Exotic and Toxic Plague in Early Nineteenth-Century Galata-Pera

Abstract

It is no wonder that plague is almost always present in historical sources such as travelogues and memoirs that deal with late Byzantine and Ottoman Istanbul to differing extents; ever since the Black Death broke out in the fourteenth century, the city had to live with it. During the early nineteenth century, plague was a “faraway,” dangerous, wearisome, and unignorable affliction for the Europeans who would visit Istanbul, where epidemics had been appearing in waves. The perceived severity of this “affliction” was increased in view of the fact that plague had subsided in Western Europe nearly a century earlier. In the early nineteenth-century European accounts examined in this study, it is chiefly in Galata-Pera that the landscape of disease, consisting of the patients, “healers,” “consolers,” hospitals, the fearful, the careless, and the remedy-seekers, can be viewed. This study looks at how these elements were perceived in the context of urban life right before the “European” district of Ottoman Istanbul rose to prominence.