Ottoman Society and Culture: Daily Life, Family, Faith, and the Arts

The Ottoman Empire lasted from roughly 1299 to 1922 — more than six centuries — and at its height governed a population of perhaps thirty million across the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arab lands, and the Black Sea basin. It was not a uniform civilization. A Turkish-speaking Muslim ruling class governed a vast, multi-confessional population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and many others. To understand Ottoman society is to understand how these communities lived together: how they built their cities, raised their children, fed themselves, dressed, prayed, and entertained each other.

This article is a structural overview. The deep dives — the harem, the cuisine, the art, the bath, the coffeehouse, Sinan’s mosques — sit in their own pages; I have tried not to repeat them here, and have linked out where the topic properly belongs elsewhere.

Key dates

c. 1299 — Founding of the Ottoman emirate by Osman I in northwestern Anatolia.
1453 — Mehmed II captures Constantinople; the empire becomes a Mediterranean power.
1517 — Selim I absorbs the Mamluk sultanate; the Arab holy cities come under Ottoman rule.
1520–1566 — Süleyman I; the classical age of Ottoman art, law, and architecture.
1683 — Second siege of Vienna; the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion in Europe.
1826 — Abolition of the Janissary corps (the Auspicious Incident).
1839, 1856 — The Tanzimat reform edicts.
1876 — First Ottoman constitution; first Ottoman parliament.
1908 — Young Turk revolution restores the constitution.
1922 — Abolition of the sultanate; 1924 — abolition of the caliphate and exile of the dynasty.

Ottoman society was formally divided into askeri — the military-administrative class of sultan, household, divan, judges, scholars, and officers — and reaya, the taxable commoners, regardless of religion. Suraiya Faroqhi has argued, rightly in my view, that this two-part division was less a description of social reality than a fiscal and legal fiction: a wealthy Greek merchant of the Phanar paid taxes like a peasant but lived like a vizier. Rank could be read off the turban, the robe, the retinue, the number of slaves in one’s household, and the size of one’s Friday luncheon.

Beneath the hierarchy, the empire was strikingly mobile. The devshirme system regularly raised Christian peasant boys to the highest offices of state; Jewish bankers, Armenian architects, Greek Phanariots, and wealthy merchants of every confession accumulated fortunes that rivaled those of Muslim officials. The Ottoman ruling class was not, as it is sometimes imagined, ethnically sealed.

Religion and the millet

Islam was the state religion. The sultan was the halife of the Muslims and, in classical theory, the protector of the faith and of the routes of the hajj. The empire was, however, organized around the millet — the confessional community with its own courts, schools, and personal-status law. The Orthodox Greeks, the Armenian Apostolic community, and the Jews each had their recognized millet with its own spiritual leader, and the Ottomans left the various Christian churches and synagogues free to govern their own flocks in exchange for loyalty and the jizya.

The arrangement was pragmatic rather than idealistic. It produced a remarkably plural urban culture: a single neighborhood of Istanbul, Cairo, or Thessaloniki might contain a mosque, a Greek church, an Armenian chapel, a synagogue, a hamam, and a coffeehouse within a few streets of one another. The 1856 Hatt-ı Hümayun and the 1876 constitution fundamentally changed what the millet system was — granting non-Muslim millets genuine corporate legal personality — and the 19th-century millet is a very different institution from the 15th-century one.

The city, the village, the steppe

About a quarter of the empire lived in cities, and the great metropolises — Istanbul, Cairo, Bursa, Edirne, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Salonica — were among the largest cities of the early modern world. Cities were organized into quarters, each dominated by a particular trade, ethnic group, or religious community, and each with its own mosque or church, bakery, fountain, and hamam.

The village, by contrast, was governed by custom and by the village imam or priest, and it was the village — not the city — that the great 17th-century traveler Evliya Çelebi sometimes missed most when he was on the road. His ten-volume Seyahatname describes a rural world of hospitality, weddings, harvest songs, and dervish lodges that endured well into the modern period.

“There is no village in the realm of Rum that does not have its saint’s tomb, its fountain, its oven, and its bath. The villagers bring their dead to the saint, the brides to the fountain, the bread to the oven, and the sick to the bath.” — Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname (c. 1640–1682), Vol. 1, on the villages of Anatolia

A significant portion of the population was semi-nomadic. The Yörük of Anatolia, the Turkmen of Syria and Iraq, the Bedouin of Arabia, the Kurdish pastoralists of the eastern mountains, and the Tatar communities of the steppe practiced a mixed economy of herding, raiding, and seasonal agriculture. These groups supplied the empire with soldiers, horses, wool, and the carpets that became one of its most famous exports.

Daily life

Ottoman daily life was organized by the five canonical prayers of Islam, by the working hours of the bazaar, and — after the mid-16th century — by coffee. A typical urban household of the 17th or 18th century rose before dawn for the sabah prayer, shared a light breakfast of bread, cheese, olives, and coffee, sent the men to the workshop, the women to the market or the hamam, gathered for the main meal at midday, rested through the heat of the afternoon, took a second meal at sunset after the akşam prayer, and ended with the yatsı.

The typical Ottoman house was built around an inner courtyard. The street wall was plain; inside, a portico opened onto a garden with a fountain and a few fruit trees, and the family’s living quarters were arranged on three sides. The harem — the women’s quarters — was generally on the upper floor or at the back, and the formal selamlık at the front. For the urban poor, a single room in a timber-framed tenement served as home, kitchen, and workshop, and several families shared a courtyard, a well, and a privy.

“I have travelled in twenty-two countries… and in all the lands of Islam I have never seen a house so well built, so finely ornamented, so spacious, and so orderly as the konak of a pasha in Istanbul.” — Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Vol. 1 (c. 1640), on the houses of the great households of the city

Cuisine, hammam, and coffeehouse all have their own articles. The point worth making here is that the Ottoman day was punctual, public, and religious in a way that made the modern distinction between sacred and secular largely foreign to it.

Family, marriage, and the harem

The family was the basic unit, and it was generally an extended, patriarchal household headed by the senior male. Marriage was an arrangement between families as much as between individuals: the bride’s marriage portion, the trousseau, and the conditions of the contract were negotiated carefully, and the contract itself was a serious legal document registered with the kadı. Muslim men could take up to four wives under Islamic law, but the great majority of Ottoman men — most of the sultans included — had only one wife at a time, and most households were monogamous.

The imperial harem at Topkapı was the most elaborate version of this domestic system. Leslie Peirce’s argument in The Imperial Harem (1993), that the harem was a household of status and lineage rather than a seraglio of sex, has, in my view, the best of the recent revisionist cases. Hürrem Sultan (c. 1502/6–1558), the haseki of Süleyman I and the first legal wife of an Ottoman sultan since the 14th century, was not a captive in the harem; she was its political master for nearly three decades, and her daughter Mihrimah Sultan became the wealthiest woman of the 16th century. The structure of the harem, the rank of cariye to valide sultan, and the place of slavery are treated in the family and harem article; the rooms, the eunuchs, and the daily routine, in life in the harem.

Children were welcomed as gifts of God. A naming ceremony on the seventh day gave the child a name, often of the Prophet, his family, or a local saint. Boys were circumcised in an elaborate public ceremony, the sünnet düğünü, often timed to coincide with a prince’s. For the sons of the ruling class, education began at home and continued at a medrese; the most promising went on to specialized military schools, and a small number to the Enderun, the palace school, where the brightest of the devshirme recruits were trained for the highest offices.

Art, architecture, music

Ottoman architecture is the most visible inheritance of the empire. The classical idiom — perfected in the 16th century by the chief architect Mimar Sinan — combined a central dome, slender pencil minarets, cascading half-domes, and vast airy interiors. The Süleymaniye, the Şehzade, and the Selimiye remain among the great achievements of world architecture; the 18th-century Ottoman Baroque and the 19th-century Balyan palaces extended the tradition with European decorative vocabularies.

In the decorative arts, the court studio of the nakkaşhane produced a body of miniature painting that combined Persian conventions with a distinctive Ottoman taste for dense, accurate crowd scenes. The Hünername of the 1580s and the Surname-i Vehbi of 1720 are the showpieces. The great calligraphers — Şeyh Hamdullah, Hafiz Osman, Mustafa Râkım — were held in a respect that contemporary European painters never quite achieved in the Islamic world. The Iznik ceramic tradition, the Ushak and Hereke carpets, the velvet and brocade textiles of Bursa and Istanbul, and the metalwork of the imperial workshops completed the visual inheritance.

Ottoman music was a sophisticated tradition of classical, folk, religious, and military music. The classical tradition, Türk sanat müziği, was a modal system based on the makam scales and usul rhythmic cycles, performed in the court, in the houses of the wealthy, and in the Mevlevi lodges of the Whirling Dervishes. The composers Buhurizade Mustafa Itrî (c. 1640–1712), Dede Efendi (1778–1846), and Tanburi Cemil Bey (1871–1916) are the great names. The military band of the Janissary corps, the Mehter, performed with kettledrums, shawms, trumpets, cymbals, and bells, and its processional music became a recognized part of European military music in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Coffee, hammam, and public life

The Ottoman coffeehouse opened in Istanbul in the 1550s, and within a generation the kahvehane had spread to every city of the empire. It was a place of conversation, of the reading of new printed books, of storytellers, poets, and musicians, of backgammon and chess — and, in the eyes of conservative ulema, of sedition. Sultans periodically closed the coffeehouses; the closures never lasted. By the 18th century the kahvehane was a fixture of urban life as central as the mosque and the bazaar.

The Ottoman hammam, descended from the Roman thermae and the Arab bath, was a public bath in every neighborhood of every Ottoman city. The camekân, the soğukluk, the hararet, the göbektaşı, and the halvet of the great Istanbul hammams are still standing; the Çemberlitaş, the Cağaloğlu, the Haseki Hürrem Sultan, and the Kılıç Ali Pasha hammams are still working bathhouses today. The hammam marked the major life events — the gelin hamamı on the eve of a wedding, the lohusa şenliği of the new mother, the yas hamamı of the bereaved.

Ottoman public life was punctuated by religious festivals — the Ramazan Bayramı and the Kurban Bayramı — by imperial processions, by royal weddings and circumcisions, and by the annual caravan of the pilgrimage to Mecca. At the other end of the social scale, the meyhane — the tavern — served wine, raki, and meze to the non-Muslim communities, the foreign visitors, and the less observant Muslims, and the songs of the meyhane form a major strand of Ottoman lyric poetry.

Science, learning, and language

Ottoman learning was built on the Islamic scholarly tradition, with deep borrowings from Greek, Persian, and Indian sources. The medrese produced a learned class of jurists, theologians, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and historians. The great observatory of Taqi al-Din in Istanbul in the 1570s briefly rivaled its European counterparts; the imperial library of the Topkapı assembled a manuscript collection of more than ten thousand volumes.

The empire’s most distinctive contribution to world learning was in the social sciences. The Ottoman historical tradition — from Aşıkpaşazade in the 15th century to Peçevi, Mustafa Âli, and Katip Çelebi in the 16th and 17th, and Evliya Çelebi in the 17th — produced a body of chronicles, geographical dictionaries, biographical dictionaries, and travel literature that remains a major primary source for the history of the eastern Mediterranean.

The language of the court, Ottoman Turkish, was a synthesis of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian that no one ever spoke as a mother tongue. The gap between the ornate written language and the spoken dialects of Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces was a persistent theme of Ottoman intellectual life. The shift to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet came in 1928, under the Turkish Republic; the older Arabic-script Ottoman heritage remains a living part of scholarship in Turkey and the former Ottoman lands.

The long 19th century and the end of the old order

The 19th century brought the most thoroughgoing social transformation of Ottoman history. The Tanzimat reforms of 1839 and 1856 modernized the legal system, the bureaucracy, the army, and the relations of the state with its non-Muslim subjects; the first Ottoman constitution was promulgated in 1876 and the first parliament met the same year. The press, the publishing industry, and the new schools of the late Ottoman period produced a generation of Westernizing bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, and doctors, and a parallel movement of Islamic modernism led by thinkers such as Namık Kemal, Ziya Paşa, and Ahmed Vefik Paşa. The dynastic harem at Topkapı continued to function through the First World War and was finally dissolved only with the exile of the Ottoman dynasty in March 1924, when the caliphate itself was abolished. By 1922, when the last sultan left the country, the empire had been replaced by a Turkish nation-state whose founders deliberately rejected the institutions of the old order.

Frequently asked questions

What language did the Ottomans speak? Ottoman Turkish — a written language heavily loaded with Arabic and Persian loanwords, used by the court, the law, and the literary culture. Ordinary people spoke Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Kurdish, or whatever was local. Modern Turkish, in the Latin alphabet adopted in 1928, is the national language of the successor republic.

What was the Ottoman Empire’s religion? Islam. The sultan was, from the early 16th century onward, the halife of the world’s Sunni Muslims, and the protection of Mecca, Medina, and the pilgrimage routes was a central duty of the state. The empire was, however, multiconfessional: Orthodox Christianity, Armenian Apostolic Christianity, Judaism, and various other communities were organized as recognized millets.

When did the Ottoman Empire end? The sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922; the caliphate was abolished on 3 March 1924 and the Ottoman dynasty went into exile. The Turkish Republic had been proclaimed on 29 October 1923. The conventional “end date” of the empire is 1922, but the institutional break is properly 1924.