The Russian‑Turkish War of 1877‑1878 was a transformative moment in the history of humanitarianism. In Istanbul, a mosaic of local and European relief actors organised the care for displaced civilians and injured soldiers with the overall aim of preventing the spread of contagious diseases in the city. Drawing on the testimonies of Catholic missionaries and British relief organisations, memoirs of international volunteers, an official Ottoman medical report and various secondary sources, this article offers an in‑depth study of this short urban emergency. Rather than perceiving the city as a mere site of foreign intervention and humanitarian diplomacy, this contribution shows how the Ottoman capital became a global hub for technical innovation in relief and a meeting point of different humanitarian traditions. The article pays particular attention to the material setting where European and Ottoman relief actors cooperated, which ranged from modern transport infrastructure to converted historical buildings, and to the broader consequences of this entanglement of relief both within and outside the city.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 150 000 people of Greek origin – mainly from Georgia, Abkhazia, and Central Asia – migrated to Greece, particularly to Thessaloniki and the region of Macedonia. Considered both migrants and members of the Greek national body, these “repatriates” have been the focus of numerous studies emphasizing their integration and identity transformations. This research shifts the perspective toward the economic dimension of their settlement, analyzing the social logics underlying their activities and entrepreneurial networks. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of embeddedness (Polanyi, Granovetter) and mixed embeddedness (Kloosterman & Rath), the economies of Greeks from the former USSR are examined as systems interwoven within family, community, and transnational networks. These so‑called “ethnic economies” are not merely a response to exclusion from the national labor market; they also represent spaces of opportunity based on trust, linguistic and cultural affinities (especially Russophonia), and mobility across multiple economic contexts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Thessaloniki (2018‑2021), combining participant observation and semi‑structured interviews, the study highlights four key sectors: construction and real estate, the fur industry, small‑scale cross‑border trade, and the market for Russian products. These activities – often positioned between the formal and informal spheres – are structured around flexible, multilocal, and transnational post‑Soviet networks. Ultimately, the economies of Greeks from the former USSR reveal a multiple embeddedness where Greek, Pontic, and post‑Soviet dimensions intersect. Rather than representing a strictly “ethnic” economy, they embody a hybrid dynamic shaped by Russophonia, mobility, and the broader transformations of contemporary capitalism.
The article contributes to three areas of research: German exile biographies, particularly Gerhard Kessler’s (1883‑1963) exile in Istanbul; German/Jewish émigré academics in Turkey during the 1930s and 1940s; and the history of radio usage during World War II. These three areas correspond to the three levels of isolation that characterised Kessler’s exile as well as his radiophonic responses to it. Furthermore, these domains correspond to three analytical scales that structure the article’s three main sections: the intimate realm of the individual and family; the political and social realm of antifascist engagement; and the imagined community of exiles connected by distant listening.
The displacement from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since the late 19th century has only recently attracted the interest of historians. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the two world wars and postwar decolonisation constitute some of the turning points in this history of displacement that connects the MENA region to Europe. This special issue looks at the societies of the Middle East and North Africa as spaces of arrival, transit and settlement for refugees from Europe. It also examines their interactions with civil societies and state institutions, and the evolution of various refugee, settlement and migration policies in the region and within the context of (post)colonial regimes in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Between 1880 and 1920, Italian anarchist exiles continued their political activities in Tunisia and Egypt. However, despite engaging in their writings with a solidarity that transcended national and racial boundaries, and despite establishing practices of material mutual aid, these expressions of solidarity rarely extended to the local Arabic‑speaking populations and their struggles. This article argues that, far from being an inevitable outcome, this distancing was the result of deliberate choices on the part of these anarchists, choices shaped both by their condition of exile and by their racialised perception of local populations.
