Polina Ivanova (Harvard University, Department of History)

Migration, settlement and the transformation of cultural landscape in medieval Anatolia

Polina Ivanova is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her dissertation investigates Anatolia’s history of migration and settlement and the reshaping of its cultural landscape between the eleventh and fourteenth century. The project focuses on the region of Inner Pontus and observes the processes of cultural transformation of medieval Anatolia on a local scale. Looking at early eleventh-century Inner Pontus one confidently identifies it as part of the Byzantine world. However, when one considers the same geographic space in the chronological framework of the ensuing two centuries, possibilities of interpretations multiply. Depending on selected sets of sources, one could alternatively re-envision it as the western fringe of greater Iran, an extension of western Armenia, a part of the Danishmendid Emirate, the Sultanate of the Seljuks of Rum, or the Ilkhanid Empire, and furthermore as the land of Turkomans, the cradle of the Babaī revolts, and one of the birthplaces of what later would become Anatolian Alevism.

People inhabiting medieval Anatolia spoke and understood several languages: different natural and visual languages, languages of power and languages of the sacred. They inhabited the same geographical spaces and yet envisioned them differently. The dissertation investigates and compares the processes by which inhabitants of medieval Inner Pontus created competing and complimentary visions of this region through uses of the natural environment, building activity, naming and other forms of inscribing collective cultural memory. The fellowship project, which forms one part of the dissertation, traces the emergence of Inner Pontus as a frontier of the Iranian world.