Introducing Conviviality: Ebru-Like Living in Burgaz

Burgaz island, one of the Princes’ Islands of Istanbul, is home to more than twenty different ethnic and religious groups from different socio-economic backgrounds. While the Balkans and Turkey are pathologised as places of ethnic and religious turmoil and “un-mixing” people, peace in Burgaz did not break despite homogenising Turkification policies. This monograph shifts the emphasis in this study of post-Ottoman plurality from coexistence/toleration to conviviality, which I describe as both living together in diversity, producing everyday life and a sense of place through embodying diversity, enjoying, performing and valuing it, and living with difference, by letting people, who might have different lifestyles, to perform and practise daily life the ways in which they would like to.