by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Serbia
I headed Russia-wards, north to Belgrade, and on the way, I noticed the minarets which had peppered most of the Bosnian countryside gradually give way to church spires and cemeteries filled with crosses. While Christians in Bosnia-Herzegovina still make up about 47 per cent of the population (the remainder being non-denominational or Sunni Muslim), there are relatively few Muslims in Serbia, something that is reflected in the two countries’ foreign policies: while Bosnia-Herzegovina welcomes Turkey and its money, Russia is a long-standing big brother to Serbia, and Putin’s popularity is high among ordinary Serbians. Most Serbians I spoke to seemed to see no paradox in wanting to be part of Europe while harbouring a vaguer but more visceral attachment to Russia. Part of this is undoubtedly down to religious affiliation, however mute this is. Even the most secular of both Serbians and Bosnians seem attuned to being not Muslim or Christian respectively – not ‘the other’. Turkey and Russia both exploit this fault line.
The road into Belgrade betrays Serbia’s reliance on Russian and Chinese money – Gazprom and Huawei-branded skyscrapers greet visitors coming into the city, and a new bridge – the ‘Chinese Bridge’ – has been built over the Danube by the Chinese, in exchange for a massive loan to the Serbian government. Belgrade was once a frontier of the Ottoman Empire; in 1521, seventy years after an initial siege, Suleiman the Magnificent succeeded in conquering the Byzantine fort which still dominates the southern side of the city, in the centre of Kalemegdan Park (from the Turkish words kale, ‘castle’, and megan/meydan, ‘battlefield/city square’). The Christian inhabitants were transported en masse to the outskirts of Istanbul, to an area which became known as the Belgrade Forest, where rich Turks today play golf and relax in gated villas far from the political smog of the city. The visible Ottoman legacy of Belgrade today is patchy, confined mainly to ruins rather than urban architecture; Zemun, a northern suburb twenty minutes’ drive away, was only temporarily occupied by the Ottomans and was indeed a separate village until 1934. You can tell – it is unmistakably Austro-Hungarian, full of picturesque churches and pastel-coloured houses.
Walking around the ramparts of the Belgrade fortress, I couldn’t help thinking of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, dominating the once-forested peninsula on the southern European side of Istanbul. Today, Turkish tourists wandering around Kalemegdan Park are looking primarily for Ottoman ruins, such as the fountain erected in honour of Mehmet Pasa Sokolovic, of Visegrad fame, or the old ‘Amam’ (hamam), erected in the 17th century below the steep ramparts of the fort. I tagged along with one Turkish tour group who grumbled when they discovered the mausoleum of an Ottoman pasha obscured by scaffolding – not quite the gratifying sight of colonial glory they came for.
Despite wielding far less influence in Serbia than in Muslim-majority Balkan countries, the Turks are hard at work here too. In Kalmegdan Park, a large photography exhibition honoured the defeat of the 2016 coup attempt. Looking closely at the blown-up photographs of angry citizens attacking tanks and President Erdoğan attending the funerals of the slain, I noticed the sponsor of the exhibition: TIKA, a Turkish government directorate explicitly devoted to funding projects in Turkic- or Turkish-speaking communities, founded in 1991 after the fall of the USSR. Its website states that ‘Turkey and the countries in Central Asia consider themselves as one nation containing different countries’; in the early 2000s, TIKA expanded into the Balkans, and then Africa and even Latin America, pushing beyond its original remit of Turkic- or Turkish-related communities to pastures ever more ambitious: a modern-day empire of influence.
The Kalemegdan photo exhibition, which was produced by Anadolu Ajansi, Turkey’s state news outlet, also popped up like a travelling propaganda installation further south in my Balkan travels, for example in the Muslim town of Novi Pazar, centre of the southern Serbian area of Sandzak which was once an important administrative area of the Ottoman Empire. The town itself feels conservative – many women wear the headscarf, and only one bar openly serves alcohol – but the gambling shops on the high street proclaim liberal laws.
Turkish influence is particularly strong near the Serbian-Kosovan border in the Sandzak area (Turkish: sanjak, literally meaning ‘region’). The usual Turkish-funded mosques are here, along with branches of Turkish banks (including the state ‘Halk Bank’), and the Istanbul-based organization Friends of Sandzak, which facilitates marriages, language classes and general support networks between the Serbians who emigrated in large numbers to Turkey over the past twenty years, and Serbia-based, self-identifying Turks. In 2009, soft power hardened when then-Foreign Minister of Turkey Ahmet Davutoglu intervened in a local political dispute, much to the anger of the Serbian government. On buildings and walls just outside the centre of the town, I saw the words ‘INDEPENDENT SANDZAK’ scrawled in graffiti; many of the residents resent Serbian rule and wish to revert to the city-state identity they held during the Ottoman era. Strangely, here, in the 21st century, the local desire for greater political independence is based in nostalgia for long-gone Ottoman-subject status.
In Novi Pazar, I conducted one of the most bizarre interviews of my life with Alija Sahovic, the president of the Novi Pazar branch of the Friends of Sandzak. I had first tried to track down the group’s headquarters via Facebook-I sent a message in Turkish, and received a response in Turkish, inviting me to come and visit. Then, when I tried to ask about precise directions, I found myself inexplicably blocked.
I decided to go anyway, based on the map shown on the Facebook page, but could find no trace of the place in the sleepy river-side neighbourhood. As I stood rather helplessly outside a butcher’s shop strung with calf carcasses, a sixteen-year-old boy wandered out. He was called Elhan, and spoke excellent English thanks to a passion for American films. To my relief, he decided to help me – ‘I don’t want a salary,’ he said solemnly. ‘But you must buy some beef sausage from my father’s shop – no pork, we are Muslims here.’
After an hour of knocking on doors, a middle-aged bald man with a large beak of a nose poked his head out of the upper window of one house. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded, in Serbian. This was Alija Sahovic, and this was his house, aka the HQ of the Friends of Sandzak. He answered my Turkish greeting in kind – ‘merhaba‘ – so I continued my pleasantries, only to be informed by Elhan that Sahovic could not actually speak Turkish – the local version of Serbian had incorporated a few Turkish words since Ottoman times, hence my confusion.
‘We took Turkish words, like merhaba and masturbated them into Serbian,’ declared Elhan. I kept a straight face so that he would continue to translate for me, craning his head up at the upper window where Sahovic’s face still poked out warily.
‘Alija apologizes for blocking you on Facebook – he was worried you were a Gülenist [follower of Gülen].’ I had no idea why Sahovic thought a Gülenist might be trying to infiltrate his group, but his attitude mirrored the paranoia of Turks in the aftermath of the attempted coup. Apparently, he had translated my Facebook message and sent a reply with the help of a Serbian friend based in Turkey, who also advised him to block me. I think I was the first non-Serb to ever contact the group.
Assured that I had honest intentions, Sahovic led us round to the back door through his garden. To my surprise, the terrace was strung with AKP bunting – Turkey’s ruling political party – and large flags with President Erdoğan’s face on them. We went into the house, where Sahovic showed me further stashes of AKP bunting and stationery, Turkish Korans, and even AKP-branded versions of the decorative wands wielded at Turkish circumcision ceremonies – an extravaganza of nationalist merchandise packed into boxes in his basement because there was not enough space to display it all in his house.
Upstairs, my host insisted on fetching me tea prepared in the Turkish style, leading me into the kitchen to show me the samovar. ‘Türk çay!’ he said proudly, beaming as I accepted my tulip-shaped glass. In the sitting room, we sat on a leather sofa in front of a flat-screen television showing TRT
, the Turkish state news channel – incomprehensible to Sahovic, but he enjoyed having it playing constantly in the background, and occasionally being treated to the sight of Erdoğan’s face.
I was overwhelmed by this Serbian man’s passion for the modern reincarnation of the empire that had subjugated his ancestors. It was almost as though he was suffering from a historic case of Stockholm syndrome – a version of the ‘Make America/Britain Great Again’ nostalgia, but from the point of view of the colonized, rather than the colonizer. Why did he feel such an affinity for Turks?
‘He thinks everyone should feel Turkish because the Ottomans made us, they gave us Islam,’ Elhan translated. Apparently, Sahovic considered himself, fundamentally, a Turk. Not so long ago, his family members grew up under Ottoman rule, speaking Turkish.
‘Alija’s mother’s grandfather knew Turkish as well as Serbian,’ said Elhan. ‘And his wife’s grandfather only knew Turkish. Here, until 1912, Turkish was the native language.’
Sahovic was clearly regretful that he himself could speak only Serbian, which he insisted on calling ‘Sandžakian’. Listening to him desperately trying to convey his admiration for President Erdoğan, I was struck by how powerful Turkish influence had become in this region during the last fifteen years and in particular, how important the Islamic element of Sahovic’s Ottoman self-perception was. Before Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2003, no Turkish government had been so explicitly religious – indeed, most were much more secular. Erdoğan has been the first Turkish leader to effectively wield the Muslim card in pursuing a foreign policy which essentially seeks to resuscitate an Ottoman sphere of influence. The Muslim card was the common denominator between the Ottomans and the Turks – the denominator which Atatürk had temporarily erased when he created a secular Republic, and which Erdoğan had effortlessly reintroduced shortly after he came to power, knowing it would have enormous resonance far beyond Turkey’s borders.
For Sahovic, the Christian Serbs were oppressors, and the Turks were true and rightful overlords. ‘Serbia is pushing out the Turkish influence,’ he told me, seemingly oblivious to the last century of history. As I left, I asked him to pose for a photograph in front of the flags in his garden. He stood, proudly, making the Islamic Rabia sign adopted by Erdoğan when he addresses his rallies of the faithful – right hand held aloft, fingers spread, thumb tucked in. As I waved goodbye and walked away, slightly dazed, I reflected that Alija Sahovic was almost certainly the most historically confused middle-aged fanboy I would ever encounter.
Kosovo and Skopje
To get from Novi Pazar to Kosovo, you have to drive via Montenegro, because Serbia regards Kosovo not as an independent state but as Serbian territory occupied since the war of 1999, during which NATO forces intervened to stop the killing of the country’s large ethnic Albanian contingent by Serb forces. The route is incredibly dramatic – up and down winding, heavily wooded mountain roads, via suspicious border guards who demand unnecessary ‘insurance’ to let you pass. The Kosovan landscape is flat, a kind of war-ravaged basin encircled by hills. My first stop was Peć [Albanian] or Peja [Serbian], a sleepy town with the usual Ottoman bridge, mosque and bazaar I had come to recognize in the towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina and southern Serbia. Like most of the mosques in Kosovo, the Bajrakli mosque was damaged during the 1999 war; in this case, the interior was burned to a cinder and restored with the financial help of the Italian government. Outside it, men sell Albanian flags as well as flags depicting maps of Kosovo with wildly ambitious borders, encompassing Sandzak, Albania and even Corfu – a kind of fantasy Albanian mini-empire. In each sub-section of the Balkans, I was to find unique self-declared identities such as this.
A few hours south-east of Peja is Prizren, a beautiful town dominated by a citadel and a lofty Orthodox church, now cordoned off and sporadically guarded by KFOR (NATO’s Kosovo Force) since 1999. Mosques and churches throughout Kosovo were targets during the war; the church in Prizren town was torched and a gloomy Serbian guard told me that the tiny Christian community was ‘dead’ – his church had become a lacklustre tourist attraction, not a functioning place of worship. Outside, a sign obscured by deep scratches proclaimed: ‘This building site is protected by law. Any act of vandalism and looting will be considered as criminal offense of the utmost gravity.’ In the town centre, KFOR soldiers patrolled, in slightly aimless fashion, and from the Byzantine citadel above the town I watched Black Hawk helicopters circle – the stern eye of the West still obvious amid simmering tensions nearly twenty years after the conflict. Later, I tried to get into the American army base outside Prishtina, improbably called ‘Camp Bondsteel’. A gale-force dust storm was gathering as I waited at the heavily guarded gate for the permission that never came, chatting to the soldiers above the howl of the wind.
‘The Kosovans seem to like you,’ I shouted, remarking on the abundance of American flags flying from ordinary civilian homes.
‘They’d better,’ a red-haired soldier shouted back, in a Texan drawl. ‘They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for us.’
The 17th-century Sinan Pasha mosque fifty metres away from the vandalized church in Prizren has been restored to its former glory by TIKA money, according to a brass plaque proudly bearing the Turkish flag and seal of the Turkish presidency; an Albanian-language newspaper claimed the renovations cost 1.2 million euros. Inside, as I gazed up at the calligraphy on the inside dome of the Sinan Pasha mosque, a young man came up to me, sensing I was not a local. He addressed me in English, but on an impulse, I answered in Turkish.
You speak Turkish!’ he exclaimed. Yes,’ I said. ‘. . . As do you?’
Ilaz, as he introduced himself, was visiting family in Kosovo; he had settled in Switzerland, in common with many Kosovans who had fled there during the war. He explained that most people in Prizren had spoken Turkish since Ottoman times, having not been as effectively ‘Serbified’ as the inhabitants of Novi Pazar, including the unfortunate Alija Sahovic. To me, someone used to standard mainland Turkish, the version that had persisted in Prizren sounded like a peculiar dialect. Later, I spoke to a newsagent who compared it to the Turkish spoken by people in the Black Sea – not a separate language as such, but with idiosyncratic pronunciations and grammar. He introduced proudly himself as Unal – ‘a totally Turkish name’. He claimed that the ‘modern’ Turkish he and I were speaking was different to what he spoke at home with his family, and which I heard snippets of as he spoke to his daughter on the phone – ‘It is an old Turkish, Ottoman.’ This seemed to me a romantic view – I could discern no archaic words, just an odd pronunciation, but it was interesting that Unal thought he was speaking Ottoman. Remembering Sahovic’s adoration of Erdoğan, I asked him what he thought of Turkish politics.
We are just happy that Turkey is strong at the moment. No doubt if we lived in Turkey we would support some party or other – my relatives live in Izmir, they like the CHP [Turkey’s main opposition party] – but as it is, we just like the fact that Turkey is strong. It’s like supporting Turkey in a football game – you don’t care which club the individual players are from. You just support Turkey.’
His analogy stayed with me: here was a more long-standing feeling of kinship than Sahovic’s frenzied worship of Erdoğan’s brand, and I believe the key to this was language, which produces perhaps a more enduring umbilical cultural connection than religion, at least in Kosovo: Turkish had been spoken here since time immemorial, so a feeling of affinity with Turkey was not so explicitly linked to Islam or politics (although, admittedly, Turkey’s perceived ascendance under Erdoğan’s rule made it more attractive, like a star striker enhancing a national team). Kosovo is, unexpectedly, less politicized than Serbia, in the sense that it is more or less homogenously Muslim, as opposed to a Christian state with a fiercely independent and resentful Muslim minority in the south. In Serbia, Turkey can exploit ethno-religious tensions and promote Turko-Islamic identity in people like Alija Sahovic; in Kosovo, a sense of O
ttoman heritage is well established, without the frenzy of a recent awakening.
A few kilometres outside Prizren I found an even more Turkish enclave: Mamusha (originally ‘Mahmut Pasha’). Essentially an open-air car factory, it is the only ethnic Turk-majority town in Kosovo, and a gate at the entrance of the town welcomes you in Turkish: ‘Hoşgeldiniz’, with Albanian and English signs underneath, almost as afterthoughts. Its streets are lined with car part-replacement stores, garages and kebab houses full of mechanics eating lunch. Unlike in Prizren, I heard no Albanian at all. I also saw no women – a young man I met in the park told me they come out at weddings and bayrams (festivals), and indeed a wedding party passed by as I walked down the main street, cars trailing white and red streamers, horns honking incessantly and women waving shyly from inside the cars.
Clearly, in Mamusha the Erdoğan brand is big, as in southern Serbia, due largely to ties created with Turkey by the mayor, Arif Butuç, who welcomed Erdoğan in 2010 to open the Anatolia’ primary school, and who supported him through the anti-government Gezi Park protests in 2013. The local park is full of benches donated by Keçiören Municipality in Ankara, with ‘Keçiören’ painted on to the wood. It’s as if the town itself has been branded, and the locals are more than happy with that. We are Turks, from long ago,’ a waiter in the Genç Osman (Young Osman’) restaurant told me. I asked him if he felt Kosovan. ‘My heart is Turkish.’
On 23 July, shortly after my visit, the Ottoman Tomato Festival would be celebrated with much pomp and ceremony – ‘flags and drums, there is a big procession’, the young man in the park told me. Turkish vegetable suppliers come and try the tomatoes, then they pick the best ones and order imports. We produce many tonnes of tomatoes.’ An extensive internet search confirmed my suspicions that there was no such Ottoman tradition, which meant that a local trade festival had been retrospectively ‘Ottomanized’ and jazzed up for maximum nationalistic impact.
