The Ottoman constitutional rule and Evolution of the Law on Brigandage (Çeteler Kanunu): The Jovanovich Murder Case

In December 1909, Ottoman police patrols in Bitola discovered the body of a certain Jovanovich who had been stabbed to death. Local Ottoman authorities launched a wave of operations in the town that resulted in the arrest of local Bulgarian notables for their involvement in the murder. The murder was considered a political crime –– a definition that placed the case within the framework of the Law on Brigandage, which was adopted as a provisional law bypassing the parliament. The local tension created a vortex drawing in provincial and central bureaucracies, the Ottoman parliamentarians as well as Macedo-Bulgarian political actors. This presentation aims to reconstruct the evolution of the case in its interaction with the new Ottoman political-legal sphere and to shed light on the implementation of the laws as well as on the power relations in an era marked by parliamentarism and discourse of Ottoman fraternity.

 

Barış Zeren is an independent researcher and associate member of CETOBAC, EHESS. He received his PhD in 2017 from Boğaziçi University and EHESS in which he studied the socio-political and judicial crisis of transition to the constitutional regime in the Ottoman Empire. He gave courses in Ottoman, Republican Turkey, and Russian history at Işık University and Boğaziçi University. His current research agenda includes the role of trans-imperial and underground networks in the development of the culture of constitutionalism within the period of 1848-1914 with a particular interest in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.