IN MANY WAYS, in the republic’s early decades the nationalists who followed Atatürk in both outlook and strategy carried the outcome of the Ottoman centuries to one extreme: they managed to convert Turkey’s population into Western-leaning Europhiles. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his revolutionary cadre established a westward-looking, secular, nationalist republic, a ‘Turkey for the Turks’ based in Ankara in Anatolia. In turning their backs on the Ottoman Empire and dynasty, on the Greeks and Armenians, the Kurds and Arabs, they also turned their backs on the Ottoman Way, incorporating others through religious conversion and tiered tolerance, ethno-religious plurality, and gendered social strata. In 1924 and 1925, Turkey disestablished the religious class and confiscated their endowments, abolished the office of the sheikhulislam, closed Sufi lodges and Muslim schools, banned Sufi orders, and outlawed religious dress. To cut the next generation off completely from its Ottoman, Islamic past, in 1928 and 1929 the republic educated the nation in a new language: modern Turkish, expunged of Arabic and Persian vocabulary and written in Latin rather than modified Arabic script. The books of the fathers became illegible to the children of the republic. Even the call to prayer was recited in Turkish, rather than Arabic. Legal equality between the sexes and the equal rights of all citizens regardless of religious or ethnic background were also instituted by the abolishment of Sharia courts in 1924 and the incorporation of a new civil code modelled on that of Switzerland in 1926. Compulsory co-ed national education was established, and in 1934 women were allowed to vote and be elected to public office.
But new social hierarchies prevailed. In 1933, on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the republic, Atatürk declared that the Turkish nation was ‘great’, of ‘excellent character’, ‘intelligent’, enlightened, an ‘exalted human community’, devoted to science, and ‘civilised’.1 These adjectives were everything that he and his cohort of secularist Turkish nationalists believed the Ottoman Empire was not. Such declarations carried one meaning to those who considered themselves and were accepted as Turks. What it meant for those who were excluded, including Armenians, Dönme, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, and religious Muslims, was another matter.
Despite Atatürk’s efforts at expunging it, the past would not go away in Turkey. Alleged political conspiracies by former CUP allies and a series of uprisings by religious Muslims and Kurds belied the claim that everyone in the country was happy to call himself a secular Turk, devoted to Atatürk’s single-party, ethno-nationalist state. Atatürk had the two most influential surviving members of the CUP central committee, Dr. Nazım and Mehmed Cavid, hanged after a show trial in 1926. Scores of Muslims who refused to wear a brimmed hat, which hindered praying, were executed. When Sufis calling for the return of Sharia and the caliphate murdered a soldier at Menemen near İzmir in 1930, nearly three dozen religious Muslims were hanged as punishment and the officer became a martyr for the new secular republic. An Armenian priest told a Kurd, ‘We were the breakfast for them, you will be the lunch. Don’t forget’.2
Indeed, only a decade after the Armenian genocide, Kurdish uprisings such as that of Sheikh Said in 1925 were mercilessly supressed. In 1930 during a Kurdish rebellion, Justice Minister Mahmut Esat declared, ‘The Turk is the master of this country. All those who are not pure Turks have only one right in the Turkish homeland: the right to be servants, the right to be slaves’.3 One of Atatürk’s half dozen adopted orphan daughters, the Armenian Sabiha Gökçen, Turkey’s first female pilot and the world’s first female fighter pilot, bombed Kurdish civilians from the sky during the massacre of tens of thousands of Kurds at Dersim (renamed Tunceli, meaning ‘bronze hand’) in 1938, the year of Atatürk’s death.4
Continuing the Orientalist, civilising mission of the late Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Republic viewed Kurds as savages, ‘mountain Turks’ in need of civilising. This time that ‘civilisation’ was secularist Turkish nationalism. The Kurds were especially affected by the 1934 Settlement Law, which entailed mass deportations of Kurds, moving them from predominantly Kurdish-populated eastern regions to the west and their replacement by Turkish immigrants. The state outlawed all dialects of the Kurdish language. When the adoption of surnames was made mandatory, Turkey prohibited using letters necessary for forming Kurdish names. In fact, such letters as J and X were not included in the new Turkish alphabet for this reason. Turkey made mention of ‘Kurds’, ‘Kurdish’, and ‘Kurdistan’ a crime.5 To this day, southeastern Anatolia—Kurdistan—is at war; Kurdish guerrillas are refusing to submit to Turkification. The fires lit in 1915 have yet to be extinguished.
Although headed by Muslims, the Ottoman Empire was very much a European empire. Centuries of conversion, Islamisation, and incorporation of Christians and Jews into the empire meant that the Ottoman legacy was and is still seen and felt across Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East today. It is present in the physical landscape and urban layout, the historical memory, and popular culture. Cities from Hungary to Egypt are sprinkled with Ottoman bathhouses, cemeteries and tombs, city walls, fountains, fortresses, houses, inns, marketplaces, mosques, palaces, and ornate villas. The dome of the tomb of sixteenth-century Bektaşi Sufi Gül Baba is visible as one crosses the Danube from Pest to Buda in the Hungarian capital. The symbol of Thessaloniki, Greece, is the White Tower, built by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. A pink-domed Ottoman mosque, shorn of its minaret and used as an art gallery, graces the ‘Venetian’ harbour of Chania, Crete. Suleiman I built the famous walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. The skyline of the peninsula of Istanbul looks much as it did during the Ottoman era. So do those of many towns in Southeastern Europe, such as Plovdiv in Bulgaria, or the Old Town of Sarajevo, Bosnia, which still boasts an enormous Ottoman cemetery rising to the top of a large hillside. The presence of Muslim and Turkish-speaking populations in Europe and the Balkans and the paucity of Christians in today’s Turkey are also outcomes of the Ottoman centuries. The Old Town of Rhodes, considered the largest intact medieval city in Europe, is actually an Ottoman ghost town now chockablock with tourists. One can still pray in the Ottoman-era Shalom synagogue built in the sixteenth century.
Even cities never besieged or captured by the Ottomans bear traces of the fear of that eventuality. A horrifying early eighteenth-century statue on the Charles Bridge in Prague depicts a corpulent, turbaned, horseshoe-moustachioed Turk with a large, curved sword and barking dog guarding three nude, shackled, wailing Christian male captives. Crowds of tourists admire another ‘Turkish’ figure on the oldest astronomical clock in Europe near the bridge in Prague’s Old Town; that figure, positioned next to a skeleton representing death, symbolises vice and pleasure. Another turbaned, horseshoe-moustachioed caricature, this time of a ‘Turkish dwarf’, amuses visitors at the reconstructed late eighteenth-century ‘dwarf garden’ at the Baroque Mirabell Palace in Salzburg. He is unsuccessfully straining with all his tiny might to break a tree trunk, symbolizing the successful resistance in 1683 of the last failed Ottoman siege of Vienna. At the other end of Europe, a life-size, turbaned, ornately costumed Ottoman ambassador greets visitors at the display of the eighteenth-century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens at the Museum of London.
The legacy of Ottoman history is not only Muslim. In Istanbul, surviving Ottoman-era Christian or Jewish cemeteries, churches, and synagogues speak to a vanished past. How many passersby wonder why modern Turkey contains the fifteenth-century Ahrida Synagogue, which boasts a boat-shaped pulpit in commemoration of the welcome given Jews from Spain; the Church of Saint George, the seat of the Orthodox patriarchate since the seventeenth century; and the nineteenth-century Bulgarian Saint Stephen Church? One comes across ruins of Armenian and Assyrian churches in Turkey, not only in eastern Anatolia but in Istanbul as well, the shattered remains of their genocides at the beginning of the twentieth century.
European museums boast captured Ottoman tents, weaponry, and even the skulls of grand viziers, such as that of Kara Mustafa Pasha, the leader of the failed siege of 1683, preserved in the Vienna Museum. At the Museum of Military History in Vienna, children celebrate their birthday in Ottoman tents captured at that siege. Vienna’s Saint Stephen’s Cathedral has a bell made of melted Ottoman siege cannons. As Ottoman armies overran vast stretches of European territory, they gave rise to Türkenfurcht, fear of the Turk, which was manifested especially in Austria. In the Austrian city of Graz, 1480 was remembered as the year of the ‘plagues of God’. Memorialised in a large fresco painted in 1485 on the south wall of the cathedral in the centre of the city, the three plagues were locusts, Black Death, and Turks.
In Central Europe one comes across menacing ‘Turks’ carved in wood and stone, as well as images of Turks as bearers of coffee and pleasure. ‘Turkish’ coffee—known officially in Greece as ‘Greek’ coffee since the military junta of 1967–1974 and as Arab, Armenian, Bosnian, or ‘traditional Serbian’ coffee elsewhere—is enjoyed with Turkish delight and baklava across a wide region. Ottoman and Turkish terms appear in many languages. Ottoman-language manuscripts and archival documents are found in many libraries of Europe and the Middle East, be they in Zagreb, Skopje, or Cairo. Sofia’s national library boasts the second-largest collection of Ottoman documents in the world. Ottoman-era land deeds are still used in several regions, including Greece, Lebanon, and Israel, where one finds Ottoman-language inscriptions carved into stone and the sultan’s tughra, his imperial cipher, on gates. The Ottomans live again in best-selling novels set in the Ottoman past written in languages as diverse as Arabic, French, German, Greek, Serbian, and Turkish, and in Turkish television series reimagining the exploits of Osman’s father Ertuğrul, Suleiman I, or Abdülhamid II, which are popular from Brazil to Indonesia. While nostalgia sells, painful aspects of the Ottoman past remain and have proven more difficult to confront.
What has happened in the past has an impact on the present. The past, whether in Turkey or Greece, or any other former part of the Ottoman Empire, is anything but dead. The question is what to do with the memories. The descendants of the Ottomans and their former subjects are now debating how the sorrows of previous generations have affected them, how they should speak of and commemorate the past, and how the problems bequeathed to them can be overcome. Many are freeing their minds from the chains of official history, facing difficult truths about what their ancestors did, and coming to terms with the prejudices they hold against the people with whom they share, or once shared, a homeland.6
Towards the end of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle, Hoja and his Italian slave accompany the sultan on his hunts and military campaigns in Southeastern Europe. Hoja has the sultan’s soldiers force Christian and Muslim villagers alike to confess their faults, as the slave had made him do. This process of self-awareness, undertaken on a much larger scale and with more coercion and violence than the experiment endured at home, produces the same results: people make the same confessions about having committed the same transgressions, no matter their religion.7 Since people are the same everywhere, they should recognise themselves in others. After all, they are capable of committing the same crimes.
Pamuk poses the question ‘Why am I what I am?’8 At the beginning of the novel, Hoja is unwilling to engage in any self-reflection. Instead of writing about himself, he writes about why others are the way they are. He declares with an exaggerated self-confidence that the other is inferior.9 But what makes him superior? What makes us and them, self and other, East and West, Muslim, Christian, and Jew any different? By narrating history to establish a connection to the past and to ourselves, we find the answer.
The Ottoman story is an inseparable part of Europe’s story. As much as they were Asian, as much as they had a unique political organisation, the Ottomans were the inheritors of Rome. When the European past is broadened to include the Ottoman dynasty and its Eurasian empire, it expands our definition of so many historical phenomena, including tolerance and genocide, which are otherwise impossible to understand. Our ancestors breathe through us. Because our lives have been shaped by their actions, their entangled histories are worth discovering and placing in the right context, especially if such histories are unfamiliar yet closer to us than we realised.