As a Phd student studying the history of Edirne during the Balkan Wars, Pinar Odabasi Tasci finds herself in “an academically unwieldy space”, and not just in the sense of having to master bodies of scholarship, on Balkan, Ottoman as well as Middle Eastern history, that may not always play nice with each other. But this sensation of unwieldiness would not have been unfamiliar to residents of Edirne. “Edirne was already experiencing this in the nineteenth century,” Pinar notes, “and this unwieldiness carries on, into the twentieth century.” A historian of war and violence, Pinar’s research has benefited from renewed interest in the Balkan Wars, inspired both by the centennial as well as by a focus on the so-called “Greater War”, which began with the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and continued until the Treaty of Lausanne twelve years later. It reflects new histories of war that address social groups and cultures of defeat. As if this was not challenging enough, Pinar is also interested in borderlands. In this conversation, recorded on 25 January 2024, Jonathan asks Pinar to share her insights into how the residents of the Edirne region understood and expressed their own identity and allegiances, as border lines shifted back and forth between the first and second Balkan Wars. The discussion then turns to the global publicity campaign mounted by the Ottoman authorities, in which they endeavoured to draw on different forms of data collected by army officers, as evidence of alleged Bulgarian atrocities. Finally Pinar tells us something of her side interest in the remarkable Ottoman exclave of Ada Kaleh: an island in the Danube three hundred kilometers west of the Romanian capital Bucharest that somehow remained Ottoman (at least de jure) until 1923. Having sunk below the waves in 1970, today this Ottoman Atlantis can only be visited in the imagination.

ADA KALEH, CIRCA 1900.

Episode 47 – From Edirne to Atlantis

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

MAIN IMAGE: TABYAS (BRICK INFANTRY EMPLACEMENTS) AT THE BALKAN WAR MUSEUM, EDIRNE.