Lexical Compendium

Wait... what is this? Sometimes I come across a word, phrase, idiom, quote, reference, bit of slang, person of interest, etc that either I don't know or I find amusing, interesting, etc. This is a collection of those items so that I can refer back to them in emails, texts, etc.

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alla turca time

While alla turca generically just means "in the Turkish style," alla turca time (or alaturka saat) specifically refers to the way that time was reckoned in the Ottoman Empire.

In the alla turca time Sun always sets at the 0’th hour and rises at the 12th hour. The hours of the alla turca time have variable length. During winters the length of 1 (alla turca) night hour is longer than the length of 1 (alla turca) day hour. During summers the opposite is true.

-- from alla turca time (blog post)

Clocks around the empire were manually set/reset by the muvakkit, or timekeeper. It's hard to even imagine using this sort of time keeping in our modern era.

I haven't been able to find a whole lot about this online, but I've noted what I have found. My father introduced me to this term; it was something he recalled from his childhood.

Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from An American" series had a good essay covering the event when US railroads adopted a standard time on 18 November 1883. There are some interesting parallels -- some opponents to the standard time because telling time by the sun was "God's time."


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Tags: time, ottoman, clock

Date Added: Unknown
Date Modified: 18 Nov 2024