices and the basic idea was that keeping awake at night kind of reversal that allows you to get closer with God basically when everybody else all those spiritually common people unaware they're sleeping there's sleep of unawareness sleep of neglect while we then lighten one you know we we spend the night praying and you know there's a lot of poetry written about these night time vigils usually they present this in the terms of the medillaries of the boom companions assemblies and on the other hand those parties are described in poetry in the same terms as those vigils thus allowing people to imagine these parties in spiritual terms so it's not just that these groups are associated with the night by their rivals it's meant something for them although something very different it was the time for spiritual pursuits away from the open eye of a majority society you write that one way we could describe the relationship of authorities to the night time is productive neglect can you talk about what you mean by that we might think that because of darkness because the collective sensorium is asleep and you know data public order relied so much on that collective sensorium then the authorities or communities would be completely oblivious or unaware of what's happening in the dark streets and as I tried to show this actually quite a lot happening with almost 600 Mayharnes and other kinds of bars towards the end of the 18th century and most of them are open mostly at night but it turns out that people knew and and so the night was an interval of deniability it's not that people didn't see it's that both communities and the authorities chose to turn and blind eye because it's easier not to see or to ignore infringes on public order and morality when they happen at night and so under the cover of darkness we have this huge scene of drinking prostitution gambling and this of course serves thousands of people you know in terms of livelihood just you just do the math we have six six hundred drinking institutions and and actually much much more than that because these are just the listed ones and then people working in these institutions serving people sex working in the sex industry this is livelihood for the authorities this is a source of revenue and it's a big source of revenue and we see in the correspondence from the late 18th and early 19th century that they are reluctant to give that up so everyone some while there would be a more pious sultan or a sultan that is really keen on enforcing stricter order at night and try to shut down all those establishments but really very open they would open up again and people are saying in you know officials say openly we need this money and the tax revenues from those mayhemes from those bars it's just one thing I mean you can also think about fines imposed on people that do all kinds of things that they should be doing at night and you can also think about bribery so money is paid by these very establishments to keep on going when they're not supposed to to sell alcohol when they're not supposed to and there was actually a name for this bribe called busy gourmet meaning don't see us money literally act as if you don't see us so this is what I mean by productive neglect it I mean that it allowed a whole economy to go on as if it didn't and different actors benefited it's not that everybody benefited for example neighborhood communities might not want a mayhem in their neighborhood you know kind of a nimbi 18th century a nimbi you know and then they they go to court and ask for a brothel or a bar to be a shutdown but the numbers are just huge so it's it's it's very significant for the you know the economy of the city for the leisure landscape of the city so this is a way that we can see how this book is doing so many things social cultural but this is also about political history this is also about political economy and these tax revenues that are generated by nighttime activities that maybe the authorities look the other way on but but appreciate getting the tax revenue this is an example of this kind of neutral reliance between authorities and these nighttime activities but what you go into toward the end of the book in part two are more explicit ways that nighttime provides a structure for revolt so first with the patrona haleel uprising in 1730 and then subsequently with salim the third Mahmoud II crack down and then ultimately disbanding of the genesis could you talk about how nighttime functions in in these contacts as as a threat to authority as I said earlier they needs had much easier access to light at night and they demonstrated power especially sotans from the early early 18th century onwards sought like the european peers to associate themselves with the ability to to to turn that night in today it was of course more an aspiration than a reality but we see a lot of these light demonstrations fireworks you know parties illuminated by thousands of candles and lanterns and so on and so forth genesis on on their hand were much of much humbler social background and had limited access to illumination and they were probably much more comfortable in the dark and we see that whenever they there is a genesis rebellion building it happens at night and then if it matures it would be at morning that they would you know take to the the atmaidani to the square and you know and then you'd have open rebellion so this was part of their protocols of rebellion they use the night for all kinds of sub subversive activities from for example inscribing janissary symbols on houses and shops to intimidate or to demonstrate their power arson putting out leaflets all of these things you know they they use the night as cover and as I said in in in organizing openly rebellions the court on its side especially towards the end of the 18th century and early 19th century when you know the tension is building against the background of the new modul army of sultan salim the second sorry sultan salim the third and then not with the second we see this this this kind of subversive activity intensifying and the court on its side tries to at several occasions to shut down nightlife in which the the janissaries were very very prominent so this is this is this goes on on the streets but in terms of of discourse we see that the court is trying to associate the sultan with light is a light dispenser and this also manifests itself materially so this practice of lighting up the minaret and using all kinds of fire inscriptions not just doing Ramadan of course in mahiyeh is the most is best known example but also doing celebrations that are related to the dynasty so you know birthdays of princes and so on so this attempt to project light both physically and figuratively through text is something that we see throughout the 18th century and by the time we get to the the last janissary rebellion we see that the janissaries are identified in texts produced in court with darkness the janissaries the bektashis you know all of these non orthodox groups that were tolerated up until the end of the 18th century they are now forces of darkness quite literally so I mean they identify they are associated with darkness and therefore you get a struggle that is depicted by the court in terms of light against darkness and when you present things in this way there's only one thing that can happen and that is you know the eradication of the forces of darkness and indeed once the janissaries were gone we begin to see slowly the court asserting its dominance over the night in ways that we didn't see before now it takes a few decades but already in towards the late 1840s we begin to see the first lighting of streets and in the 50s and 60s this intensifies we see different organization of the night policing and other things that show that there's there's a different way of organizing public order at night it has to be colonized in a way by the authority of the Sultan something we've touched on a few times is poetry it's a really important source that you're relying on for this book this book is also dedicated to Walter Andrews of course the revered scholar of Ottoman poetry could you talk about his influence on you and your approach in this book oh yeah Walter was I mean he had tremendous effect on my scholarship I knew nothing about poetry I know very little now but before I met with him and studied with him I really knew nothing about it and he opened this window to this textual ocean and gave me at least rudimentary tools to navigate it and it was with him and with Selim Kuru I'm also grateful to Selim that I began reading poetry in general and poetry about nighttime in particular and about you know metaphors of light but beyond that Walter insisted that poetry is not necessarily good to know what actually happened but it's great to understand how people perceived what was happening so of course like any other source we need to know the limitations of poetry and the tropes and the way particular traditions shape various genres but when I think when when doing the work properly it really opens venue to people's emotions or emotional scripts to use another term that Walter used a lot and aspirations and many other things that are very hard to reach using other sources could you imagine what this book would be without those sources of poetry I mean there are court records in here there are Ottoman archival sources there are lots of chronicles but what how do you see poetry changing it in a sense it's and I'm using I think I'm using a lot to in terms of it it's the soul of of the book in many ways it is where you can connect to for example the aesthetics of nighttime as perceived by contemporaries and as I try to show much of it was not limited to delete I think yeah it allows us to at least partly reconstruct the way people experienced and thought and felt doing nighttime and sometimes about nighttime so obviously these traditions in turn shape those you know we we don't treat these sources naively as if they are you know just transparent expressions of ingrained emotions no but as we know literary traditions certainly poetry in the Ottoman world script emotions and modes of thought and this is why they are so important and not just windows opening into the past they are active agents in the past so I've known in addition to being a scholar you're also an activist you're a founder of combatants for peace there was a famous photo of you from September of 2021 as you were detained and blindfolded by Israeli soldiers for delivering water to Palestinians in the south hebron hills do you see a connection between your work as a historian and your work as an activist I usually try to maintain boundaries between my work as a scholar and my activism which is an important part of my life for 20 more than 20 years now in combatants for peace working against Israeli apartheid in the West Bank and because as an activist I am deeply and emotionally involved in what's going on and as a historian I want to be an observer that is able to maintain at least some critical distance I try to keep boundaries between these two I don't know aspects of my life now obviously these boundaries are artificial and they are superficial because just like with borders you know underlying underlying them is a terrain that terrain and a subterrain that is that is really me but still I think it's helpful also in my teaching to be able to to keep that distance so as to be able to look with open eyes and open ears at people that maybe in my activism I would be in conflict with and I want to understand them so that's about the boundaries but from this you can also hear the mutual relations because on another level I try to bring my abilities to listen closely to all kinds of people and to imagine myself in the shoes of others to the extent that I am able to do it to my activism the other way around I mean the fact that I was a soldier and then refused to serve in the occupied territories and became an activist working closely with Palestinians who had themselves been involved in the armed struggle against Israel this is what combatants for peace is about so you know looking at realities from different perspective what I was what I now what my partners Palestinian partners are now what they used to be this is a very challenging experience but it it gets you very accustomed to thinking from different perspectives on anything that happens and is there's much going on so yeah this is a little bit about the boundaries but also how the two to aspects related I can probably say a lot more about it but I'll skip you to that thanks so much Avner thank you you've been wonderful seriously that's Avner Vishnitzer his book as night falls is available now from Cambridge University Press of course as always you can find more information about the book as well as a bibliography of relevant works on our website ottomanhistorypodcast.com that's it for this episode until next time take care [BLANK_AUDIO]