About Matthew Ghazarian

Matthew Ghazarian is a PhD student in the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He holds a B.A. in Government from Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of the 19th and 20th centuries in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. By engaging with historical narratives from Armenian, Turkish, English, and French sources, his research raises questions about violence, development, and identity.

Ottoman Postcards in a Post-Ottoman World

Galata_old_postcardVisitors have fallen in love with Istanbul for generations. In the early 20th century, photographers, both Ottoman and European, captured its blue seas, red roofs, and beige buildings. Despite its beauty, the city’s riot of color obscures a troubling past of missing signs, sounds, and scripts.

Listen closely. The sounds of Turkish give voice to its history. Its raised and rhymed vowels connect the syllables of each word in a harmonious flow, but that flow has been artificially enhanced. During the creation of the modern Turkish state, authorities purged the frictive sounds like “gh” and “kh” found in Arabic and Persian. For instance, in Ottoman words like “yogurt” (Turkish: yoğurt) were pronounced “yo-ghurt” (with the “gh” sound of the English interjection “ugh!”), but in modern Turkish the “gh” was silenced, becoming “yo-urt”. (There’s a reason they still spell it “yoghurt” in Britain.)

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