The present chapter provides an introduction to Ottoman Rodosto (Tekirdağ) and describes the arrival of Armenian refugees from Anatolia – mainly Kemah and its vicinity – as recounted by Ottoman Turkish court records (şer‘iyye sicilleri) and the written testament of the second Armenian bishop of Rodosto, Grigor Daranaḷts‘i. An Armenian community did not exist in Rodosto until the arrival of Celali refugees, and I describe in detail the struggles they faced as refugees upon their initial arrival, as well as their gradual efforts to build new lives, which involved the establishment of Armenian churches and an Armenian neighbourhood. Thereafter, I consider several Ottoman cities – namely Istanbul, Izmir, Rodosto, Balıkesir and Izmit – suggesting that the vast majority of Armenians in Western Anatolia, Istanbul and Thrace, who constituted the new Western Armenian Diaspora in the seventeenth century, were the descendants of Celali refugees. In short, the refugee crisis in Rodosto is but one example of a much broader demographic shift of Armenians from Greater Armenia to western parts of the Ottoman Empire.

Rodosto (Tekirdağ) at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century

To this day Rodosto – which now goes solely by the Turkish name Tekirdağ – is a quaint coastal town in Thrace approximately 140 km from central Istanbul (see Figure 3.1). A settlement has been present there since antiquity and it is mentioned both by Herodotus and Xenophon under the name Bisanthe. The name Rodosto – written Rodosçuk in the Ottoman Turkish documents – was predominant in Ottoman times, though both seventeenth-century Armenian and Ottoman Turkish sources note that it was sometimes called Tekfurdağı, meanings ‘king's mount’ in Turkish. The word tekfur likely derives from the Armenian word for ‘king’ and it was commonly used by the early Ottomans to refer to Byzantine lords. The city receives scant reference in the seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicle tradition, though it was sometimes mentioned as a way station on the journey from Gallipoli to Istanbul and perusal of the chronicles also reveals that a boat could be taken from Istanbul to Rodosto's port as a short cut on the journey to Edirne. The occasional references to Rodosto in the Ottoman chronicles fail to convey its critical role in provisioning seventeenth-century Istanbul.