Imagining Communities: Story Listening and Popular Politics in Ottoman Urban Centers, ∼1780–1830

Abstract Listening to stories was the most common leisure activity in early modern Ottoman coffeehouses. This article examines this practice as a form of guided, collective imagination and explores its political significance from the 1780s to the 1830s, a period of rising tensions and direct confrontations between the palace and the Janissary army. It argues that among the Janissaries, who gathered regularly in coffeehouses, story listening helped sustain a shared identity grounded in virility, comradeship, and heterodox religious sensibilities, all of which were central to their political activism. The Janissaries were an “imagining community:” not only did they see themselves as a distinct social body, but their sense of community was continually reinforced through acts of co-imagining—visualizing and experiencing narratives together.