Part IV - Identities on the Mediterranean Shore

Summary

The polyvalence of late Ottoman port city society, with its many different ethnic and religious communities, overseas and local cultural influences, and the failure of the Ottoman state to provide a convincing common identity for its heterogeneous population combined to make identity building a highly complicated process. Depending on individual stance, locals could find this predicament a possibility to carve out an identity that transgressed against more narrow, community-determined norms. Others however, felt the challenge to develop a personality that met the standards of the coming twentieth century a burden they could not creatively master within the commercial surroundings of the port city. Especially the bourgeois and the ecclesiastical elites of the respective communities, aimed not to negate the possibilities of the age as a whole, but to restrain most forms of individualist and in their eyes morally precarious pursuits, thus restricting the manifold possibilities contemporaries actually had to develop their personality.