IHR / NHRF & MIET & ORTHPOL Workshop Scripts and Languages in the Pre-National Ottoman Balkans (Early Modern and Modern Periods)

Recent scholarship has emphasized the Ottoman Empire as an “empire of diversity,” highlighting fluid identities, legal pluralism, and cultural hybridity. Yet, despite the abundance of multilingual and allographic texts—documents written in one language using the script of another—research remains fragmented along ethno-religious and disciplinary lines. This workshop explores the rich multilingual and multiscriptural landscape of the Ottoman Balkans prior to the rise of ethnolinguistic nationalism. It aims to foster a systematic, interdisciplinary dialogue on allographic practices, bringing together scholars from various fields to discuss manuscript and printed sources from the early modern to the late Ottoman periods. By examining hybrid texts—such as Ottoman Turkish in Greek script, Greek in Cyrillic and Latin scripts, or Romance idioms in Cyrillic and Latin scripts—we seek to reassess these practices not as deviations from norms, but as longstanding tools of identity, communication, and cultural exchange within a pluralistic imperial context.