Alms Collectors between Charity, Commerce and Denominationalisation

The immigration of Eastern Orthodox alms collectors from the Ottoman Empire into the Old Empire is the focus of the project. It pursues interwoven questions of migration, knowledge and denominational history. In order to clarify these questions, archives from different territories of the empire will be compared and insights into the history of other types of migrants (traders and students), but also of other charitable groups active in the same field, will be drawn upon. Focusing on the alms collectors' characteristic as cultural/denominational border crossers, the project will deal with the normative orders of the denominational cultures and scholarly milieus with which they came into contact. It is precisely because scholars and alms collectors entered into heteronomous relationships on the border between charity, commerce, denominational politics and scholarly culture that the phenomenon under investigation promises to reveal the social premises of processes of transfer in the history of ideas. It is intended to provide contributions to a still-to-be-written history of the mobile presence of the Greek Orthodox in the Old Empire.