ForgeryAtlas seeks to explore a criminal forgery network that was hatched in the final years of the Crimean War (1853–1856) and expanded in its aftermath. The forgers, who produced and circulated Ottoman paper currency (kaime), were wartime profiteers with a middle-class profile who exploited the security vacuum created by the war, as well as the political upheavals in the fragmented Italian peninsula during the Risorgimento (Italian Unification). The project further examines the tact and diplomacy and the forms of judicial collaboration developed by the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in response to a trans-imperial crime operating beyond the jurisdiction of both states between the years 1858–1861.
By applying network analysis and digital methodologies to historical data, the project identifies key actors, traces the mobility of criminal activity and the channels of diplomacy, and reveals different structural patterns of this entangled historical episode. This project visualizes specific components of the dataset in relation to their broader historical context.
Maps the mobility routes of individual forgers across imperial borders, the circulation of counterfeit Ottoman currency, the social interactions of forgers in Istanbul, and their network connections to one another.
Presents short biographical data on the principal criminal actors involved in the network.
Illustrates the timeline and patterns of diplomatic communication over time, accompanied by short biographical information of key state officials and diplomatic agents. Through the interactive map, users can access detailed information on diplomatic exchanges, including original archival references and transcriptions/translations of the documents.
Brings together archival materials from the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, including diplomatic correspondence and judicial proceedings conducted in Istanbul, Turin and Bologna — a rich source base for the historical episode of ForgeryAtlas.
This project builds on a section of the PhD dissertation completed in 2022 at Boğaziçi University by the project coordinator, Berna Kamay-Ulusay, titled "Extradition in the Ottoman International Legal Practice of the Nineteenth Century." As part of this research, Berna Kamay Ulusay presented a paper titled "Crimean War through Fraud and Impostors: Italian–Ottoman Judicial Policing against Kaime (paper money) Forgers" in the CSACTI Lecture Series at Università di Napoli L'Orientale in March 2024. Kamay-Ulusay also participated in the 6th Mediterranean Maritime History Network Conference, organized by FORTH Institute for Mediterranean Studies, held in Crete in May 2024, with a paper titled "Network of Crime across the Mediterranean: Reading the Crimean War through Fraud and Forgers."
The initial phase of the project was carried out as a PURE 2025 project (Program for Undergraduate Research) at Sabancı University under the title "Mapping the Crime: An Analysis of a Crime Network during the Crimean War." The scope of the project and the digital analysis of its dataset have since been expanded in collaboration with the Sabancı University DH Lab.