Paper short abstract:

In analysing the cosmopolitanist nostalgia in Istanbul through an ethnographic focus on the Rum Greek Orthodox community, I investigate the limits of the idealised image of urban social harmony, which occupies a central place in contemporary discussions about the identity of the city.

Paper long abstract:

For the last few decades, Istanbul is being presented as the historical haven of multicultural coexistence across a wide spectrum of public discourses and activities. Novels, newspaper articles, festivals, and exhibits are following one another in demonstrating how cosmopolitan a city old Istanbul has been, while utilizing a nostalgically constructed picture of the city for marketing purposes, both internally and internationally.

This idealized image of social harmony within an ageless multiculturalist urban system, however, has its limits, especially with regard to the issue of religious and ethnic minorities, as I intend to show by taking into account overlapping levels of popular debates, official ideology, and ethnographic insight. By presenting material from my fieldwork on the Rum Greek Orthodox community, I argue that these discourses remain short of asking crucial questions as to the dissolution of the cosmopolitan urban society through the displacement of various non-Muslim groups in the process of nationalization. I then pose a set of queries that remain unanswered through these discourses of cosmopolitanist nostalgia: What is at stake in these different representations of the past at present? How are the processes of identity-building in the city linked to the discursive environments in which they take place? How is the loss of cosmopolitanism imagined differently by different communities in the city; what are the specifics of cosmopolitanist structure as it is claimed to be unique to Istanbul? These questions relating to city identity become particularly important when considered within the political landscape of Turkey's candidacy to the EU and Istanbul's election to be the European Capital of Culture in 2010.