Daily Life In The Ottoman Empire (40 page)

Kirkpinar, on the outskirts of Edirne, was the first site
of Ottoman wrestling competition. The area also served as a hunting ground for
Ottoman sultans. The first Kirkpinar wrestling tournament was probably held in
1360/1361, during the reigns of the Ottoman sultans Orhan and Murad I. Today,
yagli
güresh,
or oil wrestling— where young men compete in leather shorts, their
bodies shiny and slippery with oil—remains one of Turkey’s most popular
national sports. As in Anatolia and parts of the Balkans, in Egypt too, men
stripped themselves of all their clothing except their drawers and oiled their
bodies before they entangled in a wrestling match. These matches were
particularly popular after important processions and during various festivals.

Another nonmilitary sport was the game of
matrak,
in
which balls were struck with wooden clubs/sticks that were covered with leather
and looked like bowling ten-pins. The tops of the clubs were rounded and
slightly wider than the body. The game was a kind of battle animation, and it
was considered a lawn game. Throwing heavy stones or boulders was another
popular sport that survived until the end of the empire. The sport involved
throwing in a pushing motion a heavy stone or rock as far as possible. The game
was alluded to in various Greek folk songs, “which recounted the exploits of
brigand bands.”

Among the more sedentary and less physically demanding
games that remained popular throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire were
chess, backgammon, checkers (draughts), and cards. All these games were popular
among men who spent much of their time in coffeehouses. With the increasing
Westernization of the empire in the 19th century, a host of new and competing
European sports such as soccer (football), tennis, rugby, cycling, swimming,
gymnastics, croquet, boxing, and cricket were introduced. In Izmir in 1890, a
soccer and rugby club was organized, and in the winter of 1908–1909, an Ottoman
army officer, who had studied the impact of sports on the youth, embarked on a
campaign to educate the urban population on the benefits of physical exercise.
He organized several modern sport clubs. In Izmir, an athletic club began to
hold Pannonian Games, which included aquatic sports as well as soccer, cricket,
tennis, and fencing. Horseracing and hunting clubs also appealed to the Ottoman
love for traditional sports, and they sprang up in Istanbul where race courses,
mimicking those of France and England, were built by the government. Among the
imported sports to catch on, soccer was the most successful, while games such
as tennis remained confined to the four walls of the imperial palace.

Wrestling match, 19th century.
Anonymous.

13 - SICKNESS, DEATH, AND DYING

Death
was a common occurrence throughout the Ottoman Empire. As in other
pre-industrial societies, most deaths in the cities, towns, and villages of the
Ottoman Empire “were deaths of children.” Children “were particularly
susceptible to the intestinal diseases, such as dysentery and giardia,” and the
“most common killers of young children, from birth to age five, were diseases
of the intestines and the pulmonary system.” “Measles and smallpox” were also “common
causes of death among children.” Among the young adults living in the urban
centers of the empire, “the most common cause of death” was tuberculosis. According
to one source, “one-third to one-half of the recorded deaths of young adults in
Istanbul at the end of the 19th century were from tuberculosis and its
complications.” Typhoid also “killed as many as did smallpox, approximately 5
per cent of the young adult deaths were caused by each.”

In the rural regions of the empire, the principal causes of
death were malnutrition and lack of access to clean water. A population whose
diet was “primarily made up of carbohydrates, with few vegetables, fewer
fruits, and limited protein, were naturally susceptible to disease.” Water was
the principal carrier of many diseases, and “ignorance of the nature of the
disease was in itself” one of the most important “causes of death.”

Plagues frequently killed thousands of people in a short
span of time. Until the second half of the 19th century, plague was endemic and
virulent in Istanbul and other urban centers of the empire. Called “
veba
in
Turkish, the Arabic
waba,
‘to be contaminated,’ the lethal illness known
simply as ‘plague’ usually” referred to “bubonic plague, also known in the West
as the Black Plague or the Black Death.” Pandemic “throughout the empire from
the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 19th century, plague was
caused by the bacillus
Yersinia pestis
and was usually transmitted by
means of rodents infested with infected fleas.” Although “the disease was
endemic, meaning that it was both geographically widespread and constantly
present at some level in the population, periodic epidemic outbreaks of great
virulence frequently resulted in a 75 percent mortality rate among those
affected.” For “this reason, plague was greatly feared by Ottoman subjects and
by the foreign travelers who frequented the empire.” The disease “spread along
trade routes and the paths of pilgrims to and from Mecca.” As the majority of
pilgrims came from Anatolia and the Arab provinces, regions such as “Western
Anatolia, Egypt, and northern Syria reported plague epidemics most often.” When
a plague struck, people fled from the cities and towns to the countryside.

In “its most serious outbreaks, the plague disrupted the
Ottoman economy by interrupting harvests in the countryside and commercial
activities and handicrafts in the cities.” In many urban communities a
plague-stricken person was shunned and abandoned. In the southern Albanian town
of Gjirokastër, when a person developed a pimple or a boil, people immediately
concluded that he had the plague and fled from him. He was also prohibited from
entering homes. For two years afterward, people avoided entering the home of a
person who had suffered from the plague. Even after two years, they insisted on
cleansing the house with vinegar and disinfecting it with aromatic herbs. At
times, people went as far as tearing down and rebuilding various parts of the
house and whitewashing “all the rooms with lime before entering.” Without “any
modern understanding of germ theory, Ottoman doctors, like those in the West,
hypothesized that plague was an airborne infection caused by miasmas
(unpleasant or unhealthy air), carried by the wind.” An “alternative theory
attributed the spread of plague to demons, or jinni.”

Hardly less terrible “were the variations of cholera,”
which “once introduced spread with terrible rapidity.” The great 19th-century “cholera
epidemics struck the Middle East and Balkans with ferocity, each epidemic
killing hundreds of thousands.” Cholera spread primarily through Muslim
pilgrims from India who brought the disease to Mecca where pilgrims from the
Ottoman Empire contracted the disease. From Mecca, the pilgrims who had come
from all parts of Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and so forth, brought the disease
home. Not surprisingly, Anatolia was devastated by the great cholera epidemics
of 1847 and 1865.

Another devastating epidemic that generally struck the
Ottoman Empire in times of wars and mass migrations was typhus. In the second
half of the 19th century, particularly from 1864 to 1880, Muslim refugees from
Russian conquests in the Balkans and the Caucasus died in large numbers from
typhus, which they spread in those regions of Anatolia and Syria where they
settled.

Borrowing from the practices of European states, during the
reign of Abdülhamid II, the Ottoman government introduced major improvements in
the area of public health. An international sanitary board was established and
quickly organized a quarantine system to prevent the entry of epidemic
diseases. Filth and garbage, as well as stray dogs, were removed from the
streets of the capital. The main streets of Istanbul and other urban centers
were paved “with basalt blocks,” which allowed rain water to wash them and “lessen
the accumulations of filth.” A well-organized medical school was established in
the capital to train students in medicine and modern sciences.

TRADITIONAL REMEDIES

Until the introduction of modern medicine, the people of
the Ottoman Empire relied on traditional remedies that had been passed down
from one generation to the next. In the 17th century, to cleanse their bodies
or as a remedy for various ailments such as yellow and black bile, phlegm, and
parasites, the people of Vlorë (Vlora), a major seaport and commercial center
in southwestern Albania, poured boiling pitch into a new cup, then rinsed it
thoroughly and drank water from the cleaned cup. Throughout the empire, popular
belief held that certain foods alleviated certain ailments and assisted with
certain deficiencies. For instance, according to popular belief, the eels of
Ohrid, the deepest lake in the Balkans, if caught fresh and wrapped in leaves
and roasted, not only made “a very nutritious meal” but also helped a man “have
intercourse with his wife five or six times” a day. Anyone “with consumption” [pulmonary
tuberculosis] who put “a salted eel head on his own head” was said to be cured “of
his ailments.”

At the Egyptian or Spice Bazaar (Misir Çarşi) in
Istanbul, gunpowder was prescribed as a remedy for hemorrhoids, and patients
were told to boil it with the juice of a whole lemon, strain off the liquid,
dry the powder and swallow it the next morning with a little water on an empty
stomach. Gunpowder was also “supposed to be a good cure for pimples when mixed
with a little crushed garlic.” Whatever its value as a pharmaceutical remedy,
gunpowder “was finally banned from the market because the shops in which it was
sold kept blowing up.”

The Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi writing in the 17th
century, reported that there were 2,000 men producing “ointments, pills, and
tinctures” and “selling around 3,000 different medicinal herbs and spices” in
and around the Egyptian Bazaar. Healers and men of medicine “made effective
pills from ambergris, a secretion from the alimentary tract of the sperm whale,”
which was believed “to strengthen the nerves and stimulate the senses.” Thus,
the spices, herbs, scented oils, and remedies sold in the form of paste, cream,
and syrup or powder traded in the Egyptian Bazaar were used not only to flavor
Ottoman foods and dishes but also as remedies for a wide variety of
deficiencies and ailments. From the sultans and members of the ruling family to
the humblest subject of the state, everyone relied on potions, thick syrups,
herbs, and spices as miracle cures.

In 1520, when Ayşe Hafsa Sultan, the mother of
Süleyman the Magnificent, became ill, the sultan sent a letter to a well-known
physician and healer who lived and worked at a mosque in the town of Manisa
(Magnesia) in western Anatolia, pleading with him to offer a cure for his
ailing mother who had fallen ill after mourning the loss of her husband, the
deceased sultan Selim I. Mixing 41 herbs and spices, the physician “concocted a
thick syrup” that saved the sick and dying widow. The queen mother expressed
her gratitude for this miracle by ordering that the syrup responsible for her
cure be distributed once a year among the people, a tradition that has
persisted to the present day. Every year, during the so-called Mesir Festival,
Mesir Paste (
Mesir Macunu)
is thrown to the crowds who gather in the
grounds of a mosque at Manisa named after the queen mother Ayşe Hafsa
Sultan. Also known as Turkish Viagra or Sultan’s Aphrodisiac, Mesir Paste,
which is a spiced paste in the form of a candy, is believed to restore health,
youth, and potency.

Ottomans also relied on prayers, charms, and spells as
potential cures, especially after the remedies of a physician failed to produce
positive results. At times, suras from the Quran were recited with gentle
breaths over the face and limbs of the ailing patient. Spells read in Arabic
and Persian were also considered effective, provided certain conditions were
met. Unfortunately, such prerequisites could create embarrassing situations.
Reciting a spell to an ailing and dying high government official, Evliya Çelebi
complained that the efficacy of his spell required the reciter to “strike the
palsied man’s face three times with his own shoe, holding it in the left hand.”
The ailing man in this particular instance, however, was a grand vizier, and
Evliya could not strike him with a shoe.

Some holy men used their breath to treat physical, mental,
or nervous disorders. The patient was placed in front of the healer, who went “into
a kind of trance, at intervals blowing in the direction” of the patient who was
being treated. The breath, “thought of as the essence of one’s self, was
believed to carry healing virtue to the patient.” Rich and poor, young and old,
women and men were convinced that when doctors failed to cure a patient, puffs
of breath from holy men could remedy their illness.