You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled “Knowledge beyond institutions: The works and networks of Chrysanthos Notaras” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 05 February 2026, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130 Seminar Room
Title: Knowledge beyond institutions: The works and networks of Chrysanthos Notaras
Speaker: Hasan Çolak, TOBB University of Economics and Technology
Abstract:
The scholarship on early modern intellectual history has long presented universities, academies, medreses, churches, and courts as the engines of intellectual life. While these institutions certainly functioned as enabling contexts for the formation and circulation of knowledge, the individual experience of intellectuals with knowledge presents much wider vistas for exploring how knowledge was formed and circulated on the personal level. This presentation revisits the assumed roles of institutions through the intellectual and political development of a prominent figure: Chrysanthos Notaras (d. 1730), an Ottoman Christian scholar and Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. Both a polymath and a polyglot, Chrysanthos’s expertise encompassed astronomy, natural philosophy, geography, and mathematics alongside Orthodox theology and his knowledge of languages included Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Turkish, and Arabic. Chrysanthos was also directly or indirectly connected to several institutions: he studied at the Patriarchal Academy in Istanbul, the Princely Academy in Bucharest, the University of Padua, and the Paris Observatory, and he enjoyed recognized authority not only within the Orthodox Church but also before the Ottoman court. Accordingly, Chrysanthos’s extensive archival footprint offers a uniquely well-documented point of entry into the worlds of Ottoman and European knowledge, enabling a reassessment of the role of institutions in the formation and circulation of knowledge in his scholarly works and networks. Through a holistic approach to his notebooks, manuscripts, published works, letters, and petitions to the Ottoman court, this presentation examines how early modern knowledge was produced, evaluated, and circulated through highly structured networks sustained by shared codes and emotions that enabled their operation beyond the confines of institutions.
Bio:
Hasan Çolak is Associate Professor of Ottoman History at TOBB University of Economics and Technology. He holds BA and MA degrees in History from Boğaziçi and Bilkent universities respectively and completed his doctoral studies on the interaction between the Eastern Patriarchates and the Ottoman central administration at the University of Birmingham in 2013. He has had several research and teaching positions in Ankara, Athens, Leiden, Bucharest, and Florence, including two research positions at European Research Council projects and a Andrew W Mellon fellowship at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti. He is also a contributor to the graduate program in Eastern Christian Studies at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome. He conducts research on the Greek Orthodox community as part of the Ottoman world, with a particular eye to its administrative, commercial, and intellectual aspects. He is the author of “The Orthodox Church in the Early Modern Middle East” (Turkish Historical Society, 2015) and, with Elif Bayraktar-Tellan, “The Orthodox Church as an Ottoman Institution” (Isis Press, 2019). He is a 2020 recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and is a member of the Turkish Young Academy of Sciences.