Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 March 30

= March 30 =

Demirdash


I'm trying and failing to find a location in Asia Minor known as "Demirdash" in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. According to, it was six miles from Brusa, while page 298 of speaks of "a Greek town called Demirdash, of several thousand inhabitants, five miles from Brousa". I assume the latter place is Bursa, but all I know for sure is that it was in the western part of the peninsula, or it wouldn't have been Greek at this time. I've found Brussa on the full resolution of the map at right (1918), but nothing nearby has a relevant name.

I suppose that the place has had a Turkish name since the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) (Smyrna got renamed; I assume smaller cities did too), and a town of this size should have a Wikipedia article, but I can't find anything saying "Demirdash, now X". Special:Search at the Turkish Wikipedia found nothing for "Demirdash", and Special:Search at the Greek Wikipedia found nothing for "Demirdash" or "Δεμιρδαση". So...any ideas? Thanks! Nyttend (talk) 20:31, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * "Demirdash" is itself a Turkish (rather than Greek) name, so we shouldn't expect it to have changed much. Apparently the modern spelling is "Demirtaş" (lit. "iron stone" in Turkish). According to Google Maps, there's a place of that name a few kilometers north-north-east of Bursa. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:17, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Addendum: our disambiguation page at Demirtaş lists several villages of the same name in various parts of Turkey, but not the one near Bursa, although it does also list a substub on Demirtaş Dam, which is named after that one. The Turkish Wikipedia has tr:Demirtaş, Osmangazi, and the Greek one has el:Ντεμιρτάς Προύσας. The Greek article confirms that the place was populated by Greeks and gives Δεμιρδέσι, Δεμήρδεσι, or Δεμιρδέσιο as its former Greek names. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:21, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Part of the tr:wp article says (roughly) "Adlandırlı portion of the population with Greece is settled in the region with locally made between Turkey Exchange", so that makes sense for a town that was Greek before the population exchange.  And the Greek text roughly says Demetris was a frequent phenomenon of the feud, while during the reign of Metropolitan Bursa, Constantine, the residents, due to disagreements with the metropolitan, temporarily stepped into Protestantism, which makes sense, as I encountered this name when researching a Greek Protestant clergyman who lived there for a time.  Nyttend (talk) 22:43, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Demirtaş
I'd like to write an article on this place. Could anyone help me find English-language sources? I've looked for  and   but found nothing good. Google was full of the ordinary autogenerated results (e.g. "Best Hotels in Demirtaş"), and all the reliable sources I found were human biology articles written by Asli Demirtaş-Tatlidede. JSTOR found me only an article about local archaeology, and industrial pollution in Demirtaş was covered by the journal Chemosphere in February 2017, but otherwise all I can find is stuff related to Selahattin Demirtaş and other people with this as their name. I don't want to make much use of pre-1919 sources, or the result will be profoundly out of date. Nyttend (talk) 23:23, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * This one has some info about the municipal structure and the dam. The Greek article linked above has one English-language source in it. Otherwise, like you, I'm drawing a blank. Hope someone else is a better searcher. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 14:45, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Did Hungary's pre-WWI Magyarization policy include encouraging Hungarians to settle in the non-Hungarian parts of Hungary?
Did Hungary's pre-World War I Magyarization policy include encouraging ethnic Hungarians to settle in the parts of Hungary that did not have a Hungarian-majority population? Or was the Magyarization policy limited to encouraging the non-Hungarian peoples of Hungary to begin identifying as Hungarians (Magyars) and did not include large-scale Hungarian settlement in non-Hungarian areas? Futurist110 (talk) 22:30, 30 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Although most articles discuss forced assimilation rather than displacement, a few sources use the phrase "Magyar agricultural colonization" without explaining what that actually entails.
 * Perhaps this is the same process described in The A to Z of Slovenia by Leopoldina Plut-Pregelj, Carole Rogel (p. 359): "The 1848 agrarian reforms and the creation of Austria-Hungary (1867) affected Prekmurje Slovenes in two ways. First, large landowners acquired more land, while free peasants were quickly turned into impoverished farm laborers. Extreme poverty led to mass emigration; about one-third of Slovenes from Prekmurje immigrated [sic] to the United States...". Presumably the "large landowners" were Magyars and the "free peasants" were (in this case) Slovenes.
 * Note that this process, the agrarian revolution, was going on all over Europe and often disadvantaged ethnic minority communities, the Scottish Highland clearances spring to mind. Alansplodge (talk) 15:06, 31 March 2019 (UTC)