Season 5 Report

by Chris Gratien

While we always work to innovate and improve our process, Season 5 of Ottoman History Podcast was very much about sustaining the project that we have slowly built since 2011. As in other years, we succeeded in maintaining a pace of roughly one episode release per week, publishing a total of 52 interviews and conversations between July 2015 and May 2016. In our continued efforts to expand the range of topics covered on the program, we also expanded our team, recording with more hosts in a wider variety of locations than in any other season. In doing so, we worked to reach new audiences and keep the interest of our core group of the more than 20,000 Facebook users who regularly receive our content. Most importantly, we continued to improve upon the production side of the program while remaining institutionally independent and self-funded.

SEASON 5 STREAMING ON SOUNDCLOUD

Season Overview

Season 5 of Ottoman History Podcast was the most robust to date. In a span of 10 months, we released 51 conventional interviews and one special memorial episode commemorating the life and works of Vangelis Kechriotis. 4 of our 52 episodes were conducted in Turkish. 2 episodes were cross-listed in tajine, our North Africa-focused side project.

Our episodes covered a satisfyingly wide range of topics. As usual, our coverage extended well beyond the Ottoman Empire in time and space. 9 out of 51 interviews featured research primarily concerned with the post-Ottoman Middle East. Our episodes concerning the Ottoman Empire were evenly divided between those dealing with periods before/after the 19th century. 

There were many themes that received special emphasis. One was urban space, which was the subject of our first series launched during Season 5 (more below). We opened the season by talking to Nina Ergin about the sociopolitical world of bathhouses in early modern Istanbul, following up later with a similar discussion concerning bodies and the communal politics in the baths of Ottoman Aleppo with Elyse Semerdjian. In addition to an extended interview with Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar about their research on the social history of Ottoman Istanbul, we sat down with Amy Singer to chat about different topics in the urban and social history of Edirne from its days as the Ottoman capital all the way into the 20th century.

The history of science and knowledge continued to serve as a major focus of our project thanks in part to Nir Shafir’s continued persistence in identifying guests working on this topic. Our offerings in this field ranged from Ahmad Ragab’s discussion of hospitals in medieval Egypt and the Levant to an interview with Liat Kozma on the field of sexology in Hebrew and Arabic during the early 20th century. We featured two episodes on foreign doctors in the Ottoman domains: an interview with Valentia Pugliano about Venetian physics in the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period and another with Edna Bonhomme about medical experimentation in 18th century Egypt. We also added three episodes on geographical imagination through interviews with Karen Pinto on Islamic cartography, Palmira Brummett on European mapping of Ottoman space, and Ayesha Ramachandran on global imagining in early modern Europe.

From Episode No. 220 with Karen Pinto: Classic Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik world map, ‘Ṣūrat al-Arḍ’ (Picture of the World) from an abbreviated copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī's Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms). 589/1193. Mediterranean. Gouache and ink on paper. Diameter 37.5 cm. Courtesy: Leiden University Libraries. Cod. Or. 3101, ff. 4-5.

Another central focus of our episodes involved new approaches to questions of identity and communal relations in the Ottoman Empire and Middle East. We featured two episodes about relationships between the Ottoman state and Greek subjects with both Molly Greene and Vangelis Kechriotis. We interviewed Ussama Makdisi about the latest developments of his thinking regarding sectarianism in the Middle East. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular offered the results of her research on the implications of transition from an Ottoman order and identity to a post-Ottoman reality in Bosnia. Our interviews with Saghar Sadeghian about non-Muslims in the Iranian parliament and Liora Halperin about language diversity in Mandate Palestine expanded the conversation beyond the Ottoman context. Our conversations about Palestinian capitalists with Sherene Seikaly and the middle class in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Aleppo with Keith Watenpaugh introduced the emergence of new social classes as an often ignored complement to the discussion of communal identities in the Middle East.

During Season 5, we were fortunate to feature the groundbreaking research of a number of historians concerning law and legal institutions in the Ottoman Empire. These included two major contributions to the study of Hanafi Islamic law and its transformation under the Ottomans by both Guy Burak and Samy Ayoub, an interview with Boğaç Ergene about quantifying justice through economic relations reflected in the Ottoman court records, and Yakoob Ahmed’s work on the Ottoman ulema and their role in the Second Constitutional Revolution of 1908. Cengiz Kırlı offered new perspectives on the remaking of the Ottoman state during the 19th century through a discussion of the making of corruption as a legal category, and Nadir Özbek explored the politics of Ottoman taxation (in Turkish). One of our final and most popular episodes of Season 5 featured Hugh Kennedy discussing the evolution of the concept of the Caliphate across the centuries. Look forward to his new book on the subject this summer.

From Episode No. 240: Taylan Güngör with Hugh Kennedy at SOAS Radio

Many of our interviews featured research that emphasizes the role of women as historical actors. Akram Khater offered a look inside his book on an influential and controversial female religious figure in 18th century Lebanon. Nazan Maksudyan presented her work on the subject of suicide with regard to women in early Republican Turkey. We also had the opportunity to speak with Ellen Fleischmann and Christine Lindner about women at the American Protestant Mission in Lebanon. With Zeynep Kutluata, we discussed the often ignored experience and role of women in war during the late Ottoman period (in Turkish). Sylvia Wing Önder meanwhile presented her research on the continued centrality of women and households in decision about medical care in rural Turkey today.

Memory and cultural heritage also figured prominently in a number of our episodes. Rochelle Davis spoke to us about her research on Palestinian efforts to document the histories of lost villages, and Vahé Tachjian spoke to us about similar efforts among Armenians to continually reconstruct the memory of Ottoman Armenian life, including his own work on the digital houshamadyan project. Yelins Mahtat presented his own work recording and revitalizing storytelling and folklore of the Morocco’s Middle Atlas region.

During Season 5, we placed increased emphasis on showcasing research that offers novel approaches to historical sources and makes effective use of non-textual material. These included a number of interviews concerning visual sources, including a conversation with Emine Fetvacı about painting and historiography at the Ottoman court, Edhem Eldem’s presentation about Ottoman photography and an exhibition of Ottoman photographs in Istanbul, an interview with Özde Çeliktemel-Thomen about her research on early cinema of the late Ottoman period, and a well-received discussion with Sarah-Neel Smith about Turkish politician Bülent Ecevit’s engagement with art and intellectual production. Nina Ergin shared some of her research on the sonic history of the Ottoman Empire, and Elif Sezer discussed the interplay between oral and textual sources in Ottoman history.

From Episode No. 195: Camera Ottomana exhibit entrance at Koç RCAC

While we pride ourselves on placing the Middle East at the center of historical inquiry, we have also offered up a number of episodes that explore global connections. Michael Talbot shared his take on Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy and the emergence of maritime law. Eileen Kane presented aspects of her new book on Russian engagement with Muslim subjects and the hajj pilgrimage. Reem Bailony discussed transnational engagement with the 1925 Syrian revolt, and Hilary Falb Kalisman explored the role of British Mandate policy in fostering transnational networks in the Middle East through education. Meanwhile, Keith Watenpaugh emphasized the centrality of the Middle East in the making of global humanitarianism. 

Some of our most well-received content concerned unusual or emerging subjects of inquiry. For example natural disasters played well in Season 5. Alan Mikhail presented an article that detailed the impact of a volcanic eruption in Iceland on the politics and economy of the Egyptian countryside. Yaron Ayalon discussed his book on the link between natural disasters and social history of the Ottoman Empire. We featured two appetizing episodes on food, one with Nicolas Trépanier on medieval Anatolia and another with Burak Onaran about food and politics (in Turkish). 

Although the researchers featured on Ottoman History Podcast are primarily academic historians and social scientists, we are always eager to speak with scholars who bridge the gap to other media. We spoke to two academics involved in documentary film projects during Season 5: Selim Deringil, who has participated in the production of a film about the Ottoman orphanage at Antoura during WWI and Isabella Alexander, who is currently undertaking a film project about her doctoral dissertation research, which explored Sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco and their perilous and uncertain journeys to Europe. Both of these projects, which deal with the experience and legacy of displacement on different layers of time, are exemplary of the ways in which our discussion of the past in continually engaged with questions of the present in the Middle East today.

From Episode No. 242: "Migrants and hopeful refugees create a makeshift camp in the forest around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, waiting for a large enough group to storm at the fences in their attempted crossing." [Isabella Alexander]

New Developments

Ottoman History Podcast remains primarily focused on presenting regular interviews with scholars about their research. During the course of Season 5, we worked to improve and expand upon our medium in a variety of ways.

Series

With Season 5, we unveiled a new “Series” feature on the website. Having amassed almost 200 episodes in our catalog by 2015, we wanted to create a new system of organizing content on our site and find ways to repurpose older episodes that withstand the test of time. The new thematic series were designed to give structure to the mess of old episodes, ensure greater continuity in future installments, and make our project more conducive to classroom use or selective browsing. We released our first series entitled “Urban Space in the Ottoman World” (curated by Chris Gratien and  Kalliopi Amygdalou) to coincide with the launch of Season 5 along with the informal pilot series “History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise” curated by Nir Shafir. In addition, we debuted two new series “Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World” (curated by Susanna Ferguson and Seçil Yılmaz) and “Continuity and Transformation in Islamic Law” (curated by Hadi Hosainy and Zoe Griffith) over the course of Season 5 and laid the foundation for a number of other series that will launch during Season 6.

Each series debuts with at least 10 to 20 episodes that share a relationship with a particular salient theme in the history and historiography of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. The series are organized by curators who write an introductory essay and bibliography for the subject, select and organize the episodes to include within the series, and play a leading role in identifying and courting potential guests for future installments. The series on the Ottoman History Podcast website have their own podcast feeds that are listed in iTunes and independent of our main podcast feed, allowing users to quickly download the relevant set of episodes without having to sift through the large OHP catalog. The series pages mark popular episodes as well as episodes selected by our editors as particularly exemplary. Episodes of OHP may appear in multiple series when relevant.

The series feature has been well received by our audience. For example, our “History of Science” series received over 7000 page views, more than any other new page on our website over the course of Season 5 besides the “Series” tab itself. The series have also served as effective means of targeting future guests and sustaining personal involvement of our contributors. Our goal is that every new episode of OHP will fit into an existing series by the end of Season 6.

The Feed

As demonstrated below in the discussion of traffic, our podcast feed and its subscribers comprise an important segment of overall engagement with our episodes. Since Season 2, our podcast episodes have regularly appeared in the listings of iTunes through the same feed, which is currently hosted via Soundcloud. Our main podcast feed currently includes episodes going back two full years. 

At the end of Season 3, we switched over to Soundcloud for our hosting after previously hosting the podcast through Hipcast. Soundcloud offers a superior interface and quality to the similarly priced Hipcast and other services. However, during Season 4, the Turkish government blocked Soundcloud along with a growing number of media sites including hosts of streaming content. As a result, we witnessed a decline in overall traffic due to some listeners in Turkey, who comprise roughly half of our total audience, being unable to access Soundcloud and make use of the podcast feed listed in iTunes and elsewhere. In order to facilitate easier access for these listeners, we revived our Hipcast feed, which throughout Season 5 has featured simultaneous releases of all our episodes alongside the main Soundcloud feed. 

Production Team

When Ottoman History Podcast launched in 2011, it was like most podcasts a compact program run by two graduate students (Chris Gratien and Emrah Safa Gürkan) out of an office at the Georgetown University Department of History. Most of the early contributors were also Georgetown University graduate students and faculty. But since then, we have featured the contributions of more than 200 academics representing myriad institutions and more than a dozen countries. Thanks to our specially designed mobile setup, our episodes have been recorded in locations throughout the United States as well as Turkey, the UK, France, Germany, Greece, Lebanon, Armenia, and Morocco.

In order to achieve this increasingly global reach, we have had to not only reach out to a wide array of guests but also bring more contributors into the fold of the project as regular hosts equipped to record in their various locations. Season 5 of OHP featured more hosts than any other season. In addition to numerous one-time guest hosts and co-hosts, no less than 10 members of our production team appeared as host or co-host in more than one episode of OHP, including Nir Shafir with 13 appearances and Susanna Ferguson with a total of 7 during Season 5. Whereas I appeared in virtually every episode of the first three seasons of Ottoman History Podcast, by Season 5, I appear in only half.

We are also very happy to have added two new members to our editing team. Before Season 5, every one of the 191 episodes released on the website were edited by me. Through a partnership with Nina Ergin at Koç University, we added Onur Engin, a Ph.D. student in the history department, as a regular audio editor. We also welcomed Taylan Güngör as the audio editor and main anchor of our new London operations based at SOAS radio. Onur and Taylan have combined to edit roughly 20% of our episodes during Season 5, giving me a much needed break and allowing us to increase our release pace during the first half of 2016.

Diversity

OHP is not a podcast with a single voice or perspective. Rather, we seek to represent a great variety of perspectives and approaches the history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. We have long been concerned with the issue of diversity and in selecting our guests, we are mindful to assemble a range of contributors that reasonably represents the makeup of both the academic field and our audience. 

78 people appeared on Ottoman History Podcast as guest or in a hosting capacity over the course of Season 5. Our guests hailed from more than a dozen countries and are based at a number of institutions mainly in the US, Turkey, and Europe. Roughly a quarter of our guests in Season 5 were from Turkey, and we released four Turkish-language episodes. Our guests represent an even balance of established scholars and tenured university faculty along with early career academics, recent PhDs, and postdocs as well as graduate students. During Season 5, the majority of guests who appeared on the podcast were women.

Collaborations

Ottoman History Podcast is a collaborative effort, and in addition to fostering contributions that allow members to feel invested in the project, we have long encouraged side projects of colleagues with whom we partner. Such sites to date include The Afternoon Map, tajine, Tozsuz Evrak, stambouline, The Wild Field, and Hazine. We also are eager to share out content on other like-minded websites, and in addition to our periodic postings on Jadaliyya, we struck up a new partnership with Ajam Media Collective to reach audiences with new episodes relevant to the history of the Persianate world. 

Over the course of the past year, Nir Shafir, Michael Polczynski and myself worked with Amy Singer to organize a workshop meeting for an ongoing project called the Digital Ottoman Platform, which seeks to foster digital humanities work related to the history of the Ottoman Empire and in particular create a space for collaboration between digital scholars. After a successful meeting in June 2015 (read about the meeting and presentations here), we organized a second meeting set to take place in June 2016. The Digital Ottoman Platform is currently devoted to developing a gazetteer of the Ottoman Empire for use with historical GIS research.

Another important collaboration facilitated by the Ottoman History Podcast website involved the transliteration of an odd philosophy text that I randomly uncovered at the US archives. It comprised a treatise in Ottoman Turkish mailed to Herbert Hoover for his perusal. The text was authored by a man by the name of Kolağasızâde Hasan Tahsin. By soliciting contributors through our Facebook page, we were able to produce an accurate crowd-sourced transliteration, which will soon be published on our website.

Traffic and Reception

Prior to Season 5, I had made no comprehensive attempt to quantify or take stock of precisely how much traffic our site receives or the number of plays and downloads that occur beyond what is plainly presented by the various services we use to host our content. While I have quantified the immediate impact of particular episodes or made rough estimates of overall traffic in the past, as we have no advertisers and no aspirations to maximize traffic at the expense of the content we would ideally like to produce, I saw little need to follow traffic statistics closely. However, I have arrived at a better sense of the nature of our traffic with time, and for Season 5, I have undertaken a complete study of available traffic statistics for the purposes of offering a rough overview.

Most Popular Episodes (in no order / according to plays, views, and Facebook engagement)

#239 | Boğaç Ergene, Economics and Justice in the Ottoman Courts
#222 | Emine Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court
#217 | Molly Greene, Greeks in the Ottoman Empire
#194 | Vangelis Kechriotis, Ottomanism with a Greek Face
#240 | Hugh Kennedy, Caliphate: an idea throughout history
#227 | Alan Mikhail, Ottoman Iceland
#234 | Burak Onaran, Yemeğin Politik Tarihi
#198 | Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular, Late Ottoman Bosnia and the Imperial Afterlife
#220 | Karen Pinto, Mapping the Medieval World in Islamic Cartography

#193 | Ahmed Ragab, Islamic Hospitals in Medieval Egypt and the Levant

#243 | Sarah-Neel Smith, Ecevit, Art, and Politics in 1950s Turkey

Plays and Downloads

As a podcast, OHP is an internet radio program and therefore, the number of plays and downloads that occur is the most meaningful way of quantifying the program’s impact. Our current podcast hosting service Soundcloud offers complete and detailed traffic statistics; however, the fact that we have a parallel feed with Hipcast in order to circumvent internet censorship of Soundcloud in Turkey complicates the task of counting traffic, particularly because Hipcast’s statistics are not as thorough as those of Soundcloud. As it turns out, plays and downloads are split quite evenly across those two websites varying from episode to episode, reflecting the large number of users who are accessing the site from within Turkey.

The 52 episodes released over the course of Season 5 received almost 200,000 plays and downloads through Soundcloud and almost 300,000 through Hipcast. Feed subscription through iTunes and other sites serves as the base of this traffic, with streaming through the blog or the Soundcloud website playing an important secondary role. New episodes comprised roughly two-thirds of all traffic during Season 5, meaning that between Soundcloud and Hipcast, OHP served between 700,000 and 1,000,000 plays and downloads over the course of the past year (it is difficult to quantify the new traffic of older episodes through Hipcast). 

How much traffic does each episode receive? All of the episodes released in the typical fashion on our website receive a baseline of 2000-3000 plays and downloads on Soundcloud primarily through the iTunes feed within the first two weeks of an episode’s release. Traffic gradually tapers off so that after the first two months, an episode listed in the OHP iTunes feed receives on average 100-200 plays and downloads, although many receive substantially more. The numbers for Hipcast are similar but vary much more considerably. The median episode, which has been in the podcast feed for almost 150 days, has received roughly 9000 plays and downloads through Soundcloud and Hipcast. Earlier episodes, which have been out for almost an entire year, have garnered 15,000 to 20,000 plays and downloads over the course of Season 5.

Visualization of data from Soundcloud of plays and downloads for a typical episode in the podcast feed (excludes Hipcast traffic). A large portion of an episode's total traffic occurs within a short time after its release, followed by a modest sustained engagement over the months that follow.

Blog Traffic

The Ottoman History Podcast blog (ottomanhistorypodcast.com) currently receives 20-30,000 page views per month, and to date, it has clocked more than 1 million pageviews. Therefore, while the blog is an extremely important source of traffic, the number of plays and downloads we receive greatly exceeds the number of visits to the blog. Nonetheless, the blog serves as a critical means of organizing and presenting our content, and it is the repository for images, bibliographies, and other materials associated with our episodes.

The blog has two main sources of traffic: Google and Facebook. All 10 of the top referring URLs in the history of our blog trace back to either Google or Facebook. The traffic from Google results from web searches that direct readers to our site. The Facebook traffic is driven by shares by Facebook users, especially through links circulated on our Facebook page, which currently stands at about 23,000 likes. For all podcast episodes, we use a small promotion budget ($2 to $5) to reach an optimal number of Facebook users (after a few dollars the returns for most promotions are greatly diminished). This level of promotion typically exposes 20-30,000 Facebook users to the link on our Facebook page. 

Audience

Most of our audience is based in either the United States or Turkey. Our Facebook page is probably the best representation of our sustained audience. According to the statistics from the Facebook group, roughly 14,000 of our roughly 23,000 fans list their location as Turkey. Almost half of our fans use Facebook in Turkish. Istanbul alone claims 7,000 of our 23,000 Facebook fans.

The Ottoman History Podcast blog has been visited by a roughly equal number of people from the US and Turkey, which are far and away the primary sources of traffic. Other major sources of traffic are the UK, Germany, Canada, Ukraine, France, Russia, China, and Australia. However, the stats for some of these countries may be increased by large numbers of people in Turkey using VPNs that cause their IP addresses to be traced to foreign countries. Ukraine, Russia, and China are not highly significant sources of traffic for our Soundcloud feed.

About half of our audience on Soundcloud is traced to the US. We also received over 50,000 plays and downloads traced to Turkey in Soundcloud in addition to whatever has taken place through VPNs. The large number of downloads we receive through Hipcast is further testament to a large number of listeners in Turkey.

Budget

This is quite happily the shortest section of the report. Our production and promotion costs are met by the Ottoman History Podcast production team. Excluding time, labor, travel, and the cost of acquiring new equipment to expand our operations, our production costs are as follows

Soundcloud Pro subscription – $100 per year
Hipcast subscription – $7.99 per month = $96 per year
Domain hosting - $10 per year
Total hosting costs = $206 for 2016

In order to promote new episodes of Ottoman History Podcast (and not including promotion by Nicholas Danforth for the Afternoon Map blog) we spent $204 between July 2015 and May 2016.

What’s Next?

Production for Season 6 of Ottoman History Podcast is well under way. While maintaining our current operations alone is no small task, we envision a number of developments over the course of Season 6.

More Solid Research

Season 6 will likely feature more episodes than any other season as we will assume a more rapid release pace. We already have 15-20 episodes recorded and waiting to be released, and with our expanded production team, a release pace of more than one podcast per week is an achievable reality. This will be a welcome development for our contributors and audience, who are likely already picking and choosing between episodes and will benefit from as many options as possible. Yet while increasing the quantity of episodes we release, we are even more concerned with increasing the quality of our production by sharpening our interviewing and hosting schools, fine-tuning the editing process, and producing a more enjoyable and engaging final product.

Exploring New Formats

While our pool of guests has diversified tremendously, our format has become more standardized and narrowed over the years. Season 5 was entirely dedicated to the host/guest interview format. We remain open to developing more variety in our production in order to make our presentation of the past more vibrant and incorporate the energies of more contributors with different visions and creative instincts.

One area of development will be renewed interest in multimedia and the use of audio materials such as music in our episodes. Doing so requires additional planning and sometimes involve complications concerning rights to use, but our listeners can expect greater commitment to the original impulse behind the “historiographical mixtapes” that we periodically present. 

Another possible change to the format that we will develop and experiment with during the course of the next year is digest episodes dealing with major themes in world history with a focus on the Middle East. These will be thoroughly planned and mostly scripted episodes that mix in a wide range of materials and draw excerpts from past and forthcoming episodes.

Other possible formats we are interested in developing are audio-book style readings of primary or secondary sources. There is also potential to revitalize the Study Sounds series of field recordings.

Classroom Integration

Ottoman History Podcast has become widely used in university classrooms, but as of yet, we have done little to facilitate further integration of our program with such classrooms or explore the pedagogical potential of our medium. We are eager to devise classroom assignments and activities that relate to our podcast content and develop content better suited to those purposes. We invite educators with ideas of how this might be possible to contact us with suggestions.

Problems and Challenges

Ottoman History Podcast is currently beleaguered by two major issues. The biggest is the division of our feed between Soundcloud and Hipcast as a result of the extended block on Soundcloud implemented in Turkey during 2014. While hosting our podcast on Soundcloud offers great quality and much better exposure than using conventional hosting, much of this gain is negated by the fact that half of our traffic currently flows through a parallel feed. The fact that traffic is divided means that on Soundcloud, in iTunes, and in all the places where algorithms determine the relative ranking of OHP, we suffer from diminished exposure due to only a portion of our total audience engaging through the main feed. This audience must be reunified with time.

The second major challenge is represented by bottlenecks in the production process. Bringing on new hosts and especially new editors has allowed for better delegation of tasks, but certain aspects of the production and release process are almost entirely reliant on my own energy. If I get busy and cannot devote spare time to the podcast, it has a dramatic impact on the vitality of the project and may result in a backlog if other team members continue recording. Ottoman History Podcast needs to transition to a less vertical model that includes a rotating editorial board and in which many members of the production team are able to carry out a larger variety of production-oriented tasks.

On the other hand, there is nothing that says Ottoman History Podcast must continue and grow forever. For the time being, I am incredibly happy with the things that our team has been able to achieve, and I feel a deep sense of gratitude and indebtedness to all the collaborators and contributors who have given their time and shared their research through our project. I am also grateful to our audience for helping us carve out a small space for thoughtful intellectual discussion and exploration on an increasingly cluttered and corporatized internet, and I look forward to what is to come in the year ahead. Thank you for working with me. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for listening. Academic pursuits can often be oppressively solitary, but thanks to you all, my continued exploration of historical questions has become a festival of collaboration that even while sometimes profoundly hectic and exhausting has proven time and again to be deeply satisfying and meaningful.

Season 5 Credits

HOSTS AND CO-HOSTS (by order of appearances)

Chris Gratien

Nir Shafir

Susanna Ferguson

Ufuk Adak

Taylan Güngör

Graham Pitts

Graham Cornwell

Emily Neumeier

Seçil Yılmaz

Polina Ivanova

Nicholas Danforth

Arianne Urus

Samuel Dolbee

Alissa Walter

Hadi Hosainy

Huma Gupta

Erin Hutchinson

Yasmine Seale

Matthew Ghazarian

Christopher Rose

AUDIO EDITING

Chris Gratien

Onur Engin

Taylan Güngör

SERIES CURATORS

Kalliopi Amygdalou

Samuel Dolbee

Susanna Ferguson

Chris Gratien

Zoe Griffith

Taylan Güngör

Hadi Hosainy

Faisal Husain

Emily Neumeier

Ünver Rüstem

Nir Shafir

Seçil Yılmaz

GUESTS (in alphabetical order)

Yakoob Ahmed

Isabella Alexander

Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular

Yaron Ayalon

Samy Ayoub

Reem Bailony

Lorans Tanatar Baruh

Buket Kitapçı Bayrı

Bülent Bilmez

Edna Bonhomme

Ebru Boyar

Palmira Brummett

Guy Burak

Özde Çeliktemel-Thomen

Rochelle Davis

Selim Deringil

Edhem Eldem

Boğaç Ergene

Nina Ergin

Hilary Falb Kalisman

Emine Fetvacı

Kate Fleet

Ellen Fleischmann

Paolo Girardelli

Molly Greene

Liora Halperin
Güneş Işıksel

Eileen Kane

Vangelis Kechriotis

Hugh Kennedy 

Mehmet Kentel

Akram Khater 

Cengiz Kırlı

Liat Kozma

Zeynep Kutluata

Nilay Özlü

Nir Shafir

Christine Lindner
Yelins Mahtat
Ussama Makdisi

Nazan Maksudyan

Alan Mikhail

Burak Onaran

Nadir Özbek

Karen Pinto

Valentina Pugliano

Ahmed Ragab

Ayesha Ramachandran

Saghar Sadeghian

Sherene Seikaly

Elyse Semerdjian

Elif Sezer

Amy Singer

Sarah-Neel Smith

Vahé Tachjian

Michael Talbot 

Nicolas Trépanier

Zeynep Türkyılmaz

Keith Watenpaugh

Sylvia Wing Önder

ADDITIONAL THANKS

Anthony Alessandrini

Beeta Baghoolizadeh

Buket Coşkuner

Asher Kohn

Emrah Yıldız

Rustin Zarkar