Recovering & Uncovering the Past of Diverse Communities in Imperial Spaces: Memory and Self-Organization in Urban Centres of the Eastern European and Ottoman Realms
12-13 September 2024
Venue: Ilia State University, Austrian Centre Reading Hall, Giorgi Tsereteli Street, 3, S 507 (5th floor), Tbilisi, Georgia (See on GOOGLE Maps)
Conveners: Max Weber Foundation & Orient-Institute Istanbul in cooperation with Ilia State University, Tbilisi
A two-day workshop is dedicated to the everyday life of urban communities in minority position in imperial pasts, to their memory and heritage. Historians and anthropologists are brought together to present diverse experiences of ethnic and religious communities in the cities of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. A special attention is paid to the history of the institutions that these communities created to function within the city, their ethnic and religious infrastructure, forms of agency, and their representation in private memory. Some presentations focus on the past of communities no longer present today that nevertheless once played a pronounced role in urban life and whose cultural, artistic, and architectural heritage is still being appreciated and conceptualized both by contemporary residents and outside observers.