Save the Bees: Indignity and the Commons in the Ottoman Mediterranean

In March of 1896, Nikula Psyaki—a Greek subject of the Ottoman Empire—signed a forestry concession with Egypt’s ruler Abbas Hilmi II. In exchange for the concession, Psyaki would be the sole supplier of timber on the Mediterranean island of Thasos. But for this concession to be profitable, the islanders were forbidden from harvesting, selling or burning any wood. Overnight, the forest went from communal property to private property by decree. Such decrees mimicked general Ottoman reforms under the Tanzimat, Ottoman reforms during 1848-1876, and the economic thinking of the reform-minded Young Turks (Yayicoglu, 2008). The decree was similar to mortmain decrees in nineteenth-century England that mapped unused communal land held by the crown, and US attitudes to populate and exploit its frontier territories (Turner, 1893, 1906). Elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan was granting concessions to nineteenth-century European capitalists to mine its countryside for minerals (Hanioglu, 2016).

Unlike these examples, and in mainland Egypt, the islanders of Thasos managed to roll back the concession. Their resistance was couched in ecological terms that negotiated their indigenous position which they understood as one of the last frontiers that the Ottoman Empire wished to exploit (Gratien, 2022). Harvesting wood through indigenous ways, as opposed to en masse forestry, protected the local ecosystem; especially the bees. The islanders complained that Psyaki’s concession would cause more forest fires which would kill the bees “the main source of their livelihood”. Relying on the private papers of Abbas Hilmi II, this paper writes a history of Thasos from the perspective of these bees. It catalogues the resistance led by the islanders against Psyaki and the ecological campaign they waged that bridged the world of human and non-human (Latour, 1986) to protect these apiaries through forms of indigenous knowledge (Mikhail, 2010).