Imagined Commonalities: The Invention of a Late Ottoman “Tradition” of Coexistence by Cross‐Media Project: A Balkan Tale. ChristinaKoulouri, team leader. Goethe Institute, 2012. Photograph exhibit and catalog, plus documentary film The Silent Balkans: A Hundred Years since the Balkan Wars (Andreas Apostolidis, dir.).

Abstract

The “Balkan Tale” project includes an exhibit of photographs of Ottoman‐era buildings, texts by historians from the region, and a documentary film on the Balkan wars of 1912–13. Installations include a “soundwalk” and an experience of Ottoman perfumes. Materials are available in English, Albanian, Greek, German, Serbian, Macedonian, and Turkish. The project premises that various peoples of the region lived peacefully together before the creation of nation‐states and promotes a common history based on religious and ethnic coexistence. Yet such a proposition is as much an invention of a putative tradition as any nationalist history, ignoring relevant scholarship on the complexities of parallel and at times conflicting existences during Ottoman rule. The presentation echoes trendy anthropological theories on the fluidity of borders but neglects, or rejects, dominant concepts held by peoples in the region about themselves and each other, as well as scholarship that posits alternative conceptualizations of putative Ottoman proto‐multiculturalism.

Introduction to the Special Issue

“…have argued that the literature on SRPs has at times put too much stress on conflict rather than its resolution, at the same time underestimating what they define as choreographies of sharing. When applied to research in the Balkans, the two main strands of research here discussed-one more conflict-oriented, the other more focused on peaceful co-existence-tend to cast light on how inter-religious commonalities are often more presumed than real (Hayden and Naumović 2013) and on the invented absence of a shared past (HadziMuhamedovic 2018), respectively.…”