Date: Tuesday 30 September 2025
Time: 18.00 to 20.00
Location: Room 2041A, the Swift lecture theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free and all are welcome.
In the 1890s, conflict erupted on the strategic Ottoman island of Crete and devolved into a civil war between Christians and Muslims. Amid the environmental and human catastrophe of this strife, four European states intervened and occupied the island. The military intervention uprooted most of the native Muslims as the European coalition’s policy of pacification rested on this population’s removal from Crete. In a twist of history, after 1908, survivors of the civil war emerged as protagonists of a sweeping protest movement that threatened European economic presence in the Ottoman Empire. Underlining the seeds of protest sown by violence and indignity of displacement, this talk explores how the failure of establishing a just peace perpetuated conflict in the Ottoman world.
The Trinity Centre for International History, in cooperation with the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies, and Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, welcomes Associate Professor Uğur Zekeriya Peçe from Lehigh University, the author of Island and Empire How Civil War in Crete Mobilized the Ottoman World (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Further information is available by emailing the event organiser, Dr Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, School of History & Humanities, at ramazan.oztan@tcd.ie
The event is funded by the Research Incentive Fund of the Trinity Long Room Hub.
