In this episode, we speak with Dr. Mehmet Çelik about his new book, Empire and Nation in the City: Rusçuk from Ottoman Rule to Bulgarian Statehood, published by Syracuse University Press in 2026.

The book tells the story of Rusçuk — known today as Ruse, in northern Bulgaria — a cosmopolitan port city on the Danube that, within the span of just fifteen years, passed through three entirely different political systems: a modernized Ottoman provincial administration, a Russian military provisional government, and a newly independent Bulgarian national state. Through this one city, Çelik offers a striking new account of how empires end and nations begin — and how much continuity lies beneath the surface of what looks like rupture.

At the heart of the book is the Tanzimat reform era, when Governor Midhat Pasha turned Rusçuk into a laboratory of Ottoman modernization. The city became home to the first provincial municipality in Ottoman history, the first agricultural credit cooperatives, a bilingual newspaper, secular mixed schools, and elected councils in which Muslim and Bulgarian Christian representatives sat side by side. Çelik shows that the Ottoman Empire, at its most ambitious, offered Bulgarians a genuine political alternative to nationalism — and that many took it, among them the chorbaci, the Bulgarian Christian notables who invested in and co-governed the Ottoman system, and who have been largely written out of Bulgarian national memory ever since.

When Russia invaded in 1877–78, Rusçuk surrendered peacefully — a telling sign of how deeply the city's diverse population had been woven into the Ottoman fabric. What followed was equally surprising: the Russian provisional government preserved the Ottoman institutional framework almost entirely, relabeling its councils and offices rather than dismantling them. The Bulgarian national government that came next did much the same, adopting Ottoman tools of minority management — including the military exemption tax and millet-style community administration — at the very moment it was defining itself in opposition to the Ottoman past.

Çelik also uncovers a remarkable story of religious conversion under Bulgarian rule: while some Muslims and Catholics converted pragmatically to Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity to secure the rights of the dominant group, Protestant conversion driven by the long-standing American Methodist Episcopal mission quietly gained new ground. In one of the book's most unexpected findings, a small community of Orthodox Bulgarians, Muslim Turks, Jews, and Armenians formed a lasting bond through their shared Protestant identity.

Drawing on Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, British, French, and Austrian archives — as well as prison registers, consular reports, missionary records, and the bilingual provincial newspaper Tuna/Dunav — Çelik bridges two historiographies that rarely speak to each other. Ottoman historians tend to stop at 1877; Bulgarian historians tend to start there. Empire and Nation in the City insists on the continuity that both fields have missed.

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Mehmet Çelik, "Empire and Nation in the City: Rusçuk from Ottoman Rule to Bulgarian Statehood" (Syracuse UP, 2026)

New Books in History

Mehmet Çelik, "Empire and Nation in the City: Rusçuk from Ottoman Rule to Bulgarian Statehood" (Syracuse UP, 2026)