Mainstream WeeklyBOOK REVIEW
The Nature of the Ottoman City Water and Urban Space in Sofia, 1380s–1910s
by Stefan Peychev
Cambridge University Press
2024. 204 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-00-955885-3
Reviewed by Dale Stahl (University of Colorado Denver)
The Ottoman city of Sofia, Bulgaria, was once the center of the empire’s European domains, the provincial capital of Rumeli. It was also a city of water with a sophisticated hydraulic infrastructure of pipes, public fountains, thermal baths, and irrigated gardens. In The Nature of the Ottoman City, Stefan Peychev challenges national, regional, and imperial historiographies that have obscured the dynamism of Sofia’s Ottoman past, recovering that history through an examination of this hydraulic system.
Peychev begins his three-chapter work by describing how Bulgarian histories of the city characterized the Ottoman period as one of backwardness and decline. Eager to establish Sofia as the center of a new nation-state, nationalist histories accompanied and justified urban redesign efforts that led to the demolition of many Ottoman monuments, making way for a city modeled on western European examples.
But nationalist historiography isn’t the only reason Sofia’s urban dynamism in the Ottoman period has been obscured, Peychev argues. The historiography of the Balkans, as well as that of the empire itself, has marginalized or misunderstood the contexts of Sofia’s growth, its importance to Ottoman rule, and what Sofia may offer to a larger understanding of empire-wide social dynamics. Histories of the Balkans have at times presumed a sui generis region with few, if any, ties to Anatolia and other imperial possessions to the east and south. Studies of cities in Anatolia have done something similar, Peychev argues, constructing a notion of the “Anatolian city” disconnected from other parts of the empire. Moreover, the insular nature of Ottoman historiography has limited more sophisticated analyses of syncretic urban development, in which multiple trends in urbanism coexisted and cross-fertilized.
Peychev seeks to remedy these historiographical weaknesses by revealing Sofia’s waterscape in greater detail and with thorough attention to Ottoman sources. The book’s first chapter opens with Sofia’s water supply and early modern developments. Here, readers learn how Sofia’s early modern infrastructure was organized and funded and, to a lesser extent, how it was constructed. True to his aim to make the book accessible beyond Ottoman studies, Peychev’s description of the system of religious endowments (vakıf) is among the clearest this reviewer has encountered.
The second chapter introduces Sofia’s famed thermal springs and public baths, situating them within the city’s social life. Peychev details how the baths served as sites of social mixing, drawing individuals from different classes, religions, and ethnicities into common spaces. He also notes how Sofia’s baths were encountered by European and Ottoman travelers, often while passing to or from the imperial capital at Istanbul.
In the third chapter, Peychev relates Sofia’s misfortunes in the nineteenth century when two earthquakes, banditry, wars, and territorial shifts reduced the city’s population and its economic and political importance within the imperial system. Nationalist historians have interpreted these changes in Sofia’s position as symptomatic of an overall Ottoman decline rather than as the result of changing circumstances and a cluster of adverse events. In response, Peychev offers a more granular and interconnected understanding of Sofia’s troubled nineteenth century. In doing so, he does not deny the city’s decline but situates it within linked environmental, social, and political contexts rather than a broad notion of mismanagement. Moreover, the shift to post-Ottoman Bulgarian rule, when the views of the city’s own residents were discounted in the push to demolish and modernize, is fascinating and well written.
At about 175 pages, the book is a rich study that offers historians of the Balkans and Ottoman Empire much to consider. Peychev persuasively revises Bulgarian nationalist accounts of Sofia and places the city within broader Ottoman institutions and transformations. Yet the emphasis on this corrective work, combined with the book’s brevity, limits its ability to make the broader connections its introduction and analysis invite. The historiographical problems Peychev seeks to correct largely organize the analysis, such that historiographical correction sometimes becomes an end in itself rather than a springboard for connective and comparative work. A more sustained synthesis—even a brief one—might have shown more fully how Sofia alters our understanding of Ottoman urban and environmental history.
While arguing for Sofia’s place in an Ottoman world, the book could go much further in demonstrating the city’s relationship to that larger history. For instance, many Ottoman successor states experienced a period when leaders and scholars distanced themselves from the Ottoman past in favor of earlier origin stories, even while those same individuals continued to frame political and economic issues in Ottoman terms. In this way, Peychev’s story of Sofia is reminiscent of Damascus or Ankara. Had those links been pursued and analyzed, Sofia’s transformation from a mostly Muslim city into a mostly Christian one in the late nineteenth century could have added greater nuance to our understanding of how postimperial leaders conceived of urban space and linked environmental, political, and economic change.
As environmental history, the book tends to situate Sofia ecologically more than it engages environmental theory. The book does good work in describing Sofia within its various ecological contexts. Even so, discussions of place making, landscape, and environmental change rarely lead the analysis, with the most trenchant observations arriving near the end of chapters. These observations, moreover, engage narrowly with extant literature and never quite cohere into a larger argument. While a reader learns of different piping technologies, the urban “image making” of European travelers, and the shocking destruction caused by earthquakes, the point of the book is more to define “the proper historical setting of Sofia’s Ottoman experience” (p. 175) than to theorize nature in and of Ottoman cities. This distinction is especially apparent in the lack of engagement with studies of other Ottoman cities. As a result, even though Peychev notes in his introduction an “epistemological deficiency … made possible by the reluctance on the part of Balkanists to make comparisons with other cities” (p. 15), the analysis does not fully capitalize on the comparative possibilities Peychev identifies. Reading Peychev’s book brings to mind a number of related histories, especially on Istanbul and Cairo. Although relevant titles appear in the footnotes and bibliography, they rarely become active in the analysis, leaving the reader to wonder how Sofia might confirm, revise, or complicate interpretations developed from the histories of other important Ottoman centers.
Ultimately, The Nature of the Ottoman City is more about an Ottoman city than the Ottoman city. More precisely, Peychev succeeds in reintegrating Ottoman Sofia into Bulgarian history, but less fully in demonstrating what Sofia changes about our understanding of Ottoman environmental history. Still, the book will help historians achieve a clearer idea of Sofia’s development, its impressive hydraulic setting and politico-economic importance, and the Ottoman contexts that shaped the city. The book will also interest those looking to reframe nationalist and regionalist conceptions of Ottoman history, providing vital arguments, data, and analysis for such examinations. In these ways, Peychev’s study contributes important research and arguments to broader efforts to recover a more nuanced and dynamic Ottoman past.
[This review from H-Net is reproduced under a Creative Commons License]