by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
At this point in my travels, I made a realization: nouveau-Ottomanism is not purely a construct of Erdoğan’s, or the AKP’s. Muslims in the Balkans are aware of their Ottoman heritage and already identify with Turkey – there is a ghost empire here ripe for the taking and it just needs to be brought to life. There is no actual continuum between the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey’s power in the region, and other countries (Russia in particular) could claim former domination, but Turkey seems to be the country most aggressively courting influence – not always unchallenged. In 2012, Macedonia’s Information and Society Minister announced that the broadcasting of Turkish soap operas would be reduced on national channels because Macedonia’s own shows were being pushed past midnight as Turkey hogged the prime-time slots. To remain under Turkish rule for five hundred years is quite enough,’ he semi-joked.
Kosovo is a good example of Turkey swooping in for the spoils of recent war; Erdoğan was one of the first world leaders to congratulate the newly declared independent state in 2008, nearly a decade after the 1999 war of independence. In October 2013, he visited Prizren and announced with characteristic paternalism that ‘we all belong to a common history, common culture and common civilization; we are the people who are brethren of that structure. Do not forget, Turkey is Kosovo, and Kosovo is Turkey!’ The Serbian government furiously called his statement a ‘direct provocation’. Some Kosovo-based Albanian language newspapers are also not fans of Turkish quasi-intervention in the country; in 2015, a Prishtina-based newspaper claimed that Erdoğan’s business associates laundered money by building mosques in Kosovo tax-free via TIKA, which had restored at least thirty religious Ottoman structures in four years – if true, this conjures up a kind of mosque-building mafia empire.
Turkey has competition in the form of Saudi Arabia, particularly in Macedonia. In 2010, the Sunday Times reported on a Macedonian investigation into a network of extremist imams and Islamic terror cells allegedly funded by Saudi money; this was echoed by a Bulgarian journalist I met later in Sofia who told me that many ordinary Macedonian locals no longer go to mosques because of the extremist rhetoric preached by the new Saudi-funded imams – You can always tell the Saudi-built mosques’ (something that is also true for some of the mosques around Sarajevo). Turkey’s relatively moderate form of Islam seems to have been more naturally absorbed in the Balkan region; the fall-out between Turkey and Saudi Arabia over the Qatar crisis in 2017 intensified the proxy Islamic Balkan war that has been playing out since the 1990s.
From Kosovo, I went south to what was still then the Republic of Macedonia – in June 2018, an accord was signed to change its name to the ‘Republic of North Macedonia’, solving a thirty-year dispute with Greece over their respective claims to Macedonian ethnic and territorial identity. Unlike much of the Balkans, where the countryside is dominated either by Muslim or Christian villages, Macedonia is dotted with churches and mosques in quick succession. The country felt almost Soviet, with street signs in Cyrillic, and socialist-style housing blocks even in the villages. On the banks of Lake Ohrid, hotels built in the 1960s reminded me of abandoned Soviet holiday homes on the banks of Lake Sary-Chelek in Kyr-gyzstan, Central Asia – one of the other limited holiday destinations for Russians during the Cold War. The Ottoman past life of Ohrid itself, a town described by tourist operators as the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’, is obvious in its distinctive white houses with black-edged, jutting windows next to the remaining Byzantine churches. The overwhelming air is of a once-magical town gone to seedy tourism.
Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, was conquered by the Ottomans in 1392 and remained under its control until 1912, when Macedonia joined the Balkan League in fighting for independence from the empire. After a massive municipal splurge in 2013 (207 million euros according to official sources, around twice that amount according to opposition figures), the visible narrative of the city is hideously ugly; some inexplicable bronze horses burst upwards out of a fake fountain, and gargantuan statues of Alexander the Great alongside Balkan nationalist heroes like Gotse Delchev and Pavel Shatev, who led rebellions against the Ottomans at the turn of the 20th century, dominate the centre. In fact, only pre-Christian and Christian leaders from Macedonia’s past have earned their bronze form in Skopje’s centre, with a strange gap coinciding with the 500-year period of Ottoman rule.
Despite the public denial of its Ottoman past, Skopje’s social Ottoman legacy is strong, like Prizren’s. Around 10 per cent of the community are ethnic Turks, concentrated on the eastern bank of the River Vardar, and even non-Turks speak the language brokenly. The signs on mosques are in Turkish, as is random graffiti – ‘Özlem [a girl’s name], I’m so sorry’, declared one anguished love-struck message scrawled on a garage door. A short way away from the old bazaar, I found surprisingly peaceful little tea gardens with old men sitting and chatting in Turkish over glasses of tea. In the bazaar itself, now given up almost entirely to tourists (many of them Turkish), I passed one baklava shop with an enormous faded poster of Erdoğan’s relatively youthful face called Turkish Angela Merkel Baklava’ – presumably established in the height of the politico-romance between the two leaders circa 2011 (and sadly lapsed since then), and noticed the lira-Macedonian denar exchange rate displayed prominently at the top of the bureaux de change. Skopje’s architectural narrative may say one thing, but the reality of tourism is perhaps more eloquent – Turkey still has more than a foothold in a country it ruled for 500 years.
Minarets and Muftis
Bulgaria felt the most Soviet of all the Balkan states I passed through, and the most Christian; almost all the country’s mosques were destroyed during the Russian-Ottoman war in 1878. To avoid the wrath of Muslim Bulgarians, Russians went about this destruction with an impressive level of subterfuge: they planted dynamite in the minarets of seven mosques and waited for a stormy night in December to set them off, later blaming lightning. Sofia is the accidental capital. It was chosen after it was liberated from Ottoman rule by the Russians in 1878, a modest town of 12,000 people, on the basis that it would also be the capital of Macedonia; as 20th-century history played out, however, and Macedonia achieved its own state, it lies not in the centre of Bulgaria but towards the edge, across the border from Serbia.
Bulgaria has the highest number of indigenous Muslims in the EU – around 1 million, or 15 per cent of the population: 75 per cent of them are ethnic Turks, the remainder Roma and Pomak, a Slavic ethnicity which converted to Islam during Ottoman rule and remain a very distinct, traditionally dressed and self-sufficient community. Despite the high number of Muslims, there is only one functioning mosque in Sofia, the russet-coloured, modest Banya Bashi Mosque, built by the great Mimar Sinan in 1576. Most Bulgarian Muslims (who are usually classified as ‘Turks’, regardless of whether they are ethnic Turks or not – an Ottoman throwback) live outside Sofia, where they feel more welcome – recent reactions to the refugee crisis have led to unprecedented levels of Islamophobia, as I was to find out.
A hundred metres away from the Banya Bashi Mosque is the city’s only functioning synagogue, built in 1909 at the very end of Ottoman rule; it is strikingly beautiful, almost art deco. Just inside the hall is a wedding tent, and on the walls are commemorative plaques of deceased members of the congregation and boards of donors’ names for a recent renovation project. The Bulgarian journalist Anthony Georgieff took me here; a prolific author, and the former editor of Bulgarian Playboy, he has amassed a huge amount of knowledge about Balkan history. As we walked to dinner, he kept stopping to point out items of interest – ‘Look! Here are the fountains where residents can get mineral water for free – so healthy, the Germans would love this’ – ‘Ah, there is the house of the last Ashkenazi rabbi of Sofia, most Jews here are Sephardic of course.’
We went to a restaurant near Georgieff’s house, where he insisted we sample several versions of the local spirit, rakia, made variously of apricot, figs and quince. Suitably fortified, he told me the story of the ethnic Turks of Bu
lgaria, in particular about the intensified anti-Turkish feelings during the Communist era. In 1986, when Bulgaria was under Soviet control, authorities, worried by the high birth rate of the 10 per cent Turkish demographic, decided that they should be Christianized and forced to assimilate, and part of that involved the imposition of Christian names – Mustafa became Michael overnight, whether he liked it or not.
‘But no one knew this was happening. The American Embassy found out only when their [Turkish] driver informed them his name had been changed.’
The atmosphere worsened, and in 1988, a thinly disguised Soviet propaganda film was released, Time of Violence, which the Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassabova describes in her book Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe:
‘Time of Violence [was] the must-see event of the season and, bafflingly, remains Bulgaria’s favourite film to this day, indicating a neurotic fixation on a doctored version of the distant past, the kind of fixation that drove murderous nationalists next door in Yugoslavia.’42
This ‘doctored version of the distant past’ echoes what the Bosnia-Herzegovinian historian Edin Hajdarpasic calls the ‘authentic fantasy’ of Ottoman oppression in the Balkan region.
‘It was a fictionalized portrait of the Islamization of the Rhodope region in the seventeenth century, complete with the country’s finest actors, soulful music, and impalement scenes to haunt your lifelong nightmares. Its message was as simple as the production was sumptuous, and the message was: the good guys (Christian Bulgarians) were quietly heroic and their women were pure. The bad guys (the Turks) were sadists with shaven heads whose women signalled their moral turpitude by eating baklava. The main villain was a janissary, once taken from the same Christian village he was now converting by fire and sword. People gobbled it up with a masochistic relish, and collective self-pity lubricated the exodus of the ethnic Turks.’43
This exodus came in 1989, only months before the end of the Cold War, and was carefully PR-managed: Bulgarian-born Turks were ‘allowed’ to return to Turkey (and indeed, were invited to do so by the Turkish government at the time, who immediately handed them passports) but Georgieff says that, in reality, many were expelled by the Bulgarian authorities.
‘Secret police told them they had twenty-four hours to move out – these poor people left with only what they could carry across the border. My German wife at the time was travelling near the border and saw these refugees and thought they were traders, they had carts full of bits of furniture, and most didn’t have horses so they pulled the cart themselves. No one [outside Bulgaria] knew what was going on.’
Some of these Bulgarian Turks returned in due course because life in Turkey was too hard. They couldn’t integrate. For example, they spoke a kind of Ottoman Turkish, not modern Turkish.’
Georgieff, a Bulgarian of relatively typical heritage, can understand Turkish thanks to a childhood spent chatting to his grandmother. ‘Like almost everyone else in Bulgaria at the time, my grandmother had many friends and neighbours all of whom spoke their languages, including Turkish. Language purity was not – and still is not – a Balkan virtue.’ At this point in our dinner, he had relaxed and started telling me about his travels in Turkey, a country he loves.
‘I can make myself understood, but my limited vocabulary of Bulgarian Ottoman-style Turkish can lead to some unfortunate incidents. I was in a restaurant, and every time the waiter brought something I said "aşk olsun" – in Bulgarian Turkish, that just means “how lovely”. But the waiter kept taking the dish away!’ I tell him that in modern Turkish, the expression is one of emphatic disagreement. Yes, a man on a table next to me told me that, so finally I could eat.’ Later, to further illustrate his point about language, he sent me a trailer for Game of Thrones made by Bulgarian fans who, in his words, ‘wanted to make fun of the kind of bogus Turkish Bulgarians think is actual Turkish’. I could understand less than half of it.
Before we parted, Georgieff’s buoyant mood deflated as he described the increase in Islamophobia in Bulgaria in the wake of the refugee crisis, and the ‘extreme nationalist’ government of the last few years. ‘The deputy Grand Mufti of Bulgaria was beaten up with his wife and daughters the other day. It is disgraceful – this country is a house of straw, it just needs a match to set it alight.’
I asked if the deputy Grand Mufti was an ethnic Turk. Yes. His name is Birali Birali. You want to interview him? Here’s his number.’
Birali Birali (the name is particularly comic to a Turkish ear) is a very busy man – luckily, he had a spare half-hour between meetings to see me the following day, so I went to his office near the mosque. He welcomed me with a gentle inclination of the head – no shaking hands with a strange woman. To my surprise, his office was full of Dali-esque paintings, featuring strange objects half-sunk in sand, and when I remarked on them he smiled – ‘I love art,’ then pointed to himself: ‘Bir Dali!’ It took me a moment to realize the holy man was making an unexpected pun on his own name, and claiming authorship of these artworks, or so it seemed. Swallowing my surprise, I got to business: why the recent increase in Islamophobia in Bulgaria?
‘There is fear in some parts of Bulgaria, a restlessness. They say we Muslims will bring sharia law, that we will become radicalized. They have made a building [of Islamophobia] on the foundations built in the Communist era. They learn in school how the Ottomans oppressed them for five hundred years, there is a sense of resentment towards the Muslims, the heirs to the Ottomans, supposedly.
‘Then, of course, there are the refugees coming in, and sadly there is propaganda in the news, plus news of ISIS and so on – these ideas are thrown around and Bulgarians start thinking, “Will our Muslims become radicalized?” Vigilante groups are rounding up refugees at the border with Turkey. Generally, in this country we get on very well with Christians, but in Sofia in particular it has got very bad.’
Birali experienced this first-hand a few weeks before our interview, when his headscarf-wearing daughters and wife were attacked by a group of teenage girls in the street as he parked their car nearby.
‘My daughters tried to protect my wife, so they got beaten badly. When I caught up I tried to protect them, I was also beaten – here,’ he showed his arm, ‘bruises all along my arm. But the media said my daughters lied – that in fact they started the fight. This is really the bit that hurt us. My daughters are very traumatized by this; perhaps they would have got over the attack itself but really, when someone accuses you of lying ...’ His voice trails off.
He believed his family were attacked simply for being visibly Muslim – the teenagers did not know of his position of deputy Grand Mufti. In 2011, outside the mosque at Friday prayers, far-right Bulgarians burned the prayer mats of worshippers. Georgieff had told me about this incident; he had been present with the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, and when the attack started, they had run off to take refuge in the synagogue nearby.
As with the Turkish community in Serbia and Kosovo, I felt compelled to ask Birali what he and his congregation thought of Turkey’s ruling AKP, and Erdoğan. His answer was circumspect.
‘In general, the Turks in Bulgaria feel close to Turkey – we receive a lot of support, for example for our schools. So we support Turkey in turn.’ As I thought.
In March 2017, the Bulgarian government cancelled a previous agreement with the Turkish government which had allowed it to pay the salary of imams in Bulgaria via the Diyanet (Turkey’s religious body). The reason was that Turkey’s government was seen to interfere in Bulgaria’s snap parliamentary election on 26 March, encouraging Bulgarian Turks to vote for Muslim candidates.
As it happened, I had been in southern Bulgaria in March that year, at the time of an incident when Bulgarian border guards turned away busloads of Turks, based in Turkey but with Bulgarian citizenship granted to them in 1989, who had been bussed in to vote for AKP-sanctioned Bulgarian candidates. This was also in the lead-up to the referendum in Turkey, in April 2017, in which Turks narrowly voted for President Er
doğan to gain executive powers, amid accusations of vote-rigging. I had crossed into the country from Greece, at the Makaza checkpoint. There had been an immediate change in the landscape, from the rolling, grassy hills of Northern Greece to more dramatic forested hills dotted with rather bleak-looking villages, and a darkening horizon as a thunderstorm rolled in. By the time I got to my destination, the 600-year-old wooden ‘Yedi Kizlar mosque near the village of Podkova, the rain was torrential and flashes of lightning cracked out of the sky. Looking up at the wooden minaret of the mosque as I sat in my car in the rain, it seemed incredible that it had withstood six centuries of thunderstorms and lightning bolts – I hoped it would survive one more.
The Yedi Kizlar or ‘Seven Girls’ Mosque is an object of religious-touristic pilgrimage for Turks today, its Facebook page alive with selfies. Its little cemetery has seven gravestones to represent the seven girls who, in legend, built the mosque, preferring to perish through hard labour rather than marry, and whose spirits are said to haunt the mosque even today. Most tombstones in formerly Communist Bulgaria have neither crosses nor the Bektashi turban-tops present in most Ottoman-era cemeteries throughout the Balkans, so the presence of the Bektashi tombstones alerts you to an emphatically Turkish village such as Podkova, which is easily the most depressing place I’ve ever been.
After my rain-soaked and slightly spooky mosque trip I needed food and friendly faces, and in Podkova I found neither; as I drove through the village I noticed an emaciated cow eating from a skip. The signs were not good, and sure enough, I had a futile search for food before finally discovering a shop whose owner would sell me bread and sucuk (a typically Turkish beef sausage, such as the one I bought from Elhan in Serbia in return for his translation services). At the back of the shop was a smoky enclosed terrace in which several Slavic-looking, middle-aged, ethnic Turkish men were discussing the upcoming referendum in Turkey, which was to decide whether Turkey should switch from a parliamentary to a presidential system to solidify President Erdoğan’s power. The men fell silent and stared as I sat near them; as in Mamusha, Kosovo, I had not seen another woman in public. After an excruciatingly long time they looked away and picked up the conversation again.
