The Nature of the Ottoman City: Water and Urban Space in Sofia, 1380s–1910s

The history of a city is political. When examining the heritage of a place, it is often the case that present-day politics projects itself onto the past. Perhaps no other example of this is truer than the Ottoman past in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1913, the local council of the Bulgarian city of Sofia voted to demolish the last remaining Ottoman bathhouse, as Stefan Peychev writes, the destruction of the bathhouse represented more than the removal of a hygiene facility. ‘The bath was also one of the last architectural relics of a 500-year-long period that had seen Sofia’s rise as the capital of the Ottoman Empire’s European possessions in the mid-fifteenth century and its eventual decline to provincial obscurity in the nineteenth.’ From the late 19th century, a new tradition nationalist tradition emerged that viewed the Ottoman rule over Bulgaria as being pitiful, backwards and managing the country poorly. No better example, critics would point to, than the way the Ottomans failed to cultivate Sofia’s natural environment and water resources for the benefit of the population. This narrative initially espoused by nationalist activists and politicians made its way into the way early 20th century Bulgarian historians wrote about the past. In his new book The Nature of the Ottoman City: Water and Urban Space in Sofia, 1380s-1910s, Peychev critically takes apart these notions. 

To understand the perspective of late 19th century nationalist historiographic writers, we have to consider the experiences of Sofia in the 1800s. The notion of the city being a backwater with little positive development was heavily influenced by the changes underway at the time. The city experienced two devastating earthquakes in 1818 and 1858. The earthquakes destroyed much of the urban fabric and infrastructure of the city, which left huge psychological marks on the population. One newspaper wrote after the 1858 earthquake, ‘suddenly, at once, a roar was heard, loud and deafening, as if thousands and thousands of cannons fired all together. At that very minute, at that instant, the earth shook and rocked so hard and so frightfully that all were plunged into despair and thought that that was the end of the world!’ The damage caused by the earthquakes was not considered by Bulgarian historians when looking at the history of Sofia until the 1980s. Other events such as a series of wars in the Balkans and the Ottomans moving their administration centre away from Sofia and to Monastir in North Macedonia, also contributed to the sense of a city in decline. However, Bulgarian historians that emerged after the 1870s, as Peychev writes, do not view the decline of Sofia as a nineteenth-century event, but as symbolic of five centuries of Ottoman rule. ‘Bulgarian historiography has glossed over the earthquakes of the nineteenth century in an attempt to attribute Sofia’s dilapidated state in 1870s to the five-centuries-long period of mismanagement of the city at the hands of the Ottomans.’ 

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But as Peychev finds this couldn’t be further away from the truth. The Ottomans turned Sofia into a key administrative capital in the Balkans and developed a sophisticated system for managing the growth of the city. European and Ottoman visitors to the city remarked about the abundance of thermal springs, public bathhouses and urban design up until the nineteenth century. Private Islamic religious endowments known as Vakifs played a massive role in building up Sofia. In the sixteenth century, Ottoman military commander and imperial administrator Yahya Pasha, built the city’s water supply system. His vakif states ‘brought to the protected city of Sofia a source of running water, known as Saraçpınarı and located above Sofia, and built numerous public fountains at convenient locations.’ What this meant according to Peychev is he created a conduit where fresh mountain water could be carried through a system of different fountains throughout the city accessible to the whole population. This water infrastructure facilitated the commercial growth of the city. The Ottomans would start building better and better water infrastructure, by the mid-sixteenth century, they established a Directorate of Waterworks, which centralised the whole process. ‘A cohort of engineers and technicians manned a technologically sophisticated system that provided water for public and private needs throughout the empire’s urban centers and in the agricultural achievements.’ 

The Nature of the Ottoman City offers critical insight into the centrality of water in an urban space for the Ottomans. Probing into this area reveals a lot about how the Ottomans saw themselves, but also how they valued cities like Sofia. It speaks to the history of science of the empire, which is a long neglected field, due to the prejudice of many historians prior to the 2000s that Islamic civilisational decline after the fall of Baghdad in 1258, meant Muslims produced little useful science. That’s what makes studies like this one fascinating as it on one level is trying to offer a more accurate description of urban infrastructure during Ottoman times, but in doing so it unveils various ideological assumptions. Peychev’s book will be of interest to anyone thinking critically about environmental history, not only in the Empire, but also anywhere else. 

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