Eureka! Institutional Repository

In recent years, the nature of cultural mediation in orient has attracted the academic interest of many researchers. The aim of this research is to explore the role of the Education provided to Levantines in Constantinople during the 18th and 19th centuries and focuses on the genre and its role from a cultural perspective. Looking at the links between the changing concepts "East" and "West", the specific groups of mediators and their institutional arrangements, this research underlines the potential and active role of mediators in defining the education offered. The aim of this research is the contemporary reflection, institutional and operational aspects of the education of the Levantine’s community in the Ottoman capital during the 18th and 19th centuries. Our information is provided through the travelers to the Ottoman Empire and concerns the teaching of the monks who worked with zeal to satisfy the educational requirements of the residents of Pera who demanded Jesuits teachers for their children to maintain the Catholic doctrine and protect their cultural and religious heritage. The diversity of the pupils was reasonable to create problems and the monks were accused of conversion. An important point considered an innovation of the time is that the monks prayed and taught in various languages among them in Italian, French and Greek. According to Eric Dusteler there is considerable competition between schools of monastic orders and parents used to change their children’s schools for political reasons according to the relations they maintained with European Ambassadors supporters of the various monastic orders. The diplomatic relations of the French ambassador or the Venetian Vailo seems to determine the choice of the school. The high number of religious institutions was the centre of life of the community in the second half of the 19th century. Around the end of 1880, until 1908, the French press progressed gradually in Istanbul with a focus on scientific, literary, artistic and technical issues aiming at the French intellect of the time. The establishment of new schools and technical schools between the years 1860 and 1870 is addressed mainly to the Ottoman elite and the study of the French language is an indication that the students belong to the social elite of the time.