engleski

Women in the Balkans as seen through the eyes of the 18th century Ottoman poet

Women were rarely mentioned in the Ottoman Turkish literature and representations of women are rather neglected and even understudied topic in the Ottoman literary scholarship. There are only few works in Ottoman literary tradition dealing with female characters, and the most interesting with respect to imagology is the Zenân-nâme (The Book of Women), a catalogue of women written in the late eighteenth century by Enderunlu Fazıl Bey (1757-1810), Ottoman poet who was brought up in the Palace School. The Zenân- nâme is a poem in 'mesnevi' form describing women of various ethnic groups, and is exceptionally rich in the representation of their national characteristics. Many of the women types described in the book are originally from the Balkans, like Albanians, Greeks, Rumelians, Bosniacs, Moldavians, Bulgarians, Croats and others. This paper examines the image of the Balkan women throught the eyes of the late eighteenth century Ottoman poet, a member of the Ottoman scholarly class. Through a close examination of these literary images, the paper will try to explore to which extent these representations are determined by historical or ideological circumstances, as well as by cultural, literary or discursive conventions of the classical Ottoman literature. The purpose of this analysis is to shed some light on the attitude of the Ottomans towards the Balkan people, be it with respect to gender, religion, nation and ethnicity.

Ottoman literature, imagology, Balkan women, ethnic stereotypes

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