Ottoman History Podcast - Getting High at the Gates of Felicity

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

Episode 391 with Stefano Taglia hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The use of stimulants, what we now refer to as recreational drugs (marijuana and hashish – esrar and haşiş), in the late Ottoman world constitutes a lens through which one can observe multiple aspects of both the history of the Ottoman Empire and its historiography in its broader sense. The life and social dynamics of those involved in drug consumption contributes to sketching a picture of the social life of the Ottoman Empire and its capital and, in this sense, helps expand a field that is somewhat limited. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. We're joined today by Dr Stefano Taglia, a research fellow of the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He's the current assistant editor for the Middle East of the journal Arkiv Orientani. Having completed his PhD at SOAS, he has published on Ottomanism in the Hamidian era from the point of view of political opponents of the regime. He published a book with Rutledge, Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire in 2015, and has edited a thematic issue on

Ottomanism and Neo-Ottomanism with D. Welts, Des Islams, and his current research is on the consumption of cannabis in the late Ottoman Empire, and in particular, Istanbul. Stefano, first of all, thank you very much for agreeing to record a podcast with us. Thank you very much for having me, Talan. The first question has to be your research on cannabis in the late Ottoman Empire, or the consumption of cannabis in the late Ottoman Empire, is a little bit of a switch from your previous research on Ottomanism. Why the shift of your focus of interest? I worked for quite a long time on political exiles and intellectuals abroad

who were trying to change the nature of the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II. You know, the history of that period and of those people is rich. There's a lot of sources. There's a lot to be discussed. I kind of gathered that their life was very disconnected from the everyday life of people. So we read what they thought about big issues, the reform of the empire, religion as a whole, but we don't really understand from their writing what was happening on the ground. So I wanted to get into more of a social history. And I found a pretty huge gap in the history of cannabis, while we have a large literature on opium, for example, or other drugs or other aspects that could or were considered vices. informs other areas of Ottoman history. So we're not just looking at who smoked, why, where and how much,

because that could be interesting, but up to a certain point. While cannabis users, their life is informative from the broader aspect of social history, but it also presents a nice parallel or contrast to the life of intellectuals in the same period. So the topic is clearly of interest for us if we're looking at this modern period in the Ottoman Empire, if we're looking at the state intervention in social life, in day-to-day life. Before we delve into these broad topics, what has been done so far?

You mentioned that there's a lot of research or research has been done in terms of the use of opium and opiates. Has there been much written about in terms of the use of cannabis particularly? Not really. I mean, let me give you a kind of a broader view of sources. So there is quite an important amount of primary sources, but there isn't a sufficient amount of secondary sources. So not many people have written on it. There is stuff written for previous centuries, so not really for the 19th. There's stuff for the medieval part of Islamic society in general.

And there's also a lot being written about other topics that are, I think, tightly connected to the consumption of cannabis. So there's a lot that has been written on the consumption of alcohol and on prostitution, not just prostitutes, but also the clients. And I think these three together, they give us a nice kind of, they complement each other in understanding how the state reacts to this, to vices or groups that could be seen as harmful for a productive, modern productive society. In terms of prostitution, we can look at the work done by Malte Furman, but also by the very interesting work done by Cecil Ilmas on prostitution and syphilis. From the alcohol point of view, there is obviously interesting stuff being done by Francois Georgian, There is obviously interesting stuff being done by Francois Georgian, but there's also very interesting stuff done by Daniel MacArthur-Seale.

So who are the consumers of cannabis and cannabis products? You're looking at the late Ottoman Empire, and I think you're looking specifically or more specifically at Istanbul and the use of these drugs in Istanbul. Who are these people? Are they undesirables? Are they the lower classes? How are they perceived?

Are they potentially people at the margins of Ottoman society? Well, that's what's very interesting about cannabis consumers. First of all, these people are not really at the margin of society. They could be at the margin of society, but not because of their addiction to cannabis, but because of their social standing or because of their other addictions they might have. But they're not at the margins for being consumers of cannabis. These people are, we can call them, you can find consumers across the social divide,

the financial divide, the religious divide, the ethnic divide. So in a way, we can even say that the consumption of cannabis was an increased sociability in the late Ottoman Empire. So we've called them Esrar Keshler. What's the terminology that's used? What are the different ways of describing cannabis and cannabis users in this period. And I suppose, broadly speaking, what does cannabis consumption look like in the late Ottoman Empire? The way that they're usually referred to is Esrar Keşler. The substance itself was given many names. It had many, many nicknames in the 19th century. Some of them are kind of similar

to what would be used today, as for example, powder, pleasure, cave, or there's some funny ones like the sarikas, the blonde girl, or Hindi baba. Some names are something like paspal, which is a type of coarse flour, which is a bit weird because it would remind people more of other substances rather than hashish and marijuana. The way that the cannabis setting looked like, it's probably very much the way it looks today. A bunch of people who, it seems to me,

wanted to get high for different reasons, either because it was a pleasurable moment or evening, or because they tried to escape the harshness of reality. They would meet in specific cafes. They are usually referred to as Esrarhane or Hashishane. And there they would, let's say there were mainly three ways of consuming cannabis. One was to drop a pill, seems to be more of an older, so something from the previous century rather than the 19th century. something from the previous century rather than the 19th century.

So cannabis was sometimes added to opium and some spices like saffron and pressed into a pill. Or it was smoked more frequently the way that it's smoked today. So either in the form of a joint or with the use of a bong. And we have some nice description of this. So we see how the joint was actually made. Two papers, for example, were stuck together with a bit of spit. Some tobacco was put on the papers and then hashish or mariana was put on top of this in very small pieces like a grain of rice. Or a bong would be made and this was usually referred as kabak or a a pumpkin but it had nothing to do with a pumpkin it was actually taken from a coconut the coconut was emptied from the pulp and the water

a top part was cut off and a spout and a little tray was put in that hole. And this is where the substance would be layered. Then on the two sides, two holes would be drilled, one for inhaling and one for stopping the air or letting the air through when you're inhaling. In terms of who they were, as I was saying before, the consumers could be found across the many divides. When these people met in the Esrarhane, there would be a very kind of rigid way or kind of ritual for smoking. So the sahib or the owner, the person who would pay for a half or three quarters of the bong would be the first to smoke.

And then other people who've chipped in would smoke. And then the others in kind of order of descending age. I found mention of a famous individual, Neysen Tefik, who had his own kind of spot, personal spot as an hangout. And rumor has it, or kind of the sources, some of the sources claim that up to the First World War, he had consumed an incredible amount of cannabis, something like seven tons of cannabis, which, you know, obviously there's an exaggeration there. But that gives us an idea that this guy was very much a B2A and a lover of smoking. Stefano, can you tell us a little bit about these Escherhányas? Where were they? What did they look like? Who ran them and who frequented them?

I mean, until now, I've managed to map something like almost 20 of them in Istanbul, pretty much scattered around. So we can't say that there was a specific area that this is where kind of cannabis was consumed. I mean, the first impulse that people usually have is to say, well, it must have been in the European side or in Pera. But instead, we see that, for example, some of them are south of the Golden Horn. Some of them are north of it. And some are even on the Asian side, especially in Uskudar and Kadiköy. So it's really something that was very widespread. Some other sources like Ekrem Koç's Istanbul Encyclopedia states that some of these ezerhane were even hidden in the old walls of the city.

And we even find the names of some of the owners of these venues, and they seem to be scattered around the religious divide as well. I mean, we have people like Ali Bey or Alaeddin, but we also have a Dayani, so definitely a Greek. And we also have the name of a Madame Katina, so even a woman who owned one of these hangouts. In terms of the consumers, these are scattered all around. I found a list in a Sanbachi, Ezra Keschler, of a number of people who were known users to him. And we see that the list contains people from different religious backgrounds, like Mevlevi or Bektashi, a Jew,

or Bektashi, a Jew, as well as people from all different geographical backgrounds. So a Belgian guy, Georges, a John from England. There's a Russian, a Maltese, an Italian even, as well as a lot of Ottomans from different areas of the empire. So how would the state react to these Ehl-i-Keyf, this Esar-Kesler, or to Esar-Haineler? Do we have any examples of the reaction or the enforcement of law from the Ottoman state? What would happen to a person if the person was to be stopped and searched? That varied according to period and according to, I think, the mood of the person who stopped him. First of all, my research kind of focuses on the Hamidian era, so 1870s to the first years of the 1900s.

But the sources go start earlier than that. So the ones that I've picked starts from the late 1830s, and they stop at about the outbreak of World War I. Usually these people were jailed for a little bit. Sometimes they were just, their stuff would be just taken away from them, either thrown away or burned. But penalties don't seem to have been very, very severe. So I think it's interesting to look at how the state responded not only to users, but to cannabis as a whole. And I think in this sense, we have to look at three different parts,

the farming of it, the smuggling of it, and the smoking of it. So in terms of the farming, you can, I mean, it's pretty clear that there wasn't a coherent policy on the part of the state. Things seem to change according to decades. The Ottoman archive is ripe with sources that speak of tithes, tithes dedicated to cannabis farming. And depending on the period, the authorities changed their attitude. And depending on the period, the authorities changed their attitude.

In the late 1830s, opium and hashish were both cultivated. And some of the places where cannabis was cultivated belonged to the state. So it produced revenue for the state. In 1876, the central administration, we know that it notified the provinces that cultivation was outlawed. So there we see already a switch. Then 10 years later, prohibition to farm was lifted, but only for wholesale merchants,

while the small retailers were punished if found kind of growing or smuggling in smaller amounts. We definitely know that cannabis must have been a valuable source of revenue for the state, because at some point in the early 1900s, there was a talk of shifting the revenues from cannabis farming from the military to the public debt administration. And people were really worried that this would take away important revenues for the state. So in terms of the state reaction to those consuming cannabis? What happened to those who smoked, who consumed the drugs? And what happened to those who were caught smuggling these illicit substances?

For the farming, this kind of oscillated in time. Sometimes these people would be caught and sent to prison for five months, for example, which is one of the instances I found on islands, in this case on the island of Midili. Some of the time their staff confiscated and they were just free to walk. You can see from the sources that the police, however hard they tried to eradicate the smoking, they never really managed to do so.

So the idea that I got is that these places, as Rarhaneh, just kept popping up. One would close down, the police would close it down, they would just pay a little fine and then be able to reopen immediately afterwards, promising that they would not smuggle or allow smoking in their in their cafe anymore. And they would be able to open either in a new place or exactly in the same venue. Smugglers were treated somewhat similar. So sometimes they would be jailed. Definitely, usually their stuff was confiscated. Smugglers were usually caught on boats, driven by Greek smugglers. And cannabis was smuggled with weapons, ammunition and explosives, but also hidden, for example, under linen or walnuts or grapes.

And you can read some funny stories of how the smuggler reacts, pretending that he didn't know the existence of the substance in his own vessel. There's an interesting story I found an individual being mentioned in a few sources and it's the story of a smuggler who gets caught with a lot of cannabis he gets caught with about 25 kilos of seeds and about 6 to 7 kilos of cannabis now obviously the substance gets all taken away from him.

He is put on trial, and the trial takes one long year, but then he walks, basically. So he's not even punished for a pretty large amount. And we also know that an amount such as six or seven kilos of cannabis could return quite a lot of money, something like 10 litres of the time. So you mentioned that the consumers of cannabis in late Ottoman Istanbul vary in terms of background, in terms of class, if you like, in terms of their religion. Thinking about the Ehli-Keyf, the people of pleasure,

and the time of modernism and the time of, when you're looking at the intervention of the Ottoman state into this strata of society, what do their experiences vis-à-vis the Ottoman states tell us about this crucial time of modernism in the Ottoman Empire. You can't really have a typology of the cannabis smoker. As I said before, they can be found everywhere. So it's really difficult to say, you know, this was a cannabis addict. What does Nisrar Keshe look like?

It looks like many, many things. It looks like the, you know, the riffraff. It looks like the homeless. But it looks like, for example, the doctor from the Ottoman civil officialdom. We have a source from 1893 that tells us the pains of a doctor by the name of Fakhreddin Effendi, who was forcibly retired because he was found smoking. So then he had to write a plea back to the Ottoman bureaucracy, saying that he promised to give up his smoking habit,

but he would like to be reinstated. And actually, he was indeed restated. So that also gives us an idea that the state was pretty lenient on at least some of the consumers. I'm going to go down and I'll be back. I'm going to go down and I'll be back. I'm going to go down and I'll be back. I'm going to go down and I'll be back. Stefania, can you tell us a little bit about what the sources you are using are?

Are they mostly primary sources? Are they accounts? Are they state archival resources? Do we see them more in terms of the legal sources or the legal documents? Well, first of all, I'm still scanning the horizon of sources. This is a very initial stage of my project. I'm looking at the Ottoman archives, so the sources of the state. I'm looking at some literature of the time, some encyclopedic entries. But very interesting are the medical and botanical treaties that you find mentioned, mentioning, sorry, and studying the effects and the provenance of cannabis, which really gives us an idea, which still I need to corroborate, but it gives me the idea that the state increases its interest in looking at its citizens who are using cannabis as a group of citizens who need to be studied

and society needs to be warned about the perils of smoking cannabis and becoming a cannabis addict. So we can see the use of cannabis, or at least the study of the effects of the use of cannabis. You mentioned the medico-botanical sources that we have. Can you tell us a little bit more about these sources, what they are, who are writing them and what the purpose of it is? And what I want to kind of deepen a little bit is how much the state was commissioning, if at all commissioning, or why do we see a growing interest of books published and studies done, carried out on the topic of cannabis smoking and addiction. There is definitely, I mean, if you look at some of these sources, you see a very kind of thorough study of, first of all, the provenance of the plant,

so botanically where it's from, how it's grown, how it's farmed and then dried to give it more potency. And then this, after kind of an introduction of the plant itself, so the botanical part, side of the argument, then we see a thorough discussion of the side effects of a prolonged use. In terms of the side effects, though, these are treated also in the kind of the more general literature. And the two kind of correspond in their negative view of addicts and of the pathology that comes from cannabis addiction. But you can also see a difference in the two. So while the literature treats it more as a morally negative

habit, then in the medical treaties we see a definite pathological issue treated there. So what happens to your blood flow? What happens to your heartbeat? How it affects your mind? How you're probably not able to concentrate as well anymore. But both the medical and the literature treaties end up in the same spot.

So either death or a complete kind of social, if it's not physical death, it's social death. So is it fair for us to characterize the sources mentioning the consumption and the use of these drugs and the production of these drugs and the production of these drugs as being led by those who are participating in illicit activities that lead on to not only the moral degeneration of Ottoman society, but also the degeneration of the human body. Yeah, and I think that the difference that has to be made here, it kind of ties in well with what we were talking about before. So in the literature, we see that the degeneration is of society.

So an addict is a bad moral person. He's a vermin. He's kind of the scum of society. And he could also be a bad influence for, you know, the new generation. In the medical treaties, instead, we see more of a kind of emphasis on the degeneration of the body. So, what happens medically rather than morally, you know, to the people who are cannabis addict. What overlaps is kind of the broader side effects. So when we're talking about the lack of comprehension or lack of interest in life or lack of concentration, these are things

that are shared by both the literary and the medical treaties. One of the authors of a literary treatise on cannabis, Hassan Bahri, sketches out his own kind of trajectory of the addict, and that's the Ezra Arkesh Merdiveni, where he draws six kind of usual steps of the addict that starts with the feeling of euphoria that you get from your first few paths of a joint and then ending with death that you bring upon yourself by being an addict. In fact, you dig your own grave with your own hands. So we have descriptions of the effects of cannabis use and the use of drugs in general by, for example, the literary author you mentioned

that describes a esarchesh mardveniore, a ladder of degeneration of the cannabis user, the esarchesh. You also mentioned that doctors are talking about the effects, the medical effects of the use of this drug onto the degeneration of the body itself. What does this tell us about the perception of drug users in the Ottoman Empire in terms of the wider society, in terms of the state perception? What does this interest in the effects of cannabis use tell us about the wider Ottoman society and the state in particular? You know, some of this needs to be researched further, and I need to corroborate this further.

But my sense is that some of these medical treaties are used by the state to look at a group of citizens as a problematic group, possibly a group that is not productive. as a problematic group, possibly a group that is not productive. And this is something that pops up time and again in different aspects of Ottoman society. We find it in, as I was mentioning before, in alcoholics or in people who would get ill by visiting prostitutes and catching specific diseases or homeless people, you know, they they represent a part of society that in the modern state of thing should not exist. So the modern citizen is one that follows the rule, but especially is a productive citizen. He's not a parasite of society. And it seems to me, in some respects,

cannabis users were looked at, more than cannabis users, cannabis addicts, were looked at by the state as problematic citizens because of their not production or not being productive. citizens because of their not production or not being productive. So, you know, while in the literary treaties, these people are kind of addressed in very negative ways because they morally kind of represent moral degeneration. moral degeneration and for example people refer to them as resorting to

muharrib devastation and perversion and who's through the use of cannabis then we see the state looking at them less as negatively labeled but

more as probably ill people, people with a problem that needs to be dealt with. Is the use and consumption of cannabis and all of the practices that come with it seen in association with other illicit activities like the consumption of opium, like the consumption of alcohol, or other practices like prostitution? Or is it seen as a matter of interest onto its own? Do we see sources that are specifically talking about cannabis as an ill? Or do we see it bundled up with other societal ills? Right. So in the general literature of the time, it was linked to people in prison and to homosexuality.

I have found sources that tell of youth's consumption and smuggling of cannabis in the prison, for example, in Beyoğlu. And I think that was a push of kind of a side of society, the moral side of society to represent, you know, cannabis addicts as, you know, people who succumb to vices 360 degrees. Usually in the same literature, this is linked with gambling, with abusing kids, abusing children. So I'm not too sure that we can link it historically to other aspects. Obviously, sometimes these things happened together. But it doesn't look like to me that if someone was to be a cannabis addict,

he would then resort to a lot of other vices or a lot of other behavior that are kind of looked at in a negative way by society. We've talked about the users, so the consumers of cannabis, the places of consumption, so the eser hainilash. We've talked about the contemporary perceptions of these Ehli Keif, these consumers, these people of pleasure. We've seen that it was associated with degeneration of not only the body and the soul, but also degeneration of wider society. What are your wider conclusions in terms of its use in the Ottoman Empire?

And really, what is your next focus of research and what else needs to be done on this topic or these topics in general? So, kind of the conclusions that we can draw from this discussion is that cannabis was fairly widespread. It was used by a number of different people. So we cannot characterize them in terms of social standing. We cannot characterize them in terms of their religious background or ethnic background. And this was really a habit that in a way increased sociability and put people together regardless of these supposed barriers. Now, what I think is crucial here is to understand

how the state reacts to them. And it seems to me that there is a reaction of a state that looks at them as a block, a specific part of citizenship that needs to be studied, possibly helped. And the state needs to warn others of the perils and the dangers of becoming a drug addict, and in this case, a cannabis addict. There is a large amount of work to be done. And as I said, I've just started, I want to look more closely at the relationship between the state and the consumers. Then there's the legal aspects that needs to be looked at. There is a very large amount of poetry that I haven't approached yet that will have to be definitely looked at because it tells us much more about who was consuming, where and also how this was seen by the poets and therefore kind of the representative of the general society.

Another interesting part to look at is the names, why specific names were given to the venues where Esrar was consumed. So we've mentioned them as Esrar Hane or Hashish Hane, but they were sometimes referred to as Teke. So why were they linked to Sufi lodges? What was the link between it? Was it just because supposedly some of the Sufi sects were consuming it, or was there more to that?

I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time discussing this fascinating topic. Stefano, thank you very much for what has been a very stimulating topic of discussion today. Thank you for having me. It was a great pleasure. You can find out more about the topic discussed today on the Ottoman History Podcast website. Don't forget to follow us on Facebook and join our community of over 32,000 followers. My name is Taylan Gengor. Many thanks for listening. Thank you.