Andreas-Tietze-Fellows

Dr. İlkay Kirişçioğlu

Project title: Between Crescent and Cross: Exiled Europeans and Ottoman Converts

Fellowship period: 2026

İlkay Kirişçioğlu is a historian of nineteenth-century Europe and the Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on the revolutionary networks that connected Hungarian, Italian, and Polish lands under Austrian and Russian rules with the Balkans under Turkish rule. At the Sapienza University of Rome, he recently defended his PhD thesis, “Garibaldi’s Sword of Glory: Hungarian and Polish Converts in Constantinople,” which deals with the transnational encounters of the Hungarian and Polish 48ers who converted to Islam in the Ottoman Empire in the late 1840s and later developed close relations with the Italian revolutionary circles in the early 1860s. His broader research interests include the revolutionary networks in Europe and their entanglements in the territories of the Ottoman Balkans in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with ego-documents, religious conversion, transnational mobility, and police surveillance during the long nineteenth century.

Abstract
Following the failure of the springtime of nations in Hungary and Italy, thousands of Hungarian, Polish, and Italian revolutionaries sought refuge in the Ottoman Balkans, with hundreds of them converting to Islam to avoid extradition and secure employment. Unlike the majority of the refugees who later left the Ottoman territory for Europe and America, hundreds of converts were employed in the Ottoman bureaucracy, starting a new life within the empire. However, studies have hitherto preferred to give voice to the leaders; little is known about the rest, including the converts, despite their significant number. Relying on their self-narratives, this research seeks to interpret how these converts navigated political and religious loyalties that often clashed with one another, and how their identities dynamically evolved in response to multiple geo-cultural frameworks from the late 1840s to the early 1860s. It aims to revisit on-the-ground experiences in a way to countervail the Clash of Civilizations paradigm that still largely informs the epistemological understanding of religious conversion in historical studies.

Thanks to the Andreas Tietze Memorial Fellowship, he takes the opportunity to prepare future grant applications in cooperation with the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Vienna.