One-Eyed Yorgi

Zoe Griffith, Brown University

The crew of 13 Rum seamen that set out to purchase Black Sea grain for the Ottoman Porte aboard the ship of Captain Nikola, son of Yorgi, was motley indeed. According to a shipping permit granted to the “tall, yellow-mustachioed” Captain Nikola for the voyage in 1808, the Greek sailors included “tall, black-mustachioed Mihal, son of Dmitri,” “short, barefaced Yorgi, son of Balash,” and “medium-height, sandy-mustachioed Mankarbuda, son of Vasil.” A man called Yorgi, son of Arkir, was apparently more readily identifiable as being “short and pockmarked” than by his facial hair. But none of the enterprising seamen possessed so distinctive a characteristic as “medium-height, one-eyed Yorgi, son of Dmitri” (“orta boylu, yek-çeşm Yorki veled-i Dimitri.”) Two hundred years later, historians can only wonder how poor, cycloptic Yorgi fared without the privilege of his depth-perception on the high seas. But the fact that we can wonder at all speaks to important changes in Ottoman geopolitics and administrative norms with major implications for the imperial provisioning system during a period of great transformation in the decades leading up to the Tanzimat.

The short document introducing us to the crew full of Yorgis and sons of Yorgi (let's not even think about how many of their grandfathers' names were Yorgi) is one of hundreds of pieces of bureaucratic flotsam held at the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi under the label of İzn-i Sefine, or “Shipping Permits,” for the years 1780-1846. According to İdris Bostan, the bureaucratic institution of izn-i sefine emerged in response to the momentous 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, in which the Ottomans conceded their nearly 300-year hegemony over trade and taxation in the Black Sea and found themselves suddenly in competition with the Russians (and, later, other European commercial powers) for access to the grain used to provision the capital city of Istanbul. Captain Nikola and the Yorgis were part of the Ottoman state’s response to this new geopolitical reality: on the one hand, agents were employed by the Imperial Flour Scales (Kapan-ı Dakik, or Unkapanı) to obtain grain from the Black Sea ports on the Porte’s dime. On the other hand, private merchants also brought grain for gluten-happy Ottoman officials to weigh on their floury scales (in exchange for cold, hard cash, of course.) To ensure that private Ottoman merchants like Captain Nikola brought every last, precious grain back to state officials in Istanbul, private vessels were not permitted to pass through the mouth of the Boğaz into the Black Sea without a freshly-minted izn-i sefine. This particular document testified that Captain Nikola’s ship had been inspected by customs officials of the Imperial Grain Inspector (Zahire Nazırı), and emphasized that Nikola’s round-trip voyage was to last no longer than three months, after which the permit would be rendered void. In addition, all of the crew members listed by name and description on the document - including our monofocal friend, Yek-Çeşm Yorgi - had to return with Nikola to Istanbul. By the early-19th century, the Porte was particularly concerned that non-Muslim seafarers would abandon the Ottoman imperial project and take up residence in Russian lands. Thus, if Yorgi had decided to jump ship and build a new life for himself in Odessa, his absence would have been quickly and easily noted by customs officials in Istanbul upon Nikola’s return.

When Ottoman historians discuss the Nizam-ı Cedid (New Order) reforms of the 1790s under Sultan Selim III, they generally focus on the military reforms undertaken to build a “modern” Ottoman army. As scholars have begun to point out, however, the Nizam-ı Cedid also manifested itself in the realm of economic policy and the proliferation of bureaucratic procedures intended to secure access to resources, whether fiscal, edible, or human. In the voluminous production of Izn-i Sefine records, we catch a glimpse of what James C. Scott refers to as “Seeing Like a State." Although the tale of Captain Nikola's rag-tag team of Greek sailors seems far from the high-modernist projects Scott takes aim at in his famous monograph, the desire to record identities in the first place speaks to a new imperative of legibility in a context of increasing global competition, concerns over ethnic and sectarian identity, and the evolution of bureaucratic practices around the turn of the 19th century. So this case is not exactly seeing like a state. But we nevertheless catch a glimpse of what the Nizam-i Cedid state saw when it started peering paternalistically at its diverse subjects and servitors.

Source: BOA, A.{DVN.İZN. 3/37 (1223/1808)

For details on izn-i sefine, see: İdris Bostan, "İzn-i Sefîne Defterleri ve Karadeniz'de Rusya ile Ticaret Yapan Devlet-i Aliyye Tüccarları 1780-1846", MÜTAD, Vol. 6 (1991): 21-44.

two-eyed Yorgi

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