by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Turkey: Heart of the Empire
‘Either I conquer Istanbul, or Istanbul will conquer me’
Sultan Mehmet II, 1452
There is an absence in Turkey that is at first hard to identify. It lies in shadows and silence, in obsolete place names, faded inscriptions and a surplus of antiques. It is the ghostly presence of people who used to live here, for many more years than they’ve been absent.
Walk up the marble steps from Istanbul’s Taksim Square to Gezi Park, and you are walking on tombstones taken from a demolished 16th-century Armenian cemetery a few miles down the road11. Climb into the hills above the Mediterranean coastline and you find the abandoned homes of Greek Orthodox Christians and Jews. Float in a hot-air balloon above the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia and you pass over cave churches where locals congregated less than a hundred years ago.
The fates of the minority communities once living in Turkey were tied to the demise of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire. By the early 20th century, the empire had grown so weak that it was known in the West as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ and by the end of the First World War in 1918 it had collapsed in all but name, its territories lost to the Allies. British forces occupied Istanbul, the empire’s capital for over 500 years, allowing the last puppet sultan, Mehmet IV, to cling on for another four years before he escaped to Malta.
In the face of total occupation, Mustafa Kemal Pasha – later Atatürk, ‘Father of the Turks’ – fought a fierce and ultimately victorious war of resistance to save at least Anatolia, the heartland of the empire. In 1923, he declared a Republic of Turkey with its capital in Ankara. This new state was to be for self-identifying Turks only; such a dramatic reordering of what remained of a once-vast empire was necessary for its survival, but the stiflingly nationalistic atmosphere of the new Republic forced many of the remaining minorities either to leave or to relinquish their real identities so as to pass as ‘Turks’. Minorities become even more invisible as the decades passed, and their cultural impact dimmed; the families and congregations who remain have a proud but sad attachment to the past.
Istanbul
I met seventy-six-year-old Ivan in the pouring rain in Taksim Square in March 2014. His Russian credentials were immediately obvious: steely blue eyes, a yellow-tinged beard and a kind of dogged, cheerful pessimism. His spoken Turkish, however, was that of a native, and he holds only a Turkish passport. He was born in Kars, the old Russian garrison town on Turkey’s border with Armenia, after his parents fled Moscow at the outbreak of the Second World War, and was brought up in Istanbul.
‘I went to the Russian Embassy to ask for a passport,’ Ivan told me, blowing cigarette smoke slowly through his beard, ‘but they said no. “You have Turkish nationality. You cannot be Russian.’”
Ivan fumed, literally, at the memory.
‘I said, what about Gerard Depardieu? They said he was a special case. Pah!’
Ivan is resolutely Russian, whatever his passport says, and obsessed with the fast-disappearing Russian Orthodox community in Istanbul, though he himself is not religious. His allegiance to the Church is his way of expressing his true national identity, a very Ottoman mentality born of the empire’s millet-ordered society. The nominally secular republic of Turkey has resisted such distinctions, because Turkish citizens are assumed to identify as a Sunni Muslim.
Ivan took me to see one of the last remaining Russian church services in the city, a strangely secretive evensong in St Panteleimon, a tiny chapel on the top floor of a dilapidated building in Karaköy, near the Golden Horn. St Panteleimon and the monastic dormitory below it have been in use since 1878 when the dormitory served as a pit-stop for Russian pilgrims en route to the monastery of Mount Athos in Greece. Now, services are attended mainly by Moldovan, Bulgarian and Georgian Christians, most of them women who work in the homes of rich Istanbul families, while St Andrei, the chapel just next door, is the preserve of the handful of White Russian families who remain in the city, relatives of the thousands who escaped here from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Ivan hinted darkly that the two congregations do not get on, a tiny localized class war, but they are both reminders of the gamut of Russian, Balkan and Caucasian congregants of the Eastern Orthodox Church, rich and poor, that have lived here in varying numbers for centuries.
A wizened old lady led us into the chapel, which was crowded, the air heavy with the scent of melting wax. On every inch of wall and ceiling were carefully restored gilt icons of Christ and the Apostles. Facing the congregation was an altar thronged with candles, and on either side, two large Cyrillic letters, X and B (for Христос Воскресе – ‘Christ has Risen!’) garishly lit by flashing pink light bulbs. The whole effect was reminiscent of the kitsch ecclesiastical aesthetic of Baz Luhrmann’s iconic film Romeo + Juliet. Hidden behind a screen, two ladies sang in Russian, their sopranos occasionally supplemented by an unseen, rich bass. Eventually, the embodiment of this bass made an entrance from behind a curtain: spectacularly huge and bearded, he waved his smoking pendulum of frankincense with unhurried majesty, a red-and-gold embroidered cassock draped around his shoulders. As he walked round the chapel, the congregation turned to face him like sunflowers, bowing as he intoned. I was led out at this point because I was wearing trousers – the old lady explained kindly that men wear men’s clothes and ladies wear ladies’ clothes. She found a floral gypsy skirt in a cardboard box, tied it round my waist, gave me an approving look and pushed me back inside the chapel.
Both the social and architectural legacies of Ottoman Istanbul are fading, and services like those at St Panteleimon have an almost furtive aspect to them. Old Greek and Armenian districts are full of once-splendid houses with crumbling neoclassical facades, flanked by purpose-built apartment blocks; furniture abandoned by their owners gathers dust in antique shops down the road. Place names have become redundant; Arnavutköy – ‘Albanian Village’ – is now a collection of expensive houses on the European waterfront, and Polonezköy, ‘Polish Village’ – once the 19th -century home of Polish émigrés – is a collection of kiosks in a park on the outskirts of the city, a Christian graveyard the single, fitting reminder of its previous existence. The banking quarter in Karaköy is still heavy with the grandeur of granite-columned exteriors but inside, in place of the tills and halls which were once thronged with Jewish bankers and Levantine merchants, laminated red letters spell out HSBC and an ATM flashes in the corner behind a glass pane. Down by the shore of the Golden Horn, the elegant grey-stoned Greek Orthodox patriarchate is almost unchanged. Its view, however, is no longer of the Genoese-built Galata Tower across the water. In front of that, a new bridge stretches to the opposite shore and every four minutes a high-speed train thunders across the water before disappearing into the ground.
The Empire had its seat here from 1453, when the twenty-one-year-old Sultan Mehmet II conquered the city, until 1922, when the last sultan, Mehmet VI, was exiled. ‘Ottoman’ (Osmanli in Turkish) is an anglicisation of Osman, the Turk from central Asia who in 1299 planted the seeds of the empire in the Anatolian town of Söğüt, from which he waged war against the crumbling Byzantine Empire in the west. Osman’s fledgling empire reached its height centuries after his death, in the early 17th century. By this point, Istanbul was the greatest capital in the world, a city of several hundred thousand people, so rich and bustling that authorities had begun to worry about its over-population12. Mosques, churches, synagogues, hospitals and schools enriched the nexus of a fast-growing empire, catering to an array of subjects who were perhaps at their most diverse under Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled between 1520 and 1566. His favourite court architect, Mimar (‘Architect’) Sinan, was born into a Christian family – either Greek or Armenian – in Kayseri, central Anatolia, before joining the janissary corps and converting to Islam. He designed some of the most iconic mosques in the world, including Suleiman’s eponymous Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul. His architectural achievements outside Turkey serve as landmarks of 16th-
century Ottoman expansion: the Juma-Jami Mosque in Yevpatoria, Crimea (1564), the Tekkiye Mosque in Damascus, Syria (built for Suleiman’s son, Selim I, in 1566) and the Banya Bashi Mosque in Sofia, Bulgaria (1576) among them. The Armenian Balyan family, famed architects of the 18th and 19th centuries, built the lavish Dolmabahçe Palace on the banks of the Bosphorus among other iconic buildings. Their legacy shows both how much the empire relied on its non-Muslim subjects, and how high these non-Muslim subjects could climb – Jews and Christians were typically the sultan’s most trusted military commanders, doctors, architects and advisors.
Almost all the contemporary accounts we have of Ottoman life in Istanbul were written, unsurprisingly, by men. Evliya Çelebi, a court favourite of Sultan Murad IV in the mid-17th century thanks to his note-perfect, eight-hour recitations from the Koran, was also the Ottoman Herodotus, known for blending fact and fantasy in his collection of travel writing, the Seyahatname. A devout Muslim who wryly described sex as ‘the greater jihad’13, he was a strange mix of intrepid explorer and court sycophant. He commented extensively on the daily habits of the sultan in his chronicles of life in Topkapi Palace, and occasionally on the social life of the city. His account of a Greek goldsmith who worked in his father’s workshop in Unkapani, a western district of Istanbul, gives us an idea of the atmosphere of a city in which an ‘infidel’ would naturally exchange stories of the empire’s glorious Christian past with a precocious Muslim child spouting Persian.
‘One of the goldsmiths in our shop was an infidel named Simyon. He would read aloud from the history of Yanvan, and I would listen and record it in my memory. From childhood on I used to hang around with him, and being clever for my age, I learned fluent Greek and Latin. I instructed Simyon in the [Persian-Ottoman] dictionary of Şahidi, and he instructed me in the history of Alexander the Great, which included an account of the ancestors of the Roman emperors going all the way back to the Amalekites and to Shem the son of Noah.’14
Some of the more atmospheric descriptions of Ottoman life in the city were made by an English woman writing in the early 18th century, when the empire still retained much of the wealth and cultural diversity of its zenith in the previous century. In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her husband, the newly appointed British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, set off from London for Istanbul; between 1717 and 1718 they lived in a house in Pera, a cosmopolitan district just above Galata. It is obvious from Lady Mary’s correspondence with friends in England that she would have made a far more successful diplomat than her husband, who was recalled to London after only a year (she was also something of a medical pioneer – having observed smallpox inoculation being used by Ottoman doctors, she introduced the method to English doctors who were at first sceptical before being convinced when Lady Mary demonstrated it successfully on her own daughter15). She made the most of her privilege as a woman to access the nuclei of Ottoman life, braving the steamy nudity of the hamam and learning Turkish by infiltrating the haremlik (women’s quarters) of Topkapi Palace, where she befriended the women closest to Sultan Ahmet III and learned about political machinations hidden from her husband.
The district of Pera, where the Montagus lived, was full of a dizzying array of Ottoman subjects, visiting traders, diplomats and workers. The Montagu household itself was an immigrant hub: ‘My grooms are Arabs, my footmen French, English, and Germans,’ she wrote in one of her letters. ‘My nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russians; half a dozen other servants, Greeks: my steward an Italian; my janizaries [guards on loan from the sultan, like embassy guards provided by a host state] Turks; so that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here; for they learn all these languages at the same time, and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it. There are very few men, women, or even children here, that have not the same compass of words in five or six of them.’16
This proliferation of polyglots was not something unique to Istanbul; it existed throughout the major trading towns of the empire. For example, the historian Mark Mazower tells us that in Thessaloniki, ‘as late as the First World War, Salonikan bootblacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages’17. Smyrna was even more of a cosmopolis, composed of all the most eclectic groups of the empire, along with other major trading hubs of the Levant – Alexandria, Beirut and Tyre. In the 21st century, the tyranny of English as a global language means that – despite the many second, third or even fourth languages spoken in cities like New York and London – we are unlikely to experience that level of true linguistic diversity again.
Ziya
Ziya Gökmen is a dynamic, chatty man in his forties. He is fluent in several languages because he runs a tourist agency in Istanbul – a difficult endeavour in these times – and is more prone to dwelling fondly on the past than speculating on an uncertain future. One afternoon, he told me his family background over endless cups of tea in his office, occasionally picking up the phone to check a date or a name with his mother. He is fascinated by the Ottoman roots of his family – long before the Turkish government digitalized everyone’s family trees, Ziya had his almost perfectly memorized.
‘My grandmother Bedriye was born in 1912 in Macedonia, in a town called Ustrumca [modern Strumica], at the time of the watermelons. People at that time didn’t record exact birthdays so they did it by the fruit season. So, when is watermelon – July, August? Let’s say August.
‘The First Balkan War started two months later, in October; it was fought between the Ottomans and the Balkan states who wanted to carve up the remaining European territories of the sultan. My great-grandfather Nazmi, who was a manager at Ziraat Bankasi [a bank that still exists today in Turkey] got advance warning from Istanbul via the bank to leave ASAP and escape to Istanbul before the war really started; they had to go via boat from Selanik [Salonika, modern-day Thessaloniki]. So when Bedriye was still a tiny baby, they got on a horse and travelled a hundred and thirty-three kilometres to escape from the soldiers [who would have targeted the family as Muslim “Turks” – i.e. the enemy].’
At this point, Ziya rings his mother to check the 133 km claim, and is reminded of some extra eyewitness testimony from his great-grandmother.
‘Oh yes! My great-grandmother Hatice said they even left the chestnuts in the saucepan when they were leaving the house, they took whatever they could carry and left for Selanik. Most of the families in that area abandoned their babies. Hatice hid my two-month-old grandmother in the saddlebag – she had seen babies massacred by Bulgarian soldiers. She worried my grandmother would die of suffocation, but before they got to each check point, she checked the saddlebag to see if her baby was still alive.’
Ziya’s absorption in his own story, in the every breath of his baby grandmother, is mesmeric.
‘There were two boats in the dock at Selanik harbour – one going to New York, and one to Istanbul. They didn’t let my great-grandpa get on the boat because only women and children were allowed, so he chose the Istanbul boat for his family because he knew the baby wouldn’t survive the journey to New York. As my great-grandpa watched them board, he started chatting in Bulgarian with the soldier at the checkpoint, and gave him a cigarette. After a while of chatting together, they become friendly, and somehow the soldier helped him sneak through the checkpoint on to the boat to join his wife and baby.
‘There is a saying in Turkish: "Bir lisan bir insan" – “Each language is one person” – you add a persona to yourself if you add a language. My grandmother’s life was saved by her father knowing Bulgarian, and that’s why it is so important in my family to learn new languages.’
Visibly moved, Ziya stands up and picks up an English dictionary from his bookshelf.
‘Bedriye gave me this dictionary because she wanted me to learn English, she understood that a new language helps you to be harboured in a new country [Ziya studied in America]. I met her mother – my great-grandmother – in her ninet
ies when I was a kid. She was speaking Turkish with a Macedonian dialect – "yaporoz, edoroz", instead of "yapiyoruz, ediyoruz".
‘Because my great-grandfather was a civil servant working in a bank, he was given the advice to get back to Istanbul as soon as possible. That’s why he survived – but others suffered much worse. Many left their babies with their neighbours, thinking they would die. Lots of Armenians did that in 1915. Many Turkish Muslim families today used to be Armenian or Greek before they assimilated, or they are the orphans of Armenians who died during the Armenian relocation.’
The term ‘Armenian relocation’ is a common euphemism for ‘the Armenian genocide’, which is never referred to in Turkey – in fact, the even more euphemistic ‘events of 1915’ is more often used to describe the massacres and forced marches of the majority of the Armenian population of Ottoman Anatolia in the middle of the Great War. Ziya actually knows much more about this period of history than the average Turkish citizen, and is particularly interested in the overlap between Armenian survivors of the genocide and the Alevi community of Turkey, partly for personal reasons.
‘People in Tunceli [a town in eastern Anatolia] who are Alevi used to be Armenian. In 1915, they decided to become Muslim rather than be deported but they thought Sunni Islam was too harsh, so they wanted instead to become Alevi. The grandmother of Derya [Ziya’s wife] died a few weeks ago. Derya and her brother went to Çorum for the funeral and it took place in a cemevi (an Alevi house of worship] – they suddenly realized that their father’s mother was Alevi but they never knew that. They asked their father, ‘Dad, why did you never tell us?’ He was a retired military colonel, and he told them, ‘Kids, if my soldiers knew I was Alevi they would never listen to my orders.’
