In Karlsplatz, not far from the Vienna Opera, the imitation entrance to a gigantic tent covers the façade of the Künstlerhaus, which at present houses the chief of the many exhibitions devoted to “The Turks Before Vienna”, it being the third centenary of the siege and battle of 1683, one of the great frontal encounters between East and West. Visitors momentarily get the impression of entering the vast pavilion of an Ottoman general, the tent which Kara Mustapha, commander-in-chief of the Turkish army, erected in splendour and magnificence in the vicinity of the present church of St Ulrich, in what today is the seventh arrondissement of the city.
The immense dimensions of the imaginary tent do in any case call to mind the figure of the Grand Vizier who embodied the Ottoman cult of all that is grandiose and exorbitant. In some of the twenty-five thousand tents of the Turkish army which had since the beginning of July 1683 been surrounding Vienna, Kara Mustapha had also lodged his one thousand five hundred concubines guarded by seven hundred black eunuchs, amid gushing fountains, baths, luxurious quarters set up in haste but with opulence.
The Vizier’s head is now preserved at Vienna in the History Museum, which – next-door to the Künstlerhaus – also houses one of the exhibitions. Defeated on September 12th 1683 by the imperial troops commanded by Charles of Lorraine, together with the Polish army led by their king, Jan Sobieski, Kara Mustapha was pursued from the field and defeated again at Gran. At Belgrade he was met by the emissary of the sultan, who brought him the silken cord with which the lords of the Crescent who had fallen into disgrace with their sovereign, the “shadow of God on earth”, were strangled. Having laid out his prayer-mat, the Grand Vizier offered his neck to the executioners and accepted his fate in the name of Allah. When, decades later, the imperial armies conquered Belgrade, someone dug up his body and brought the head in triumph to Vienna.
When the visitor enters the imitation pavilion, he instantly becomes himself one of the figures in the exhibition, and is uncertain whether he is just daydreaming as he imagines himself a prey – one of the countless prisoners led as slaves to the invader’s tent – or else a predator, one of Sobieski’s knights who for a whole day after the victory sacked the camp and despoiled even the tent of Kara Mustapha.
The aim of the exhibition is not to set the victors against the vanquished, still less the civilized peoples against the barbarians, but rather to give the feeling of the futility both of victory and of defeat, which follow on each other’s heels for every nation, like sickness and health or youth and old age in the case of individuals.
As he walks round these rooms the Western visitor may consider that the victory of September 12th, which saved Vienna and Europe, was a thoroughly good thing; but he does not feel himself to be son and heir only of the swords of Charles of Lorraine and Jan Sobieski, or of the cross brandished by the great preachers who incited people to defend the faith, such as Abraham at Sancta Clara, according to whom the liturgical canon must give place to the cannon of the artillery, or Marco d’Aviano, the Capuchin from Friuli. Walking among those victory trophies, which are also the relics of a shipwreck, the visitor feels himself rather to be the son and heir of a history unified in its fragments, though these are scattered like objects in a pillaged encampment; a history composed of crescents as well as crosses, of Capuchin cords and of turbans.
The exhibition deliberately sets out to differ from previous celebrations of the events of 1683. Fifty years ago Dollfuss, the Christian-Social chancellor, applauded the liberation of Vienna in terms of his corporative, authoritarian Catholicism, with which he opposed both Nazism and Bolshevism. Years later, in a National-Socialist commemorative bronze, the banner of the vanquished Turks bore not the Crescent but the Star of David. The Turks were simply identified with the enemy, which is to say the Jews, by means of a falsification which today, in the xenophobic attitudes towards the seasonal foreign workers, runs the risk of becoming tragically true. We do not want to be the Jews of tomorrow, says a picture by Akbar Behkalam in the Museum of the Twentieth Century, where there is an exhibition by Turkish artists devoted to present-day conditions in their country and among the emigrants.
The shadow of a new, if different, problem looms over relations between Turks and Europeans, especially Germans, and only the clearest awareness of the problem can prevent it taking on ruinous proportions. Repulsed three hundred years ago, the Turks are now returning to Europe not with weapons but as a work-force, with all the tenacity of the Gastarbeiter (immigrant workers) who undergo poverty and humiliation but gradually put down roots in a land which they conquer by means of their humble toil. In many cities in Germany the schools are empty of German children and the classrooms are full of Turkish children; the West, which entrusts its decline to the fall in the birth-rate, is reacting with anxious intolerance to the results of a social mechanism of its own making. It may be that the moment is approaching when historical social and cultural differences will reveal, and violently, the difficulties of mutual compatibility. Our future will depend in part on our ability to prevent the priming of this time-bomb of hatred, and the possibility that new Battles of Vienna will transform brothers into foreigners and enemies.
History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner. Alessio Bombaci reminds us that in the eighteenth century the Turks themselves felt the word “Turk” to be an insult, and their history is one of a series of age-old struggles between diverse peoples, originating on the steppes of Central Asia, peoples who began to become aware of their own common identity only when the Ottoman Empire was almost on its deathbed. The first unitary name given to Turkey by the various and often mutually hostile peoples was the name of Rome, mamālik-i-Rūm, which indicated the Seljuk kingdom.
But all histories and all identities are composed of these differences, these pluralities, these exchanges and borrowings of diverse ethnic and cultural elements, which make each nation and individual the child of a regiment. The Hapsburg eagle, which halted the advance of the Great Turk, spread its wings over almost as varied a multiplicity of races and cultures, and during the First World War, when the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires were allied, posters and the press in Austria sung the praises of this brotherhood-in-arms with their age-old enemies.
The meeting between Europe and the Ottoman Empire is the great example of two worlds which, while hacking each other to pieces, end by a gradual understanding, to their mutual enrichment. It is no coincidence that the greatest Western writer to recount the story of that meeting between two worlds, Ivo Andrić, is fascinated by the image of the bridge; it occurs time and time again in his novels and stories, symbolizing a hard-won means of communication thrown across the barriers of raging torrents and deep ravines, of races and religions. It is a place where weapons clash, but where in the end, and little by little, enemies become united in a world that is as variegated yet unified as an epic fresco, as in the Balkan gorges Turkish soldiers and haiduks – the guerrilla-brigands who resisted them – came to resemble each other.
One of the first items in the exhibition is a splendid map of the first (1529) siege of Vienna, undertaken by Suleiman the Magnificent, the great sultan who died at the siege of Szigetvár and whose death was kept secret for several days so as not to discourage his army. Messengers were led into the presence of his embalmed body seated motionless on his throne, listening to them without replying, the majesty of death disguised as regal impassiveness. This map of Vienna is surrounded by areas of blue, as if it were the whole world girdled, as for the ancients, by Ocean. The Turks thought of Vienna as the “city of the golden apple”, the almost mythical aspect of the Empire which they had to conquer at all costs; the nomads of the steppes of Asia, the “wild asses” who despised every corrupting urban settlement, seemed to wish to possess, in Vienna, the City par excellence, their very opposite. The sultans who pressed on Vienna perhaps envisaged it as the capital of that universal “Roman-Muslim” Empire which, according to Jorga, the great Rumanian historian, they wished to found, even if Jalal ud-Din Rumi, the Persian mystical poet, said that it was reserved for the Greeks to build and for the Turks to destroy.
A mixture of film and novel, the exhibition puts us right inside the besieged city, with its acts of heroism, cruelty and hysteria, and also on to the battlefield, brought to life for us in a large hall with the help of audio-visual effects. Kara Mustapha’s strategic error in leaving the hills without garrisons was fatal to the Ottoman army, which by five in the afternoon was in full flight, thanks largely to a lightning feint by Charles of Lorraine. The Christian army was composed of some 65–80,000 men, the Muslim forces numbering about 170,000. The deaths were respectively 2,000 (with the addition of 4,000 among the besieged) and 10,000 plus vast numbers of wounded and prisoners, as well as casualties from various diseases and men cut down during the retreat and subsequent pursuit, which gave rise to episodes of pitiless ferocity and of magnanimous chivalry. Sobieski, who had served Mass on the Kahlenberg, according to an Italian chronicler, declared to Charles of Lorraine that as far as his person was concerned the King had stayed in Poland and only the Polish soldier had taken the field. All the same, on September 15th the meeting between Sobieski and the Emperor Leopold, who had by then returned to Vienna, was the occasion of diplomatic embarrassments and wounded feelings.
Such episodes taking place behind the scenes of the big show are also part of history – even the untrue legend that it was the siege that led to the founding of the first café in Vienna by an enterprising Galician-Armenian trickster, Koltschitzky. Like all exhibitions, these in Vienna devoted to the Turks give one a slight feeling of unreality, the unreality of our lives and histories, the events we are living through. Often these seem to unwind like a movie, to appear to have happened already, as if like a movie they already had an ending, which we do not know, though it is there on the reel.
As if it were itself an exhibition, the organizers also present the palace and park of the Belvedere, the famous residence of Prince Eugène of Savoy, the victor over the Turks who had his first youthful trial by combat at Vienna in 1683. In that palace, life becomes a symbol of itself. The symmetry of that park – which with its statues, fountains and ornaments rises in allegorical terms from the bounties of the four seasons to the apotheosis of the glory of victory over the Crescent – is the triumph of a civilization which preferred to live within limits over the impetuosity of another which, as has been said, thought in terms of unconfined spaces.
Descendants, tourists and visitors, we now walk among those carefully ordered symmetries, those boundaries and restraints which we love, like extras in some spectacle in the grand manner, some film by Abel Gance. In the grey, dull pictures and photographs shown by present-day Turkish artists in the Museum of the Twentieth Century, other faces and gestures emerge, the obscure, humiliated dignity of the new immigrants, of those who play no part – or not yet, or no longer – in any grand performance. “Our forefathers rode on horseback here,” says a caption to one of the photographs, “and we sweep these streets.” But the inscription is not looking for consolation, for with absolute honesty it adds “the fault is ours, not of the Austrians.”