"'The claim to set up new States according to the limits of nationality is the most dangerous of all Utopian schemes,' the Austrian Foreign Ministry warned in 1853," - from the excellent The Balkans: A Short History, by Mark Mazower #EnSonNeOkudun 
Love this colourful description of inter-group intolerance in the massively cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire, where most groups got along, but didn't necessarily like each other:
Having said that, the level or multiculturalism in Ottoman Constantinople never ceases to amaze: "for a time Slavic rivaled Turkish as a court language."
After all, this was an empire in which "probably around 80 percent" of its European parts remained Christian, and "Even where Islam made inroads into the countryside, it rarely carried the Turkish language along with it."
But I certainly hadn't realized that life was *this* difficult for religious minorities in Constantinople:
