Ottoman Odyssey

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I’ve started to feel guilty about contacting my friends in Turkey – any links to a blacklisted person are toxic. The result is a much more intense form of isolation than the physical distance from Turkey, especially when that distance is minimized. Yet what I found in Lesbos was that the view of Ayvalik was a constant reminder that Turkey is more than the sum of its depressing headlines. It was a reminder of the country’s natural beauty and its potential for normality and peace – I could see the same sleepy fishing villages and olive groves as in Lesbos, just across the water.

  ‘The past is a foreign country,’ writes L. P. Hartley in the Go-Between.57 Looking across at the Turkish coastline from Lesbos is like being physically confronted by a memory – it is the recent past, the cruellest distance of all. In Lesbos, I began to consider from a personal perspective the questions I’d started thinking about during my travels: where or what is your homeland? Is it where you were born, where you grew up or where you choose to live? Is it where your ancestors were born? Is it a promised land or a forsaken one? Do you claim it or does it claim you?

  Some question whether it exists at all. In Inhale and Exhale in 1936, the writer William Saroyan, born in California to Ottoman-born Armenians, claims that diasporic identification is more real than geographic identification: ‘There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.’58

  If we believe this, it makes a mockery of those who decide to return to what they imagine to be their ‘homeland’, but I’m not sure I do believe it. There is an interdependence between geography and culture which is strong enough to last millennia, as the Jewish people and their relationship to Israel will testify – whether real or imagined, that relationship shapes people’s identity. Homeland is where the collective heart is, and all the turmoil contained therein – and sometimes, that is a place, not just a concept. In the absence of Turkey, my adult home, I returned to Cyprus, where my earliest memories were formed. Why? I cannot define exactly the emotional connection between geography and identity, but it is there, like a sharp-edged object in the dark. The physical existence of a homeland, the touch and smell of it, has an unexpectedly strong resonance for those whose cannot access it – as Nazim Hikmet found, puffing away on his dwindling stores of Turkish tobacco in exile. Reminders of the physicality of a place bring our past experiences back to life.

  ‘Some Christians took a leaf or a flower or even an insect or a feather or a handful of earth because they wanted something from their native land,’ wrote Louis de Bernières in Birds Without Wings.59

  My grandmother kept a relic of the olive groves she had owned in Cyprus before the war: a large glass jar filled with dried leaves she had collected from the trees just before she left. Occasionally she would take one out and burn it to ward off evil spirits, a superstitious practice repeated frequently enough that, over the course of my childhood, my mother had to collect new leaves on our trips back to the island, to replenish the slowly emptying jar. The brittle feel of the thin, slightly curled leaves was a necessary luxury for my homesick grandmother. The jar also became a kind of totem for me as a child – there was something shamanistic about its contents, little shards of a distant place that my grandmother would destroy, one by one, with great ceremony. As the tip of each leaf smouldered and glowed, a curl of smoke would release its smell, the most evocative sense of all. Over time I realized that, in destroying the leaves, she was in fact keeping her memories of home alive. After my grandmother’s death, my mother has taken to burning them, and I am the one who must replenish the jar.

  Timeline of Countries

  TURKEY

  1299 Ottoman Empire established in Söğüt, north western Anatolia, by the Oghuz tribal leader Osman

  1453 Mehmet II captures Constantinople, defeating Emperor Constantine XI and ending the Byzantine Empire.

  1839–1876 Tanzimat reforms, leading to the short-lived 1876 constitution

  1908 Young Turk Revolution restores constitutional monarchy

  1914–1918 Young Turks side with Germany in WWI

  1919–1922 War of Independence led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha against Greek troops supported by the Allies

  1922 Victory of Turkish forces and Abolition of the Sultanate; Mehmet VI is exiled to Malta

  1923 Republic of Turkey established by Mustafa Kemal Pasha

  1928 Modernisation of the Turkish language and introduction of the Latin script

  1934 Mustafa Kemal Pasha is named ‘Atatürk’ – Father of the Turks – by the Turkish Parliament, which also passes the Surname Law and introduces women’s suffrage

  1955 Istanbul pogrom against religious minorities, leading to a significant exodus, especially of Greeks and Armenians 1960, 1971, 1980 Coups d’état, various

  1989 Application made to join the predecessor of the European Union, the European Economic Community

  2002 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan comes to power in general elections

  GREECE

  1458 Capture of Athens by Ottoman forces

  1579 Cyclades islands officially annexed by the Ottoman Empire having been under vassal status since the 1530s

  1669 Crete ceded to Ottoman control from the Venetians at the end of the Cretan war

  1821 Simultaneous national uprisings in Macedonia, Crete, Cyprus, and the Peloponnese

  1821–1832 Greek War of Independence; Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt fights on behalf of the Ottomans against Greek uprising but is unsuccessful after Russia, Britain and France intervene on the Greek side

  1834 Athens chosen as the capital of the newly independent Greek state

  1920 King Alexander bitten by a pet monkey and dies

  1923 Exchange of minorities between Turkey and Greece

  1939–1945 Greece fights Italy and is partly occupied by Nazi forces

  1946–1949 Greek civil war, fought between the Western-backed government and the Greek Communist Party, won by the government

  1981 Greece becomes tenth member of the European Union

  DODECANESE ISLANDS

  1522 Rhodes falls to Suleiman the Magnificent

  1830 Excluded from the new kingdom of Greece

  1912 Occupied by Italy after the outbreak of the Italian-Turkish war over Libya

  1923 Turkey renounces territorial claims

  1943 Italy surrenders to the Allies

  1943–1945 Germany occupies the islands after defeating the Allies in the Dodecanese campaign, before eventually surrendering to the British in May 1945

  1947 Formally united with Greece as part of the peace treaty with Italy

  CYPRUS

  1570 Passed from Venetian to Ottoman control

  1878 Sultan Abdul Hamid II leases Cyprus to Great Britain in exchange for British support for the Empire

  1914–1925 British protectorate

  1925–1960 British crown colony, growth of Greek and Turkish nationalist movements

  1960 Cyprus achieves independence. Archbishop Makarios III becomes the first president, leading a mixed parliament of Greek and Turkish Cypriots

  1974 Greece-backed coup followed by Turkish invasion of the north, civil war and internal displacement

  1974–present day Island divided between the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and the Republic of Cyprus

  2003 Border opens, island remains divided despite calls for unification

  2004 Republic of Cyprus joins the European Union

  BOSNIA AND HERCEGOVINA

  1463 The kingdom of Bosnia falls to Ottoman control

  1482 The region of Herzegovina falls to Ottoman control

  1566 Mehmet Pasha Sokolovic orders construction of the bridge on the Drina, Visegrad

  1878 Treaty of Berlin hands occupation and administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Austro-Hungarian empire

  1914 Archduke Franz Fe
rdinand assassinated by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Prinkip in Sarajevo, leading to the outbreak of WWI

  1918–1941 Following the defeat and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croat and Slovenes emerges (from 1929 renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia)

  1941–1945 Invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia by Nazi Germany and its allies. Josip Broz Tito leads Communist resistance against the Nazis

  1945–1992 The Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia

  1990 Yugoslav wars break out leading to disintegration of Yugoslavia

  1995 The Bosnian War, fought between Serb, Croat and Bosniak forces Tito dies War ends with the Dayton Agreement, enforced by NATO, and Bosnia and Herzegovina continues as independent state

  SERBIA

  1346 The Serbian Empire established by King Stecan Dušan “The Mighty”; territory included most of the Balkans

  1355 King Stefan Dušan captures Adrianople (modern Edirne)

  1369 Sultan Murad I captures Adrianople and makes it the capital of the Ottoman Empire

  1389–1459 The Ottoman Empire expands into Serbian territory

  1521 Belgrade captured by Suleiman the Magnificent, Christian subjects exported to Constantinople

  1801 Renegade janissaries declare the Sanjak of Smederevo (central Serbia) independent of the Ottomans, and after two Serbian uprisings the semi-independent Principality of Serbia is established in 1817

  1882 Kingdom of Serbia established

  1912 First Balkan War–Ottoman forces defeated by the Balkan League (an alliance of the Kingdoms of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro)

  1941–45 Serbia occupied by Axis forces

  1989 Serbian nationalist Slobodan Miloševič becomes President of Serbia

  KOSOVO

  1389 Ottoman and Serbian armies both annihilated at the Battle of Kosovo. Murad I stabbed to death by a Serbian knight who had pretended to defect

  1455–1912 Kosovo under Ottoman control, until the First Balkan War

  1876–1878 Serbian-Ottoman war; tens of thousands of mainly Albanian Muslims flee from the Serbian province of Niš to Kosovo

  1878 League of Prizren unites Albanians across the Empire in struggle for autonomy

  1912 First Balkan War leads to greater Serbian control; many Albanians leave

  1915–1916 Occupied by Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian forces

  1918 Allied victory grants control back to Serbia

  1941–1945 Occupied by Axis powers (mainly Italian-controlled Albania)

  1945–1989 Tensions between Kosovan Albanians and Yugoslav authorities

  1990 Kosovan Albanians proclaim the Republic of Kosovo

  1990–1999 Kosovan War

  1999 UN Security Council places Kosovo under NATO control

  2008 Kosovo declares independence from Serbia

  BULGARIA

  1393 Second Bulgarian Empire falls to Ottomans after Battle of Nicopolis

  1878 Northern Thrace incorporated into the Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia under the Treaty of San Stefano

  1885 The semi-autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia unites with Bulgaria

  1908 Bulgaria declares itself an independent state

  1912 Defeat in Second Balkan War

  1914–1918 Fights with Central powers against the Allies

  1922 Thrace divided between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey at the end of the Greco-Turkish war.

  1941 Bulgaria sides with Axis powers

  1944 Monarchy abolished

  1946–1989 One party people’s republic

  1989 Collapse of Eastern Blok, exodus of ethnic Turks to Turkey

  2007 Joins European Union

  MACEDONIA

  1395 Ottoman victory at Battle of Rovine establishes the Sanjak of Ohrid

  1392 Ottomans capture Skopje, the capital, and occupy Macedonian territory

  1903 Following a nationalist movement, Macedonian-Bulgarians revolt unsuccessfully against Ottoman rule

  1913 Following Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars, territory of Macedonia annexed by Serbia and named South Serbia

  1915 Bulgaria gains control of Macedonia until end of WWI, when it reverts to Serbian control; Bulgarian books banned, clergy and teachers expelled

  1929 Macedonia forms part of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia

  1941–1945 Occupied by Axis powers

  1963 Renamed the Socialist Republic of Macedonia following renaming of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

  1991 Declares independence and does not participate in the Yugoslavian wars of following decade

  2018 Agreement signed with Greece to change name from the ‘FYRM’ (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) to ‘Republic of North Macedonia’

  ARMENIA

  1639 Western Armenia becomes part of the Ottoman empire after the Ottoman-Persian war

  1829 Russia gains sovereignty of Eastern Armenia in the Treaty of Adrianople following the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–1829

  1917 Russian advance into Western Armenia as part of the Caucasus campaign halted following the Russian revolution

  1918 Caucasus campaign fought between the Ottoman Empire and Russia terminated by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Caucasus campaign between the Ottoman Empire and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia terminated by the Treaty of Batum, which declares the independence of the First Republic of Armenia

  1920 First Republic invaded by both Turkish and Soviet forces

  1922–1990 Armenia under Soviet control

  1991 Armenia declares independence

  LEBANON

  1516 Selim I defeats the Mamukes of Egypt and gains control of Lebanon and Syria (later considered part of Greater Syria)

  1516–1917 Lebanon allowed to operate fiefdoms under feudal system; the Druze and Maronites emerge as most powerful rival sects

  1635 Overambitious local ruler Fakhr-al-Din II executed on the orders of Sultan Murad IV

  1839–1841 Egyptian-Ottoman War; Muhammed Ali Pasha sends his son Ibrahim to occupy Lebanon

  1840 Britain helps Sultan Abdulmejid I regain control of the region; Abdulmejid I appoints the Maronite leader Bashir III as Emir of Mount Lebanon, ushering in a period of sectarian conflict

  1914–1918 Arab nationalist movement crushed by Young Turks

  1916 Execution of twenty-one Arab nationalists in “Martyr Square” in Beirut, ordered by Cemal Pasha

  1918 Ottoman Empire loses Greater Syria along with other territories in WWI defeat. Unofficial French control until mandate established in 1923

  1923–1943 French Mandate of Lebanon

  1926 Lebanese Constitution outlines equal rights for Christians and Muslims

  1943 Independence and establishment of ruling troika

  1948 – present day Conflict with Israel, including Israeli occupation 1982–1985, and 2006 war

  1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War; Syrian occupation

  PALESTINE and ISRAEL

  1516 Selim I gains control of the Greater Syria region

  1880 Jewish immigration from Europe begins as part of the Zionist movement

  1917 Balfour Declaration promises British support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; soon after, British take Jerusalem

  1922 British mandate of Palestine

  1947 After the Holocaust and end of WWII, UN pass resolution to partition Palestine and award Jewish state; civil war follows

  1948 Arab-Israeli War fought between Jordan and newly formed state of Israel

  1967 Six Day War, during which Israel establishes settlements on Palestinian land

  1987–1993 First Palestinian Intifada

  1988 Declaration of State of Palestine

  2000 Second Intifada; Israel builds wall

  Present day Israeli occupation of Palestinian land illegal under international law

  Notes

  Introduction: Sultans Old and New

  1. www.turkiye.gov.tr.

  2. ‘E Devlet soyağaci sorgulama hizmeti ufuk açti!’ Hurriyet, 19
February 2018.

  3. Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, p .86.

  A Historical Note: Classified Infidels

  4. Mansel, Philip (1995). Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire. New York: St Martin’s Press.

  5. ‘The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian periods’ (1996). The Cambridge History of Iran Vol. 3(2), ed. Ehsan Yarshater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  6. Lewis, Bernard (2014). The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.28.

  7. Zubaida, Sami (2015). ‘Sectarianism in Middle East Polities’. Routledge International Handbook of Diversity Studies, ed. Steven Vertovec. Oxford: Routledge. p. 195.

  8. ‘Alevi Dedesinden, Cumhurbaşkani Gül’e 3. Köprü Ricasi’ Haberler, 24 July 2013.

  9. Zachs, Fruma and Bawardi, Basilius (2005). ‘Ottomanism and Syrian Patriotism in Salim al-Bustani’s Thought’. Ottoman Reform and Muslim Regeneration, ed. Itzchak Weismann and Fruma Zachs. New York: St Martin’s Press, p.114.

  10. ‘Nation and tribe the winners’ Economist, 22 April 1999.

  Turkey: Heart of the empire

  11. ‘Gezi Parki’nin yani başindaki Ermeni mezarliği’ Agos, 26 August 2011.

  12. The Cambridge History of Turkey Vol 2, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power 1453–1603’. ed. Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (2013). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.379.

  13. Seyahatname extract (VI 48a34) in Dankoff, Robert (2004). An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Celebi. Boston: Brill.

  14. Seyahatname extract (123) in Dankoff. An Ottoman Mentality.

  15. ‘Lady Montagu and the introduction of inoculation’ Wellcome Library blog, 25 May 2016

  16. Taken from a letter from Lady Mary Montagu, Pera, 16 March 1717, to Lady Rich. The Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, (1825) London: J. F. Dove.

  17. Mazower, Mark (2005). Salonica: City of Ghosts. London: Harper Collins, p.II.

  18. Al-Sabouni, Marwa (2016). The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect. London: Thames and Hudson, p.31.

  19. Ibid. p. 67

  20. ‘Mardin’de kilise Diyanet’e devredildi’ Sözcü, 24 June 2017.

  21. Maalouf, Amin (2000). Balthasar’s Odyssey. New York: Arcade Publishing. p.226.

 

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