Blank physical map of the Konya Plain. Semhur, via Wkimedia Commons. Cropped.
The project, which is part of a broader dissertation research on refugee settlement and agricultural modernization in the Ottoman Crown Estates, situates Konya within the transimperial networks that connected the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and the Russian borderlands. The project examines how the settlement of Muslim refugees (muhacirs) on the Konya Plain formed part of a broader effort to transform the region into an engineerable, investable landscape of property. It also explores how these processes reshaped and often displaced existing Kurdish, Armenian, and Greek communities. Drawing on cartographic, archival, and engineering sources, the project demonstrates how Ottoman state institutions and foreign concessionary companies jointly produced a contested property regime that reconfigured land, sovereignty, and social relations in late Ottoman Anatolia. During his research trip supported by the Mosafer fellowship, Tanridag conducted archival research at the Deutsche Bank Historical Archive and the German Federal Archives in Germany.