Mustafa Nuri and the Casino of Viranbağ

This monograph offers a multi-angle inquiry into modern Turkish cultural history through the intertwined lives of a man and a place: the Ottoman lawyer-entrepreneur Mustafa Nuri and the Viranbağ casino on Büyükada (Prinkipo). Using this microhistory to illuminate larger patterns, it engages five strands that merit further study in their own right: the history of casino/entertainment culture in Türkiye, the cultural history of Büyükada, the biography of Mustafa Nuri, the evolution of vakıf institutions, and the history of forestry. The central concern is everyday life in western Eurasia during the age of nationalism—especially in the Aegean and the Propontis—amid the frictions of Greek and Turkish national projects. Confronting Greek nationalism in Crete and occupied İzmir, and Turkish nationalism in the early Second World War years, Mustafa Nuri ultimately sought refuge in the familiar social world of Viranbağ. Like its proprietor, the casino was an “islander,” and its fortunes rose and fell with nationalist politics. Their shared trajectory provides the lens through which this study reconsiders space, identity, and economy in the late Ottoman and early Republican eras.