Cappadocia as a Field for Expertise: Paths of Three Rum ‘Experts’ of Cappadocia in Search of a Historical Identity

In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, literature in the Greek alphabet, namely in Greek and in Karamanli-Turkish, experienced an important increase in terms of the number of publications as well as the proliferation of published topics and the diffusion of these publications to wherever readers were present throughout the Empire, especially in Cappadocia, but also abroad. Cappadocia – as a region inhabited by Rums for centuries – became itself a subject for expertise for those who aimed to look into the past of local Rum communities, which, for the most part, were Turkish-speaking, while a minority of Greek-speakers were observed as the heirs of Ancient Greece. While Western travellers were interested in this topic and proposed (hypothetical) theories about the origins of these communities, a series of Rum authors became central experts about Cappadocia’s history, geography and even ethnography and published several books and articles in Greek and in Karamanli-Turkish about Cappadocia. In this paper, we will follow the path of three of them: Nikolaos S. Rizos (1838–1895), Anastasios Levidis (1834–1918), and Ioannis Kalfoglou (1871–1931). Through the analysis of their biographies and writings, I will try to understand what the main motivations of these authors were to write about Cappadocia, why and how they became experts in this topic, what kinds of interactions they had with other authors writing about Cappadocia, and to what extent Cappadocia became a field of expertise and these authors experts in this field.