When Obedience Failed: Parricide and the Limits of Household Authority in Late Ottoman Istanbul, 1870–1920

In late Ottoman Istanbul, parricide both transgressed household authority and exposed its limits. Drawing on newspapers, archival documents, and medico-legal sources, this article examines how violence against parents was interpreted between the 1880s and the early twentieth century. Contemporary accounts rarely treated parricide as an isolated crime. Instead, they explained it through abuse, abandonment, economic conflict, and domestic instability. Parricide is analyzed as a recurring interpretive problem through which contemporaries understood the failure of the conditions that sustained household order.