Feriköy Cemetery Project

The Feriköy Protestant Cemetery was established in the 19th century in Istanbul as the burial ground for protestant communities from several European countries and the United States living in Istanbul. Still in use, the cemetery is a testimony of the individual histories of the people buried there, as well as a landmark of the communities to which these people belonged and of the diplomatic, commercial and cultural relationships of these communities with the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.
 
In 2018, a group of international research institutes based in Istanbul, including the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT), began the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery Initiative (www.ferikoycemetery.org) in order to preserve, document and study this cemetery. The initiative is in the process of recording all the graves and digitizing and studying the burial registers and other relevant documents present in Istanbul.
 
This PURE project will build upon the already existing research, by studying, transcribing and translating 18th and 19th century inventory records that belong to some of the individuals commemorated or buried in this cemetery. Their names include diplomats, merchants, doctors, watch-makers, adventurers and others. With the study of such records, it is possible to find out more about who they were, what brought them to Istanbul, and how their lives in their own ways helped give shape to international relationships over the centuries.
 
Prospected activities and tasks related to this project: visiting the Feriköy Cemetery, visiting the Orient-Institut in Cihangir to use the cemetery database, studying historical documents.
Important note: students applying to this project should have good reading skills in French or Italian.
Image: © http://www.ferikoycemetery.org/