Ottoman Odyssey

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

  memleketim,

  memleketim . . .’

  ‘My country, my country, my country,

  I no longer have a cap made in your lands,

  No longer have a shoe that carried your roads,

  My last shirt was long ago shredded on my back,

  It was from şile fabric.

  You are now only in the whites of my hair,

  In the dead tissue of my heart,

  In my forehead lines, my country,

  My country,

  My country ...’

  Nazim Hikmet, died in exile 1963

  Perhaps the inevitable consequence of crossing so many borders for this book was that I began to imagine what preceded them: how people used to say ‘this is our space; that is yours’. As I handed over my increasingly cluttered passport, I thought about people who lack this privilege to cross borders freely, about those who have never left home, those who can never return, and those who identify with an ancestral land they have never seen. What is ‘homeland’ – a place or an idea? The more I travelled, the more powerful and yet obscure I found the emotional connection between geography and identity.

  A memleket was not always marked with passport controls – it was merely where your people happened to be. Before nationality was a part of the public consciousness, Ottomans lived in little pockets of urban or rural life across the vast lands of the empire, and what primarily defined them was their community. Yurt dişinda (‘abroad’) is a phrase in Turkish that means literally ‘outside the yurt [tent]’. The phrase is a throwback to a time when Turkic tribes considered the outside world to be anything outside the confines of their tiny tented community, and when life was nomadic, so that ‘home’ actually moved. In Turkish, the word memleket, from the Arabic (mamlaka), is loosely translated into English as ‘homeland’ but in fact it is untranslatable. Its primary, implicit meaning is Turkey – the shared memleket of most Turkish speakers (hence ‘my country’, in the words of the poet Nazim Hikmet, above). But speaking to a Turk within Turkey, the word transforms into something different: memleketiniz neresi? becomes ‘which part of Turkey are you from?’ – the particular region, town or village. The word adapts to context, zooming in as the focus narrows, but it means, essentially, where your roots are.

  There is a similar word in German: Heimat, which has more negative connotations, at least to those who are conscious of the racist sense with which it was used in 1930s Nazi Germany, when Adolf Hitler popularized the ‘Blood and Soil’ conception of German nationalism. In early 2018, the German government controversially announced it was creating a ‘homeland ministry’ (’Heimatministerium‘), to be headed by a representative of the conservative, anti-immigration Christian Social Union in Bavaria.53 Words matter – the announcement worried those who fear the blurring of the line between patriotism and xenophobia in the age of the refugee crisis, and who look askance at the most visible global role model for a ‘homeland ministry’ – the Department of Homeland Security in the US, notorious for the ferocity with which it guards its borders.

  Patriotism is separated from nationalism by linguistic nuance; it sounds more acceptable, suggesting a “homeland” rather than a nation state. Significantly, English has no equivalent for Heimat or memleket. There is no word to denote that tribal sense of belonging to a particular community located in a particular place, perhaps because of the unique, conglomerate nature of Great Britain and what preceded it. Yet we still try to pinpoint where we think people ‘belong’, picking up on clues like accent and asking new acquaintances questions like ‘Where did you grow up?’ to avoid the less politically correct ‘Where are you from?’. The more specific the question, the more factual and therefore acceptable it is. In English, this quest to locate people’s origins is often surreptitious. In Turkey, the question is asked openly, because it is a much more homogenous society, and there is less concern about offending non-natives – although, as I hope this book has made abundantly clear, no one is a native if you look back far enough.

  Fenced Life

  If no one is a native, who gets to decide where other people should live?

  Europe is connected to the current wars of the Middle East most obviously by the refugee crisis at its borders – the political debate rumbles on, ugly and polarising, as displaced families wait indefinitely. Visiting refugee camps first as a journalist and then while researching this book, I thought about the connection between the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, the nation states that replaced it and the conflict that we are seeing today. I met Sunni Muslims fleeing Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite regime, Christians fleeing Sunni extremists, and other refugees who had abandoned their homes for a variety of reasons, but often because of religious or ethnic divides. The Ottoman system accommodated different religious groups far from perfectly, but there was no mass exodus of minorities from the empire in the way we are seeing in the 21st century Likewise, the population exchange and forced assimilation of minorities at the dawn of the Republic of Turkey was wrong in many ways, and we are seeing the results of that today – but a relatively homogenous society like Turkey is unlikely to see the kind of splintered, sectarian civil war that Syria or Lebanon has experienced.

  When people have lost everything, their basic and most urgent need is to create something approximating a home, however difficult or temporary that may be. The Greek authorities no longer allow journalists inside Moria, the camp on Lesbos, and I saw why when I squeezed through a hole in the fence in November 2017: the camp was built to hold a maximum of 1,800 people and held around 7,000 at the time of my visit. Flimsy two-man tents of the type that Europeans take to summer festivals hold families of six, set up higgledy-piggledy in the middle of paths connecting different sections of the camp. Just outside the camp’s fences, three shanty-cafés provide warm pockets of life preserved inside plastic zip-up walls. Inside, the air is thick with sickly sweet smoke: young men sit on low chairs with legs spread macho-wide, puffing on shisha pipes propped up beside their rickety tables. Each table is reserved for a different group of men, from Yemen, Egypt or Syria, and each has a crackly stereo blaring out their own music so that the space is filled with competing sound. A cocoon of nostalgia, this is the only place approximating home for these men, an illusion of familiarity segregated by region and shared by necessity, with the kind of reluctant community spirit that emerges in adversity.

  Women are notable by their absence, performing domestic tasks in their own approximation of home back in the tents. Some refugees sit in the rain playing musical instruments they have carried thousands of miles, singing songs that others crowd round to hear, whether or not they can understand the words. Turkish is often the broken lingua franca between disparate groups of people who have spent months in limbo on Turkey’s Aegean shoreline, waiting to cross to Europe; unsurprisingly, children are often the most fluent.

  The better-funded asylum centres of Western Europe, the holy grail of people fleeing the overstretched camps in Greece, are in some ways more alien environments to refugees from the Middle East and Africa. The weather is colder, the landscape more unfamiliar, the culture more remote – and the need for familiarity correspondingly more desperate. Take the rickety city-link train from the centre of Amsterdam for thirty minutes and you reach Almere, a suburb town which hosts many of the Netherlands’ asylum seekers in a 1,000-person camp on its outskirts. The identical bedsits in Legolike blocks of red brick set in featureless fields have an atmosphere of impermanence and reluctant schedule, housing a collection of people thrown together for the common purpose of waiting. Around the camp wander Eritreans, Afghans and Iraqis, young mothers pushing prams, slouching adolescents, middle-aged men carrying shopping bags. The ground floors are reserved for men and the first floor for women, two rooms to a unit, two people to a room.

  I visited the Almere camp in 2015 to meet a Syrian doctor called Samer, who showed me into the unit he shared with three other men – an Egyptian, a Yemeni and Christian Syrian from Aleppo. A traditional Ar
ab breakfast was in full swing when I arrived, and I was invited over to join in – flat bread and labneh (strained yoghurt) with fresh mint, zaatar (thyme, sesame seeds and salt) and olive oil were spread over the tiny table. At the time, I wondered where the men managed to find these ingredients; later, I realized that local shops soon learn to stock the refugees’ favourite ingredients. What struck me at the labneh-laden breakfast table was how spick and span everything was in this quasi-Middle Eastern setting, despite the lack of women. In honour of my arrival, a shisha pipe was brought from a nearby unit and ‘top-quality’ apple tobacco proudly produced by the Yemeni man, Maagdi, who translated for me. Word soon spread of a visitor in Block D and at various stages of the interview new faces appeared to take a puff on the pipe and offer their stories to me.

  I learned from these refugees that a sense of home can be reclaimed in the imagination, or in domestic ritual, if not in reality. But as the 21st century becomes both more nationalistic and more fractured, the reclaiming of a collective homeland – real or imagined – becomes harder than ever. We are becoming a world of nomads, obsessed with the nation state.

  Conjugations

  The word memleket has sailed effortlessly into the 21st century despite its old-fashioned brand of nostalgia. It forms a bridge between two people, though they may not share the same memleket, simply when one speaks it and the other understands, because language is perhaps the greatest unifier of all.

  My Turkish friend Nur lives in London, and when we meet, we usually speak in English. Once we met for lunch in a private members’ club in Piccadilly, and sitting at the other tables were white-haired Englishmen tucking into guinea fowl. Instinctively, we started speaking in Turkish, first because it allowed us to freely comment on the oddities of our fellow diners, but also because, in hindsight, we needed a moment of solidarity. Turkish became a spoken form of kinship: the two of us were inhabiting a verbal memleket.

  That lunch made me think of the Turkish proverb Ziya Gökmen quoted to me in his Istanbul office: Bir lisan bir insan – ‘Each language is a person’. When Nur and I spoke Turkish, we were not only creating a sense of home but also slipping into different personas. I am certainly a different person when I speak Turkish. I have a more limited but more hard-wired vocabulary thanks to a childhood spent nattering away to my grandmother. Turkish phrases pop into my head when I am angry or surprised, or when I talk to animals. My sense of humour tends more towards the absurd. Sometimes, only an English phrase or a Turkish phrase will do in a particular context; at those moments, it is a liberating as well as a mildly schizophrenic experience switching between the two languages with another person who can understand both.

  In every country I visited, I saw that language can divide as well as unite people, and in southern Serbia I saw that it can be used as a tool even when it is incomprehensible to the person using it. Alija Sahovic, the Erdoğan fanboy, was a master of linguistic appropriation. He spoke no Turkish, yet derived great satisfaction from the sound of it playing on Turkish state TV all day long: for him, it was a form of Wagnerian music representing a historical legacy that he worshipped. By calling the language he spoke ‘Sandžakian’, he gave it a rarefied Ottoman status despite it being basically the same language spoken by about 20 million others living across Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. Thus, he used both a language he didn’t speak, and one he did, to self-identify as an Ottoman. In the Kosovan village of Mamusha, the men I spoke to in Turkish identified as Turks in a much more instinctive way, and had done since childhood, largely because of a ‘native’ tongue that had been spoken for hundreds of years, hundreds of miles away from the Turkish heart of the empire. In Bulgaria, Anthony Georgieff’s strange Ottoman-era Turkish, absorbed from his grandmother, informed a significant part of his affection for Turkey but also led to him being misunderstood when he travelled there: a full-scale version of the ‘false friend’ British students are warned against when memorising GCSE French vocabulary. In Istanbul, a young Sephardic woman told me that her community was disintegrating partly because Ladino ‘died with our generation’. Because language serves as a powerful tool of identity, when it dies, so does a part of the community that used it.

  I found Turkish words scattered like Ottoman souvenirs across the countries I visited, and this was one of the most striking indications of the empire’s social legacy. Greetings like merhaba, and culinary terms (dolmades and boreki in Greek, findjan and bardak in Hebrew, džezva [coffee pot] in Serbo-Croat) were all relics of the centuries of coexistence of Ottoman subjects, and of an even deeper overlap of Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew in the region. My own name causes confusion; Jews sometimes think I am Israeli because my name sounds like the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet – aleph (alpha in Greek, and other Semitic scripts, also meaning the number one). Arabic words used by Muslims of various ethnic and geographic backgrounds – inshallah, mashallah – also create a sense of shared identity. I am guilty of gratuitous use of these words to ingratiate myself in some of the Muslim communities I met while researching this book. Using them provides an immediate bond, a way of saying ‘I relate to you’.

  Strangely, though, the death of a shared language can also create bonds as well as destroy them. The Afro Turks of the Izmir region are united in mourning the lost African languages spoken by their ancestors that were never passed on to them because of the pressure to assimilate into the Republic. In Jerusalem, seventy-two-year-old George Hintlian revealed the full emotional legacy of a more recently lost language when he told me how much he missed speaking Turkish: ‘Sometimes I speak it to myself, not to forget.’ For him, it represented not the language of oppression associated with those who killed his relatives in the genocide, but the adored home of his parents that he was taught to love from afar. His eagerness to keep hold of it created a bond with me, another Turkish speaker. ‘If you speak the language, you can’t hate the people.’ Cynics will point out that this is easy to disprove in the context of historical conflict, but the sentiment of Hintlian’s observation struck a chord with me, particularly when I thought of my grandmother. In her case, language was much more of a unifying than a divisive force, because her ability to speak Greek was both a consequence of and a contributing factor to her affinity with Greek Cypriots, wherever she found herself. The Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf believes language can carry equal if not greater weight than religion as a marker of cultural identity, and both can be used as divisive forces. In his essay On Identity, he notes that: When two communities speak different languages a common religion is not enough to unite them: take for instance the Catholic Flemings and the Walloons, or the Turkish, Kurdish and Arab Muslims. Nor does a common language ensure that Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslims can coexist in Bosnia-Herzegovina.’54

  While this is true, it would be miraculous if language alone could prevent our hunger for conflict, and Maalouf points out that language, unlike religion, is a necessary component of someone’s identity. ‘If the Israelis are a nation today it is not only because of the religious links, powerful though they are, that bind them together, but also because they have managed to make modern Hebrew into a genuine national language. A person who lived in Israel for forty years without ever going into a synagogue would not thereby exclude himself from the national community. The same could not be said of someone who lived there for forty years without attempting to learn Hebrew.’

  Language can unify, but is that always to the good? In the crumbling years of the Ottoman Empire, the feminist writer Halide Edip helped to carry out a programme of forced assimilation in the Turkification schools’ under the instructions of Cemal Pasha in Beirut in 1916. In these schools, orphaned Armenian children of victims of the genocide were stripped of their Armenian names, given Turkish names and punished if they were heard to speak Armenian rather than the Turkish literally beaten into them. According to Halide Edip and her colleagues, this was all in aid of the ‘unification’ of Ottoman citizens – for the Armenian community,
it was part of the overwhelming tragedy of the genocide and its aftermath. A few years later, in the new Republic of Turkey, language was key to breaking with the country’s Ottoman past. As part of Atatürk’s nation-building, he introduced sweeping, ‘westernizing’ reforms that included an overhaul of the Turkish language. In 1928, he replaced the Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish with the Latin script in which it is written today; the present government has painted this as an act of gross negligence – ‘he made his nation illiterate overnight!’ – but in reality, only around 8 per cent of the population were literate anyway. The new Latin alphabet was introduced on 1 November, as well as the Turkish replacement words for the Arabic and Persian vocabulary which had dominated Ottoman Turkish. Atatürk gave the country only three months to acclimatize to this modernized language. On 1 January 1929, the new Turkish alphabet became obligatory in public communications and the Republic came one step closer to the West – at least for the time being.

  Minced Words

  In February 2018, while walking in the Old Town of Nicosia in Cyprus, just north of the border crossing, I found a hefty, bright orange dictionary in one of the stalls of the old Ottoman caravanserai. Its title was printed in both Turkish and Greek, as were its contents: The Shared Dictionary of Cypriot Turkish and Greek Dialects – a compilation of the words that have spread between the two languages over centuries of mutual use. For me, this was a manifestation of the overlap of culture that often goes unnoticed, the Greek Cypriots not realising that words they use daily are Turkish in origin, and vice versa. The dictionary was more than a dry reference book; it was proof of linguistic bonds forged by coexistence. Much of Cypriot geography has been revised – villages with Greek names in the north have been rebranded with Turkish names (Ipsil – now Sütlüce – in the Karpaz region, for example) or alternative names officially discarded (the village known as Bodamya by Turkish Cypriots is now officially named Potamia, because it lies south of the border), but little can be done about the way the two dialects have merged like vines over centuries of use. Vines are hard to uproot, or disentangle.