From Women's Magazines in the Ottoman space to CLARIN:EL

To celebrate International Women's Day (March 8), we dedicate this month to resources which are hosted in the CLARIN:EL Infrastructure and constitute members of the Kypseli: Women's Magazines Resource Family.

Anastasia Natsina (Assistant Professor, Department of Philology, University of Crete) and Vassilis Petikas (PhD Candidate on Modern Greek Philology, University of Crete), Scientific and Technical Responsibles for the creation of the Institutional Repository of the University of Crete at CLARIN:EL, talk about the Βiographies of the contributors in Women Magazines of the Greek-Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire: 

This resource includes summary bio-essays of female and male collaborators of women magazines and calendars of the Greek Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, as they were documented and included in the Digital Research Database "Kypseli: Women's Magazines in the Ottoman space" in the context of the implementation of Postgraduate Studies programmes "Educational Theory, History and Politics" and "Culture, Education and Human Development" of the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete during the academic years 2014-2017.

The study on Ottoman women’s press has dynamically been approached by the international scholarly community as a major field of construction, development and reconstruction of women's collective identities, and as an attempt to intervene in women's individuality in the public sphere, following closely the international developments around the "women’s issue" and the female emancipation. Women of the Ottoman Empire take an active role for the first time in the traditionally male-dominated publishing activity, either as editors or as contributors, establishing the conditions for the existence of a place for advancing writing and welcoming female literary works, and the means for  the development and promotion of inter-communal communication, new life models and business activities. This collection focuses on the emergence and evolution of women’s publishing activity during the late Ottoman period, from 1845, the year of publication of Kipseli, the first women's journal published in the Ottoman territories by the poetess, teacher and director of girls' schools, Efrosini Samartzidou, until 1923, year of dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. During this period of Asia Minor Hellenism great flourishing, more than 12 Greek-language, bilingual and even trilingual periodical publications by women of literary, educational or diverse interest have been published.

The most imporant among these periodical publications are Eurydice magazine (Constantinople, 1870-1873) by Emilia Ktena - Leontiadou and Vosporis magazine (Constantinople, 1899-1906)  by Cornelia L. Preveziotou - Tavaniotou.Eurydice, with a clear orientation towards the analysis of the nature and destiny of the female gender, focuses mostly its material on the education and upbringing of women, as well as on the publication of historical, scientific or popular studies related to women's life, ancient authors, customs and traditions, and narratives of historical, economic and geographical interest. The publication of this journal is considered the result of the first collective collaboration of women from all regions of the Greek-speaking world. Vosporis, sets as its main goal the moral benefit and progress of the female gender. The journal's material revolves around the publication of original and translated literary works, ephemera, chronicles and open letters, while its pages are often occupied by articles on educational, pedagogical and religious issues, but also by studies of literary, historical, archaeological and medical interest, essays on women's issues or publications on household economy or social and recreational matters. Finally, annual periodical albums or diaries, such as the Mikrasiatikon Imerologion (Samos, 1907-1910) by Eleni Svoronou, the Imerologion tis Ephemeridos ton Kyrion "I Lesvos" (Constantinople, 1911) by Hariklia P. Melandinou and the Imerologion Anamnisis (1899-1922) by Cornelia L. Preveziotou and her husband Emmanouil Tavaniotis, are considered to be of equal historical and cultural value. These were periodical publications that went back to the long tradition of the Western European almanac; books that were published at the beginning of each year. These periodicals were dominated by literary publications, travelogues, articles on home economics, essays of historical, political and linguistic interest, biographies of scholars, etc., bringing together texts from the most famous literary or scientific pens of the time.

The summaries of the articles and literary works of the above-mentioned journals are made available as independent resources, classified chronologically and according to their specific genre, the introductory editorial notes and the extensive descriptions of the character of each publication, a small collection of digitized original short stories and narratives, as well as the bio-essays of all contributors, as searched and recorded by the research team of the Digital Research Database "Kypseli: Women's Magazines in the Ottoman space".

Access to this resource is freely available for research purposes through CLARIN:EL under a CC-BY-NC-SA License of Use (Attribution, Non-Commercial use,Share Alike).