Ottoman Society and Culture

The Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries and stretched across three continents, yet it was not a single, uniform civilization. It was a layered society in which a Turkish-speaking Muslim ruling class governed a vast, multi-confessional population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, Serbs, Bulgarians, and many others. To understand Ottoman society and culture is to understand how these communities lived together — how they built their cities, raised their families, prepared their food, dressed, prayed, and entertained themselves.

This article is an overview of that world. It draws on the long era from the founding of the emirate in the late thirteenth century through the constitutional revolution of 1908 and the empire’s final dissolution in 1922. Across that span, the most distinctive features of Ottoman life — the külliye complex, the imperial harem, the coffeehouse, the hamam, the meyhane tavern, the Mehter military band, the şenlik festival — remained remarkably stable, even as the empire itself modernized and shrank.

Ottoman society was formally divided into two broad legal categories: the askeri (the military-administrative class) and the reaya (the taxable commoners). The askeri included the sultan, his household, the members of the divan, the military officers, the judges, the teachers, and the religious scholars. The reaya were everyone else — peasants, artisans, merchants, and townspeople, regardless of religion.

In practice, the empire was also a deeply hierarchical world in which rank was expressed in the color of one’s turban, the fabric of one’s robe, the number of horses in one’s retinue, and the size of one’s household. Beneath this hierarchy, however, Ottoman society was more socially mobile than many of its European contemporaries. The devshirme system regularly raised Christian peasant boys to the highest offices of state, and wealthy merchants, Jewish bankers, Greek Phanariots, and Armenian architects often amassed fortunes and influence rivaling those of Muslim officials.

The role of religion

Islam was the state religion, and the sultan was both a political ruler and, in legal theory, the protector of the faith and the shadow of the caliph after the Mamluk sultanate was absorbed in 1517. Yet the empire was, from the beginning, organized around the principle of the millet — a confessional community with its own courts, schools, and personal-status law. The Orthodox Greeks, the Armenian Gregorians, and the Jews each had their recognized millet with its own spiritual leader, while the Ottomans left the various Christian churches and synagogues free to govern their own flocks in exchange for loyalty and the payment of the jizya tax.

The result was a social landscape in which a single neighborhood in Istanbul, Cairo, or Thessaloniki might contain a mosque, a Greek church, an Armenian chapel, a synagogue, a hamam, a school, and a coffeehouse within a few streets of one another. Religious tolerance was pragmatic rather than idealistic — the Ottomans were no more tolerant than they had to be — but it produced a remarkably plural urban culture.

The city and the village

About a quarter of the Ottoman population lived in cities, and the great metropolises — Istanbul, Cairo, Bursa, Edirne, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Salonica — were some of the largest in the world. The rest lived in villages, on farms, or as semi-nomadic herders. The cities were organized into quarters, each dominated by a particular trade, ethnic group, or religious community, and each with its own mosque or church, its own bakery, its own fountain, and its own hamam.

The village, by contrast, was governed by custom and by the village imam or priest, and it was the village — not the city — that the traveler Evliya Çelebi, the great seventeenth-century Ottoman writer, sometimes missed most when he was on the road. His ten-volume Seyahatname describes a rural world of hospitality, weddings, harvest songs, and dervish lodges that endured well into the modern period.

Daily life

The rhythm of the day

Ottoman daily life was organized by the five canonical prayers of Islam, by the working hours of the bazaar, and — after its introduction in the sixteenth century — by the habit of coffee. The muezzin’s call from the minaret divided the day into clean, predictable segments. A typical urban household in the seventeenth or eighteenth century would rise before dawn for the sabah prayer, share a light breakfast of bread, cheese, olives, and tea or coffee, send the men to the bazaar or the workshop, the women to the hamam or the market, gather for the main meal of the day at midday, rest through the heat of the afternoon, take a second meal at sunset after the akşam prayer, and end the day with the yatsı prayer before bed.

Food and meals

Ottoman cuisine is one of the great syntheses of world cooking. It drew on Persian, Arab, Byzantine, Balkan, and Central Asian traditions, and it produced a repertoire of dishes that are now considered classics across the Middle East, the Balkans, and beyond. The imperial kitchen at Topkapı — a vast complex of dozens of specialized cooks, pastry chefs, butchers, and roasters — set the standard for the whole empire. From its workshops came pilav seasoned with currents and pine nuts, slow-cooked lamb stews, stuffed vegetables, börek pastries, sherbets of rose and tamarind, and the famously elaborate desserts of the palace: baklava, kazandibi, künefe, and lokum.

For ordinary families, the daily bread was a flat loaf baked in a neighborhood oven, accompanied by cheese, olives, eggs, vegetables in olive oil, yogurt, and soup. Meat was a luxury eaten once or twice a week, and the cooked wheat and chickpea dishes of the Ramadan iftar table were common to rich and poor alike.

The home

The typical Ottoman house was built around an inner courtyard. From the street, the visitor saw only a plain wall and a heavy wooden door. Inside, a portico opened onto a garden with a fountain, a few fruit trees, and a small pool, and the family’s living quarters were arranged on three sides of the courtyard, with the women’s quarters — the harem — generally on the upper floor or at the back. Houses were built of stone or wood-frame masonry, plastered and painted in cool blues and whites, and the principal rooms faced away from the street to give the family privacy. Wealthy homes added a selamlık, a formal reception hall where the master of the house received male guests and business associates.

For the urban poor, a single room in a timber-framed tenement served as home, kitchen, and workshop, and several families often shared a courtyard, a well, and a privy. The contrast between the harem of a pasha and the garret of a porter was a familiar theme of Ottoman satire and shadow theater.

Family, marriage, and the harem

The family was the basic unit of Ottoman society, and it was generally a large, extended, patriarchal household headed by the senior male. Marriage was an arrangement between families as much as between individuals, and a bride’s marriage portion, trousseau, and the conditions of the marriage contract were negotiated carefully. Muslim men were permitted up to four wives under Islamic law, although in practice most Ottoman men — including most of the sultans — had only one wife at a time, and the great majority of households were monogamous.

The imperial harem at Topkapı was the most elaborate version of this domestic system. It housed the sultan’s mother (the valide sultan), his consorts and concubines, his daughters, his sisters, the wives and daughters of his male relatives, and a vast staff of attendants, eunuchs, and servants. The harem was governed by an internal hierarchy of rank, and it functioned as a kind of parallel court in which the women of the dynasty managed the imperial household, raised the princes, and exercised considerable political power, especially during the long seventeenth- and eighteenth-century periods when sultans were often minors or recluses. A separate guide to the Ottoman family and the imperial harem explores this world in more detail.

Childhood and education

Children were welcomed as gifts of God. A naming ceremony on the seventh day after birth gave the child a name, often of the Prophet, his family, or a local saint, and the child was sprinkled with salt to protect it from evil. Boys were circumcised in an elaborate public ceremony, often timed to coincide with the circumcision of a prince — an event known as a sünnet düğünü that could last for days.

For the sons of the ruling class, education began at home and continued at a medrese, where the curriculum centered on the Qur’an, the hadith, Islamic law, Arabic and Persian grammar, logic, mathematics, and astronomy. The most promising students went on to specialized military-administrative schools, and a small number were selected for the palace school, the Enderun, where the brightest of the devshirme recruits were trained for the highest offices of the state.

Girls of the elite learned domestic skills — cooking, sewing, embroidery, household management, and the recitation of the Qur’an — at home, while girls of the poorer classes often entered the workforce as apprentices to weavers, dyers, or midwives. Among the dervish orders and in some Sufi lodges, women played important teaching roles, and a number of women poets and mystics, such as the sixteenth-century figure Mihri Hatun, were celebrated in their own lifetimes.

Slavery and concubinage

Slavery was a legal institution in the Ottoman world from beginning to end, and a substantial proportion of the urban population was enslaved at any given moment. Household slaves, both male and female, were a mark of status, and the children of enslaved mothers were generally born free, since Islamic law traced status through the mother and the children of concubines were recognized as legitimate.

The Ottoman family was, in fact, a hybrid institution, and the imperial harem was a system in which women rose by merit as well as by birth. The most powerful women in the empire — Hürrem Sultan, Nurbanu Sultan, Kösem Sultan, Turhan Hatice — were largely women who had been brought into the dynasty as concubines and who had climbed the ranks of the harem. The harem’s internal hierarchy, its educational regime, and its political importance are described more fully in the dedicated article on the imperial harem and in the broader survey of the Ottoman family and the harem.

Art, architecture, and music

Architecture

Ottoman architecture is the most visible legacy of the empire. Its great monuments — the mosques of Istanbul, Edirne, Bursa, and the provincial cities; the imperial palaces; the külliye complexes of schools, hospitals, and soup kitchens; the bridges, hans, bazaars, and hamams — defined the skyline of the eastern Mediterranean for half a millennium. The classical idiom, perfected in the sixteenth century by the chief architect Mimar Sinan, combined a central dome, slender pencil minarets, cascading half-domes, and vast airy interiors. The Süleymaniye, the Şehzade, and the Selimiye mosques remain among the great achievements of world architecture. By the eighteenth century a more ornamental phase — sometimes called Ottoman Baroque or the Tulip Period style — emerged under the influence of European Baroque and Rococo, and by the nineteenth century imperial architects were working in a hybrid of neoclassical Ottoman, Beaux-Arts, and Art Nouveau.

The decorative arts

The Ottomans produced a rich tradition of miniature painting, in which court artists such as those of the sixteenth-century studio of Nakkaş Sinanbey illustrated manuscripts of history, geography, and literature. The finest examples, such as the Hünername and the Surname-i Vehbi, combine Chinese-influenced landscape, Persian-influenced color, and a distinctive Ottoman taste for dense, accurate crowd scenes. Ottoman calligraphers, working in the six canonical scripts of the Islamic tradition, produced Qur’ans, imperial decrees, and monumental inscriptions for the mosque. The great names of Ottoman calligraphy — Şeyh Hamdullah, Hafiz Osman, Mustafa Râkım — are still considered masters of the art.

The applied arts were equally celebrated. Iznik pottery, with its brilliant white ground and tulip, carnation, and rose motifs, became one of the most recognizable ceramic traditions of the early modern world. Ottoman carpets, velvet and brocade textiles, jeweled sword hilts, and illuminated bindings of the Qur’an were exported across Eurasia.

Music

Ottoman music was a sophisticated tradition of classical, folk, religious, and military music. The classical tradition, called Türk sanat müziği, was a modal system based on the makam scales, and it was performed in the court, in the homes of the wealthy, and in the mansions of the Mevlevi dervishes. The composers of the classical tradition — Buhurizade Mustafa Itri in the seventeenth century, Dede Efendi and Tanburi Cemil Bey in the nineteenth — produced a body of instrumental and vocal works that is still performed today. The military band of the Janissary corps, the Mehter, performed with kettledrums, shawms, trumpets, cymbals, and bells, and its stirring processional music became a recognized part of the Ottoman state ritual.

For an extended discussion of these traditions see the dedicated article on Ottoman art and music.

Hammams, coffeehouses, and public life

The hammam

The Ottoman hammam was a public bathhouse modeled on the Roman thermae and the Arab bath. In every neighborhood of every Ottoman city, the hamam was a place to wash, to meet, to do business, to celebrate the bride before her wedding, to mourn the dead, and — in the men’s section — to gossip about politics. The great imperial hamams of Istanbul — the Çemberlitaş Hamamı, the Cağaloğlu Hamamı, the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı — are still working bathhouses today, and the ritual of the hamam — the hot room, the soaping, the scrubbing with a rough mitt, the cool marble, the tea at the end — is one of the most distinctive features of Ottoman daily life.

The coffeehouse

The first Ottoman coffeehouse opened in Istanbul in the 1550s, and within a generation the coffeehouse had spread to every city of the empire. It was a place to drink the new, fashionable, mildly intoxicating beverage of coffee; to read the news; to listen to poets, storytellers, or musicians; to play backgammon or chess; and — in the eyes of conservative religious authorities — to plot sedition. Sultans periodically closed the coffeehouses of the capital, and writers like İbrahim Müteferrika complained that idlers in the coffeehouses were ruining the empire. The coffeehouses survived every crackdown, and by the eighteenth century they had become a fixture of urban life as central as the mosque and the bazaar.

Festivals, processions, and the meyhane

Ottoman public life was punctuated by religious festivals, imperial processions, and seasonal celebrations. The two great religious festivals — the Ramazan Bayramı at the end of Ramadan and the Kurban Bayramı at the time of the pilgrimage — filled the cities with feasting, gift-giving, and visits between family and friends. Royal weddings, circumcisions, and the accession of a new sultan were marked by the sünnet düğünü or şenlik, multi-day festivals with processions, illuminated gardens, fireworks, and theatrical performances. The annual caravan of the pilgrimage to Mecca was itself a public ceremony that organized the religious and economic life of the empire for months each year.

At the other end of the social scale, the meyhane — the tavern — served wine, raki, and meze to the non-Muslim communities, the foreign visitors, and the less observant Muslims of the empire. The tavern, like the coffeehouse, was a place of conversation, music, and poetry, and the songs of the meyhane — the songs of the drunkards, the wanderers, and the lovers — form a major strand of Ottoman and Turkish lyric poetry.

Science, learning, and literature

Ottoman learning was built on the Islamic scholarly tradition, with deep borrowings from Greek, Persian, and Indian sources. The medrese curriculum produced a learned class of jurists, theologians, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and historians, and the great observatory of Taqi al-Din in Istanbul in the 1570s briefly rivaled its European counterparts.

The empire’s most original contribution to world learning was in the social sciences. Ottoman historians, geographers, and travelers — from the chronicler Aşıkpaşazade in the fifteenth century to Evliya Çelebi in the seventeenth and Katip Çelebi in the same period — produced works of extraordinary scope. The geographical dictionaries, the tax registers, the court chronicles, the legal compendia, the biographical dictionaries, and the great universal histories of the Ottoman house were an important part of the early modern information revolution, and they remain a major primary source for the history of the eastern Mediterranean.

Ottoman literature flourished in three main languages — Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian — and a fourth, smaller, but important stream in Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew. The two great narrative poems of the Turkish tradition, the mesnevi, were Fuzuli’s Leyli and Mejnun and the Husrev and Shirin of Şeyhi; the most celebrated lyric poet was Baki in the sixteenth century, and Nedim in the eighteenth. The most influential prose style was that of Sinan Paşa, of the sixteenth-century historian Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli, and of the great encyclopedist Katip Çelebi.

Dress and appearance

Ottoman dress was one of the most visible expressions of rank, religion, and profession in the empire. The traditional dress of the Ottoman Turkish man was the kaftan, a long, often brocaded robe, worn over a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of wide trousers, and a turban. The color, the fabric, the cut, and the ornament of the kaftan were carefully regulated by sumptuary law, and a person’s rank could be read off the costume from across a room. The sultan’s kaftan was of gold brocade, with pearls and precious stones; a grand vizier’s kaftan was of crimson silk; a scholar’s kaftan was of plain cloth, generally in green or white.

The women’s dress was similar in structure — long robe, shirt, trousers, sash — and the colors and fabrics of the women of the household signaled their position in the hierarchy. The ferace and the yaşmak — the long overcoat and the veil — were the standard outdoor dress of the urban woman, and the peçe — the face veil — was worn in the most conservative households. The dress of the non-Muslim communities was equally regulated: the Christians were distinguished by the color of their shoes and turbans, and the Jews by a particular shape of the turban. The red headdress — the külah or the kavuk — was reserved for the Muslims.

The traditional dress of the Ottoman countryside was simpler. The peasant wore a long shirt of coarse linen, a pair of trousers, a woolen cloak in winter, and a flat cap or a wrapped head-cloth. The clothing of the Yörük and the Turkmen was the dress of the herder — baggy trousers, a long shirt, a wide belt, and a tall conical hat. The clothing of the soldiers, the Janissary corps, the sipahi cavalry, and the religious scholars was even more strictly regulated, and the uniform of the Janissary — the white felt cap, the long-sleeved coat, the wide trousers, and the broad belt — became a recognizable costume in the European imagination of the empire.

The nineteenth century brought the gradual westernization of Ottoman dress. The tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, the adoption of the fez in 1829, the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826, the dress reforms of Mahmud II, and the adoption of the European frock coat and trousers for the bureaucracy gradually replaced the older Ottoman costume. By the early twentieth century the European suit had become the standard dress of the elite, and the older Ottoman costume survived only in the religious establishment, the court, and the countryside.

The countryside, the nomads, and the pastoral world

Beneath the cities lay the rural world. Most Ottomans were peasants, and the rhythms of their lives were set by the agricultural calendar — the sowing of winter wheat, the spring plowing, the harvest of summer crops, the threshing of the autumn grain. The village mosque, the village fountain, the village shrine of a local saint, and the village oven were the principal public institutions.

A significant portion of the empire’s population was also semi-nomadic. The Yörük of Anatolia, the Turkmen of Syria and Iraq, the Bedouin of Arabia, the Kurdish pastoralists of the eastern mountains, and the Tatar and Cossack peoples of the steppes all practiced a mixed economy of herding, raiding, and seasonal agriculture. These groups supplied the empire with soldiers, with horses, with wool, and with the carpets that became one of its most famous exports.

The long nineteenth century and the end of the old order

The nineteenth century brought the most thoroughgoing social transformation of Ottoman history. The Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and 1856 attempted to modernize the empire’s legal system, its bureaucracy, its army, and its relations with its non-Muslim subjects. The new codes of commercial and criminal law were largely modeled on European precedents; the Mekteb-i Harbiye military school and the Mekteb-i Tıbbiye medical school were founded in the 1830s and 1840s; the first Ottoman constitution was promulgated in 1876 and suspended in 1878; the first Ottoman parliament met in the same year.

In social and cultural life, these reforms produced a new class of Westernizing bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, and doctors, and a parallel movement of Islamic modernism led by thinkers such as Namık Kemal, Ziya Paşa, and Ahmed Vefik Paşa. The old elite of the askeri, the old dress codes, the old hierarchies of rank were progressively abolished or simplified. The harem of the sultan was dissolved in 1909, the title of sultan gave way to that of caliph, and the elaborate court ceremonial of the eighteenth century was replaced by the etiquette of a modern European monarchy. By 1922, when the last Ottoman sultan left the country, the empire had been replaced by a Turkish nation-state whose founders deliberately rejected the institutions of the old order.

The press, the publishing industry, and the new schools of the late Ottoman period were an important part of this transformation. The first Ottoman printing press, established by İbrahim Müteferrika in 1727, was followed by a series of official and private presses in Cairo, in Istanbul, in the Balkans, and in the Arab provinces, and the number of printed books, newspapers, and periodicals in the empire grew rapidly over the nineteenth century. The first Ottoman novels, plays, and modern newspapers appeared in the 1860s, and by the early twentieth century the press of Istanbul, Cairo, and Salonica was among the most active in the Middle East. The literary language, which had been an ornate mixture of Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, was gradually replaced by a simpler prose closer to the spoken Turkish of the time.

The memory of those institutions, however, lives on. The mosques, the palaces, the hamams, the cookery books, the carpets, the shadow plays of Karagöz, the meze tables, the coffee cups, and the songs of the meyhane continue to define a recognizable Ottoman cultural inheritance in Turkey, in the Balkans, in the Arab world, and beyond.

Ottoman architecture — Mosques, palaces, külliye complexes, the classical Sinan tradition, and the Ottoman Baroque phase of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ottoman cuisine — The palace kitchen, food classes, feasting, breakfast, sweets, and beverages of the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman family and the imperial harem — Family structure, marriage, the harem, concubines, the valide sultan, and the place of slavery in Ottoman domestic life.
Ottoman art and music — Miniature painting, calligraphy, Iznik ceramics, classical Turkish music, and the Mehter military band.
Mimar Sinan — The life and works of the chief architect who designed the Süleymaniye, Şehzade, and Selimiye mosques.
Ottoman coffee culture — How coffee reached Istanbul, the rise of the coffeehouse, and coffee’s role in Ottoman social life.
Life in the imperial harem — A day in the harem of Topkapı: its rooms, its hierarchy, and the routines of the women and children of the dynasty.
The Turkish bath and the hammam tradition — The design, rituals, and social role of the Ottoman hammam.
Traditional Ottoman dishes — A survey of classic dishes: kebab, pilav, börek, baklava, kahve, and şerbet.