Shared secrets: (re)writing urban mysteries in nineteenth-century Istanbul

Abstract

The cultural and literary interconnectedness of the communities that inhabited the nineteenth-century Ottoman imperial capital – Muslim Turks, Greek Christians, Armenian Christians, Sephardic Jews and others – was partly effected by literary translation as a vector of ‘trans-communal’ contact. Juxtaposing a Greek novel published in Istanbul and inspired by the model of Eugène Sue’s (1804–57) Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3) with a translation of the same text into Greek-scripted Ottoman Turkish (Karamanlidika) published almost simultaneously in the same city, this chapter engages with translation, adaptation and circulation as both a cross-border phenomenon and a cross-community one. Setting two versions of a single, translated text – separated by language, but sharing the same script – side by side reveals nuances in cultural and intellectual relations between linguistic and ethno-religious communities. Moreover, by highlighting intra-lingual transliteration as an alternative form of translation, this case study challenges entrenched conceptual categories in the field of translation studies.

First serialised in Athens in 1888–9 in Ephimeris, the newspaper owned by its author, and later reprinted in book form in 1890, Epaminondas Kyriakidis’ (1861–1939) Πέραν Απόκρυϕα (‘The mysteries of Pera’) was one of many novels directly inspired by the works of French novelist Eugène Sue to appear in Istanbul, and in several local literary idioms, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although Kyriakidis’ work was technically an ‘original’ novel, it was evidently an attempt to domesticate the narrative templates and conventions of urban popular fiction developed by Sue, investing them with new meanings shaped by cultural expectations and social anxieties specific to late-imperial Istanbul.

‘Urban Mysteries’ in Greece and in the Ottoman Empire

It is useful first to situate Kyriakidis’ The Mysteries of Pera, and its Greek-scripted Ottoman Turkish (Karamanlidika) translation, The Mysteries of Beyoğlu, by Evangelinos Misailidis (1820–90), within the larger context of Greek reception of Western popular fiction – the French roman de mystères in particular – in the Ottoman environment. It would be incorrect to describe Eugène Sue as the sole inventor of the popular novel, a category that emerged gradually, integrating existing features of Western European prose fiction into new forms that reflected emerging social realities especially in evolving urban settings.