by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
OTTOMAN
ODYSSEY
Travels Through a Lost Empire
ALEV SCOTT
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
In memory of my Granny Şifa,
and other victims of nationalism.
Contents
Map
Introduction: Sultans Old and New
Names and Pseudonyms
A Historical Note: Classified Infidels
Turkey: Heart of the Empire
Istanbul
Ziya
The Sacré Coeur
Antakya
Izmir and the Levantines
The Afro Turks
Scattered Pomegranates
An Empire Enriched
Thessaloniki
Hidden Synagogues
1915
Yerevan
Western Armenia
Ghosts of Troy
Cyprus
Foreign Soil
Ayvalik
Thrace
Aegean Turks
Granny Şifa
Minarets in the West
Bridge on the Drina
Missionary Zeal
The Art of War Zones
Serbia
Kosovo and Skopje
Minarets and Muftis
Spires in the East
Jerusalem and the West Bank
The Hanging Gardens of Haifa
Beirut
An Islamic State Enclave
Ain Dara
Warlords and Sheikhs
Memleket
Homeland
Fenced Life
Conjugations
Minced Words
Coffee Cups
Return of the Native
Exile
Timeline of Countries
Notes
Index
Introduction
Sultans Old and New
In the capital of Turkey, in a palace with a thousand rooms, a man sits on a gilt throne. Some of his soldiers are ornamental and armed with sabres, others fly F-16s and protect him from military coups. The year is 2018. The man is President Erdoğan. The fantasy is Ottoman.
The Republic of Turkey emerged in 1923 from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, which at its zenith stretched from Mecca to Budapest, from Algiers to Tbilisi, from Baghdad to the Crimea, connecting millions of people of different religions and ethnicities. An Ottoman subject was an Eastern Orthodox Christian from Odessa or a Jew from Mosul, a Sunni Muslim from Jerusalem or a Catholic Syriac from Antakya. The sultan, who was also the caliph, leader of the Islamic world, allowed non-Muslims to organize their own law courts, schools and places of worship in return for paying ‘infidel’ taxes and accepting a role as second-class citizens: a system of exploitative tolerance that allowed diversity to flourish for centuries in the greatest empire of early modern history.
In recent years, a bizarre reinvention has been taking place in Turkey: its politicians are reclaiming the legacy of its Ottoman past, while the country remains as nationalistic as ever. In 2017, the country voted to grant unlimited powers to President Erdoğan, nearly a century after the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate. For some, this was an unfathomable act of political suicide, an event that marked the end of democracy in Turkey. For others, it was a reharnessing of the strength the country needs to lead the Middle East by shining example and stand up to Europe: a return to the kind of power exemplified by the Ottoman Empire.
‘The last century [the period of the Republic] was only a parenthesis for us. We will close that parenthesis. We will do so without going to war, or calling anyone an enemy, without being disrespectful to any border, we will again tie Sarajevo to Damascus, Benghazi to Erzurum to Batumi. This is the core of our power. These may look like different countries to you, but Yemen and Skopje were part of the same country a hundred and ten years ago, as were Erzurum and Benghazi.’
The words of Ahmet Davutoglu, Foreign Minister in 2013, sold Turkish voters a heady – if vague – pride in a long-fallen empire, and a belief that it could be effortlessly resurrected. In fact, the discrepancies between the Ottoman glory days and the reality of modern-day Turkey are stark, but Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party have been adept at claiming the best of the empire and ignoring the worst of it. On 8 February 2018, the government launched a new website portal1 which provided Turkish citizens with access to their family trees via digitalized census and tax records stored in the state archives of Istanbul. These archives stretch back to the 1830s, recording the births and deaths of Ottoman subjects scattered across the empire. Within hours, millions had rushed to the ‘e-devlet (‘e-government’) portal in an orgy of self-discovery; the website promptly crashed.
Bulent Çetin was one of the lucky ones who managed to access the site to download his family tree in the first couple of hours. He found that most of his mother’s side of the family were born outside the borders of modern Turkey, in what was previously Ottoman territory: his great-great-grandfather in Macedonia in 1869, his great-great-grandmother in the Caucasus in 1864. Somehow, they produced Bulent’s great-grandfather in Sivas, in central Anatolia, in 1897, and subsequent generations remained within Turkey, resulting in the birth of Bulent himself in the Republic’s capital of Ankara in 1986. Like many Turkish citizens, Bulent sees no contradiction in being a patriot who is also proud of his Ottoman ancestry, telling me he feels Turkish because ‘we are all united under this flag, within this country, sharing the same destiny.’
When the website relaunched six days after its crash to a renewed wave of interest, there were unforeseen consequences: Turks who discovered ancestors from ex-Ottoman territories now in the European Union – Bulgaria and Greece, most commonly – started making applications for second citizenships2 to these countries, reflecting the anxiety felt in Turkey over the past few years of political turmoil. As Bulent noted, all Turkish citizens are theoretically ‘united’, but not all want to share in a destiny that looks increasingly bleak; they would rather use their Ottoman heritage to escape the backward-looking Turkey of today.
While right-wing politicians in Europe, the US and Turkey have misleadingly evoked the glory of vanished empires to harness nationalist votes in recent years, the Left are also guilty of nostalgia, of looking through rose-tinted spectacles at a particular version of the past. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, the diversity of its subjects is sometimes presented as proof that everyone lived in a constant state of peaceful coexistence. This is not true; non-Muslims were second-class citizens, and at the turn of the 20th century there were horrific systematic abuses of these subjects as the empire began to eat itself. Yet the fact remains that its 600-year-old social diversity is almost impossible to imagine today in countries like Turkey, a country that suppresses difference even in thought.
Halfway through my research for this book I was barred from Turkey, which drastically changed both my life and the course of the book.
I had first decided to write about the social legacy of the Ottoman Empire while I was in south-east Turkey in 2014, near the Syrian and Iraqi borders. Unlike most of Turkey, where signs of its former wealth of peoples, cultures and religions have been systematically eroded over the past century, towns like Mardin and Antakya offered a glimpse of the Ottoman world I was trying to reimagine – at least, a Levantine corner of it. But by 2015, al-Qaeda and IS had crossed the Syrian border and established cells in these towns. The risk of kidnap for Western journalists was high; even veteran war reporters avoided the area, and suddenly the gentle historical field trips I’d planned seemed a little naïve. Still, I had most of Turkey open to me, and its neighbouring countries, to continue my research. Then, in 2017, wh
ile travelling in Greece, I failed to get permission to cross over the land border back into Turkey, and discovered I had an entry ban on my passport, placed by the Interior Ministry. The ministry staff offered no explanation for this, but I knew it was my political journalism, and my appeals were ignored.
That is how this book became an odyssey encompassing eleven countries of the former Empire. I found myself speaking Turkish with car mechanics in rural Kosovo and with the children of Armenian genocide survivors in Jerusalem; I discussed Ottoman religious diversity with Lebanese warlords and professors in Turkish universities in Sarajevo. My entry ban motivated me to go out and explore the ways in which the empire shaped the histories of people in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Levant. I found myself asking questions about forced migration, genocide, exile, diaspora, collective memory and identity, not just about religious coexistence.
Many of the communities I interviewed were descendants of ancient minorities that were allowed to flourish in the empire, and then intimidated, ignored or expelled from modern Turkey. Others, living hundreds of miles from Turkey, believed themselves to be Ottoman in some vague but visceral sense, encouraged by the current Turkish government’s attempts to resurrect regional influence. In the century that has passed since the death of the empire and the formation of the nation state in its former territories, much has changed – primarily how people live together, and their sense of belonging to a greater whole. All across the remains of the Ottoman Empire, new states have been ‘stretching the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire,’3 to quote the historian Benedict Anderson. But amidst this change, other things have come almost full circle, such as the paranoia and sweeping powers that come with one man rule – a phenomenon not restricted to Turkey in the year 2018.
Names and Pseudonyms
Zigzagging between the past and present in this book, I have generally referred to towns like Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonika and Antioch by their modern names (Istanbul, Izmir, Thessaloniki and Antakya) for simplicity. By the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was widely referred to in the West as ‘Turkey’ and Ottomans as ‘Turks’ (both of which had a negative connotation), even though the empire was still home to millions of non-Turkish Ottoman subjects; I have used ‘Turkey’ only to denote the Republic, in existence since 1923. I refer to most of my interviewees by their real names, but many of the people I interviewed in Turkey asked for pseudonyms. They feared reprisals for speaking about the discrimination faced by minorities, or they were wary about being quoted in a book written by a blacklisted journalist. To my surprise, however, a couple of my Turkish interviewees refused my offer of anonymity. They were proud to have their family stories immortalized in print, proving that people’s attachment to their roots can outweigh the claims of a nation state – even one as ferociously possessive as Turkey.
I would like to thank everyone who, wittingly or unwittingly, named or unnamed, helped and inspired me to write this book.
A HISTORICAL NOTE
Classified Infidels
The cultural and economic wealth of the Ottoman Empire was a direct consequence of the system of taxation and governance that allowed non-Muslims to live in a caliphate. These non-Muslim ‘people of the Book’ (i.e. Christians and Jews) living under Islamic dominion were known as the dhimmis and were grouped within religious communities classed as millet or ‘nation’ groups, primarily the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, the Apostolic, Orthodox and Catholic Armenian Church, the Assyrians (Syrian Christians) and the Jews. Non-Sunni Muslims such as the Alawites were not allowed to form their own millets but were regarded simply as Muslims – that is to say, Sunni.
In principle, the lives of dhimmis were dictated by all kinds of Ottoman laws, but in practice, these were often ignored. The historian Philip Mansel4 illustrates this in the case of religion-based, colour-coded dress laws, which were variously implemented and disregarded until the 19th century: ‘Only Muslims could wear white or green turbans and yellow slippers. Greeks, Armenians and Jews were distinguished respectively by sky blue, dark blue (later red) and yellow hats, and by black, violet and blue slippers ... [however] the rules were often flouted: the status of Muslims was so attractive that the minorities’ desire to resemble them was irrepressible. Individuals could also buy exemption from dress regulations.’
The difference between the Ottoman mindset towards belonging and identity, and the modern Turkish one, is in some ways encapsulated in the meaning of the word millet, which comes from the Arabic milla (nation). In 19th-century Ottoman Turkish, its primary meaning was ethno-religious community; in modern Turkish, it simply means ‘nation’. Community identity became state identity after the theoretically secular Republic formed in 1923. There was no room for the religious millets – there was only one identity, one millet: Turkey, a home for Turks who were pre-identified by the state as Sunni Muslims. This attitude translated to an intolerance for anyone who resisted their new label of ‘Turk’, even when that amounted to little more than continuing to speak in Armenian, Greek or Kurdish. The Republic had zero tolerance for such deviations from the sanctioned norm, which explains the surface-level homogeneity of modern Turkish society – it is still ill-advised to be different.
The roots of the millet communities went beneath the Ottoman Empire to the Persian Sassanid Empire5, which existed in the region south-east of Turkey during the 4th century. The millet-based version of tolerance was fundamentally connected to Islam, which recognizes itself as the third of the religions ‘of the Book’, i.e. the monotheistic faiths, and acknowledges its connection to both its predecessors, Judaism and Christianity. As long as the dhimmis swore allegiance to the sultan and recognized Islam as the supreme religion of the empire in which they lived, they were broadly speaking left alone to govern themselves, run their own justice and education systems, and collect the requisite non-Muslim taxes, which included the cizye and the ispençe, historically presented as payment for the sultan’s protection (the dhimmis were exempt from military service). Many of the dhimmi conversions to Islam stemmed from a desire to avoid these taxes, which were one of the main sources of income for imperial coffers.
Many dhimmi subjects achieved great wealth and prominence in a world where Muslims were encouraged to live modestly and spend their time reading the Koran; at the same time, they also took jobs which Muslims considered ‘dirty’. The historian Bernard Lewis notes that, ‘as well as the more obvious dirty jobs, the dhimmi professions included what was also, for a strict Muslim, something to be avoided – namely, dealing with unbelievers. This led at times to a rather high proportion of non-Muslims in such occupations as diplomacy, commerce, banking, brokerage, and espionage. Even the professions of worker and dealer in gold and silver, esteemed in many parts of the world, were regarded by strict Muslims as tainted and endangering the immortal souls of those engaged in them.’6
Some sultans embraced the dhimmis more enthusiastically than others, and some were guilty of hideous cruelty to non-Sunni Muslims, who were regarded with more hostility than Christians or Jews on the grounds that they were heretics practising a warped version of Islam. Selim the Grim, who murdered his own brothers and forced his own father to abdicate to secure the throne, drastically expanded the empire’s territories in the east. He massacred 40,000 followers of Alevism (an offshoot of Shia Islam, not to be confused with the Alawites of Syria) on one march in 1514, when he defeated Shah Isma’il of Iran7. In 2016, President Erdoğan horrified Turkey’s current 15 million Alevis – the country’s largest minority – when he inaugurated the ‘Sultan Selim the Grim Bridge’ in Istanbul8.
Although the dhimmi always came second to Muslims, they were also seen as sources of income, and non-Muslims within the empire were not targets of systematic violence until the 19th and early 20th centuries. By this point, the last few sultans were resorting to increasingly cruel methods to stem the tide of growing nationalism among their minority subjects as nation states began to spring up aroun
d the peripheries of the empire, while also introducing reforms to keep these same subjects happy – a bizarre carrot and stick approach. Before he died in 1839, Sultan Mahmud II set the wheels in motion for a series of reforms known as the Tanzimat, essentially an attempt to westernize the failing empire by accommodating its non-Muslim minorities more fairly. Midhat Pasha, a prominent backer of the Tanzimat and the instigator of the first constitution of the Ottoman Empire, the short-lived, liberal constitution of 1876, dreamed of an empire where ‘there would be neither Muslim nor non-Muslim but only Ottomans’9. Less than a century later, there were no Ottomans at all.
Although the Tanzimat was intended to make the empire stronger, it in fact fostered nationalist movements by diminishing the importance of the Church, especially among Eastern and Greek Orthodox Christians. Suddenly, these Christians began to identify themselves along nationalist rather than religious lines – as Armenians, Russians, Bulgarians or Greeks – as the empire’s neighbouring states became the ‘kin-states’ of these minorities, and as sympathy began to grow for the Christians brutally punished by Ottoman forces for pursuing independence, like the Bulgarian nationalists killed in the 1876 Batak uprising. For the last few decades of the empire, the Tanzimat contributed to a cultural swansong as minority communities mixed more freely and openly in public life but it was too little, too late to keep the empire intact. Nationalism and, more dramatically, the First World War, destroyed any modern version of Ottoman multiculturalism that might feasibly have emerged in the 20th century.
The legacy of a hugely diverse empire like the Ottoman Empire is that its heart – Turkey – has produced an ethnically complicated people. This has only been partially acknowledged, because of the pressure on both religious and ethnic minorities to assimilate after the creation of the Republic. Several of Turkey’s political parties claim the ethnic superiority of the ‘Turkic race’10, of which modern Turks are the supposed heirs. The reality is that most people in this country have a great-grandfather from Macedonia or Albania, or a great-aunt from Syria or Greece, and can tell a seemingly fantastical family story of exile and survival.
