Crossing the Black Sea: Muslim Migrants and the Worlds They Made

Often seen as a barrier between the nineteenth-century Russian and Ottoman empires, the Black Sea was in fact a bustling maritime highway that closely connected the two in the modern era. Between the 1850s and 1914 millions of migrants crossed the sea and Russo-Ottoman frontiers, moving in both directions as pilgrims and merchants, spies and fugitives, laborers and émigrés. Muslims were the most numerous of these migrants, and their movement produced distinctive Muslim communities in port cities around the Black Sea’s shores, composed of Russian and Ottoman subjects.

Drawing mainly on Muslim civil registers (metricheskie knigi) from Odessa, imperial Russia’s chief port on the Black Sea, my paper attempts to reconstruct the internal lives of these communities through patterns of marriage, divorce, births, and deaths. Through this preliminary sketch, I hope to highlight some of the sources that allow us to capture the history of cross-border migrations that knitted together these two empires in the decades before WWI. I also seek to unsettle traditional notions of Russian and Ottoman worlds as separate and neatly bounded by formal borders, revealing instead a more fluid world of cross-border contacts and exchange, and offering some preliminary thoughts on the political, cultural, and intellectual repercussions of these relationships for the Russian and Ottoman imperial regimes.