Thrace 101
When I say "I study Thrace" to those who ask what I've been doing in grad school for the past decade, they usually reply: "Oh, I did not know you had an interest in antiquity." To make it clear, I don't. Contrary to the misconception that Thrace and its inhabitants ceased to exist in antiquity, Thrace and Thracians are still with us today.
But those who primarily associate Thrace with ancient Greece have a point. Thrace and Thracians indeed loom large in Greek mythology and texts. Orpheus has origins in Thrace, reputed to have introduced civilization to Thracians, who were deemed savage and warlike people by the ancient Greeks. Ares, the Greek god of war, was from Thrace and had a huge cult following in the region. Some accounts hold that Dionysus, the Greek god of wine-making, theater, and ecstasy, was also from Thrace. Another famous figure that Thrace introduced to the world, this time during the Roman times, was the rebellious gladiator Spartacus.
Thrace, in ancient times, was a region in today's Southeast Europe, with shores on two contrasting bodies of water: the Black Sea, which the Greeks called the Euxine Sea (hospitable sea) in a clear euphemism for its cold and saline waters and rough waves, and the Aegean Sea in the Mediterranean, which is famous for its warm and hospitable waters, idyllic islands, and soft climate that attract millions of tourists every year.
Today, this territory is divided between three nation-states. The southeastern part of Thrace, also known as Eastern or Turkish Thrace, belongs to Turkey and constitutes Turkey's northwestern borderlands with Bulgaria and Greece. The northern part, along the Rhodope Mountains, forms Bulgaria's southeastern borderlands with Turkey and Greece. And finally, the southwestern part, also known as Western or Greek Thrace, falls under Greece, forming the nation-state's northeastern borderlands with Bulgaria and Turkey. Whether under Greece, Turkey, or Bulgaria, Thrace is first and foremost defined by being a borderland, and this quality informs the lives of its modern inhabitants.
This exhibit mainly concerns Turkish Thrace, which came under Ottoman rule in the 15th century. Today’s Turkish Thrace roughly comprises what remains of the Ottoman vilayet of Edirne. Once a prosperous province lying between the empire’s capital, Istanbul (Constantinople), and its possessions farther in Europe, Edirne enjoyed a relatively secure existence from the 16th century to the 19th century, when the Ottoman-Russian imperial rivalry heated up. The first external threat destabilizing the Ottoman rule in the region came with the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829, during which the Russian army crossed the Balkans to defeat the Ottomans and marched, somewhat to the latter’s surprise, unimpeded across the Maritza River to capture the city of Edirne. Although the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) reset the western Ottoman-Russian border along the Danube River, a second and deeper Russian thrust in 1877–1878 could only be stopped short at the gates of Constantinople, throwing the region into further disarray until the Treaty of Berlin (1878) restored Edirne to Ottoman rule.
Çorlu, my field site, then was one of the smaller districts in the vilayet of Edirne, falling under the sanjak of Tekfurdağı. The Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Sephardic Jews pursued a relatively peaceful, albeit segregated, coexistence in the modest town until the late 19th century. According to the 1870-71 Ottoman yearbooks, the city had a population of 5,726, nearly two-thirds of whom were non-Muslims.
