Grocers of Istanbul: Tracing Food Consumption (GrocerIST)

The main objective of GrocerIST is to reveal and analyse the food consumption patterns of inhabitants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Istanbul through the use of grocers’ (bakkal) inheritance inventories. By making comparisons across the centuries and different socio-economic conditions of the city, this project intends to discuss the food consumption of Ottomans within the frameworks of the internal and external political and socio-economic circumstances of the empire.

In order to systematically analyse a large quantity of archival material, a custom database is set up which results feed into a dedicated web-application allowing to browse, query, visualise and map the different data points. Also transcriptions and facsimiles of the inheritance inventories are made accessible through this web application.

GrocerIST is led by Yavuz Köse from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna and funded by FWF. The ACDH-CH is responsible for data modeling, data managing, data archiving and for developing the database as well as the web application. All code produced in the course of this project can be found on GitHub.