Ottoman America

Ottoman America is a three-part documentary series (2022) exploring the history of Ottoman immigration to the United States from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. The series was written by Todd Fine and Işıl Acehan and directed by Tevfik Şenol. It was produced by Bahçeşehir University (BAU), Bay Atlantic University, MEDAM, and the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB).

The documentary premiered at the opening of the Turkevi Center (Turkish House) in Manhattan on September 20, 2021, during the United Nations General Assembly. Turkey’s First Lady Emine Erdoğan attended and spoke at the screening.

The Documentary

The series covers Ottoman immigrants — Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Sephardic Jews, Greeks, and other ethnicities — who came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Filmed across nine U.S. states and Turkey, it uses archives, maps, infographics, 3D animations, expert interviews, and field footage to tell stories including:

• Imam Mehmed Ali Efendi, a six-language-speaking attaché appointed to the Ottoman Embassy in Washington in 1910, who established a mosque in the area that would later become the World Trade Center site
• The Turkish and Kurdish leatherworking community in Peabody, Massachusetts
• Immigration through Ellis Island
• Ottoman communities across the eastern United States — from Paterson, New Jersey to Detroit, Michigan

The series is available on beIN Connect via Tarih TV in Turkey.

Peabody, Massachusetts

An estimated 2,200 Turks came to Peabody at the turn of the twentieth century to work in the leather tanneries. Most were Turkish and Kurdish speakers from the Harput (Elazığ) region of eastern Anatolia. Their boarding houses and coffee houses on Walnut Street were so numerous that it became known locally as “Ottoman Street.”

At Cedar Grove Cemetery in Peabody, 51 Turks are buried — the majority died from tuberculosis in 1917. Many graves are unmarked because the workers had no money and no family in America. American headstone carvers carved Ottoman script on some gravestones by imitating the handwriting of the Turks. One notable grave belongs to Yakub Ahmed, whose enormous polished stone bears a cross on one side and an Islamic crescent on the other, reflecting his interfaith marriage to a French-Canadian woman. We worked to place a marker at the cemetery remembering the immigrants buried there who could not afford or didn’t have a headstone.

For further reading, see Işıl Acehan’s academic paper: “‘Ottoman Street’ in America: Turkish Leatherworkers in Peabody, Massachusetts” (International Review of Social History, Cambridge University Press).