by David Jacobs
The Russo-Turkish War gave Abdul Hamid II the excuse to suspend the new constitution, which remained suspended for the rest of the century. The sultan ruled with an iron fist, sending spies into all places where men gathered, and exiling and executing thousands of suspected and actual rebels. The more he repressed them, the faster the secret societies grew, especially in Istanbul. The most effective and best-organized society was the Committee of Union and Progress, known as the Young Turks.
In 1908, the Young Turks staged a rebellion with the help of an army of Turkish subjects from Thessalonica. As the army positioned itself around Istanbul, their spokesmen demanded restoration of the constitution of 1876. Abdul Hamid agreed. They held elections and established a constitutional government. But when the Thessalonicans went home in 1909, the sultan attempted a counterrevolution. The army returned quickly to Istanbul and forced Abdul Hamid II into exile. His brother Mehmet V ascended the throne in 1909, but the Young Turks made it clear that he would only be a figurehead. Through their National Assembly, they would be in charge.
The Young Turk Revolution essentially ended the reign of the Ottoman sultans. It might have been a good revolution because its leaders were well-educated, liberal, and quite anxious to have Turkey join in the progress of the technology-minded West. But it was not to be. Certain events and several centuries of inept leadership kept them from being successful.
First there were the Balkan wars of 1912-13. During these conflicts, the empire’s former Greek and Bulgarian subjects seized much of the Ottoman’s remaining territory in Europe. Then came World War I itself. Among European nations, Germany had given the most aid to Turkey. It had financed a railroad across Anatolia; it had sent officers to train Turkish soldiers; and it had provided loans and advice to the Young Turk leaders. Understandably, the Turks allied themselves with Germany in the war. Although they fought fiercely and well, the ultimate defeat of the Central Powers meant the defeat of the Turks.
After the war, the Allies occupied Istanbul. The Turks could retain their sultan - Mehmet VI, who inherited the throne in 1918 - but the Ottoman Empire virtually no longer existed. The Young Turks assembled in Anatolia, which the Greeks invaded in 1920. Mustafa Kemal, one of the most successful Turkish generals during the war (although he had opposed Turkish participation in it), met with a group of friends and former Young Turks in the city of Ankara and formed a National Assembly. Then, under its authority, he rode from village to village stirring up the Turkish population and mobilizing Turkish veterans to resist the Greek assault. It promptly became clear to the Allies that the sultan’s Istanbul government was powerless to deal with the Anatolian Turks. Moreover, when the Turks drove the Greeks from Anatolia in 1922 (and, in fact, defeated them in a number of engagements in the south and west of Asia Minor), the Allies decided to recognize the independence of the Turkish nation.
When the Allies invited both the sultan and Kemal to attend the peace conference at Lausanne, they ensured the end of the monarchy. The Greek war had demonstrated the impossibility of a coalition between the sultan in Istanbul and the assembly in Ankara.
Actually, no one was absolutely sure when the final schism came. There were men in the Assembly who wanted to found a constitutional monarchy. There were others led by Kemal who wanted to eliminate everything old and start anew. But even Kemal hesitated because he did not want to make a martyr of Mehmet VI.
In Istanbul, the sultan did not know what to think. The secret police of the nationalists had a firm grip on the city, and they made daily arrests that included some of the sultan’s friends. The sultan did not even know whether the police were arresting these people because they were loyal to the sultan or because they opposed the Assembly. All he knew was that his staff was deserting him, his capital was a terrified city, and he needed protection.
The British said it was their policy not to take sides in the internal affairs of Turkey but they would protect the sultan’s life if necessary. Nevertheless, the Allies decided the fate of the monarchy when they asked both Mehmet VI and Kemal, a representative of the National Assembly, to attend the peace conference. This insulted all but the most devoted monarchists. After all, the sultan had surrendered to the Allies. He had endured quietly the occupation of his capital and had done nothing to defend Anatolia. In contrast, the National Assembly had formed a new nationalist government. It had been the army of Mustafa Kemal that had driven the Greeks from Turkish soil, won the admiration of the Allies, and earned the coming peace treaty.
While in Ankara, the National Assembly was officially eliminating the sultanate and establishing the Turkish Republic, the sultan in Istanbul packed his trunks with jewels, revolvers, and other valuables and departed in a British ambulance. A British naval launch ushered his entourage, which included his son, his first chamberlain, a bandmaster, his doctor, two secretaries, a valet, a barber, and two eunuchs, to the battleship HMS Malaya, which set sail for Malta, then to San Remo, where a villa was waiting for him. A month later, one of the eunuchs returned to Istanbul to arrange for the transport of the sultan’s five wives and numerous children.
The Assembly was not disturbed by the sultan’s departure because now it would not have to create any martyrs.
In October 1923, the allied occupation ended, and the Turkish Republic was born. Kemal was its first president. Later the Assembly would proclaim him “Atatürk” - “Father of Turks.” Ankara was his capital.
Even though Istanbul no longer was the capital of anything, the reforms of Atatürk still greatly affected it. While trying to push Turkey forward into the twentieth century, Kemal established an electoral dictatorship and ruthlessly pressed for his reforms. Although Kemal was vain, immoral, and brutal to his enemies, he enacted official measures that tried to improve the lives of the Turkish people. Unlike most dictators of his time - he was a contemporary of Mussolini and Hitler - he had no desire for expansion but concentrated his efforts on solidifying a compact, realistically defined state. He declared all Turks equal, guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, and travel, and separated the activities of church and state.
It probably was this last measure that created the greatest change in Turkey. Because Atatürk felt that Islam was suppressing his people, he eliminated those religious restraints from government. In 1926, he replaced the Muslim code that had served as law with a new civil code based on Swiss law. This code outlawed polygamy; adopted the Western calendar; replaced Friday as the day of rest with Sunday; and outlawed religious apparel and the fez in favor of Western dress. In 1928, the Latin alphabet replaced the difficult Arabic script.
To try to eliminate class distinctions among his people, Kemal built thousands of secular schools that were available for all children. He erected adult education centers in every town to combat illiteracy; old and young alike learned practices of good nutrition and healthful exercise.
Kemal was wise to remove his capital from Istanbul. The old city on the Golden Horn had too many symbolic reminders of past glories and past tragedies. He wanted a fresh start that wouldn’t tempt him or a successor to reseek the glory that was Rome, Byzantium, or the Ottoman Empire.
Istanbul remains an international city, old and new, Eastern and Western, religious and secular. Appropriately, Hagia Sophia is neither church nor mosque. It is now a museum that does not belong to a particular faith. Many other important old buildings share this designation.
But Istanbul is not itself a museum. It is a vital, vibrant, important city, the nation’s financial center and major port, the largest city in Turkey and the most cosmopolitan. Today, as centuries ago, Istanbul University remains a point of assembly for students from throughout the Near East. Open-air restaurants, familiar in the city since before the days of Justinian II, still are popular and probably more crowded than ever. Peddlers still sing about their wares in the streets, their commercial songs occasionally contrasting with the chanted prayers of Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Ancient bazaars do a brisk business - thanks to a substant
ial tourist trade, which centers around the city’s splendid international hotels.
Many of the walls encircling the old city have disappeared. As a result, the distinction between city and suburbs is somewhat blurred. Galata and the old Asian site of Chalcedon now belong more integrally to Greater Istanbul. The Galata Bridge spanning the Golden Horn is crowded at rush hours with pedestrians in Western-style attire. Beneath the approaches to the bridge are countless shops and the dock for the ferryboats that cross the Bosporus and unite the Asian and European sections of the city. As accustomed to water-travel as many Westerners are to bus, subway, and automobile travel, commuters have ample opportunity to purchase fresh fish for dinner on their way home. Bosporus fishermen bring their boats right up onto the shore of the Golden Horn and peddle their day’s catch.
The hills of Istanbul afford splendid views of the intertwining waterways below. Narrow, rectangular, earthen-colored houses of three and four stories are clustered along narrow streets on the hillsides, their squareness contrasting with the gentle curves of the city’s hundreds of domed edifices. From almost any point in Istanbul, one can see a church or a mosque or two, and minarets and crosses rise above the skyline.
Suburban homes, parks, and inns line the Bosporus. In the Thracian outskirts, several age-old cemeteries remain, where the dead of thousands of years of history rest. History, indeed, is all around. Sections of walls survive, and ancient gates remind residents and tourists of scores of armies from many epochs, marching behind the standards of Caesar, Christ, and Mohammed, singing and chanting in Greek, Latin, or Turkish.
For here in these hills - possibly more often than in any other place on earth - worlds met to either blend or clash. Through these hills, West reached East and East headed West. From these hill’s, civilizations radiated. In a symbolic way, Istanbul remains, like Constantinople and Byzantium before it, the city at the center of the world. Below these hills, within sight of them, ships from everywhere still come and go, their many flags rippling in the breeze of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn.
Blue Mosque
Blue Mosque
Galata Tower
Grand Bazaar
Ancient walls of Istanbul
Basilica Cistern
Basilica Cistern
Fountain of Ahmed III
Dolmabahce Palace
Dolmabahce Palace
Kocuksu Palace
Topkapi Palace
Hall of the Sultan, Topkapi Palace
Istanbul Archeology Museum
Istanbul Archeology Museum
Hagia Sophia
Fall of Constantinople
Fall of Constantinople
Fall of Constantinople
Fall of Constantinople
Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great (Doubleday, 1949).
Charles Diehl, Byzantium: Greatness and Decline (Rutgers, 1957).
Glanville Downey, Constantinople in the Age of Justinian (Oklahoma, 1960).
Martin Hürlimann, İstanbul (Thames and Hudson, 1958).
Lord Kinross, Ataturk (Morrow, 1965).
Robert B. Merriman, Suleiman the Magnificent (Cooper Square, 1966).
George Ostrogorsky, George, History of the Byzantine State (Rutgers, 1957).
Philips Price, A History of Turkey (Macmillan, 1956).
David T. Rice, The Byzantines (Praeger, 1962).
David T. Rice, Constantinople (Stein and Day, 1965).
Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople (Cambridge, 1965).
Speros Vryonis Jr., Byzantium and Europe (Harcourt, 1967)
Chairwoman, CEO, and Publisher
Donna Carpenter LeBaron
Chief Financial Officer
Cindy Butler Sammons
Managing Editors
Molly Jones and C. David Sammons
Art Director
Matthew Pollock
Senior Editors
Hank Gilman, Ruth Hlavacek, Paul Keegan,
Larry Martz, William Souder, Sebastian Stuart
Associate Editors
Betty Bruner, Donald Detore, David Harpster,
Robert W. McCune, Val Pendergrast, Susan Peyton
President Emeritus
Helen Rees
Chairwoman Emeritus
Juanita C. Sammons
Published by New Word City LLC, 2015
www.NewWordCity.com
© American Heritage
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61230-926-2
