My talk is about the military contractor and businessman Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiadis who rose to prominence in the late Ottoman Empire. So great was his power that a later Turkish evaluation of who really ruled the lands bordering the Middle East and Anatolia during the First World War concluded that behind the mask of a military contractor Bodosakis was heading a government within the government. Even if this is an exaggeration, it is clear from other contemporary sources that Bodosakis’ influence was significant also after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and when he had established himself in Greece.
In this way, Bodosakis’ agency also tells the story of the great transformations that shaped the lands of Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the twentieth century and lays bare how power relations and networks forged during the late Ottoman Empire continued to shape state formation, politics, and international relations well into the era of the Cold War and how the agency of non-official actors with a past in the Ottoman world remained crucial also in the era of nation state.
The aim of my talk is to discuss how this came to pass and the ways in which Bodosakis transferred his power from the Ottoman world to the era of nation states to become an actor in the Eastern Mediterranean, coveted and feared by the great powers from Hitler’s Germany to Britain, France, and the United States.

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Programme 2022

Le Séminaire moderne et contemporain est un moment d’échange dans lequel les chercheurs des programmes de la section moderne et contemporaine et des intervenants invités peuvent présenter leurs travaux en lien avec les axes thématiques de l’EFA et avec la programmation scientifique de la section, mais aussi avec l’actualité de la recherche sur les Balkans et la Méditerranée orientale. Lieu de rencontre entre chercheurs venant d’horizons différents, le séminaire vise tout à la fois à valoriser les recherches menées à l’EFA en histoire moderne et contemporaine, anthropologie, géographie, sociologie et histoire de l’art (et autres), et à faire connaître auprès de la communauté de l’EFA les recherches menées dans d’autres institutions de la région.
Pour l’année 2022, centenaire de la retraite de l’armée grecque d’Asie mineure, le séminaire sera en partie consacré aux questions relatives à la dite «Grande Catastrophe», aux échanges de populations et aux mémoires du conflit.