Ottoman Odyssey

by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)

  Since my last visit, there were more grotesque casinos on the coastline, and yet more half-finished buildings dotting the hills. Next door to the cemetery a racetrack had been built, and the whine of speeding cars rang out disrespectfully over the graves. I found my grandmother in the sprawling cemetery with the help of my mother’s instructions over the phone and put the flowers I had brought on either side of the marble tombstone, confused memories of her funeral playing in my head. Waiting a respectful distance away were two English friends of mine and a man called Yannis, the Greek Cypriot boyfriend of one of them. We spent the rest of the day driving around my favourite spots in the north of the island. Yannis and I soon clashed, but not in the way I was expecting. Whenever I mentioned ‘Turkish Cypriot’ or ‘Greek Cypriot’ he would correct me: ‘Cypriot’. Eventually I asked him what his problem was.

  ‘You are perpetuating the nationalist rhetoric used by both Turkey and Greece. We are all just Cypriots. Brothers. Sisters. Whatever. We are not owned by Greece, or by Turkey.’

  I saw his point, and agreed, but it was incredibly hard to self-edit in the way he suggested, and particularly difficult to discuss the war, or indeed current politics, without specifying what type of Cypriot we were talking about. Eventually we settled on a compromise: ‘Turkish-speaking’ and ‘Greek-speaking’ Cypriots, and even that was contentious, as both speak in a dialect much derided by their respective mainland co-linguists.

  A few weeks later, I was staying in an apartment on the south coast of the island, owned by an old and grumpy man who seemed suspicious of my face. ‘You sure you’re English?’ he asked me, several times. Your face is Cypriot.’ Eventually, I admitted that my mother was from the north of the island, and a stony silence followed.

  Turkish? Hmmm,’ he said, staring at me.

  Here we go, I thought.

  ‘I fought in the war. They took me prisoner and sent me to a prison in Turkey – in Mersin, you know it? For four months, they gave me only four olives a day to eat. Sometimes bread, sometimes no bread. No water. We had to fight to drink the toilet water.’

  We sat in silence a while, and on the wall opposite I noticed a faded photograph of a young man dressed in army fatigues and holding a gun, unmistakably my host. Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake, revealing my true identity to this ex-soldier who probably had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and an abiding hatred for Turks.

  The next morning, he came and knocked on my door. ‘Merhaba!’ he said awkwardly. I took this as an olive branch, but over the next few days his grumpiness made me nervous and I became convinced that he secretly hated me. Then I took myself in hand – who was being xenophobic and judgemental in this situation, him or me? I’ve always prided myself on being tolerant and all-loving of Greeks, Turks, everybody, but here I was reading into an old man’s moodiness when maybe the paranoia was all mine. Perhaps I have not entirely left behind the suspicions instilled in me from a childhood spent north of the border.

  As I spent time in the south, I thought more and more about my grandmother’s desperation to make Greek-speaking friends in London, how she clung to Cyprus in that grey, faraway city full of strangers, where she never really belonged. She loved to sit on a bench near our flat in north London, watching the world go by. One day, an old man sat down next to her. She looked at him; he looked at her. Minutes passed before mutual recognition dawned: here was her old friend Spiros, the father of the boys who taunted my mother with ham sandwiches. They broke into excited Greek.

  ‘Spiro! What are you doing here? Do you live here too?’ asked my grandmother.

  ‘Şifa hanim, it’s good to see you. I’m actually visiting my son in the hospital up the road, he’s not well.’

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear that. How is your other son these days?’

  A pause.

  ‘You didn’t hear? When the Greeks arrived in ‘74 he refused to fight with them. He said he didn’t want to kill any Turks, so they shot him.’

  My mother related this exchange to me many years later, a very simple, searing story of humanity that made me retrospectively understand the grandmother I had known as a child. She was not a refugee in the most extreme sense when she came to London; she was not forced to leave Cyprus, but she left behind friendships that had existed against all odds, and a community deeply damaged by war – she was a refugee of political barbarism. Like the exchange of 1923, there was an exodus on both sides of Cyprus after the partition in 1974, and an arbitrary cruelty in the ‘solution’. Though my grandmother remained heartbroken, it was easier for her to retain her sense of identity hundreds of miles from home than it has been for the Turks of Thrace to retain theirs in the place they have called home for generations. Such is the crazed nature of civilized tribalism, or nationalism, in neighbouring countries with centuries’ worth of political grievances to air – or in Bruce Clark’s words, the ‘perpetually shifting symbiosis’ which has existed between these countries since the Battle of Troy.36

  Minarets in the West

  ‘"This soup is as cold as the sea!" But he was not shouting at the soup. He was shouting at the Turks, at the Venetians, at the Austrians, at the French, and at the Serbs (if he was Croat) or at the Croats (if he was a Serb)."

  Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

  Bridge on the Drina

  On a 500-year-old humpbacked bridge in Mostar, southern Bosnia-Herzegovina, a sunburned man in tiny swimming trunks is collecting coins from tourists. After ten minutes, he hands the money to a friend before stepping on to the crest of the bridge. Breathing deeply and stretching like an Olympic champion, he pauses for effect before simply stepping off and plunging into the green water twenty-four metres below. Robbed of a proper diving performance, the crowd nevertheless bursts into nervous applause as he surfaces from the frothing water, alive.

  Spanning the River Neretva near the modern-day border with Croatia, the Stari Most bridge was commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566. Impressive even today, it was at its completion the widest man-made arch in the world; the 17th-century travel writer Evliya Çelebi described it in characteristically extravagant terms, like heaven’s rainbow ... a bridge so high it seems to be connecting two clouds’. Its creator, Mimar Hayrüddin, was a star student of Suleiman’s court architect, Mimar Sinan, the Christian designer of iconic mosques across the empire. Walking gingerly over its steep, slippery cobbles in flip-flops, I remember the local story that the original bridge was held together by egg-white mortar, an unglamorous but apparently effective technique, as it lasted for 427 years until deliberately targeted and destroyed by Croat shells in 1993 during the Bosnian war. In 2004, the bridge was carefully reconstructed by UNESCO with its original stones. Now it stands as though untouched while the town itself bears many marks of the 1990s war, riddled with bullet holes and craters. On many of the half-smashed brutalist apartment blocks, I saw ‘1981’ scrawled in red graffiti paint – the date the local Velež football club, which united the town’s Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks in fierce support, won the Yugoslav cup, before one of the most horrifically violent wars of the 20th century.

  The Yugoslavian history of the town has now been overshadowed by its Ottoman history as tourists flock to see the reconstructed bridge; in the centre of town, the twisted alleyways are packed full of souvenir stands under the eaves of striped black and white, almost

  Tudor-looking Ottoman houses. Most of the tourists wandering around are mildly adventurous middle-aged Turks bussed in from Sarajevo to the north. After their excursions, they sit in restaurants by the river, happily eating kebabs and marvelling at the legacy of their ancestors: ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ they gush. I was to witness a lot of this nostalgic tourism at play during my time in the Balkans, a strange tour of inspection of former territories by modern Turks; a collective basking in reflected historical glory.

  From the 14th century onwards, the Balkans made up the longstanding core of the Ottomans’ western territories; most of Greece had come under Ottoman con
trol by the end of the 15th century, and Suleiman’s Balkan conquests of the 16th century stretched to the gates of Vienna in the west and eastwards to Odessa in southern Ukraine. This regional dominance lasted until the early 20th century when the emergence of the concept of a nation state inspired rebellion among people who were made aware of their ‘Bulgarian’ or ‘Greek’ identities. Greece was an early trendsetter, rebelling in 1821 and establishing itself as an independent state in 1830. Nearly a century later, Bulgaria, Crete and Bosnia-Herzegovina declared themselves independent in 1908. Sultan Mehmet V fought desperately to keep these territories in the First Balkan War of 1912 and lost: it was the beginning of the end.

  Today, mosques, bridges, caravanserais and hamams existing in various states of disrepair across the Balkans are physical relics of the Ottoman glory period and its decline. The bridges have survived best; the Stari Most is one of the most famous of these, but is surpassed in grandeur and cultural legacy by the Mehmet Pasa Sokolovic Bridge in Visegrad, the subject of the historical novel Bridge on the Drina, written in 1943 by the Bosnian Nobel Laureate Ivo Andric. Surprisingly, the Communist authorities oversaw the building of new mosques in the 20th century, but many of these and the existing Ottoman mosques were destroyed in the Balkan wars between 1992 and 1995. Turkey has come to the rescue, flexing its regional muscles after barely a century’s rest.

  In the past sixteen years of Erdoğan’s rule, the Turkish government has been busy building new mosques, and rebuilding Ottoman mosques and hamams, with millions of euros of taxpayers’ money. A few hundred yards from the Stari Most bridge in Mostar is a perfectly restored 16th-century hamam, oddly sterile, and in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, the entrance hall of the 15th-century Çifte Hamami has been transformed into a modern art gallery, light twinkling down through the domed roof on to the exhibits. To give an imperfect Western analogy, this spending pattern is the equivalent of the current Italian government tirelessly and single-handedly restoring Roman ruins across Europe, with a view to promoting both Italy’s imperial past and, by extension, its current standing in the world. It seemed absurd and vainglorious as I encountered it at the start of my journey; as I headed south, it made more sense.

  The Balkans are a historical twilight zone, unforgiving on firsttime visitors confronted with its chequered imperial chronology. As I travelled around the region, I was looking for the legacy of the Ottoman Empire in all its forms – architectural, political and social – and found it in the dungeons of Sarajevo’s burned library, the cafés frequented by Turkish-speaking car mechanics in the Kosovan countryside, old tea gardens in Skopje and haunted wooden mosques in Bulgaria. The Balkan landscape is dominated by mountains, rivers and forests, a jagged terrain famously difficult to govern, even for the Ottomans. Like the rest of the empire, the Balkan territories were controlled as vilayets, or administrative regions, which were divided into smaller districts called sanjaks, ruled – theoretically – from hundreds of miles away by central command in Constantinople. The local government of these districts was entrusted to local pashas, who were expected to keep an eye on both the Muslim and more numerous Christian and Jewish subjects. To tackle the challenging mountain districts, the Ottomans chose powerful men to rule their own; two dozen Grand Viziers were chosen from modern-day Albania alone.

  The famous ‘Bridge on the Drina’ in Visegrad was built by the great Mimar Sinan himself, and commissioned in 1572 by the Grand Vizier Mehmet Pasha, originally one of the young Christian boys taken from the area to serve in the Ottoman court in the early 16th century. In his novel, Andric imagines the traumatic experience of these boys, who were seized from their mothers and transported across the River Drina on a decrepit old ferry, eastwards to Istanbul and a life of service to the sultan. Mehmet Pasha Sokollu (the Turkified form of Sokolovici, meaning ‘son of the falcon’), who was probably around ten years old when he was abducted from his mountain village, went on to have a glittering career, summarized by Andric like a proud father: ‘a young and brave officer at the sultan’s court, then Great Admiral of the Fleet, then the sultan’s son-in-law, a general and statesman of world renown [. . .] who waged wars that were for the most part victorious on three continents and extended the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, making it safe abroad and by good administration consolidated it from within.’37

  Andric’s gushing aside, the career progression of this abducted boy was truly extraordinary, and conjures up a Darwinian system in which only the most physically and mentally robust of child conscripts excelled, bringing glory to their place of birth; Sokollu joined the ranks of similarly glorious military figures, Christian conscripts-turned-Viziers from the same region. Andric’s perhaps romanticized theory of Mehmet Pasha’s commissioning (and personal financing) of the Visegrad bridge was that the great man never lost his painful memories of his birthplace and childhood, despite his later success in the empire. He was seized by a desire to join the two ends of the road which was broken by the Drina and thus link safely and for ever Bosnia and the East, the place of his origin and the places of his life. [...] That very same year, by the Vezir’s order and at the Vezir’s expense, the building of the great bridge on the Drina began.’

  Missionary Zeal

  In the aftermath of the USSR, the decline of the European Union and the rise of religious tensions, the Balkan states are trying to define themselves in the 21st century. Driving across Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria, I noticed half-completed buildings everywhere, and this unrealized construction boom seemed to mirror the semi-constructed, aspirational state of the countries themselves. The region is ripe for more powerful states to carve out influence; Russia and Turkey are currently gaining on the ebbing influence of the EU and NATO in the former Yugoslavia and its surrounding region.

  Bosnia-Herzegovina is a study in modern wannabe imperialism; while 500 years ago the country was occupied by Ottoman forces, it is now occupied to a surprising extent by Turkish money, which is poured into schools, media, construction and cultural projects in an attempt to recreate some approximation of past influence. I visited Mostar on a swelteringly hot day in July 2017, and after I watched the sunburned faux-diver performing for tourists, I passed over to the east bank of the Neretva, where a magnificent orange-striped building flies a large red-and-white Turkish flag; this is the Yunus Emre Institute, a governmental organisation set up by then-Prime Minister Erdoğan as a kind of cultural-centre franchise in 2007, with branches all over the world. The single staff member on duty in the Mostar branch – a burly man who spoke Turkish with a strong Bosnian accent – looked astonished to see me. The building was totally empty, the walls plastered with Turkish language charts (‘B for Baklava’, etc), pristine classrooms awaiting phantom hordes of eager Bosnian students. Despite boasting only twelve Turks, Mostar also maintains a Turkish Consulate well stocked with leaflets about Istanbul’s newest museums, and genuine Turkish staff brimming with missionary zeal.

  Sarajevo was founded by the Ottomans in 1461 and is a painfully beautiful city of cemeteries, surrounded by hills occupied by Serbian paramilitaries less than thirty years ago, and still haunted by trauma. Today every slope within the city hosts a swathe of white tombstones, many of them the graves of those killed in the recent war, others clearly Ottoman, with the recognizable turban-like headstone of the Sufi Bektashi order. Signs of the war are everywhere: the recently restored town hall was once a library, shelled by Serbian forces in 1992. In the fire that resulted, the one and a half million books, many of them Ottoman, were burned – in the underground archive space, previously used as dungeons, only black-and-white photographs of the collection remain. On the floors and walls of the building itself, almost too perfectly restored, the replicated Jewish Star of David and Islamic-style calligraphic art reflect the multilayered history of the city, visible today because of punctilious archaeologists paid by the EU.

  In keeping with the conquering Ottoman modus operandi, the first governor of the city, Isa-Beg Isha
kovic, immediately built a mosque, closed bazaar, hamam, castle and bridge, which was later the site of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. He also built a whirling dervish lodge, destroyed by Communist authorities in 1956 and rebuilt by the Turkish municipality of Konya, an uber-conservative town in central Anatolia, in 2013. Trudging up through a cemetery to reach it, I found a spotless Alpine chalet-like building perched above the city on a tiny flower-filled outcrop of land. It was utterly empty and in pristine condition, like the Yunus Emre Institute in Mostar. Inside, bookshelves filled with Turkish editions of the Koran and a silent caretaker who offered me tea; outside, neat flowerbeds and a brass plaque that proudly proclaimed that in 2013, then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (the bespectacled academic, and architect of Turkey’s current Ottoman foreign policy), opened this lodge on behalf of the Republic of Turkey.

  Turkish politicians take their visits to Bosnia-Herzegovina very seriously; Erdoğan has paid homage at the grave of the country’s first president, the unapologetic Islamist Alija Izetbegovic, who died a few months after Erdoğan became Prime Minister of Turkey in 2003. In 2017, Izetbegovic’s son Bakir, the Bosniak member of the country’s current tripartite presidency, claimed that his father ‘bequeathed’ Bosnia-Herzegovina to Erdoğan in one of their last conversations: ‘He recognized in him [Erdoğan] a future strong leader, and bequeathed him with caring for Bosnia-Herzegovina. I think that Erdoğan has been carrying out that bequest very well. Just look at this new action of his, to build a road between Belgrade and Sarajevo.’ In return, Bosnian politicians take their obligations to Turkey equally seriously. In early 2018, the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was denied an honorary citizenship of Sarajevo by the city council commission after initial enthusiasm for the idea, seemingly because politicians from Izetbegovic’s party feared the repercussions of welcoming a writer who is well known for criticising Erdoğan.