Samuel Dolbee, New York University
Chris's post gave a nice sense of where lambs came from before their slaughter on Kurban Bayramı in 1817. This post concerns where these beasts - or at least their constituent parts - went afterwards nearly a century later. While people may have sacrificed as part of their relationships with god, the fate of the literal parts of the sacrificed animals had to do with people's relationships with the Sultan and the state.
In a document from September of 1914, the president of the Association for the Ottoman Navy wrote to Istanbul and provincial officials about the upcoming Eid al-Adha celebrations. Since his group's inception in 1909, the sales of "slaughtered sacrificial animals' skins and horns", he wrote, had benefitted the organization, allowing them to turn byproducts of religious sacrifice - like lambskins and cattle horns - into money that built Ottoman warships.
How much money came from these pious offerings? Not much, according to a document from the governor of Diyarbakır in January of the same year. The previous year's donations totaled 5,144 kuruş in Siverek and 375 kuruş in Viranşehir. Based on the 1857 pegging of 110 kuruş to 1 pound sterling, this amounted to about 50 pounds sterling. Or, put differently, about .001% of the cost of the battleship Reşadiye, a vessel the Ottomans ordered but never received from the United Kingdom, thanks to the efforts of a man called Churchill in the lead up to World War I.
But aside from monetary value, the skins and horns had a symbolic value, too. A lamb changed from a breathing creature to a slit-throat expression of god's love to a skin sold to support the rebuilding of the Ottoman fleet. And, clearly, even people in places as far from the high seas as Diyarbakır province could get on board with this project.
Source: BOA DH.İ.UM.EK 89/30 (1332 Z 6)
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