Authors

Discussion

This paper examines the development of imperial to post-imperial republican identities in the Ottoman and Habsburg successor states of Czechoslovakia and Turkey, through an evaluation of the presence and occupation of Czech brewmasters in the Ottoman and Turkish brewing industries. The setting of the study is the breweries of two of the latter’s most cosmopolitan cities, Smyrna/İzmir and Constantinople/İstanbul. Though the geography was more vast, the study remains focused on those cities that remained in the geography of Turkey after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. These industrial spaces of beer production (and cultural re-/production) are where Habsburg and Czechoslovak Czechs gradually showcased their craft and brewmaster capabilities as a dominant feature of their national culture, and through which Turkish republicans were, in turn, able to demonstrate the secular and alcohol-consuming sociabilities of their own. 

The brewing industry provides a unique and neglected lens onto the intersection of the cultural, economic, and symbolic aspects of Czechoslovak and Turkish identities, at a juncture where both were undergoing refinement while carving a place for their culturally distinct nation-states (under-construction), divorced and distinct from their former belongings in more multicultural imperial contexts in their near-simultaneous debuts on the international stage.