ABSTRACT
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed large-scale population movements in the Balkans and Anatolia as a direct result of RussianOttoman wars fought out on battlefields in a vast stretch of land from the Crimea to the present-day suburbs of Istanbul. Throughout the century these wars led to dramatic land losses for the Ottoman Empire, which left most of its provinces in the Balkans first to the Russians and then to the several newly established nation-states in the region. Withdrawing Ottoman armies were often accompanied by long lines of refugee columns, mostly peasants who had lost their lands and were displaced either because of direct military action, political design, civil strife, or some combination of these. Thus, by the first decades of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was reduced to its Anatolian and Arab provinces, with a total of more than 5 million of its Balkan inhabitants – predominantly Muslims – taking refuge in the remaining lands of the contracting empire (Quataert 1997: 793). The loss, within a very short time period, of some of the core provinces of the Empire had been devastating economically and politically, catastrophic socially, and traumatic for the Ottoman rulers, with dramatic long-term consequences. Russian and Bulgarian armies at the gates of Istanbul no doubt rang the death knell for the Empire as such. Hundreds of thousands of refugees in the streets of Istanbul were constant reminders of the losses both for the displaced and dispossessed refugees themselves and for the rulers.
