286 | Migrants, Revolutionaries, and Spies
problematically portrayed the empire and its government in a less than flattering
light. For example, in the nineteenth century American humorist and author
Mark Twain wrote the following after his travels to Ottoman Palestine in the late
1860s:
Palestine sits in sack cloths and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that
has withered its fields and fettered its energies.... Renowned Jerusalem itself,
the stateliest name in history has lost all its ancient grandeur, and become a
pauper village.... The Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the Holy
Cross. . . . Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?
Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?Bad publicity such as Twain’s richly evocative and dreary picture of Otto-
man Palestine, especially when it called into question the imperial government’s
stewardship of the Holy Land, sullied the empire’s reputation in the eyes of many
Americans. As a result, image management was a central part of Mavroyeni’s
job description. Such efforts were on clear display during the 1893 World’s Co-
lumbian Exposition in Chicago, which featured an entire Turkish Pavilion where
fairgoers could shop in a model Ottoman bazaar or watch authentic belly danc-
ers. The elaborate exhibit was expressly intended to demonstrate the empire’s cul-
tural and economic vitality to the exposition’s legions of visitors.
By the late 1880s, the importance of Mavroyeni’s position increased with the
arrival of hundreds of Ottoman migrants each year to the United States, mainly
Christians from present-day Lebanon and eastern Turkey. By the early 1890s, this
trickle of migrants had grown to a flood. Of particular interest to the Ottoman
government were the thousands of Armenian Christians who had arrived in the
United States during this period. Throughout much of Ottoman history, Arme-
nians comprised one of the empire’s largest non-Muslim ethnic groups. Indeed,
elite Istanbul-based Armenian families, like their Greek-speaking Phanariot
counterparts, had historically played a significant role in the economic and ad-
ministrative life of the empire. The majority of Ottoman Armenians, however,
lived as peasants, craftsmen, and merchants in eastern Anatolia, what is now
modern-day Turkey.
Beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the relationship
between the Ottoman government and its Armenian population began to fray.
By the early 1890s, a variety of factors had given rise to several Armenian nation-
alist and revolutionary organizations that operated both within and outside the
empire. The largest of these organizations was the avowedly socialist Hunchak-
ian Revolutionary Party (Hunchaks). The Hunchaks advocated for the radical
restructuring of the empire’s political and economic organization, including
the creation of an autonomous Armenian state in eastern Anatolia. It adopted