GrocerIST is a cooperation project led by the University of Vienna with the ACDH-CH as an associated research partner.

The main objective of GrocerIST is to reveal and analyse the food consumption patterns of inhabitants of eighteenth and nineteenth century Istanbul through the use of grocers’ (bakkal) inheritance inventories. By making comparisons across the centuries and different socio-economic conditions of the city, this project intends to discuss the food consumption of Ottomans within the frameworks of the internal and external political and socio-economic circumstances of the empire.

In order to systematically analyse a large quantity of archival material, a custom database is set up. The results are fed into a dedicated web-application allowing to browse, query, visualise and map the different data points. Transcriptions and facsimiles of the inheritance inventories are also accessible through this web application.

GrocerIST is led by Yavuz Köse from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna and funded by the FWF. The ACDH-CH is responsible for data modelling, data managing, data archiving and for developing the database as well as the web application. All code produced in the course of this project can be found on GitHub.

Project lead: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Yavuz Köse (University of Vienna)

Project team University of Vienna: Dr. Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke (Postdoc), Deniz Özeren, MA (Praedoc), Mag. Martin Gasteiner (Phaidra, NewsEye, University Library)

Project team ACDH-CH, ÖAW: Dr. Peter Andorfer, Mag. Michaele Rausch-Supola, Kinga Sramó

Project duration: 03/2022 - 09/2025

Project number: P35546