An Experiment in Group Research: a Girl's High School Choir in Ottoman Salonica

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

One of the main goals of Tozsuz Evrak is playing with unconventional ways of approaching historical research and use of primary sources. Part of this is developing a collaborative approach to research and realizing the potential of group effort in an electronic setting. This post discusses one such attempt to do so using Facebook, and some of the possibilities it suggests. I will mention all those who contributed to this article to highlight the collaborative aspect of the approach.

In a box of uncatalogued documents from the Ministry of Education (Maarif Nezareti), I found a folder ( BOA, MF-VRK 19/81*) containing some enigmatic music written down in a language I later identified as Bulgarian. Knowing that the document might be interesting to the Ottoman History Podcast readership but absolutely lacking the time to learn Bulgarian, I decided to post it in our Facebook group. Ottoman History Podcast has an international audience with a Facebook following of roughly 3,000 members that include scholars and students as well as those with a general interest in history. According to Facebook statistics, the posts that I am about to discuss reached approximately 2,000 people. I posted this image on Facebook on November 11, 2012 and solicited the help of readers in identifying the song. 

Within minutes, Torkom Movsesiyan had identified the song as "Quiet White Danube," a well-known Bulgarian poem about the Danube River. However, not only was the title identified, which would only require being able to read Bulgarian, but more information about the song started to pour in. Velislav Radic wrote: 

It's indeed the "Quiet White Danube" /"Тих бял Дунав…" It's a special song for most Bulgarians, performed by schoolkids, brass bands, football fans… It commemorates the revolutionary and poet Hristo Botev, who in 1876 with some 200 of his brigands hijacked the Austro-Hungarian passenger steamship "Radetzky"on the Danube and convinced the captain to take them from their Romanian exile to the Bulgarian coast to fight for independence. The lyrics were written by national poet Ivan Vazov while Bulgaria was still an Ottoman province, but the music we see here was composed later.

Gergana Georgieva followed up with more information and two links to wikipedia explaining some of the historical background of the song, namely the aforementioned revolutionary Hristo Botev and the poet Ivan Vazov. Philip P. Stanil posted a link this youtube video of the song, allowing us to hear the poem along with the later music composition:

By this point we knew a lot about the song, but the post also sparked a conversation about the history of the melody itself. Based on the key in the Western notation, Rohat Alp identified the melody as the Kürdilihicazkar makamı commonly used in the Ottoman world, which prompted a response from Esref Berk Turkoglu saying that with just the excerpt that I had posted, it would be hard to match it up completely with a certain makam. Meanwhile, Grigor Boykov posed the important question of what was this musical piece doing in the Ottoman archives anyway?

Based on these questions, it seemed necessary to post the entire folder as an album on Facebook and ask readers to say what they could about the documents. Milica Mančić and Gergana Georgieva identified the first document in the folder was an end of the year program from a 1909-1910 school year performance by the choir at a Bulgarian Girl's High School called Holy Annunciation in Salonica, especially interesting consider Hazel Lynn Singer's suggestion to contact the Bulgarian Women's Choir for more information. Pınar Üre and Timur Koraev provided more information about the program, which was set to begin at 9:30 AM and included an annual report of the school, musical and theatrical performances, and a graduation ceremony at the end.

Program from Bulgarian Girl's High School Musical Performance ad Graduation Ceremony in Salonica

more songs from the
program

The rest of the documents were then pertaining to the musical program of the event. In addition to the aforementioned sheet music for "Quiet, White Danube," there were lyrics to several other songs that Kameliya Atanasova helped identify as folk songs, "a musical anthem" and of course the poem "Quiet, White Danube." On the third document, Velislav Radev added that the top song is supposed to be taken from the Russian Royal anthem (though it is not) and the bottom song is a Russian folk song called 'Northern Star' by Mikhail Glinka, XIX century.

more songs from the
program including "Quiet, Blue
Danube"

In a matter of roughly an hour, the basic content of the folder had been revealed: music attached to a graduation ceremony at a Bulgarian Girl's High School that included perhaps the single most important patriotic song in Bulgarian as well as other folk songs in Bulgarian and even Russian.

more songs from the
program includinng
Russian song
'Northern Star' by Mikhail Glinka

Based on this information and the location of the folder, which as I mentioned was in a random uncatalogued box of the Ministry of Education at the Ottoman archives, we can derive some conclusions. First of all, we can see that the Ottoman Ministry of Education was supervising or monitoring the activities at a Bulgarian school (and likely other schools if its kind by extension) that was evidently able to operate freely in Salonica, which had been the base of the liberal Young Turk Revolution just a few years before in 1908. This school clearly presented a program that was not religious but rather focused on important aspects of Bulgarian communal/national identity through the poetry of Ivan Vazov and folklore, which was a favorite of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century nationalists.

Velislav Radev added further interpretation:

Mikhail Glinka, the composer of the other [Russian] song, was profoundly important for Pan-Slavism. It seems its activists were on the ground in the Salonika High school. That may well explain why the Ottoman government requested these documents, or kept an eye on the school...

The results of this experiment were positive, not just for the information that came out, but for the speed with which a diverse group of people could competently handle these documents to piece together a story. Moreover, the images and comments were available to thousands of people who could respond to each other and make corrections as the work was unfolding. The advantages of this wiki-type approach to historical sources are clear: more eyes and brains means more knowledge and less chance of egregious errors in the final product.

Could research be conducted in such a manner? Could a set of documents be handled not by one scholar responsible for all aspects from gathering material, reading, interpreting, and analyzing data but rather by a group of individuals with unique skills piecing together information and reviewing each other work in real-time via internet?

This is in fact the idea behind projects like Wikipedia, the flaws of which are obvious. A totally public data base of primary source documents analyzed in such a manner would result in uneven coverage and unreliable material getting mixed in even with editors and a feedback system to rate the quality of a particular contribution. However, a team of scholars who know and trust each other could theoretically tackle a set of documents very efficiently in precisely this manner, and if an effective interface that ensures a  ratings and reward system for all aspects of the process from transcription and interpretation to correction and further references were somehow developed, it would create an exciting and competitive environment where researchers would have an incentive to contribute productively to a collaborative project and be civil while doing it.

At any rate, this article came a long way from the name I originally had given to the files on my computer: "Greek music class"

What is remarkable for me is that the documents under discussion here are in Bulgarian, which means they are only relevant and legible to a small number of Ottoman History Podcast readers and listeners. Next time we will attempt a similar experiment using a document in good old Ottoman Turkish and report back with results.

The original Facebook posts can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=472019919503030&set=a.332283373476686.72027.202234406481584&type=1&theater and here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.472085552829800.99800.202234406481584&type=1

*It might also be worth mentioning that the original date on the folder was 1319 or 1901/1902, but the documents were evidently of later origin.

school

Salonika