Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Neighbourhoods Visited by Courage, Sleeplessness and Dead Bodies

Abstract

The 'Ottoman Neighbourhood' is the basic social unit for the study of the Ottomans and the social lives they led, and many of these studies have been based on such classic resources as religious archives (ser'i siciller). This work investigates the social life of the Ottomans from a perspective that is ignored in the classic resources, as it uncovers the Ottoman individual's courage, willingness to forgo sleep, and approach to unsolved murders. The individuals who lived within the communal organizations as prescribed by Ottoman law behaved in ways that would seem quite strange today. This paper analyses the response of both public authorities and neighbourhood residents to the kinds of crimes that required meticulous investigation in order to solve them, and the meting out of punishments for these crimes.