#turks vs greeks

[babygirlificationn]

This man is ruining my life.

[gemsofgreece]

the other day someone told me that greece was actually turkish and that greece stole all turkish food from them and i am shaken to the core and still quite confused ahahahahahahahahah

Oh I have the meme for this

Having said that, Turkish and Greek cuisine also share numerous elements with Balkan and Middle Eastern and Arabic cuisines so it’s not at all an only Turkey vs Greece in fact.

In general the cuisine of this region comes from the Ottoman Empire which simply made modifications over the Byzantine Empire’s cuisine. The specific locality of each dish is usually not known because all these different peoples lived in the same empires and dishes were getting popularised within their broad borders. Most ingredients Turks use are indigenous in the Mediterranean and although they certainly like to think that, it is a little unlikely that they came last in the region only to teach Greeks, Arabs and Slavs entirely how to eat, because apparently we all ate cardboard before the Turks came. Thanks for the rice and coffee tho

It is always beneficial to us how Ancient and Byzantine Greeks recorded all but their daily dookie size, because there is knowledge available. I think you will like this series of three posts about the History of the Greek cuisine. I have added the first part, in which you will also find the links to the second and third part.

[thisandthat-whatever]

Dutch vs German…. so refreshing to see other countries fight in the comments for a change. 😂 I have been sick of the Greeks vs Turks arguments over and over again.

[santaniegos]

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[thereteller]

Turks and Romans around ~1000 - 1100 AD according to Byzantine Empire of the time. In the ages of Roman Empire and/or Eastern Roman Empire also known as Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, self-describing of Byzantine Greeks was “Romans (Romaioi)” instead of “Greeks (Ellines)”.

To the Romans and/or Eastern Romans (Byzantines), after diplomatically, commercially and militarily being in contact with the Khaganate of Tourkoi (Turks) who were formerly known as Skythikoi (Scythians), now known as Tourkoi (Turks, i.e. Turkish Khaganate, also Gök-Türk Khaganate or Turkic Khaganate), thus the ethnonym Skythikoi was used together with Tourkoi as cognates, and slowly replaced its usage completely to Tourkoi in time. Those Turkophone groups included tribes such as Huns, i.e. those who originally bore the ethnonym Hun, popularly and falsely known as “Hun elites”, should be called as “Huns” only, thus excluding their non-Hunnic allies who are Indo-European or Uralic speakers who cannot be counted as Hun and/or Hunnic or Hunnish. After the dissolution of the Khaganate of Tourkoi (Turkish or Turkic Khaganate), Turkophone tribes who arrived around boundaries of Byzantines and raided towards Europe and Iran (and/or Persia) and also directly towards the realm of the Byzantine Empire such as Anatolia and Balkans, continued to be called Tourkoi besides aging usage of Skythikoi. One of the examples that Romaioi used both Skythikoi and Tourkoi together commonly for collective Turkophone tribes is the name of a prominent unit they used in their military ranks called “Skythikon (Scythian)” which only made up of strong warlike cavalry of Turkophone tribes such as Pechenegs, Cumans, Bulgars etc. Prominent Turkophone tribes who remained around Europe after the dissolution of Hunnic Confederation without losing their identity such as Ogurs (Oghurs, Oğurs, Onogurs, Uturgurs, Kuturgurs, Saragurs, Altzikurs) and Agacheri (meaning in the language of Turks: “woodman, woodmen”; Akatziri in Huns, Agathyrsi in Scythians) were also called Tourkoi and their realm was called Tourkia. For example, the realm of Onogurs was called Western Tourkia even after the arrival and domination of Turk-identified Uralo-Turks called “Magyars” who were led by other Ogur Turks of Arpad together with the Turkophone Kabars who lost the Khazar Civil War, in the Ogur Turk ruling Confederation of Onoguria (Onoguria > Ungaria > Hungary) until around 1300s, thus the Kingdom of Hungary was always called “Tourkia (Turkey)”, or “Western Tourkia” in contrast to “Eastern Tourkia” also known as Khazaria, a khaganate established by an Oğur or Oğuz tribe called “Khazar” (the Turkish Khaganate called them “Sabar”, a Turkophone tribe which was also allied with Huns, also known as “Sabir”), which was established soon after the dissolution of the Turkish Khaganate. Before the arrival of Onogurs in the Pannonian plains and causing Byzantines to call their realm “Onoguria” or “Ungaria (Hungary)”; they were living around a region called Etelköz, probably north of the peninsula of Taurica around modern-day Kyiv (Kiev), the land they will arrive was ruled by the Avars, another Turkophone tribe that lost a great war against the Turkish Khaganate and fled into the Pannonian plains, defeating the Germanic Gepids. They had Turkish-named khagans like Bayan, and their realm was called “Avaria” by the Byzantines, and they were sometimes called “Varchonites” which is the unification of the ethnonyms Avar and Hun, thus Varchonites > Avarhuns, Byzantines also called them “descendants of Huns”. Khagan of Tourkia sent diplomats to demand the withdraw of the Eastern Roman recognition of Avar rule in the Pannonian plains and a joint Turkish-Byzantine offensive towards the realm of Avar tribe, self-described as “Avar Khaganate”.

Also other Turkish tribes such as Pechenegs, Oghuz (Oguz and Ogur tribes were the biggest and the main body of all Turkophone tribes, all other Turkophone tribes anciently split off from this great tribe in early times. Oguz or Ogur means “the tribes” or “the people”. The Tribe or “Oguz/Ogur” constitued the greatest and most populous tribes or tribal unions of the Turks in history), Cumans (or Kipchaks), and a prominent dynasty or clan from the Oghuz tribe called Selchuk who founded the Seljuk Empire, controlled and conquered nearly all of Anatolian peninsula after conquering Iran (Persia), and also other statelets of Oğuz Turk clans which was established in Anatolia after the arrival of populous Oguz Turks in Anatolia following the conquest of Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks, such as Saltuk, Danishment, Mengujeg, and the first Turkish sailor in history named Tzachas (Chaka or Çaka); were also called “Tourkoi” and their realm “Tourkia”. Tzachas was a captive from a battle between Tourkoi and Romaioi around Smyrna, and until Alexius Komnenus rule he lived in the Byzantine court and served for them, but when Komnenus forcefully kicked him from Constantinople, he fled to Smyrna and as a commander he defeated the Romaioi armies, he allied with Pecheneg Turks and made assaults against the Byzantines together, captured Smyrna and cities and towns around Smyrna and establishing an Smyrna-based independent Turkish state, and created the first navy of Turks in history and conquered Midilli, Sakız and Sisam islands around 1090s. From the other heavily populous mass migration of Oğuz and Cuman Turks who arrived in Anatolia (other than other destinations for them such as Hungary, Bulgaria, Iran, India, Egypt etc.) fleeing from the Great Mongol Invasion of Genghis, clans such as Jandar, Teke, Eretna, Germiyan, Ottoman etc. settled in Anatolia under the protection of Seljuk Tourkia which was later defeated by the invading Mongols just like Cuman Tourkia which was defeated by the Mongols; leaving the Mongol vassal-state Seljuk Tourkia and established independent beyliks to rebel and fight against the Mongols and their allies to end the Mongol dominion over Anatolia. After the dissolution of Seljuk Tourkia, Ottoman Empire rose up and the realm of Ottomans was also called “Tourkia”, thus since the ages of Seljuk Tourkia and Ottoman Tourkia, it’s still called the “Republic of Tourkia (Turkey)”.

[nerd-in-distress]

hello fellow 18 year old turk with existential dread and an interest in the arts. saw your submission on the dream blog thingy and thought "there is no way this guy isnt turkish". since my main purpose in life is to find all the cool turkish people on tumblr, here i am. nice to meetcha. Ğ

Pls i didn't even know that got posted 😭😭 I do have wild dreams but that one was hilarious and yeah, weirdly specific. I think I had that dream around 8th grade so right around the time for me to learn about the Turkish vs Greek thing all year around.....

Nice to meet you to! Welcome to my silly little blog on the silly little side of the internet!

Ğ

[avelera]

I think my final weird historical ramble of the day As Brought to You By my research for Lights Out/Old Guard Nicky/Joe fic into the Crusades is how seeing Europeans as like a colonizing force during the Crusades or the Crusades as a “Clash of Civilizations”, East vs. West, Muslims vs. Christians, etc etc, the way many people view it in the US and indeed the way I was initially taught to view that conflict, is wrong because apparently it gives way too much credit for how haphazard, pathetic, and primitive the Europeans actually were.*

I mean, far from being some unstoppable European war machine of CONQUEST and EMPIRE, these hapless European, barely-more-than-barbarian-tribes, forces basically stumbled into establishing a Latin Christian presence in the Levant mostly because of internal political strife on the part of the defending Fatimid Caliphate + the Fatimid’s conflicts with the Seljuk Turks (both Muslims and often conflated by Westerners - basically, the players were Latin Christians and Byzantine Greek Christians, who were often infighting, Seljuk Turkish Muslims and Arabic Fatimid Caliphate Muslims, who were originally fighting but then later once the Europeans arrived were sometimes allied but also each of them respectively were sometimes allied with the Latin Christians once those forces got their feet under them and began to operate as just another political force in the region and ANYWAY THE POINT IS, this whole thing was a MESS and not a clash of two monoliths AT ALL at least not for the first HUNDRED YEARS of the conflict).* 

(*according to several lectures I have listened to, please do not consider this comprehensive knowledge, it’s a product of around 100 hours of research, not a PhD)

The thing is, the Europeans didn’t set out to “conquer” the Middle East when they answered Pope Clement II’s call to “liberate” Jerusalem (which was more of a favor that Clement was doing for the Emperor of Constantinople anyway and it backfired for that Emperor in so, so many ways). The Casus Belli really was just to “liberate” the Holy City from the “pagans” (no mentions of Islam as a faith that they were fighting but, interestingly, the Latin Christians, at least the Italians, may not have even really seen Islam as a separate faith as such in fact some may have seen it as a heretical Christian sect which is kind of wild but also, like, a little closer to the reality in that both faiths are Abrahamic as compared to incorrect interpretations that it’s just an entirely “pagan” religion??). So the Christian forces were mustered, it seems for the most part, by Clement inspiring them based on the incredibly devout faith of the Europeans who stepped up for the call, NOT as much by inspiring in them the the hopes of gaining money or territory, except for by a few minor princes who figured out that there was an opportunity to gain territory only AFTER they were there. So, to characterize this conflict as financially motivated on the part of the European Crusaders is to ascribe modern motives to an ancient, truly religiously-motivated conflict. 

Now, financially, fortunes WERE made in a very cynical way as a result of this conflict, but it was the CHURCH milking the Crusaders, not the Church expecting to gain any wealth from the Holy Land. They became a de facto bank lending money to Crusaders could buy equipment and horses in exchange for loaning or selling their lands and livestock to the Church (I’m sure Jesus would have LOVED that!) BUT the Crusaders all did so at a HUGE disadvantage because, uh, supply/demand kicked in because there was a TON of land suddenly up for sale and EVERYONE needed a horse (or 3) and weapons and armor and food so you see where this is going the Church made BANK and the Crusaders went BANKRUPT for this cause that they were pretty much doing JUST out of a desire to save their SOULS, NOT out of hope of plunder!

So they eventually get to the Holy Land, probably like 50% of the *knights* who set out to fight there die along the way, let’s not even get INTO the Peasants Crusade or the camp followers/civilians who tagged along. And really, the plan was to kick out the “pagans” from Jerusalem, in theory hand the territory back over to the Byzantine Christians in Constantinople and just... go home. Then a bunch of stuff happened and they stayed. 

BUT to go back to my original point, acting like it wasn’t a total haphazard mess that led to the conquest of Jerusalem, let alone holding it, that the Europeans had any idea what they were doing, that they were anything more than just ANOTHER band of smelly barbarians rolling through, setting up some short-lived fortresses and then fucking off again once any kind of serious local resistance gets organized, is to give the Europeans WAY too much credit. They’re not the sophisticated war machines of modern era Imperial Britain or France, these are barely more than Frankish clans and German feudal lords along with a bunch of whackadoodle Christian believers, getting tricked more or less by their religious leaders to go maraud to a random place on the other side of the world, bankrupting and/or killing way more than half of these hapless guys, for reasons that were largely baffling to the more sophisticated governments currently “in power” (for a certain value of “power” given internal divisions in the Fatimid Caliphate). 

TL;DR The Europeans were basically a barbarian hoard, who lacked the manpower to do more than cling to the edges of the coast for barely a century before being driven off again. If this was the Romans and the Gauls we’d consider this occupation a footnote, if not for the long-term ramifications that we continue to suffer from this event, but more from the PERCEPTION of this event more than the material reality of it, for the last 1,000 years. 

And anyway, as an Ancient Rome/Greece nerd primarily, this has been an interesting thing to learn!

[enchantedbyhiddles]

I'm from the US, never been to Germany, but from what I've heard of it, y'all are at the top of the list when it comes to being regretful about the Holocaust (appropriately so) and doing your best to take no backsliding about it. Of course the Jews weren't the only victims of it; black people were also very much targeted. So even if Germany is very homogenous, I would've expected there to be more care shown about racism by how much awareness is paid to past atrocities. I'm kinda shocked.

I think with you being from the US, as weird as it sounds, here the understanding about racism is totally different from yours.

One thing that everyone from the USA needs to understand is that you have to go by a totally different mindset. While you think that talking about differences helps being anti-racist, the official stance here is different. It is more about “we are all people, lets focus on that”. Talking about races is absolutely racist here. During the holocaust we saw the most atrocious crimes, murder and genocide, because people were divided into groups by their ethnicity and how they looked. So you’ll find nothing like that in Germany today. There are no official papers, where you can check your ethnicity or anything. The only thing that gets noted is your nationality. And that is a slippery slope, because you aquire German citizenship by blood-relation, not by being born here. There are nationalities that are non-German, but aren’t discriminated, while others are. Even though from the US-POV they are all white. (*There is something like “immigration background” what is often cited to say “Germans from foreign origin”, but this includes everyone, who has a parent with a non-German passport or being born outside of Germany and is not the same.)

Actually because of the holocaust and because people are really indoctrinated to be aware of the atrocious antisemitism, we developed the arrogance that we aren’t racist. “I heard about the holocaust for years in school. I know everything about it, so people shouldn’t try to educate me on that.”; ”Our constitution states right in the first few articles that we don’t discriminate. It is a written law, so it must be true.” Similarly “Antisemitism lead to people being killed, so something like the N-word or Z-word is comparably not bad at all, so people are too sensible and should shut up”. I hope you understand, what kind of thinking many people here developed? We are in the beginning and very much talking basics here. There are a growing number of people who “get it” and understand racism, systematic racism, micro-aggressions (like not always and not perfectly, but they are aware that such things exist and try to work on that), but there is still the majority for whom you have to really spell it out.

Black people weren’t actively targeted as a group in Nazi-Germany, because there were so few. Like while they were seen as “inferior” and faced incredible racism, it depended very much on the individual case, how they were treated. There are now much more black people (especially in former West Germany), because of immigration, but also to a certain degree because of US-soldiers. Black/mixed-race Germans of a certain age were for part of their lives seen as children of an occupational power. Black people from the US often face more discrimination than black people from Africa, because of that.

I know many US-Americans can’t imagine such a world, but as I grew up in former Eastern Germany, I saw the first black person where I lived, when I was 18. Most of the families have lived there for a few hundred years. They simply can’t imagine that people move to different places. You’ll always be an outsider in such a place, even if you are a white German. For people that have a different ethnical background such an area is the worst racist nightmare imaginable. Even those that are open-minded and positive towards a non-German, will throw around racist remarks by the douzen in minutes. And there will be no one to correct them.

While in the USA racism is often very much seen as black vs white, here in Germany it is most often that we all look very similar. If there was a group of 100 Germans and all look white and you make an antisemitic or antizigianist joke, you wouldn’t know that there is a Jew and a Sinti in that group. This stereotyping and racism is much more sinister. There are many, many minorities and the younger people with influence from the internet and other societies (like the USA), develop a different kind of conscience of what they find acceptable and what not. I mean, e.g. for the Roma, they are German nationals and lived here for centuries and German is their mother language. When they talk about themselves many will use the Z-word, because that’s the one they know. That doesn’t make it okay for German ethnicity Germans to use it. There’s an ongoing emancipation.

The biggest problem is faced by the Sinti and Roma. Like they’ve been here for 700 years, they are German, they have typical German names, and for all the time they faced horrible antizigianism. If you are from a different area, you wouldn’t know that this particular family is Sinti, yet in their area people know that they are and discriminate against them. There are still so many prejudices and they are seen as “lazy, only living from wellfare, too many children”. From a huge part of society.

They are the forgotten victims. Even after WWII, when everyone regretted the Holocaust, they were still persecuted, because they deserved it. They were “Asoziale”. They weren’t even acknowledged until the 70s or 80s. In school you learn about them being victims of the Nazis, but never in an explicit way. Like they are just part of the list with homosexuals, “disabled”, criminals, and “Asoziale”. (see the problem in that list?) So if it comes to Z* the idea that it is racist, is very much non-existent. 

And this doesn’t even start on the racism that is faced by the many immigrants and their children. For US-Americans lot of that wouldn’t even be considered racism, because it is against Italians and Greeks, now people from Eastern Europe. Compared to the discrimination against Turks and people from the middle East and Northern Africa. From a German POV though, the discrimination they face is very much from the same origin. Those people were invited, because Germany needed workers. There is a great sentence by Max Frisch about that “We called for workforce, but people came.”

[ottomanladies]

Hey this a question about Köçeks and their connection to the Harem but also LGBTQ in the harem and the empire. I read somewhere that court dancers and concubines, jealous of attention to the boys killed them? What about eunuchs? Did women of the Harem ever have affairs with them? How did castration become a thing in the first place and who decided who was castrated vs. who was a slave soldier? Do we know if women had affairs with other women in the harem? What about the eunuchs?

I'm sorry, köçeks have no connection to the harem. They were entertainers in the city (taverns, pubs?, clubs, etc) not in the palace.

It seems you have read the wikipedia page about them because it says:

Köçeks were much more sought after than the çengi ("belly dancers"), their female counterparts. Some youths were known to have been killed by the çengi, who were extremely jealous of men's attention toward the boys.

And, again, belly dancers were not harem dancers or court dancers. So, no, no one from the harem killed köçeks.

About eunuchs, Croutier says:

The first traces of eunuchry appear in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which eventually become one and empty into the Persian Gulf. In that delta, a beautiful valley nurtured many tribes— predominantly matriarchal societies. During the ninth century B.C., Semiramis, queen of Assyria, castrated male slaves. So did other queens. — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

I seem to remember that the Byzantines employed eunuchs in the Royal Palace and that is how eunuchs ended up being employed in the Imperial Harem of the Ottoman sultans.

And indeed Croutier says about this:

During the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans first began secluding their women, the Byzantines supplied them with eunuchs, but it did not take the Turks long to establish their own trade. — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

Eunuchs could not be castrated by Muslims so they were sold already castrated. It was Christians and Jews who castrated them

Egyptian Christians or Jews castrated some young black boys on the way at rest stops, since Islam prohibited the practice. It was a risky operation with a high mortality rate, and the hot, arid climate was not conducive to easy recovery. Desert sand being considered the most efficacious balm, the newly castrated were buried up to their necks until their wound healed. The boys who survived the pain, hemorrhage, and subsequent burial became luxury items, bringing enormous profit to the traders. And since they attracted wealthy purchasers, the eunuchs’ futures actually held opportunity for position and power. — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

Talking about sexual relations between concubines in the harem is a very risky thing because most of the people who reported them did so to feed the image of the harem as a world of sexual perdition. An example:

“It is common knowledge that as a result of this familiarity in washing and massaging women fall very much in love with each other. And one often sees a woman in love with another one just like a man and woman. And I have known Greek and Turkish women, on seeing a lovely young girl, seek occasion to bathe with her just to see her naked and handle her.”  — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

Another rumour is that they could not serve entire vegetables to the concubines because they would use cucumbers or similar vegetables to pleasure themselves... which is something clearly written to shock Europeans.

Of course we cannot exclude lesbian relationships in 700 history of harem seclusion but I'm quite sure they were kept a secret because I doubt that the sultan would have appreciated that.

The only time sources talk about a lesbian relationship is with Turhan Hatice Sultan and Meleki Kalfa. They said that they would share the bed but it was done just to discredit the valide sultan and not for the sake of reporting the truth. Also sometimes Meleki is portrayed as a seductress who deceived Turhan Hatice just for power.

About eunuchs, again Croutier says that there were instances in which they had sexual relationships with the women in the harem (or outside the harem):

The loss of sexual organs does not necessarily remove all sexual desire, especially if castration is performed at puberty [...]. A eunuch who had lost only his testicles could still have erections and enjoy sex.  — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

They sometimes kept their own odalisques, and others preferred young boys, as a court halberdier remarked in Risale-i Taberdariye fi Ahzal-i Ağa’yi Darüssade (1714): These wretched men, they fall in love with handsome youths too and keep them close, these wretches have so much desire in their corrupt bodies. Every single one of them buys a couple of slave girls and secretly keeps them in their room, jealous of the others of their kind. They fight with each other over these women they keep in their rooms. How could a traitor commit such an act without sexual urge?  — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

Eunuchs were also known to experiment with aphrodisiacs and erotic paraphernalia. Having contact with the outside, they were able to obtain a variety of sex toys, including artificial phalli and other erotic succedanea. They were also highly skilled in the art of oral sex; a woman who married after having made love to a eunuch was often dissatisfied with her husband’s performance, according to a halberdier: Is it said that these odalisques who become intimate with eunuchs develop a voracious sexual appetite? That they do is a well-known fact all over Istanbul. Two odalisques were given their freedom and married off. A week after their weddings, the husbands divorced them. The reason being that the odalisques told their husbands they did not perform as well as the eunuchs. Because of that, the husbands divorced them. This incident occurred in my time.  — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

I don't know if these things are true or not but they were reported by ottomans. Again there's always the doubt that it was done to discredit those men or to smear their reputations. I personally think that eunuchs led a very sad life because not each of them became Chief Harem Eunuch and therefore powerful and respected. I feel like they had to deal with a lot of rumours and malicious gossip. After the fall of the empire, no one wanted to get close to them:

During the last days of the Ottoman Empire, there was a great deal of concern about their survival in old age. They feebly attempted forming unions. Nobody wanted to deal with them anymore, because they stood for a past everyone wanted to bury. “In the midst of a crowded bazaar,” Edmondo de Amicis writes in Constantinople (1896), “among the throng of pleasure seekers at the Sweet Waters, beneath the columns of the mosques, beside the carriages, on the steamboats, in kayiks, at all the festivals, wherever people are assembled together, one sees those phantoms of men, these melancholy countenances, like a dark shadow thrown across every aspect of gay Oriental life.”  — Harem: The World Behind the Veil

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Mr. Gaiman, I was wondering the reason why you changed that War scene in the book where it was a Turk vs. Greek to something else?

Logistics and finance. That scene as written in the book and originally written in the script was too expensive, and so it got modified. And we were shooting in Africa, so we set it there.

[bluewatsons]

Yilmaz C. Olak, Ottomanism vs. Kemalism: Collective Memory and Cultural Pluralism in 1990s Turkey, 42 Mid East Stud 587 (2006)

Turkey’s Ottoman heritage has been a critical issue of the country’s culture and identity during the era of the Republic. In recent times a dramatic shift in the perception of the Ottoman past has emerged, even among Turkey’s ruling cadre, a shift that demonstrates tolerant (rather than reactionary) and refined (rather than cruel) dimensions, and finds clear expression in popular culture, in fashion, architecture, the media and, perhaps most important, in political life. In the late 1980s, Turkish politics was subject to a war of cultures which was caused by the rise of the separatist Kurdish movement, which had rejected the homogenous Turkish identity and turned to violent action, the Islamist groups that included severe critics of the official policy of secularism, together with the Alevis, which condemned the state’s propagation for Sunni-based Islam. This war of cultures resulted in questioning the official definition of Turkish culture and its implications for political membership. This was also coupled with the emergence of new states especially in the Balkans, entailing ethnic estrangement (and eventually assaults on Balkan Muslims, Ottoman ‘souvenirs’ for Turks remembering the cultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the Balkans for centuries ‘peacefully’, by the imperial notion of pluralism). Some conservative and nationalist Turkish policymakers, especially Turgut O ̈ zal (prime minister between 1983 and 1989 and president between 1989 and 1993), began to use Turkey’s Ottoman legacy to resolve internal sociocultural tensions that resulted from cultural diversity, and to determine Turkish foreign policies, especially toward the Balkans. The Ottoman legacy was used to invoke a collective cultural memory by constructing a nostalgic narrative of Turkey’s shared past. Coupled with competing elite groups’ struggle over the country’s collective memory, this was a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the present; it was ‘cultural memorization’, which Bal defines as ‘an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future’.1

This paper examines the political implications of the use of the Ottoman view of pluralism to curb the demands of various social identities in Turkey in the 1990s. I seek to show how the idea of Ottoman pluralism, which entails the peaceful coexistence of different ethno-religious and cultural groups under a political community, was constructed as part of neo-Ottomanism combining the traditional Ottoman form of pluralism with modern liberal multiculturalism and how this model was used to formulate a common, superior identity encompassing all Turkish citizens within a religio-ethnic affiliation. Through the mid-1990s, Turkey faced the rise of Islamism, which Islamized to some extent Ozalian neo-Ottomanism. In this study I also show that the Islamic form of neo-Ottomanism has the connotation of an ‘exclusionary’ legal pluralism inspired by the Islamic/Ottoman form of multi-legal entities (Ottoman version is the millet system) defined mainly in terms of religious differences.

The emergence and spread of counter-memories led to the regime’s reaction of Kemalist hegemony, which came as the retrieval of the cultural memory of the 1930s, the golden age of Kemalism,2 in which new ‘civilized’ manners were introduced to and imposed upon the masses.

In a rapidly globalizing world, the ‘secure world’ of the nation-state that monopolizes all cultural arrangements and activities within its borders has been challenged by two well-known parallel processes. These are universalization (e.g., the global spread of consumption and cultural patterns, and of such political values as human rights and democratic government), and localization (e.g., reconceptualizing local traditional forms as sources of identity).3 The result is the rise of new identification processes and the emergence of new historiographies, which reject the universal account of ‘Western history’. Furthermore, this trend, through the 1980s and the 1990s, was coupled with the critique of Western-oriented modernization. As a result, the search for identity at the local level acted against both the nation-state form and Western hegemonic narratives. In the process, the most contested issue has been a ‘unified’ history of nation-states. Mike Featherstone describes the ‘discovery of the lesser traditions of history, the suppressed history of outsider groups such as women, slaves, ethnic minorities’ that seek to ‘assert themselves against a unified history within the nation-state’, and this ‘task of establishing history in the context of contested global histories’ necessitates that ‘postcolonial histories start to be written which effectively ‘‘speak back to the West’’’.4

In this sense the quest for neo-Ottomanism that signifies rewriting Turkish history on the basis of a shared Ottoman past in a globalizing context becomes more meaningful. Neo-Ottomanism as an act of constructing a new present has, as Yavuz notes, two main characteristics: (1) ‘the rearticulation of Turkish nationalism and increased political and cultural tolerance for diversity as in the Ottoman past’; (2) ‘the elimination of economic borders among the Balkan, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern countries’, but respecting the political boundaries of the countries in the ex- Ottoman space.5 Both these characteristics of neo-Ottomanism are clearly seen in the efforts of O ̈ zal, who emphasized the necessity of constructing a new common cultural identity binding groups with different particular affiliations in Turkey, and who attempted to unify the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, especially by pragmatic and cultural means. But neo-Ottomanism is not an anti-Western, counter-hegemonic movement that challenges the universal ideals of the West. It rejects naı ̈ve dichotomies between the West and the rest, between modernity and tradition, emphasizing political and economic globalization (the prevalence of liberal democracy and free market economy) together with a localized common identity.

However, appropriating secular West versus Islamic East dichotomy, the Islamic groups’ Ottomanism came to be an anti-Western, as well as anti-secular establishment, movement. The act of remembering the Ottoman heritage through a political formulation certainly does have political and cultural implications for Kemalism, which, in the construction of a new Turkish society and culture, deemed the Ottoman Empire as a significant Other. Such forms of negative implication of the return of Ottomanism are true also for the Balkan and Middle East states that constructed national identities on the basis of new histories that degraded Ottomanism as an alien system.

One might claim that the act of remembering that retrieved the Ottoman past as a collective memory for 1990s Turkey was indeed part of a general trend to question the present as shaped through struggles of various groups over common identity and moral values; an endeavour for origins to shed light on blurred personalities and places. ‘Remembering’, writes Sturken, ‘becomes a process of achieving closer proximity to wholeness, of erasing forgetting . . . Thus, the positioning of memory as a process through which origins are retrieved means positing forgetting as an act of misrecognition.’6 In terms of newly emergent searches for collectivities, that means the reconstruction of the past for the present, which increases its density by globalization processes all over the world. Late 1980s and 1990s Turkey witnessed the rediscovery of various pasts to construct new identities, or counter-memories, such as Kurdish, Islamic, Balkan; that in fact stemmed from the failure of Kemalist modernization projects to produce new strategies for inclusion.7 These new modes of identification, or rising cultural pluralization, happened in parallel with a huge sociological transformation that was accelerated by the emergence of new social networks and connections, new patterns of association and social relation- ships. Within such a framework, and within the debates around Turkish identity and the multicultural nature of Turkey’s population, some conservative and nationalist politicians and intellectuals reimagined the Ottoman past, and especially its cultural pluralism, as a model for the identity and political unity questions of the present.

The idea of Ottomanism as an ideology of modern political patriotism became the official line in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Ottoman reformers formulated it as the Ottoman Empire faced nationalist separatist movements, especially in the Balkans. Under the influence of Western legal and political system, Tanzimat Fermanı (1839, the reform edict) and Kanun-i Esasi (1876, the first constitution of the Ottoman Empire) provided legal and political bases for Ottomanism. The policy was in fact a rearticulation of the Empire’s millet system that, as the most developed form of ‘imperial pluralism’, had established the autonomous religious communities, called millets (including Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and Jewish). Ottomanism, the idea of a common homeland and common traits based on modern patriotic citizenship and universal law, was developed to provide Ottoman unity in the context of each ethnic-religious group’s efforts to develop its own nationalism. Karpat aptly defines Ottomanism as an ‘attempt by the Ottoman government to use one single citizenship as a common political identity in order to achieve equality and unity among all Ottoman subjects and supersede differences of faith, ethnicity, and language’.8 It was from everything else a political identification with the territorial fatherland.

Although the Ottoman millet system had provided mainly for religious pluralism,9 its new articulation under the modern ideology granted new political and civil rights to its citizens regardless of their religious differences. That political membership to the state reflected the ‘imagined’ Ottoman nation, making all Ottoman subjects think of themselves as Ottoman (Osmanlı). By using the secular term Ottoman as the name of a collective identity transcending all community-based identities grounded in religion, the reformers hoped to demonstrate that ethnic and religious affiliations were of secondary importance.10 The expectation was that collective identity would inspire the loyalty of Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian separatists, and later Armenian and Albanian nationalists. It is because Ottomanism functioned as the rhetoric of the modern public sphere that the age-old Muslim/non-Muslim category was reformulated in terms of a majority/minority logic that is the end product of the modern public sphere. The nature of the millets began to be redefined in a secular and egalitarian way and transformed into minorities and majorities.11 In short, as a new technique to govern various religio-ethnic groups, or as a modern version of cultural pluralism, Ottomanism served to create a consciousness of being Ottoman through melting various groups into one pot, establishing a modern citizenship. Just only in the last decades of the Empire (1910s) it lost its significance as the Turkish nationalists gradually came to dominate Ottoman politics.

The Ottoman imperial structure became a modern state with a nationalist ideology through the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The Kemalist rulers worked to destroy all that was Ottoman, using exclusivist logic of modernity versus tradition – erasing Ottomanism was deemed necessary to adopt Western political forms. During the first two decades of the Republic, especially in the 1930s under the guidance of the Turkish History Society (founded in 1931), a group of politician- historians determined a Kemalist historiography as the national mythology: Ottoman history, culture and literature were rejected and replaced with a new myth of Central Asia and Anatolia to form a ‘civilized’ Turkish culture and identity. History was highly politicized; the aim was to rediscover the civilized and cultured essence, the talent of the Turks, to tie the new culture to their prehistoric past by following the traces of Western civilization.12

The new nation’s politician-historians (in what seems to have been an attempt to rewrite Ottoman historiography), described the Ottomans’ view of history as closely tied to divine authority and following the genealogy of the Sultanate. ‘Ottoman history’, writes Yusuf Akc ̧ ura (one of the leading politician-historians of the 1930s), ‘did not pay enough attention to the Turkish language and history, and also did radically separate itself from Turkish history. The great victories and achievements of the Turkish nation to which the Ottomans belonged were not taken into account when writing history.’13 That is, according to the new Kemalist Ottoman historiography, there had been not a Turkish nation, but a Muslim community whose members had to be unconditionally faithful to the Sultanate, and the non- Turkish character of the Ottoman Empire brought about the failure of the Turks in their leadership of civilization. In the Kemalist historiography the reason the Turks became decadent and corrupt was the rule of the Sultanate, and the subjugation of the Turkish nation. Thus, the rulers of the new regime deemed Ottoman rule ‘the dark age’ of the Turks; and, in writing a new and glorious history for the Turks, should be ignored.

The Turkish Revolution demanded a complete rupture with the Ottoman order, seen to be antithetical to the new Turkish order with its entire worldview and institutions. Thus the legitimate history of Republican Turkey began with the War of Independence on 19 May 1919; time was restarted with that date. Implicit in this rearrangement of time was the significant Other that was the Ottoman-Islamic past. In the Kemalist discourse, the Ottoman-Islamic past belonged to another time that determines its status as provisional and illegitimate, and disappeared in the face of the continuing march of progress. None of the attitudes, cadres, or programmes existing before 19 May 1919 belonged to legitimate Turkish history but rather to a different historical realm.14 The founders of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s reconstructed the Ottoman past as the archaic other of the new, modern regime.

The Turkish reformers’ main intention was to end the Ottoman multicultural and multinational legacy by melding all differences under the name of Turk. The Ottoman Muslim population (including Turks, Kurds, Caucasians, Bosnians, Albanians, Lazs) became the dominant group in Anatolia, especially after the population exchange with Greece in the early 1920s. The reformist rulers strove to transmute the Ottoman Muslims into a ‘civilized’, homogenous Turkish nation. Non-Muslims (Greeks, Armenians, Jews) living in Turkey were Turks in citizenship only, but Muslim migrants from the Balkans (Bosnians, Albanians) and the Caucasus were easily naturalized and accepted as part of the Turkish nation. For the rulers, the transformation of the people from a religious identity to a modern and national identity was possible only by means of a secular state and society.

Despite Kemalist policy, Ottomanism survived in the Turkish popular culture, in popular stories and entertainment, and in intellectual, especially literary, works. Within the multiparty system, these notions found place in some political parties’ manifestos, particularly in the Democrat Party of the 1950s, which carried the official definition of history as a chief objective of political debate, stressing the significance of local Islamic traditions and continuity with the near past – i.e. the Ottomans. A larger place was reserved for the Ottoman Empire and its political and social system in history textbooks. Ottoman artistic figures and portraits of the Ottoman sultan began to appear in La Turquie Ke ́maliste, the official and prestigious magazine that from the early 1930s was published to show Western countries how civilized the Turks were.15 The centre-right parties, including the Democrat Party (DP) (1950–60) to Justice Party (1960–80) line, saw the Ottoman era as part of Turkish collective memory; the nationalist rightist politicians, represented by the National Action Party, used the idea of the Ottoman Empire to portray the Turks’ glorious past; and religious rightists, represented by the pro-Islamist National Salvation Party (1971– 80) to Welfare Party (1983–98) line, strove to Islamize it in accordance with its general tendency of Islamizing Turkish historiography. Ottoman imagination and images continued to exist and even increased in Turkish popular social and political life until the late 1980s, but that imagination had not yet turned into a political vision combining the Ottoman system with modern political principles to produce policy.

Turgut O ̈ zal became a leading figure in perpetuating Ottomanism as the core of a political vision based on a new collective memory, for a new form of foreign policy and social contract. As a conservative and nationalist politician, he had had from the beginning a strong interest in the Ottoman past as a state of belonging and a source of collective memory. Parallel to a cultural policy of the 1980 coup, based in a large measure on ‘Turkish–Islamic synthesis’,16 the government under his rule (as Premier, 1983–89) effectively popularized such Ottoman cultural traits as classical Turkish music and some linguistic forms, using state-controlled television and radio broadcasting. The education system was also an important vehicle: history textbooks preached the goodness of the Turks’ Ottoman past, making all Ottoman history part of Turkish collective memory, but on the basis of Kemalist legitimacy.17 Rising official concern was evident in the commemoration of the 700th anniversary of the Ottoman state, when the ministry of culture, under a pro- Kemalist left-wing party, emphasized the Republic as ‘the historical heir of the Ottomans’.

O ̈ zal’s time was one of collective memory wars of the Republican regime, which occurred concurrently with global crises of modernity, the end of the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and Yugoslavia. In that context O ̈ zal found himself in a debate on Ottomanism – especially during his presidency.18 When new states in previous Ottoman hinterlands, and concurrently new national strategies at the international level, emerged, and when ethnic separatism and religious extremism gained momentum at the national level, O ̈ zal began to be more interested in the Ottoman heritage politically. Defining the Republic of Turkey as the heir to the Ottoman Empire, he attempted to make Ottomanism part of the Turkish identity. On some occasions he used it as a historical reference to legitimize the official sense of belonging and memory, and on others to form alternative social projects.19 Equating American and Ottoman multiculturalism as forms of ‘melting pots’, he proposed a new model of cultural pluralism based on the Ottoman legacy. This was articulated for the first time in the late 1980s, in the context of the emerging crises of the failure of Turkey’s official cultural identity to meet rising ethnic and religious claims, of the Bulgarian government’s Turkish and Muslim minority assimilation policies, of the emergence of new Turkic states in Central Asia and of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This was the call of an anti-establishment effort to form a democratic system in which every kind of difference can express itself without any state intervention.

Regarding the developments in the post-Cold War era, O ̈ zal claimed that there ‘opened new horizons for Turkey’; here ex-Ottoman lands and people (especially Muslims) achieved much more importance to provide a new multicultural synthesis for Turkey and the Balkans.20 For O ̈ zal, the Ottoman perspective with its multicultural, multireligious and multinational structure provides a suitable model for the Balkans, where ethnic conflict was continuing to overwhelm daily life, and for Turkey facing ethnic (Kurdish) separatism.21 Thus, during the early 1990s, some leading Turkish liberal and conservative intellectuals, led by O ̈ zal, began to make references to the multireligious and multicultural nature of the Ottoman Empire.22 In developing neo-Ottomanist ideas he formed an effective cooperation with Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈ (Ankara-based, right-wing monthly journal) circle. Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈ became the voice of neo-Ottomanist views and sought to publicize the new synthesis constructed on the basis of ‘imperial vision’ and Ottoman pluralist system.23 Cengiz C ̧ andar, one of the main leading figures in the formulation of neo-Ottomanism,

mentioned ‘imperial vision’ in order to express the new direction of the Republic of Turkey, moving from ‘monocultural and closed’ nation-state form to multicultural and multiethnic structure.24 Neo-Ottomanists rejected the ethnic version of Turkish nationalism and reinterpreted Turkish identity on the basis of regional and religious grounds (multiethnic and multireligious bases) and cosmopolitan liberal values. Thus, for C ̧ andar, the premises of neo-Ottomanism are free enterprise, human rights and cultural and ethnic pluralism.25 So in place of ethnic identity, the common religious one (Muslim identity) had to be more and more emphasized.

This is very obvious in the views of O ̈ zal. In re-imagining Ottoman pluralism that set the model for a new Turkey, O ̈ zal placed emphasis on the Ottoman vision of Islam that is more flexible and tolerant, and, for him, ‘this has given Turkish society a different outlook from that of other Islamic societies. As a result of its cosmopolitan foundations, moreover, the Ottoman State was open to other cultural influences’.26 In his view, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, migration from the ex-Ottoman lands turned Anatolia into a cultural and ethnic mosaic, where Turks, Kurds, Bosnians, Albanians, Caucasians and Alevis began to live side by side and a solution for Turkey’s identity crisis seemed possible from the Ottoman vision of cultural pluralism nurtured by Islam.27 Here it is clear that Ottoman identity was reconstructed as a form of national-religious identity comprising several sub- cultural, ethnic and regional identities. This formulation was seen as necessary because in a new global world difference and diversity in every sense were becoming dominant in every sphere of life. For O ̈ zal and other neo-Ottomanists only such a vision had the power to make Turkey a regional super-power once again. As mentioned in the second section, the neo-Ottomanist imperial formulation used the new Ottoman cultural identity not as counter-hegemonic, but as being part of a globalizing Western world.

But O ̈ zal had selectively reconstructed Ottomanism as an identity in religio-ethnic (Muslim-Turkish) terms seemingly contrary to the nineteenth century’s Ottomanism that, as mentioned above, entailed the coexistence of non-Muslims and Muslims under a modern state system. We can grasp O ̈ zal’s scope and aims in developing Ottomanism as a technique of cultural pluralism by comparing the two forms of Ottomanism. Although the targeted groups in O ̈ zal’s neo-Ottomanism were different from nineteenth-century Ottomanism, there are some basic similarities. These are: (1) the reorganization of the state in accord with a changing international context, forming a new political identity and culture to prevent the rise of nationalist movements, and, in the search for such culture, seeking an eclectic synthesis between traditional forms and Western values; and (2) although O ̈ zalian neo-Ottomanism defined citizenship differently from nineteenth-century Ottomanism by placing more emphasis on a common Ottoman-Islamic identity, in the construction of neo- Ottomanism as a myth of the melting pot, those considered Ottoman but with different ethnic and cultural affiliations were the spiritual grandchildren of the Muslim populations of the Empire, the ruling millet (millet-i hakime).28 However it seems clear that this vision was more exclusionary than nineteenth-century Ottomanism, which signified a political membership, and so is inadequate in providing a more inclusive multicultural context.

As mentioned above, the emergence of new states in the ex-Ottoman Empire, especially in the Balkans, triggered a debate in Turkey on the official policy of forgetting the Ottoman legacy – particularly forgetting Turkey’s Balkan past, although there have been many Turkish citizens with Balkan-Muslim origins. The Serbian nationalists’ attempt at ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians and later the Albanian minority in Kosovo (by equating the terms Muslim/Turk/Ottoman), attacks on Ottoman monuments, and rising ethnic conflict in Macedonia were tragic events that reminded both the Balkan Muslim population and Turkish citizens of their common Ottoman ancestors, of their knowledge of a common Ottoman culture. (Those incidents seemed to show us clearly that the Ottoman vision, with its multicultural characteristics, looks better than nationalist ideologies that appear more modern.) This ‘rediscovery of the country’s heritage’, its ‘historical responsibility’ engendered in the Turks’ wider public support for Bosnian Muslims, as attacks on the Bosnians made the past a part of daily life. One might equate the Bosnian war and the rise of Ottoman consciousness among Bosnian Muslims and Turkish citizens; in fact, largely because of the Ottoman past and a common heritage, Bosnian leaders looked to Turkey and tried to enlist its support in their resistance. In that public support for the issue of Bosnia, both historical (Ottoman) and religious (Islamic) motives played a significant role.29 It was the common belief among the Turkish people that Western powers’ indifference to the attacks on Muslim populations of the Balkans was due largely to religious differences. Developments in the Balkans therefore led most Turks to identify themselves with the Muslim populations of the ex-Ottoman lands, and neo-Ottomanist intellectuals effectively used the developments in the Balkans and the consequent position of Ottoman Muslims of the region to form their own ideological perspective. As Yavuz writes:

The fact that Serbian nationalist ideology identifies all Muslims, whether they are Albanians, Bosnian, Pomak, or Gypsies as ‘Turks’ made the Turkish public more sensitive to the premeditated destruction of the Bosnian Muslims. Neo- Ottomanists, such Cengiz C ̧ andar and Nur Vergin who had very close relations to O ̈ zal, used this as a way of arguing that ‘Turkishness’ is not an ethnic category but rather a construct for and by Anatolian, Balkan, and Caucasian Muslim populations on the basis of their common Ottoman experience. Thus, as a result of internal and international pressure, Turkey is pushed to ally itself with the Ottoman Muslims of the Balkans.30

That construction brought about not only the discovery of Ottoman Muslim populations of the Balkans as part of Turkey’s identity, but also the discovery of the multicultural nature of the country’s own population, which included Bosnians, Albanians and Pomaks as well as Turks, Kurds, Caucasians and Arabs. The official inclination to protect Balkan Muslims also coincided with Bosnian, Albanian and other Balkan-origin citizens’ celebrations of their differences publicly (but not as counter-hegemonic movements rejecting the unity of Turkey).31 Turkey’s Kemalist establishment emphasized homogeneity in terms of a common Turkish identity, having had from the beginning an uneasy relation with the imperial pluralism of the Ottoman Empire. Contrary to Kemalism, the goal of neo-Ottomanists was to create ‘a new Turkey...determined not by any exclusivist form of racial and linguistic characteristics but rather by a shared Ottoman historical experience and a broad and diffuse attachment to Islam’.32 So the Kemalist officials generally conceived neo- Ottomanist searches to legitimize the politico-cultural claims of various ethnic and religious groups as a challenge to the basic principles of the Republic. Contrary to O ̈ zal’s perspective, civil and military bureaucrats commonly evaluated the developments in the Balkans by negating their historical and cultural aspects,33 for those developments were making the people of Bosnian, Albanian and Pomak origin conscious of their ethnic identities.

From the early years of the Republic official policy had attempted to Turkify Balkan migrants by the process of forgetting. The Law of Settlement that was issued in 1934 established policy to regulate the migration and settlement of Balkan Muslims in Turkey.34 It stipulated that membership in Turkish culture was available to any Muslim living in the Balkans, with or without Turkish ethnic origin35 – because of their Ottoman heritage they were officially viewed as Turks who had simply forgotten their language. In the official discourse those immigrants could not be called ‘Bosnian’, ‘Albanian’ or ‘Pomak’, which were allowed as different languages in the Ottoman ‘cosmopolitan structure’. Differences were not ethnic, just linguistic – a difference that would be overcome through Turkification policies bringing about linguistic and cultural integration. Though this policy had moderated to some extent by the early 1990s, the Kemalist establishment resisted all neo- Ottomanist attempts that sought to institutionalize ethnic and religious differences, and after the death of O ̈ zal in 1993, public interest in neo-Ottomanism as a political formulation of cultural pluralism gradually lost its momentum. Nevertheless, neo- Ottomanism survived in the views and programmes of the political right, especially the religious right party, the pro-Islamist Welfare Party (WP, Refah Partisi, the heir of the 1970s National Salvation Party, NSP), which became Turkey’s biggest political party in the 1995 elections.

The Welfare Party’s re-traditionalization included the redefinition of the people’s identity through Islamic principles and the memories of the near, Ottoman past. On the basis of some aspects of the Islamic movement that had already described Ottoman history as part of Islamic history and the Ottoman state as an Islamic state since the 1970s, the new moral base was constructed. It was regarded as necessary to project a holistic vision of community, a secure shelter for all, as an antidote to the evils of modern individualism and alienation. In the 1995 election campaigns, the discourse of the WP had a populist tone, embracing all segments and ethnic and religious differences of the country. The WP’s programme, which included Islamist, nationalist, Ottomanist and modernist elements, was aimed at determining the boundaries of a new community by offering a prescription to define the symbols of sociopolitical and socioeconomic life.36 Among WP leaders and intellectuals, use of the Ottoman imagination depended upon a successful combination of Turkishness and Islamic belief.37 In strengthening and disseminating their own anti-Western positions, they also effectively used such external developments as the failure, in their view, of the Western powers to prevent Serbian nationalists’ genocide attempts in Bosnia to mobilize and even Islamicize the masses.

WP municipal leaders and the WP-led coalition government, in adopting the politics of symbols, attempted to acculturate – in truth, to Islamicize – Turkish society, and the Ottoman way of life and politics had an important place in that process.38 The WP mayors, especially in the big cities, throughout the second half of the 1990s, revived Ottoman arts, calligraphy, foods and architectural forms, integrating them into Turkish life. Alternative commemorations, countering official ones, were launched to reformulate the past to ‘construct an alternative national identity, evoked as an Ottoman-Islamic civilization as opposed to the secular, modern Turkish Republic’.39 By 1994 the WP mayor of Istanbul began effectively to launch a set of activities commemorating the Istanbul of Ottoman times.40 Among them was the commemoration of the myth of the Conqueror (Sultan Mehmed II), whose Istanbul was a place of Islam. Its rejuvenation was commemorated on the alternative national day of the Conquest of Istanbul. The myth of the Istanbul of the Conqueror has, as Bora argues, two symbolic aspects: ‘First, it is the symbol of Ottoman (that is Islamic) hegemony. Secondly, it is the symbol of the justice and the multiplicity of Islam. ...Within this discourse, Istanbul is the proud example of Muslim-Turkish justice which offers protection to foreigner-non-Muslim mem- bers.’41 According to the pro-Islamists’ idea of pluralism, such a just system would be possible only under Islamic rule.

The WP ruling cadre and intellectuals’ nostalgia for the Ottomans included a kind of nationalist-imperialist imagination anticipating creating once again the Greater Turkey as in Ottoman times. They seemed to appropriate ‘O ̈ zalian neo-Ottomanism with more Islamic tones’.42 They became passionate champions of reinstituting and regenerating the spirit of pax Ottomania, especially in the ex-Ottoman provinces. While the WP was in power (1996–97), in accordance with such neo-Ottomanist pursuits, Islam and Ottomanism were used in foreign policy to make Turkey a dominant regional power, and both constituted the foundation of the WP’s search for solutions to Turkey’s internal political crises. Especially in dealing with cultural diversity, WP leaders seemed to adopt an Islamic intellectuals’ formulation of multiculturalism that was based on the classical Islamic mechanism of legal pluralities, according to which each group is treated according to its own legal system (read as ‘religion’) – Islamic, Christian, Jewish, atheist.

In the early 1990s, an Islamic model of pluralism called ‘multi-judiciary order’ was first developed and proposed on the basis of the Prophet Mohammad’s ‘Medina Document’ and Ottoman millet system by a group of Islamic intellectuals including Ali Bulac ̧ , Abdurrahman Dilipak and I_smet O ̈ zel.43 Later in 1993 the WP adopted it as one of the premises of its programme.44 These Islamist intellectuals criticized the Kemalist view of monoculturalism rejecting the representation of different cultural groups at the public sphere and promoted the Islamic view of pluralism that anticipates the emergence of a form of legal pluralism relying on the idea of the self- rule of each legal community and rejecting the rule of the majority.45 Difference is here defined in terms of religions and different groups within same religion. Islam as a religion provides a legal framework for the functioning of multiculturalism on the basis of multi-legalism. Such ‘multi-judiciarism’ was proposed as an alternative to ‘democracy’, particularly ‘liberal democratic pluralism’.

The model of multi-judiciary society was based on the idea that multireligious and multicultural society is normally multi-judiciary, for laws and rules are not independent from religions and cultures. This multi-judiciary state model is formulated as a kind of ‘confederation of beliefs’ and promoted as an alternative to democracy.46 Here society and its values were seen as politically more important than the hegemonic modern state. This can also be observed in the WP’s view of society.47 Thus, that legal pluralism in which religious groups have legal and cultural autonomy seeks to realize the survival of civil societal elements against the hegemonic state. For Bulac ̧ , because emerging and prevalent differences in society means the dissolution of the homogenizing and totalizing account of the modern nation-state, what is needed is a strong public sphere organized around communities, in which religion plays a determining role, but not individuals. Put another way, legal pluralism stresses the survival and dominance of homogenous communities where, if necessary, individual liberties and rights might be ignored for the sake of the whole. In this view of multiculturalism based on homogenous communities, individuals are seen as parts of an organic religious community, which stems from seeing human rights as a group right, but not as individual rights. That is to say, community comes before the individual. Here there was a strong emphasis on the religious communities of the Ottoman millet system: Ali Bulac ̧ writes, ‘When we compare the Ottoman system with the modern state, it was no doubt more civil and legally pluralistic’.48 Another Islamist writer proposed the Ottoman millet system as a panacea to resolve Turkey’s ethnic problem.49

The WP adopted the above-mentioned Islamic communitarian view of multi- culturalism in an age of identity politics, and the emergence and survival of autonomous legal communities (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, etc.), each with its own parochial law. On that base the WP model was designed as a model of citizenship alternative to both Kemalist monism and liberal democracy. As I mentioned above, this view of pluralism, which recalls the Ottoman practice of Islamic pluralism called the Ottoman millet system, found wide support in WP circles. As Navaro-Yashin aptly notes:

Islamists have revived the Ottoman millet system as an example of government they argue to be more just, humane, and superior to the monism of the secular nation-state. Millet was the name for religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, communities which had their autonomous legal systems. Welfare Party activists share in this revivalist vision of Islamist intellectual. They believe that the pluralist example from the past can serve as an alternative model of citizenship to the faulty modern one.50

In fact, a hierarchical ordering among different communal bodies constitutes the basis of the ‘Islamic formula’ – some communities are credited as being more virtuous, more faithful than other secular or non-Muslim ones.

WP pluralism based on the re-articulation of the Ottoman millet system was not welcomed by Turkey’s official ideology, Kemalism, which addresses national unity on the basis of monoculturalism. Kemalist officials removed the WP from power in 1997 by an intervention into politics called the February 28 process, and the legal case filed against the party cited the its view of religious pluralism as one of the reasons. Turkey’s Supreme Court, as it closed the WP in 1998, also pointed to Ottoman pluralism as one of the reasons for their action. On this issue, to justify its judgment, as Aslan writes, ‘it (the Court) cited public statements by Erbakan such as . . . ‘‘you shall have the right to opt for whatever law you want’’ (legal pluralism)’.51

This struggle between Kemalist secularist uniformity and the Islamic quest for ‘multiculturalism’, both based on the rediscovery of historical memory, affected Turkish social and political life.

The endeavours to construct a new past for the nation and an alternative collective cultural memory, especially among Islamists in the second half of the 1990s, inspired Kemalist groups to launch a new programme to transmute Kemalism into a social identity by remembering the Republican past. Debates on the past between the Kemalist secularist groups and the conservative and pro-Islamic groups turned on competing politico-moral standards and different lifestyles. One Kemalist claimed that the Ottoman Empire and its pluralism do not have any relevance for today’s Turkish politics and society, being an ‘alien’ and ‘pre-historical’ structure; that the Ottoman model that failed to adopt modern developments cannot set an archetype for a modern nation.52

The Kemalist establishment initiated commemorative activities to celebrate Atatu ̈ rk’s time, the formative years of the Republican regime and to retrieve the spirit of Kemalism. The ceremonies of Republic Day on 29 October gained particular importance for Kemalist and secularist officials and groups after the rise of the Welfare Party (the ‘Islamic threat’), with its emphasis on the Ottoman past and celebration of the ‘Conquest of Istanbul’. Republic Day has been celebrated since the 1930s as a ‘holiday of reforms’ or a ‘holiday whereby people came to appreciate their own achievements’.53 The rising tide of such commemorations in the 1990s seemed to be central to mobilizing social awareness of the achievements and civilized qualities of the Republic. Remembrance of the Kemalist past was directly related to the process of reconstructing Kemalism in the 1990s for the sake of the hegemony of the secularist establishment.54 The effort to transmute Kemalism into a social identity was effected through organizing such social activities as rallies, conferences, concerts and balls; and establishing a network of Atatu ̈ rkist/Kemalist civil societal elements, such as the Society for Atatu ̈ rkist Thought and the Society to Support Contemporary Life.

In 1990s Turkey, the Ottoman past was re-imagined to formulate a political model of cultural pluralism in accordance with modern multicultural ideas. A group of rulers and intellectuals proposed a mythologized Ottoman cultural pluralism to co-opt Turkey’s cultural pluralization, a movement fuelled by the demands of ethnic groups and religious communities that resulted from the globalization process and the crisis of Kemalist modernization. The failure of both the liberal-conservative (O ̈ zal) and the Islamic (Welfare) imaginations to find wide support within Turkey’s ruling cadre and intellectuals is due to theoretical poverty, to a pragmatic outlook and to challenging Kemalist secularist national uniformity by stressing Islam as the core of Turkish identity. O ̈ zal attempted to combine modern liberal pluralism with Ottoman imperial pluralism in the absence of a consolidated democracy, and, as Walzer argues, the ‘peaceful coexistence of groups of people with different histories, cultures and identities’ seems to be possible only in the context of political stability and a widespread democratic practice.55 During the 1990s Turkey did not see the emergence of such a political structure, and neo-Ottomanists failed to form a common identity due to their strong emphasis on culturalism. On the other hand, the Islamic formula of pluralism, which was highly exclusionary in terms of relying on the idea of strict separation of religious groups/communities and being in the name of forming alternative collective memory, broke down after the decline of Islamic politics toward the end of the 1990s. The heirs of the WP and Islamic intellectuals who previously stressed the multi-judiciary order and Ottoman pluralism have begun to highlight a new synthesis of liberal democratic pluralism and Islamic values.

The neo-Ottomanist perspective posed two main challenges to the Turkish secular nation-state. First, its imperial vision disturbed the state’s premises related to both national homogeneity and foreign policy. Second, it recalled the existence of cultural diversity and cultural pluralism in Turkish society. These challenges revealed the fact that the old and ongoing problem of Turkey’s official ideology, Kemalism, is to integrate cultural, ethnic and religious differences into national politics. It is these differences which exist in general as centres of symbolic and local authority that perform various social and political functions in the country.

Notes

M. Bal, ‘Introduction’, in M. Bal et al. (eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999), p.vii.

Kemalism was formulated as a state ideology in the 1930s and was founded on a very selective forgetting of the ‘shameful’ Ottoman/Islamic past. It has remained a hegemonic cultural memory to the present, although there have been some structural changes. From the beginning, although it does not reflect a coherent structure or has been redefined according to changing contexts, it has come to the fore as a ‘political discourse’ used both for describing the boundaries of politics and also as the standard of judging attitudes in the public realm. For Kemalism and its different versions see E. Aydın, ‘The Peculiarities of Turkish Revolutionary Ideology in the 1930s: The U ̈lku ̈ Version of Kemalism, 1933–1936’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.40, No.5 (2004), pp.55–82.

For both processes, see R. Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992).

M. Featherstone, ‘Postnational Flows, Identity Formation and Cultural Space’, in E. Ben-Rafael and Y. Sternberg (eds.), Identity, Culture and Globalization (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p.485.

See M.H. Yavuz, ‘Turkish Identity and Foreign Policy in Flux: The Rise of Neo-Ottomanism’, Critique (Spring 1998), p.40.

M. Sturken, ‘Narratives of Recovery: Repressed Memory as Cultural Memory’, in Bal et al. (eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, p.243.

See S. Bozdo gan and R. Kasaba (eds.), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1997) for a detailed analysis of the official modernity project and its failure in different realms to realize its basic premises.

K.H. Karpat, ‘Historical Continuity and Identity Change or How to be Modern Muslim, Ottoman, and Turk’, in K.H. Karpat (ed.), Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden, Boston and Ko ̈ ln: Brill, 2000), p.6. In terms of the issue of citizenship, Karpat, in one of his previous studies, writes: ‘Thus, by 1850 the millet members began to be treated already as Ottoman ‘‘citizens’’, although the formal nationality law was not passed until 1869. This law, which is often cited as having created a new and modern legal status for Ottoman subjects, was a mere technicality that legalized and clarified further an already established concept’. K.H. Karpat, ‘Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Vol.I (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), p.162.

In the pre-modern era, the Ottoman millet system reflected a ruling mechanism in which various (religious) communities were incorporated into the Ottoman system as autonomous bodies. That incorporation occurred through being ‘hierarchically’ ordered under a system of legal pluralism. In this system religious differences were conceived of as ‘given’ and entitled to a legal status. For the Ottoman millet system see N. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), p.10. For an analysis of relations between the millet system and religious pluralism see W. Kymlicka, ‘Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance’, in D. Held (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp.81–105.

S ̧ . Hanio glu, ‘Osmanlıcılık’ (Ottomanism), in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyete Tu ̈rkiye Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: I_letis ̧ im, 1983), p.1390.

This led to the loss of the classical structure of non-Muslim groups as autonomous religious communities and they became ‘minority groups’. K.H. Karpat, ‘The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional Legacy in the Middle East’, in M.J. Esman and I. Rabinovich (eds.), Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

For the state’s formulation of history for the early Republican Turkey, see Y. C ̧ olak, ‘History- Writing, State and Culture Production in Turkey in the 1930s’, in L. Pinnell (ed.), Interruptions: Essays in the Poetics/Politics of Space (Gazimagusa, North Cyprus: Eastern Mediterranean University Press, 2003), pp.117–45.

Y. Akc ̧ ura, ‘Birinci Tu ̈ rk Tarih Kongresi’ (First Turkish History Congress), U ̈lku ̈, No.1 (Feb. 1933), p.26.

Mesut Ye gen argues that from then on, in the Kemalist historiography, ‘the palace, Sultans and Istanbul; the caliphate, Islam, tradition; Circassians, Laz, Kurd; the CUP, Freedom and Entente and Vahdettin; Cemal, Talat and Enver, all belonged to some other historical realm, not to the past’. M. Ye gen, Devlet So ̈yleminde Ku ̈rt Sorunu (Kurdish Question in the State Discourse) (Istanbul: I_letis ̧ im, 1999), p.193.

On the front page of the first issue of the magazine after the DP came to power in 1950 there was a portrait of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror’s entrance into Istanbul after capturing the city.

The Turkish-Islamic synthesis was first formulated in the 1970s by a group of right-wing intellectuals called Aydınlar Ocag ı (The Hearth of the Enlightened) which, in the 1980s under the guidance of the generals of the 1980 coup, achieved a semi-official status. It was an attempt to combine Turkish ethno- national identity with Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic past. Indeed, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis found clear expression in the 1982 constitution with reference to the significance of Turkish historical and moral values reflected most truly in the Ottoman-Turkish culture. The state elite hoped such reference would make it possible to avoid a ‘moral and historical void’ that might be filled by Marxist and Islamic fanaticism. For an extensive analysis of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, see B. Gu ̈ venc et al., Tu ̈rk-I_slam Sentezi (Turkish-Islamic Synthesis) (Istanbul: Sarmal Yay, 1991).

There is a lot of ‘Kemalist input’ in describing the Ottoman age, which is a sign of the end of the Kemalist taboo about the Ottomans, or about the continuity between the Ottomans and Kemalism. See E. Copeaux, Tu ̈rk Tarih Tezinden Tu ̈rk-I_slam Sentezine (From Turkish History Thesis to Turkish- Islamic Synthesis) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yay, 1998), p.194.

S ̧ .H. C ̧ alıs ̧ , Hayaletbilimi ve Hayali Kimlikler: Neo-Osmanlılık, O ̈zal ve Balkanlar (Imaginary Science and Imagined Identity: Neo-Ottomanism, O ̈ zal and the Balkans) (Konya: C ̧ izgi, 2001), p.102.

Ibid., p.111.

See Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈, No.19 (1992), pp.10–15.

Ibid., pp.16 and 20; for this perspective, also see C. C ̧ andar, ‘21. Yu ̈ zyıla Do gru Tu ̈ rkiye: Tarih ve Jeopoliti gin I_ntikamı’ (Turkey towards the 21st Century: Revenge of History and Geopolitics), Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈, No.19 (1992), p.33.

For this move, see G. C ̧ etinsaya, ‘Cumhuriyet Tu ̈ rkiye’sinde ‘‘Osmanlıcılık’’’ (‘Ottomanism’ in Republican Turkey), in A. C ̧ i gdem (ed.), Modern Tu ̈rkiye’de Siyasi Du ̈s ̧ u ̈nce, Cilt. 4: Muhafa- zakarlık (Political Thought in Modern Turkey, Vol.5: Conservatism) (Istanbul: I_letis ̧im, 2003), pp.378–80.

Mustafa C ̧ alık, Cengiz C ̧ andar, Ahmet Turan Alkan, Nur Vergin and Deniz Gu ̈ rsel were the main intellectuals voicing neo-Ottomanist views in Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈ during the early 1990s. For a concise, editorial description of the discussion maintained in the journal, see M. C ̧ alık, ‘Neo-Osmanlı Tartıs ̧ malarına Sade Bir Derkenar’ (A Marginal Note on Neo-Ottomanism Discussions), Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈, No.19 (1992), p.1.

C ̧ andar, ‘21. Yu ̈ zyıla Do gru Tu ̈ rkiye’. Also for the emphasis on imperial vision see M. C ̧ alık, ‘Miras Davasında Yol Ayrımı: Hangi Tu ̈ rkiye?’ (Forking in the Inheritance Case: Which Turkey?), Tu ̈rkiye Gu ̈nlu ̈g u ̈, No.19 (1993), pp.1–5.

C ̧ andar, ‘21. Yu ̈ zyıla Do gru Tu ̈ rkiye’, p.33.

T. O ̈ zal, Turkey in Europe and Europe in Turkey (Northern Cyprus: K. Rustem & Brothers, 1991), p.290.

For O ̈ zal, Islam is the basic binding mechanism transcending ethnic and regional differences: ‘It is religion that blends Muslims of Anatolia and the Balkans. Therefore, Islam is a powerful cement of co-existence and cooperation among diverse Muslim groups . . . Being a Turk in the ex-Ottoman space means being a Muslim or vice versa’. Quoted in Yavuz, ‘Turkish Identity and Foreign Policy in Flux’, p.24.

For these similarities, see A. Davudo glu, Stratejik Derinlik: Tu ̈rkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu (Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position) (Istanbul: Ku ̈ re Yay, 2001), p.85.

See C ̧ alıs ̧ , Hayaletbilimi ve Hayali Kimlikler, pp.136–7. This can be also observed in Turkey’s new foreign policy based on ‘the Imperial Ottoman tradition’ as ‘neo-Ottoman model’. See S. Constantinides, ‘Turkey: The Emergence of a New Foreign Policy: The Neo-Ottoman Model’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Vol.24, No.2 (1996), pp.323–4.

Yavuz, ‘Turkish Identity and Foreign Policy in Flux’, p.37.

Turkish citizens with Balkan, Crimean and Caucasus origins established their own associations thatdo not depend on ‘any conflict between their current Turkish identity and their ancestral and regional identities shaped during Ottoman rule’. Karpat, ‘Introduction’, in Karpat (ed.) Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, p.xvi.

Yavuz, ‘Turkish Identity and Foreign Policy in Flux’, p.24.

C ̧ alıs ̧ , Hayaletbilimi ve Hayali Kimlikler, p.146.

For the Law and its analysis on the basis of formation of Turkish identity, see Y. C ̧ olak, ‘Nationalism and State in Turkey: Drawing the Boundaries of ‘‘Turkish Culture’’ in the 1930s’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol.3, No.1 (2003), pp.2–20.

Although the migration of Muslim groups (Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians) from both the Balkans and the Caucasus were accepted, the migrations of the Gagavuz Turks, a small Turkish group with Christian origins, were rejected. S. A. Somel, ‘Osmanlı’ dan  umhuriyet’ e Tu ̈rk Kimligi ’ ( Turkish Identity from the Ottoman to the Republic), in N. Bilgin (ed.), Cumhuriyet, Demokrasi ve Kimlik (Republic, Democracy and Identity) (Istanbul: Ba glam Yay, 1997), p.81.

Like the Kemalists, its leaders conceived the democratic mechanism to establish their ‘alternative’ symbolic universe, setting some prescriptions for a new public identity. For the WP’s view of democracy and society see E. Aydın and Y. C ̧ olak, ‘Dilemmas of Turkish Democracy: The Encounter Between Kemalist Secularism and Political Islamism in the 1990s’, in D.W. Odell-Scott (ed.), Democracy and Religion: Free Exercise and Diverse Visions (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), pp.349–80.

T. Bora, Tu ̈rk Sag ının U ̈c ̧ Hali: Milliyetc ̧ ilik, Muhafazakarlık, Islamcılık (Three Dimensions of Turkish Right: Nationalism, Conservatism, Islamism) (Istanbul: Birikim, 1999), p.133.

See M. H. Yavoz, ‘Cleansing Islam from the Public Sphere’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol.54, No.1 (2000), pp.21–42.

A. C ̧ ınar, ‘National History as a Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.43, No.2 (2001), pp.364–91.

These activities for 1994 and later years are documented in detail in I_stanbul Bu ̈lteni (Istanbul Bulletin), monthly official journal of Istanbul Municipality. Istanbul Municipality gave special importance to the 700th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire, as mentioned above, celebrated in 1999 throughout the country. Among the activities there was a series of scientific conferences called ‘Ottoman Conferences’, exhibitions showing ‘Ottoman Arts’, ‘Ottoman Istanbul’, ‘Portraits of Sultans’, ‘Ottoman Cloths’, ‘Ottoman Tradesmen’, ‘Ottoman Calligraphy’, and so on, concerts of Ottoman-Turkish music, and movies about the Ottomans. I_stanbul Bu ̈lteni, No.120 (1999), pp.20–21.

T. Bora, ‘Dreams of the Turkish Right’, Mediterranean 10 (Winter 1997–98), pp.296–7.

Bora, Tu ̈rk Sag ının U ̈c ̧ Hali, p.137.

For the discussions on the Medina Document and its view of pluralism see A. Bulac ̧ , ‘Medine Vesikası Hakkında Genel Bilgiler’ (General Information on Medina Document), Birikim, No.38–39 (1992), pp.102–11; ‘Medine Vesikası U ̈ zerine Tartıs ̧ malar I’ (Discussions on Medina Document), Birikim, No.47 (1993), pp.40–46; and Ali Bulac ̧ , ‘Medine Vesikası U ̈ zerine Tartıs ̧ malar II’ (Discussions on Medina Document II), Birikim, Vol.48 (1993), pp.48–58.

H. Gu ̈ lalp, Kimlikler Siyaseti: Tu ̈rkiye’de Siyasal I_slamın Temelleri (Politics of Identites: Roots of Political Islam in Turkey) (Istanbul: Metis, 2002), p.96.

For the relationship between Islamic view of pluralism and rule of the people, see A. Bulac ̧ , I_slam ve Demokrasi (Islam and Democracy) (Istanbul: Beyan Yayınları, 1993).

See Gu ̈ lalp, Kimlikler Siyaseti, pp.159, 160.

WP’s leaders claimed that ‘they are the true representatives of ‘‘society’’, and so when they came to power especially in influential municipalities, they began to revive the ‘‘symbols’’ and ‘‘values’’ of the society’. Aydın and C ̧ olak, ‘Dilemmas of Turkish Democracy’, p.366.

Quoted in Gu ̈ lalp, Kimlikler Siyaseti, p.97.

Ibid., p.168.

Y. Navaro-Yashin, ‘Uses and Abuses of ‘‘State and Civil Society’’ in Contemporary Turkey’, New Perspectives on Turkey, No.18 (Spring 1998), p.12.

Z. Aslan, ‘Conflicting Paradigms: Political Rights in the Turkish Constitutional Court’, Critique, Vol.11, No.1 (2002), p.17.

O ̈ . I_nce, ‘Osmanlı Modeli’ (Ottoman Model), Hu ̈rriyet Pazar, 25 Aug. 2002.

A. O ̈ ztu ̈ rkmen, ‘Celebrating National Holidays in Turkey: History and Memory’, New Perspectives on Turkey, No.25 (2001), p.71.

See B. Yazıcı, ‘‘‘Discovering Our Past’’: Are ‘‘We’’ Breaking Taboos? Reconstructing Ataturkism and the Past in Contemporary Turkey’, New Perspectives on Turkey, No.25 (2001), pp.1–30.

M. Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p.25.

[theothersarshi]

Seeing a lot of stuff about the EU vs. the US, racism, and all that. It reminds me that the cultural divide between the continents is pretty huge, and for some reason the US assumes that the EU is fairly similar, except maybe with champagne and pasta.

The within-continent divide of Europe is huge. Probably way greater than most Americans would expect.

Remember how Latin was the language of scholarship in Europe in the Middle Ages? Yeah, that was Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, it was Old Slavonic. This made sense, because there were a lot of Slavic people around (not exclusively, but enough to be a majority). 

Remember how England, France &co. went crusading in the Middle East? You might remember them fighting Arabs and Turks and other “heathens”. Except they went there supposedly to save their fellow Christians who lived in the Roman Empire. 

“What?” you say. “Wasn’t the Roman Empire dead and buried by the time of the Middle Ages?”

You’re thinking of the one with the capital in Rome. The capital moved to Constantinople in 330 AD, and the empire continued for another thousand years, though we generally refer to it as the Byzantine Empire. It also switched its official language to Greek. It was rich, it was cultured, it had some Really Important Church stuff going on. 

Anyway, the Westerners sacked allied Constantinople, thus weakening it for later Turkish attacks and hastening its eventual demise, while the Turks extended their influence further and further into Europe, so what was a fun stroll in the name of faith for the West was a pretty shitty input in a war for survival for the East.

Remember the Renaissance, when the Antiquity was rediscovered and all sorts of knowledge boomed? Yeah, Constantinople fell and the Christians there ran because Muslims had a tendency to occasionally genocide them. They went West and took their knowledge with them, kickstarting the Renaissance.

The West wrote its own history and that’s what often gets remembered; the Byzantine empire was, and then it was not, and behold how awesomely the West rediscovered the “lost” works of the Ancients. 

And so on, and so on.

[gemsofgreece]

Hello! Forgive the rather specific request, but do you have a brief recap of the wars Greece fought in modern days? By modern days I mean after guns were invented up to the XX century, excluded (I mean you don't have to mention me WW1 and WW2, as I guess they are already a given). I know for a long time Greece was under the Ottoman empire, so I take that as well

Greece hasn't really fought with others much except Turkey tho lol, the list below will give you a deeper understanding of all the Greco-turkish memes

Guns were used in what we'd call their recognisable form around 1300 AD. For the next 200 years, the Greek fights are still the Byzantine fights.

In the 14th Century, the Byzantine Empire tries to resurrect itself as a result of its utter destruction from the Crusaders. This leads to Byzantine civil wars between aspiring emperors who simultaneously try to regain lands. Meanwhile, the empire fights the Ottomans on numerous battles. Throw in this mix a Byzantine-Genoese War, which had to do with the repercussions of the Crusades.

In the 15th Century, it's all Byzantine Empire vs Ottomans. The empire falls and Greeks become a part of the Ottoman empire.

In the Ottoman-Venetian Wars which span three centuries (1463 - 1718), Greeks participate on the side of the Venetians every time.

During the 16th century, Greeks make several anti-Ottoman revolts, at Vonitsa, Epirus, Thessaly and Dionysius the Philosopher's revolt. They also participate in the Albanian revolt in Himara.

In the Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774), Greeks participate on the side of the Russians.

From 1778-1815, Greeks make several revolts with local success which leads to re-invasions from the Ottoman Turks and more fights.

1821-1832, Greek War of Independence.

Crimean War, 1853 - 1856. Russia VS Ottoman Empire, France and UK. Greeks participate on the side of the Russians.

Further Cretan, Macedonian, Thessalian and Epirote revolts against the Ottoman Empire, 1841 - 1898.

Macedonian Struggle, 1904 - 1908. Atypical war between Greece and Bulgaria over the still Ottoman-controlled region of Macedonia.

First Balkan War, 1912-1913. Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria VS Ottoman Empire.

Second Balkan War, 1913. Greece and Serbia VS Bulgaria.

WWI (1914-1918). Greece joins the Allies after a lot of drama.

Greeks participate in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918-1920).

Greco-Turkish War, 1919-1922.

WWII, 1939-1945. Greece is of course on the side of the Allies and fights the invasions of Italy, Germany and Bulgaria, for the most part simultaneously.

Greek Civil War, 1946 - 1949.

Korean War, 1950 - 1953. Greeks participate on the side of South Korea. Fun fact, they were the fifth largest UN power participating in the war.

Korean stamp.

Turkish Invasion of Cyprus, 1974. Much weaker and shorter assistance of Cyprus than one would expect, most likely because at the time Greece was governed by a dictatorship.

Now as a member of NATO and UN it is in several expenditions worldwide, missions, but it's basically peacemaking and humanitarian operations etc

[archcracker]

top tier youtube comment fights:

turks trying to convince people attlia the hun was a turk vs everyone else

japanese warcrime denial

if nicholas II was actually an idiot or not

turks and greeks arguing about if greek music sounds like turk music or vice versa

anything involving serbians

[santaniegos]

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[asenatheoperator]

Reds vs Blues (Turks v Greeks) before the Operation Cerberus in Cyprus (3 years before Asena joined Rainbow) @gillesmontagnetoure‘s OC lovely Kamaki leading the Greeks. Also lighting was far better when i was taking the pictures, for some bloody reason they got darker.