Norman Stone – Turkey: A Short History (book review)
April 18, 2012
[A slightly shorter version of this review is published in the latest issue of ‘Insight Turkey’ (Vol. 14 No. 2): http://www.insightturkey.com/insight-turkey-volume-14-no-2/issues/168]
Norman Stone – Turkey: A Short History, Thames & Hudson, pp 192
A new title seems to be landing on the “Ottoman and Turkish History” shelves of Istanbul’s book shops every week. Norman Stone, formerly Professor of History at Oxford and Cambridge, is the latest heavyweight to step into the ring with this volume, an almost recklessly slim account of 1300 years’ history. The Turks’ nomadic central Asian origins, their 10th century arrival in Anatolia, the rise and fall of the Seljuk and Ottoman Empires, and the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic are all covered in just 165 pages. Though obviously thin on real detail in most places, the book nevertheless represents both a decent primer for the interested novice (with some important provisos), and an entertaining, elegantly-written frisk for the more jaded expert.
Early on, Stone suggests: “If you are Turkish you have to ask what you owe to: (1) the ancient native Turkish tradition; (2) Persia; (3) Byzantium; (4) Islam; (5) what sort of Islam; and (6) conscious westernization”. Of course, it would be far-fetched to imagine that every modern Turk self-consciously ratiocinates these things and comes up with their own credit-debit account of historical heritage. It’s this book’s major strength, however, to demonstrate the lesser-appreciated continuities – as well as sudden changes – that do make up so much of Turkish history. The Ottoman Empire, Stone tells us, initially saw itself as an inheritor of both the Seljuk Turk and Byzantine Greek traditions. Until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, for example, the Ottomans had thrived as a cavalry-based nomadic “military empire” in the Seljuk tradition; indeed, the plan of the Topkapı Palace they built soon after the conquest – with its modest, low-rise pavilions and courtyards – deliberately imitates the tented headquarters of a nomadic Turkish chieftain. On the other hand, Mehmet II (the conqueror of Constantinople) spoke fluent Greek and was “in effect set upon retaking the eastern Roman Empire that Justinian had made great in the sixth century”. Sultans often made dynastic marriages of convenience with Byzantine princesses; and even the harem eunuch, an idea so beloved of the orientalist western European, was originally a Byzantine phenomenon, originating in the early Christian understanding that sex was the work of the Devil. There’s also the little-appreciated fact that, at the time of the conquest of Constantinople, the population of the Ottoman lands was still 75% Christian.
A more self-confidently “Ottoman” identity developed in the 15th century, particularly under Selim I (known to us rather unflatteringly as “the Grim”, though a more accurate translation of the Turkish “Yavuz” is “stern” or “tough”). His capture of much of the Arab peninsula – in particular the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina – inevitably made the Ottoman Empire more overtly Islamic, and it was during his reign that the Ottomans claimed the Islamic Caliphate from the withering Mameluke state in Egypt, (the Mamelukes themselves descended from Turks, brought to Egypt as slaves by the Ayyubid dynasty). It was also around this time that the Ottoman sultans would begin to emphasise splendour and grandiosity as their distinctive characteristic, adopting titles such as – amongst many others – “Marcher Lord of the Horizon” and “Shadow of God on Earth”. We associate this grandiosity with the apogee of Ottoman power, especially the long rule of Süleyman I (the Magnificent), which stretched from 1520-66. During Süleyman’s reign the empire won a series of blistering military victories, and the Ottoman territories reached their largest extent: it could be argued that the Ottomans were, for a time, the most powerful force on the globe. Süleyman wasn’t just a charismatic general of genius, however, but also a formidable organiser of the state machine, and he is known in Turkey to this day as “Kanuni”, or “law-maker”. “Süleyman’s reign”, Stone writes admiringly, “mark[s] a synthesis of empire: Rome for the law and organization, Islam for the inspiration, Central Asia for the military”. Nevertheless, things were set to change. It’s true that a light burns brightest in the moments before it becomes extinguished, but what happened to the Ottoman Empire after the age of Süleyman wasn’t so much a swift extinguishing, but rather an extraordinarily drawn-out decline, lasting until the 20th century. This decline is usually claimed to start at the disastrous siege of Vienna in 1683, which not only resulted in defeat but also prompted an enormous Christian counter-offensive in the European Ottoman territories. Symbolic though the siege may be, in reality the rot had started long before.
Stone poses a central question at the beginning of the book, which any historian of the Ottoman Empire must take seriously: “To what extent was the success of the Ottomans based on Islam, or would you read this the other way round, and just say that the Ottomans were successful when their Islam was not taken too seriously?” You needn’t necessarily answer this question entirely one way or the other. It is true, however, that hand in hand with the long decline of the Ottoman Empire went an Islamic intellectual retrogression, symbolised by the 18th century closure of mathematics and engineering schools and the broader atrophying of scientific enquiry. It’s also true that, throughout its existence, the Ottoman Empire depended not only on taxes levied on non-Muslim minorities to maintain its impressive bureaucratic machine, but also on minorities for the bulk of those conscripted into the elite Janissary guards, and even for Grand Viziers (who often held the real power, as opposed to their often ineffective sultans). The tolerance that the Ottoman Empire extended to its religious minorities, however imperfect, was truly remarkable, and certainly compares favourably with the record of contemporary European regimes. Indeed, when the Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the early 16th century as part of the Inquisition in Spain, most were welcomed and resettled on Ottoman lands by then-sultan, Bayezid II, who dryly reflected: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” It’s a good thing that he did too, as Christians and Jews increasingly kept the Ottoman economy going over the 18th and 19th centuries, inevitable when Islam forbade the earning of interest on debts. The “capitulations” – favourable terms offered to foreigners (enterprising Europeans) to do business in Ottoman territory – also gradually came to symbolise the increasing stranglehold in which the western European powers began to hold the Ottomans. Initially intended as a sensible method to stimulate trade with outsiders (the product of a self-confident and outward-looking state machine), they eventually came to be seen as humiliating terms which the Europeans exploited to gain further leverage over the declining eastern power. The Ottomans didn’t feel able to abolish the capitulations until the First World War, when their empire became as reckless and destructive as great empires tend to do when staring down the barrel of extinction. (As an interesting footnote, Stone describes the abolition of the capitulations as coming from the same impulse that led to the notorious Wealth Tax on minorities of 1942, and the anti-Greek pogroms of 1955: the necessity of creating a “national bourgeoisie”, or functioning “Muslim commercial class”.)
Before publishing this book, Stone had already gained some notoriety for his contrarian views on the Armenian “incidents” of 1915-17, and there is no Damascene moment to report here. He characterises what happened to the Armenians as just one strand of a theme that was common throughout the Ottoman lands in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. At around the same time as the Turks were massacring Armenians, for example, Muslims were themselves being forcibly expelled and subject to atrocities in the Balkans and the Caucasus. For their part, Greeks and Armenians were each also committing their own crimes against Muslim Turks. Framing the matter this way, and puzzling over how the Christian minorities have so monopolised historical sympathy, Stone seems think that the Turks’ only problem is one of PR. It was the same story, he argues, during the 19th century, when Greeks and Turks traded barbarities on the Aegean and liberal British sympathy – dazzled by the fashionable romantic Hellenism of the time – sided with the Greeks. “Genocide” is an unsuitable word for something that was, in reality, a far more ambiguous shade of grey. If what happened to the Armenians is genocide – Stone says – then so too is what was visited upon the Muslim population of the Balkans and in the territories of the Russian Empire.
It’s true that crimes against the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire receive comparatively little attention from western historians, and Stone is right to highlight them. But what happened to the Armenians really was something altogether different, and of an altogether different magnitude. Comparisons with Nazi Germany won’t do, but it’s an indisputable fact that hundreds of thousands of Armenians did die. “Deportations” is a suitably vague term to describe the deliberate massacre of many, the accidental death of some, and the forced resettlement of many others. The debate will continue (perhaps “rage on” is a more suitable term) as to the motives and effects of Ottoman policy in eastern Anatolia. There’s surely no doubt, however, that the emptying of all significant Christian minorities from Turkish lands was indeed considered convenient by the Young Turk regime – whether all the killings were deliberate or not – and it set about achieving this by whatever means necessary. Does Stone honestly believe that what happened was a legitimate response to Armenian terrorist activity, as he suggests here? Nationalism gripped all sections of Ottoman society during the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps the greatest mistake of the Armenians was in embracing their own with such enthusiasm, despite the fact that in no Ottoman province did the Armenian population ever constitute a majority.
Stone, in his enthusiasm to testify as witness for the Turkish defence against the genocide allegations, no doubt goes much too far; and he does the same elsewhere. In the preface he makes the bizarre assertion that it’s “not really for an outsider to comment” on the state of contemporary Turkish politics. Perhaps this argument makes more sense when you’re Professor in the History department of Ankara’s Bilkent University, as Stone currently is. Would he say the same about the United States, I wonder? If not, would he not then be guilty of the same kind of relativism that he’s doubtless (correctly) critical of elsewhere? The claim seems doubly odd, when – despite professing to “resolutely refrain from doing so” – Stone does, in fact, go on to make a number of extremely contentious pronouncements about modern Turkey. Shorn of the Kurds, we’re blithely told, the country would become “a Greece and perhaps even a sort of late Byzantium”, whatever that means. Almost as bafflingly, the military coup of 1980 – as a result of which 650,000 were arrested, countless tortured or killed, and the seeds sown for the future bloody Kurdish conflict – is limply presented to us as “the most interesting of all Turkey’s coups” in which “the casualties were very few in number”.
The chapters on the modern Turkish Republic thus make for a curiously hollow read. Perhaps what Stone meant when suggesting that “it’s not for an outsider to comment” was really “it’s not really for an outsider to criticise”. In which case, more’s the pity. As Kant rightly observed, you show a friend most respect by adopting a policy of sensitive but unswerving honesty, trusting that they are mature enough to respond to such honesty with dignity and equanimity. If Stone had recognised this, his observations on Turkish history – particularly the more recent – would have carried more weight.
The neo-Ottoman view of history
April 10, 2012
As the modern vogue for neo-Ottomanism lurches on in Turkey, the contrasts between the contemporary Turkish and British approaches to national history are for me becoming ever clearer. Neither is particularly encouraging, but both are the understandable result of respective historical inheritances.
Ever since the French Revolution, the British have defined themselves against that chaotic pole across the channel: reform rather than revolution has been the rule. Moments of crisis or turmoil have been home grown, not imposed from outside, and the country has always felt able to define itself on its own terms. For all its trauma, even the Second World War only served to confirm Britain in its sense of historical and moral righteousness; no awkward compromises had to be made, and the good ship sailed confidently on. Over time, however, this serene progression has engendered its own problems. Never having been forced to reflect upon it, the general population of modern Britain has slipped into complacent somnambulism about the past. Despite its importance, a dangerous ignorance surrounds the effect and significance – for better or for worse – of the British Empire, which is barely spoken of in today’s Britain and poorly understood by the general public. I recently took one of the example practice ‘citizenship tests’ on the British foreign office website, and while there are plenty of questions about the role of county council representatives or the frequency of local rubbish collections, there is almost nothing on the most fundamental episodes of national history. Compare this with other, similar western states – many of whose own citizenship tests I also had a look at (an exhilarating couple of hours) – and the contrast is far from flattering. Perhaps the crowning symptom of this malaise was the previous Labour government’s decision to remove history as a compulsory subject for students up to 16: an unforgivable sin.
Turkey’s relationship with its past is a lot more fraught with traumatic ruptures, conscious jolts forward, and moments of forced amnesia. Since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, state policy has dictated that to look back on Turkey’s Ottoman past is backward and reactionary – somehow a betrayal of the modern Turkish nation state. The recent ‘neo-Ottoman’ challenge to this stultifying official diktat should therefore be welcome, but it’s so hollow and uneven as to be almost as problematic as what went before. Turkey’s newfound obsession with the past – evident in seductively-costumed films and T.V. series’; architecture; foreign policy; even fashion and interior design – shows no serious attempt to consider anything other than the most flattering, least challenging aspects of national history. A recent post on the Tarlabaşı Istanbul blog quotes Prof. Dr. Uğur Tanyeli on the subject, discussing the architectural example of the tawdry wedding cake confection of the “historically recreated” Demirören shopping mall on Istanbul’s İstiklal Caddesi:
“The fewer traces of the past [an object] carries, the more successful a preservation [is believed] to be … there is not only the Demiören shopping centre, but there are hundreds of buildings along the Bosporus like that. There are ‘renovated’ buildings dating back to the 13th century that look like they have been built yesterday and where not a single screw is historically justified … In Turkey, the historical has to be brand-new and squeaky clean. So what is actually wanted is the illusion of history – It has to be historical, but it is not allowed to carry any baggage of the past, or any of history’s patina, there can’t be anything about it that creates unease.”
The ongoing renovation project in Istanbul’s central Tarlabaşı district is also instructive. Having finally been vacated, most of the historical houses have been mercilessly gutted and left pray to looters and rubbish dumpers. As their sinking bay windows morosely cave in on themselves, it’s hard to see how many of these shells even remain standing. It looks depressingly likely that they are simply going to be demolished, to be replaced by historically empty ‘imitation’ replacements. The so-called ‘regeneration’ of Tarlabaşı’s old buildings thus symbolises the modern, neo-Ottoman view of history: a facile attempt to reclaim the past, without the inconvenience of the antiquated plumbing systems of a truly authentic picture. As Prof. Tanyeli says, it’s “an interesting dilemma … they want the historical, but they do not want anything old”.
Oscillating from queasy shame about the past to shallow glorification of it does not indicate a country at particular ease with its history. Freedom from such jolts, however, can result in the complacent amnesia about the past exemplified in modern Britain. It’s difficult to know which is less healthy.
Europe, Turkey and historical amnesia
April 2, 2012
[Published on openDemocracy (27th March 2012): http://www.opendemocracy.net/william-armstrong/europe-turkey-and-historical-amnesia]
“In the first years after the war … Europeans took shelter behind a collective amnesia.” – Hans-Magnus Enzensberger.
In his robust case for a liberal Euro-scepticism, ‘A Grand Illusion?’ (1996), Tony Judt robustly debunked an oft-repeated myth about the post-war rebuilding project in western Europe. From the very start, rather than being part of a carefully planned attempt to reshape the continent by deliberately sabotaging nation-states from above, (with the eventual goal being to unite the entire continent under one umbrella European super-state), initial moves after the Second World War towards greater European cohesion were, in fact, the logical result of quite distinct national concerns. These concerns only converged in shared European projects by force of convenience. As Judt points out, post-war European cooperation was “a fortuitous outcome of separate and distinctive electoral concerns, economic interests, and national political cultures, it was made necessary by circumstance and rendered possible by prosperity.” In particular, the war of 1939-45 had the lasting consequence of giving the continent something else in common: “a shared recent memory of war, civil war, occupation, and defeat […] The shared experience of defeat points to another common European wartime experience: the memory of things best forgotten […] Hitler’s lasting gift to Europe was thus the degree to which he and his collaborators made it impossible henceforth to dwell with comfort on the past.”
Almost every European participant emerged from the Second World War having lost. The shared perception of a necessity for deliberate historical amnesia in post-war Europe, for forgetting the traumatic recent past, was thus one of the most significant points of convergence between nation states that helped legitimate the new European project. Cooperation was imperative, and part of this cooperation was the tacit agreement between nations as to the importance of ignoring their own roles in the madness of the war that had just ended. At the very most, if not forcibly ignoring, countries tended (or still tend) to absolve themselves of as much responsibility as possible, to trumpet exaggerated national myths of resistance to fascism. The phenomenon is observable in France, (formerly West) Germany, Belgium, Poland, Italy: such methods were considered something like an existential necessity, necessary in order for states to get over the Second World War as cohesive units. It is only since 1989 and the end of the Cold War that a more complex, honestly realistic picture of the European inheritance has emerged, and even now it’s clear that many countries are still far from willing to look their own troubled histories directly in the eye. The official French line, for example, shared by a majority of the French people, continues to exaggerate the significance and size of the French Resistance, and underestimate the completeness of Vichy France’s submission to fascism, and its horrendous consequences. There’s a salutary lesson to be taken from a charmed visit to Paris: its state of flawless architectural continuity was paid for at the price of submission to the Nazis.
In its capacity as a candidate country of the European Union, Turkey’s apparent refusal to come to terms with the Armenian “events” of 1915 is often cited as a clear example of why the country is unsuitable for membership. However, the opposite could well be true. Far from having to recognise these events as “genocide” in order to adhere to established European norms of historical account-settling, Turkey’s continued denial of the Armenian “events” should rather be seen as an advantage, recommending it as an entirely suitable European candidate. Following classic post-war European form, perhaps Turkey’s historical amnesia should be seen as one of the key criteria that it fulfils in its wish to be defined as an authentic European state!
Turkish Islam & Turkish Nationalism: A New Balance (Turkish Policy Quarterly, Winter 2012)
March 2, 2012
[This is an extended and elaborated version of a piece I posted on here some time ago. It is published in the latest, Winter 2012 edition of Turkish Policy Quarterly, which is available for purchase now. You can read the piece below or, along with a slightly anaemic abstract, in its original habitat here: http://www.turkishpolicy.com/article/674/turkish-nationalism-and-turkish-islam-a-new-balance/ ]
Since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, received wisdom has tended to consider nationalism and Islam as mutually incompatible forces in the Turkish context. Turkish nationalism – so this narrative goes – is defined by the secularizing, modernizing example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a positivist, military man with an almost religious faith in the ability of science to reshape society. Islam, with its appeals to multinational, multiracial unity, inevitably stood in the way of the “pure”, homogenous nation-state. Such an understanding was propagated by those early secularizing elites within Turkey itself, and largely accepted by observers outside the country for the better part of the past hundred years. However, the fact is that religion has always been a crucial motivating force behind popular expressions of nationalism in Turkey. What makes the current Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s position unique is its wedding of a popular religious nationalism to real political power. Recent developments – in particular the ongoing recent spat between Turkey and Israel – demonstrate to outsiders what has been observable within Turkey for a long time: that Islam and Turkish nationalism are far from irreconcilable on the political, as well as social, level.
Popular Religion
A singular irony of the founding of the Turkish republic is the fact that for all the talk of institutional secularism, the new nation was, in fact, fundamentally defined on religious grounds. Significant numbers of those resettled on Turkish land during the Greek-Turkish population exchanges, for example, were Greek-speaking Muslims, who, in many cases, could not even speak the Turkish language. The Kurds (and other non-Turkish Muslim minorities) were also included on religious – rather than linguistic – grounds. Whether you spoke a dialect of Laz, Kurdish, Zazaki, or Turkish, religion was the most important category to fulfill in order to be included in the new Turkish state. Even Atatürk himself recognized the increased importance of religious sentiment, and was not averse – particularly in the early years of his leadership – to appealing to the emotional religious feelings of the people when seeking to unite the nation behind his resistance forces. He led the War of Independence as a Gazi, (meaning “Warrior of the Faith” in it’s original Arabic form), repeatedly invoked the name of God and the spiritual dimension of the liberation struggle in public pronouncements, and established Sunni Islam as the state religion in 1924.
Such an approach was seen as necessary following the religious retrenchment experienced by the Ottoman Empire during the late -19th and early -20th century. The loss of almost all Ottoman territory in the Balkans prior to the First World War resulted in the flight of around 400,000 Muslim migrants from hostile regions, to re-settle in Istanbul and Anatolia. Similarly, around the same number of Circassian Muslims from the north coast of the Black Sea also migrated to Ottoman territories in the 1860s, escaping from the increasingly aggressive practices of the Russian Empire. These migrants, or muhajir, had learnt to wear their religion as the singular mark of identity, and saw in the Ottoman Empire (and subsequently the Turkish Republic) a protective confessional motherland. Anatolia went through enormous demographic changes during the later years of the Ottoman Empire. Erik J. Zürcher estimates that immediately prior to the First World War, Anatolia was 80 percent Muslim, whilst ten years later, this figure had risen to 98 percent.[1] This more narrowly Muslim composition inevitably had a large impact on the policies and attitudes of the late-Ottoman and early republican eras. The decision to empty Anatolia of Christian Greeks, Armenians, and Syriacs – both before and after the establishment of the Republic – clearly illustrates how the new nation’s identity had become inseparable from its Muslim identity.
Elite Secularist Nationalism
This religious definition was emphasized even as Turkey’s new elites were preparing to systematically cleanse Islam from state institutions. The newly independent Turkish republic was not just neutral to religion; it actively subordinated it to the state, establishing a rigid and doctrinaire form of laicite in a country that until recently had been the seat of the Islamic Caliphate. All expression of Islam was to be tightly regulated by the new Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Department of Religious Affairs) to ensure compliance with the new secular order. The Caliphate was abolished; independent religious establishments were closed down; imams were appointed and their Friday sermons were written by the state; women were discouraged from wearing the veil. Myriad other cultural and political reforms were initiated, aiming at faster and more effective Westernization. All of this was imposed from above, and all was done in the name of modernization, secularization and – crucially – nationalism: to oppose the changes or the way they were implemented was to risk vilification as an irtıcacı (reactionary), against the modern, independent Turkish nation. The military became the symbol of the secular order, and the four (if we include the “post-modern” coup of 1997) coup d’états that the country experienced during the 20th century were all – at least in part – military responses to perceived religious incursions into political and social life.
Thus, it is clear that there was a tension – even predating the declaration of the Republic – between the technocratic, secular nationalism of the reforming elites and the religious character that was essentially the defining feature of the new nation. In his fine assessment of modern Turkish history, Perry Anderson has described Kemalism as an “ideological code in two registers. One was secular and applied to the elite. The other was crypto-religious and accessible to the masses. Common to both was the integrity of the nation, as supreme political value.”[2] Atatürk’s secularizing reforms have too often been accepted as the defining features of Turkish nationalism but it is clear that such dry, technocratic reforms could not possibly constitute the sole emotional appeal influencing such an aggressive and deeply-felt nationalism. It is significant, for example, that the extreme nationalists of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – which won 13 percent of the votes in the parliamentary election of June 2011 – responded to the reopening of the historic Armenian Surp Haç Church in Ani with reactiveFriday prayers, which they organized two weeks later in the same location.[3] Likewise, it is striking that Turkish soldiers, felled in counter-insurgency conflict with the PKK, are uniformly referred to as şehitler, or “martyrs”, by the Turkish media.
The AKP and Post-nationalism?
The spectacular electoral successes of the AKP, an Islamically-oriented party, starting in 2002, seemed to challenge the assumptions of the secular-nationalist paradigm even further. Here at last, it was thought, was a way out of the monocultural impasse, a tonic to divisive and destructive Turkish nationalism. Many optimistically hoped that the AKP would take the country to a post-nationalist state of peace, respect for human rights, and economic prosperity, and a series of symbolic ‘openings’ helped warm up relations with minority communities within the Turkish borders. In particular, the government was expected to attempt a solution to the “Kurdish Question” by re-emphasizing common religious bonds between Turks and Kurds. More progress was made in the European Union accession process by the AKP than any previous government. It also defanged the Turkish military – that bastion of unreconstructed secular nationalism – which it accuses of plotting a coup to overthrow the elected government in the Balyoz, or “Sledgehammer”, case.
The AKP’s Marriage of Nationalism and Religion
It is becoming clear, however, that the government’s struggle against the generals was in fact only a strike against one, narrowly defined, type of nationalism. Another has become evident, and this form can be said to constitute the new ideological bedrock of the AKP government. Campaigning during the parliamentary election of June 2011, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan adopted a much harder note on the Kurdish question than ever before, and – the AKP having won almost 50 percent of the popular vote – he has continued this tendency since. In response to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) attacks on Turkish forces stationed near the Iraqi border in October, the government retreated back into the full scale military solution that has failed to solve the problem thus far. The feeble “apology on behalf of the state” that Erdoğan offered in November for the Dersim Massacres of 1937-39 can be summarily disregarded, representing nothing more than the government’s latest attempt to score cheap political points against the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). The EU process is effectively dead, and the government has wasted no time laying the blame squarely at the door of the EU itself. The United States – and “the West” more generally – comes in for increasingly strident criticism, sanctioned by rising anti-American sentiments in Turkish society (a recent poll found that 64.8 percent of Turks have a “negative” opinion of Americans).[4] Despite evident deficiencies in the “Turkish model”, Erdoğan obviously relishes being idolized across the Arab world and, emboldened by a booming economy, he flexes his muscles on the world stage as no Turkish leader has before. Appealing to the collective libido dominandi, such behavior wins him ever more support back home. Boorish populism is prosecuted in the name of greater and deeper democracy.
The equation of Turkish with Muslim identity was always tacitly understood; now it is explicit. Whilst previous Turkish administrations have, at times, won support by appealing to both nationalist and religious sentiments as well, none have done so as successfully as the AKP. Erdoğan differs from Turgut Özal in degree, organization and success, having become the first leader in Turkish history to win three consecutive elections, with a consistently rising share of the vote. The AKP’s real innovation lies in its ability to achieve what no other government has before: wedding populist religious nationalism to the levers of government and remaining in power whilst doing so.
The New Paradigm and the Turkey-Israel Dispute
As with all nationalist movements, the AKP’s needs outside foes against which to define itself, and perhaps the most significant of these today is Israel. The raid by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) on the Turkish “Mavi Marmara” aid ship bound for Gaza in 2010 caused widespread public and political outrage, and the Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relationship has since deteriorated to such a degree that Turkey has almost entirely suspended political, military and economic ties with Israel. Owing to the widespread popular support for the government on this issue, the AKP has no motivation to desist; indeed one could argue that it may even have an interest in prolonging, even escalating the dispute. The spat brings into sharp focus the elision that has occurred between nationalism and religion: a hitherto unheard-of instance of secular nationalism and emotional religious indignation uniting in a common cause.
Nationalism and religion have been the two primary energizing forces in Turkish society for almost a hundred years, even if one has always dictated to the other. The current Turkish government’s rhetoric manages to appeal to both impulses, and that is why it is such a powerful brew.
[1] Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p.164.
[2] Perry Anderson, “Kemalism: After the Ottomans,” London Review of Books, 11 September 2008, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism
[3] “Turkish nationalist party holds Friday prayers at Ani ruins,” Hürriyet Daily News, 1 October 2010, http://web.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=mhp-prayed-at-ani-ruins-2010-10-01
[4] Talip Küçükcan, “Arab Image in Turkey,” Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) Research Report, June 2010, p.25, http://www.setav.org/ups/dosya/35086.pdf
Germane examples from Ottoman and British history
February 17, 2012
You may or may not find the following two historical nuggets useful when considering the modern-day Turkish situation.
The reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1880-1909)
I came upon the first in Norman Stone’s recently published history of Turkey. It follows thus: Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II’s reign was characterised in Europe at the time as tyrannical, authoritarian, and paranoid. Prompted by wider events gripping the Ottoman Empire, Abdülhamit attempted to reassert the Islamic character of the empire and reemphasise the Ottoman Caliphate, suspending the liberal constitution almost as soon as it was passed in 1876. He himself retired from the open, European-style Dolmabahçe Palace on the banks of the Bosphorus to the secluded Yıldız Palace in the forest just up the hill, where he weaved an elaborate network of spy cells and state informants. However, at the same time Abdülhamit made important reforms to the civil service and significantly modernised the army. He also did much for education, introducing the first girls’ schools and setting up numerous technical institutions, schools of engineering, medicine, and even business foundations. His great achievement was perhaps the Hejaz railway, a fine metaphor for the paradoxical combination of religion and modernity symbolised by his reign: a fine logistical feat and the first Muslim-built railway, designed to take pilgrims securely from Damascus to the holy places of Mecca and Medina.
Abdülhamit’s authoritarian nature, his reemphasis of the Islamic character of Ottoman lands, and his simultaneous modernising reforms have their obvious parallels in contemporary Turkish politics. He was ultimately deposed in the Young Turk Revolution of 1909, which reintroduced liberal constitutional rule to the empire in a last attempt at preserving the withering Ottoman state. Norman Stone argues that the impetus for this revolution came, ironically enough, from the same technical, military intelligentsia that Abdülhamit had in fact helped create. He goes on to suggest that “modern Turkey is undergoing a smudgy version of what happened in the later nineteenth century”, and though he refrains from making any concrete predictions, there is a rather Whiggish suggestion that something like the model that ultimately led to the Young Turk revolution may well be repeated.
The “Glorious” Revolution (1688)
The second example is more fanciful, perhaps even “maverick”. It was suggested on my long commute to work as I listened to Melvyn Bragg (described by Will Self as a “handsome walnut”) discussing the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 with his guests on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. Consider the following landmark in the development of English parliamentary democracy in the murky light of modern-day Turkish politics:
The Revolution of 1688 saw the Catholic King James II of England overthrown, to be replaced by his Protestant Dutch nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange (William III). The revolution was effectively organised by a union of Whig and Tory parliamentarians: an elite who had run the country and who between them had agreed that there was only one group of people who should be frozen out of politics and office (Catholics). James came to the throne in 1685 intent on removing the barriers that prevented Catholics from accessing office, and tried to get restrictive rules repealed. When he couldn’t do so, he effectively tried to subvert the law by dispensing members of the old order from office and replacing them with his own sympathisers in the army, the court, and in local government. He manipulated parliament, packing with MPs that would be favourable to his policies; he built up an alternative standing army that was feared could be used to impose his personal will; he revoked charters signed by previous monarchs. What started out as a seemingly innocent attempt to extend religious liberties to Catholics soon began to be seen as threatening authoritarianism. James seemed to be giving an extra twist to the policy of toleration that the English monarchy had been pursuing since the restoration of 1660.
The Orangist conspirators who eventually facilitated the revolution of 1688 comprised of the Protestant aristocracy and gentry, a far from representative group of individuals. They increasingly felt that their liberty and their parliament was under threat, and that if that Catholics were allowed equal freedom with Protestants, they would only use it as a first step to eventually subvert the toleration achieved and become the dominant power. Wherever Popery first arrives, so they thought, arbitrary or authoritarian government inevitably comes in its wake. Historians have discussed in some detail what James’ reign actually represented. Some say he was in fact never intent on absolutism, but was simply trying to achieve toleration for Catholics, in an age when the formal practice of Catholicism was still officially banned. Others believe that the authoritarian Catholic Louis XIV was his model, citing the growing links between the English monarchy and the French court. Absolutism was his ultimate goal, which he initially sought to achieve through liberal steps.
Esoteric though they may be, the parallels with modern Turkey should be fairly clear to anyone with even a sketchy knowledge of the contemporary Turkish political situation. For ‘Catholics’ read pious Sunni Muslims, for ‘Whigs and Tories’ read Turkey’s traditional secular order. To stretch the comparison ad absurdum: 1688 in England has its parallel in the failed attempted military coup of 2007 in Turkey. Imagine if the revolution of 1688 hadn’t happened, and that James II had stayed on the throne – that’s where Turkey stands today with the AKP government, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the Jacobite potential despot. However, while James II faced organised, energised and rising resistance in the Whigs and Tories, today’s ruling AKP has effectively pursued the remnants of the old order out of their traditional centres of power, and is blessed to be faced with an inchoate, haggered, and backward-looking opposition.
It’s up to you whether you find the above examples absurd, or enlightening, or both. What’s undoubtedly true is that if anyone says that they know what’s eventually going to happen to the political system in Turkey, they’re wrong.
The ‘anti-Armenian Genocide denial’ bill & Franco-Turkish cynicism
February 2, 2012
On Jan. 24 the French Senate passed a bill to criminalise denial that the killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915-16 amounted to genocide. The law has caused Franco-Turkish relations to plunge to an unprecedented nadir. The car crash was obvious long in advance, which only made it – and the predictable reaction that followed – all the more painful to watch. France had already officially “recognised” the genocide in 2001, but the new law goes one step further, making it illegal for a French citizen to publicly question the events. The signatures of enough French lawmakers have since been collected to challenge the bill in the French constitutional court, which is where it sits now. But if it ends up passing that test and going into the statute books, those found guilty will be landed with a maximum 45,000 euro fine and one year in jail. In the days leading up to the vote, thousands of French-Turks demonstrated in the streets of Paris to protest the law, and on the day of the vote rival groups of Turks and Armenians – separated by police – gathered outside the French Senate, waving flags and blowing whistles.
Some expressed quiet surprise at the apparent “moderation” of the Turkish response, although if that was “moderate” one wonders what the “extreme” reaction would look like. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan railed furiously against the bill and threatened strong concrete measures – including economic sanctions and recalling the Turkish ambassador from Paris – if it wasn’t revoked: “This is politics based on racism, discrimination and xenophobia. This is using Turkophobia and Islamophobia to gain votes, and it raises concerns regarding these issues not only in Francebut all Europe.” According to Erdoğan, the vote disturbingly echoes the “footsteps of fascism.” “The votes in the French Parliament and the proposal that has been adopted are an open demonstration of discrimination and racism and amount to a massacre of free thought,” he said. “This bill has removed the atmosphere of free discussion [inFrance]. The principles of liberty, fraternity and equality, which form the basis of the French Revolution, have been trampled on.” Other Turkish politicians and diplomats have also revelled in casting themselves as defenders of the liberal European ideal. Vice chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Ömer Çelik, took to twitter to claim: “Sarkozy is turningFranceinto Bastille Prison step by step.” Chief Turkish EU negotiator, Egeman Bagis, similarly tweeted: “I celebrate 40,000 Turks marching against the bill to defend the French Revolution’s values.”
The prospect of Turkish politicians posing as modern day Voltaires, protesting in defence of the principles of the French Revolution must be irresistible for the satirist. Such a stance might appear more sincere if Article 301 of Turkey’s own constitution didn’t make it punishable by law to “insult Turkishness.” It might also if there weren’t currently more journalists locked up in Turkish jails than there are in China (95 at the last count); or if Turkey didn’t rank 148th out of 178 countries in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index; or if Turkey wasn’t by far the worst violator of human rights among the 47 signatory states of the European Convention on Human Rights; or if that same court hadn’t received nearly 9,500 complaints against Turkey for breaches of press freedom and freedom of expression in 2011 (compared with 6,500 in 2009). A distinct tendency towards authoritarianism has been unmistakably creeping into the AKP’s rule of late, perhaps giving some perspective to this most recent outburst in defence of European liberalism.
And the French defence? There isn’t much to be said. Before the vote, President Sarkozy claimed: “The genocide of Armenians is a historic reality that was recognised by France. Collective denial is even worse than individual denial […] We are always stronger when we look our history in the face, and denial is not acceptable.” Nevertheless, the law is widely understood to be a cynical piece of electioneering, the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) having bowed to the active and well-organised Armenian lobby in Paris, and seeking to secure the 500,000 French-Armenian votes ahead of this spring’s French Presidential election. The move will also doubtless serve to further paralyse Turkey’s already-moribund EU accession bid, which Sarkozy repeatedly makes clear he opposes. There may also be some truth in the accusation that the UMP is seeking to curry favour with France’s populist right-wing, with a move targeted at a Muslim minority.
The question of whether national governments should legislate on how historical events are remembered is probably an unanswerable one. But that won’t stop both sides attempting an answer to fit their own national political agendas. Do you think those 40,000 angry Turks were protesting on the streets of Paris out of earnest concern for Enlightenment values and in sincere defence of free speech? Such lofty protestations are mere fig leaves. Whether it’s Sarkozy opportunistically chasing votes in return for laws, or the Turks spuriously invoking the French Revolution and defending some destructive, nebulous idea of “national honour,” both sides are cynically invoking the high-minded language of moral righteousness to pursue squalid political ends.
Travel notes – Mardin
January 21, 2012
You can make out Mardin from far away on the long western approach road, perched as it is on top of a mountain overlooking the Mesopotamian plains. As you get closer the box-like homes become clearer, nestled alongside the pencil-like minarets, towers, and domes, all built of the same pale honey-coloured limestone. It’s a striking, eerily timeless-looking place, but look out to your left and the present comes crashing back into view. Carved ominously into the soil of a smaller hill just outside the town are large white capitals, clearly spelt out for all comers to see, “Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyene” (How Happy to Call Yourself a Turk): a warm welcome from the Turkish military. The dolmuş I was travelling in passed countless army barracks and check points, and we were stopped twice by gendarmes asking for identity papers. A castle, originally Roman, sits on top of the mountain above the town, but whilst most Turkish towns make a landmark of their castle – charging a couple of lira for what is invariably the most spectacular view of a place – Mardin’s castle is absolutely closed. The Turkish army are its current occupants, the latest in a long line trying to establish hegemony in this ancient spot.
Close to the Syrian and Iraqi borders, the area has been a complex mixture of Arabs and Kurds for millennia, and during the 1980s and 1990s it was one of the hottest in the conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurdish rebel group, the PKK. It is also known as the Tur Abdin (“Servants’ Plateau”) plain, the historic motherland of the Syriac people of south-east Anatolia. Syriac Christians have lived in Tur Abdin for 1600 years, originally retreating there to escape Byzantine persecution. They were thus able to maintain their ancient liturgies, still performed in Aramaic (the language Christ would have spoken), and the nearby 5th century monastery of Deyr ul-Zafaran (“Monastery of Saffron”) remained the spiritual centre and seat of the patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church until 1932. The 20th century, however, proved to be the most cataclysmic in their history, when the Syriacs became one of the less remembered casualties of the upheavals that erupted in eastern Anatolia at the end of the Ottoman Empire. From 200,000 Anatolian Syriacs in the 19th century, their numbers fell to around 70,000 by 1920. A significant portion of those remaining left the area during the unrest of the 1980s and 1990s, caught in the crossfire between the Turkish government and the PKK. Today the community numbers no more than a few thousand. The landscape is thus scattered with decaying monasteries and deserted villages, and – like most towns in these parts – Mardin is also still home to the obligatory, rotting, untrumpeted Armenian church.
The municipality’s official tourist leaflet carries the headline: “Mardin: where the call to prayer echoes within the sound of church bells.” It’s a nice line, but the only church bell still ringing in the town is that of the 15th century Kırklar Kilisesi, or “The Church of the 40 Martyrs”, and a rusty old bell it was too. A caretaker called Musa rings it to announce prayers at regular intervals throughout the day, and potters around to keep an eye on things and answer questions whilst it’s open to visitors. Of the eleven churches still standing in Mardin, the Kırklar Kilisesi is the only one still open for services, and Musa told me that church numbers have been steadily dwindling, “definitely down from 10 years ago.” The flock now totals “about 80 families, around 400 people.” During my visit a family of three wandered in to the church. The father told me they lived in northern Syria, and that they were in Mardin as tourists, searching for the old family home that had been deserted a hundred years ago “because there was big problem.” Musa himself was of an extremely morose disposition, hardly able to look such comers and goers in the eye, but occasionally bursting out in fits of uncontrollable hysterics. There is in fact an uneasy coyness about most of the Syriacs I met. Put it down to an over-active imagination, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was the weight of such a tormented history weighing down upon them. Amongst all the dry facts and figures recounting seismic demographic change, it’s perhaps easier to ignore the mental effects wrought on those left behind than the physical.
Even one so well travelled as British historian Arnold Toynbee described Mardin in the 1920s as “the most beautiful town in the world,” Indeed, it has been experiencing something like a touristic renaissance more recently, with the (relatively) improved stability of the area helping to stimulate a renewed interest from visitors, mostly Turkish. A florescence of newly renovated boutique hotels can be found tucked away down the rabbit-warren backstreets that tumble down from the main central street. During my visit I stayed in the splendid “Kasrı Abbas”, converted from a large old mansion on the hillside: rooms with ornate carvings and multi-domed roofs opening onto wide open courtyards, offering panoramic views across Mesopotamia to the Syrian border. The backstreets themselves have similarly benefited from the rejuvenation, impossibly evocative and seemingly untouched for hundreds of years (despite their deliberate tidying up). It all feels slightly uncomfortable though, as if many things remain unsaid, much still remains unconfronted. The number of tourists will doubtless continue to rise, but they will probably be condemned to look at dead relics, unresurrectable remnants. Daily Radikal carried a front page story earlier this month about an apparent “return of the Syriacs”, reporting that a number of the families who migrated from Tur Abdin since the 1980s have returned. But the evidence looks pretty slender to me. It seems more than doubtful that anything like a return to the same number as previously lived in the area could ever be possible. The ties have been irreversibly cut.
Mardin perhaps bears comparison with another ancient and contested site, Jerusalem. But whilst I expect Jerusalem would confound because of the sheer intractability of its present day conflicts, Mardin does so because of precisely the opposite. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Turkey, (and that’s saying something), one gets the crushing, debilitating impression of lost, dead history. But although dead, it’s history that casts a long shadow. Unlike the myriad remnants of ancient civilisations across Anatolia, Mardin’s sense of lost history is of critical importance to the present: it paints the present day into a corner. You feel that the past has been forcibly forgotten, ignored, at most whispered about uncomfortably. It’s as if a door has slammed shut, but is still creaking uneasily. It all leaves quite an impression, but not a particularly pleasant one.
“Turkey”, Andre Falk (1963)
January 7, 2012
A little while ago I came upon one of those old, forgotten, po-faced, unintentionally hilarious English-language travel guidebooks on Turkey. Simply called “Turkey”, it was published in 1963, written by a splendidly-named “Andre Falk”, surely one of the great travellers of Anatolia. I can only say that I wish today’s Lonely Planet guides were written like this.
Falk on Istanbul:
What is one to think of the local mosques, shapeless, dull and unimaginative, looking like asthmatic tortoises decorated by what might be pencils, rockets or phallic symbols?
The Golden Horn is not and probably never has been anything but a stagnant backwater, a sump full of floating vegetable waste at the foot of bare mounds.
The Grand Bazaar remains the biggest in the world, and probably was once the most exciting. But after numerous fires (its last layout dates from 1889 – the worst of periods) it is now the ugliest junk market to be found between East and West […] Let us move on. Everybody knows that the only places for decent shopping are in Rome and Paris…
On Ankara:
It takes an effort of the imagination to realise that this ultra-modern city was created from nothing. You take it for granted that you can live there without contracting malaria.
A gypsy caravan rotting in the backyard of an air-conditioned government building: that is more or less the picture of Ankara.
There is little life in public places, nothing to invite you to stroll about after office hours. Severe, ill-paid officials lock up files of state secrets in their briefcases and hurry off along avenues named after flowers for a game of loto with a colleague from the next department. Suffering diplomats stifle a yawn over the bridge table while the ladies are eagerly engaged in gossip. At the municipal restaurant the din of the musical medleys annoys the secret service agents who are straining their ears to listen to the diners’ conversations. A city you must see, of course, but a brief visit is enough.
On Anatolia:
It is a harsh, even brutal land, where nature and man combine to form a scene of extraordinary harshness.
From north to south you find carelessness, absence of style and no attempt at elegance […] Concrete, disinfectant, prison smells, grey buildings with the paint peeling off, such are the provincial hotels revealing the bad workmanship put into them. The restaurants are like canteens and the dining rooms like feeding troughs.
On Turks:
When a Turk says no, he raises his eyebrow, throws his head back and gives you a stony stare, as if he would like to see you fall dead at his feet. Such behaviour does not make for easy relations between men, but at least it is clear.
His endurance and his lack of imagination make the Turkish infantryman a redoubtable soldier: ‘the most reliable and the most obedient in the world’, wrote T.E. Lawrence, who had fought him in Arabia […] To tell the truth, it is rather a terrifying sight meeting Turkish soldiers.
Fortunately rugby is unknown in Turkey, for it would turn to a massacre.
The higher reaches of Turkish society are probably, man for man, more brilliant than their western counterparts, and this is all to their credit, for the intellectual professions are meanly rewarded […] When you meet a professor, a librarian or a hospital doctor, you are greatly touched when you learn the real incomes of these disinterested men.
The humble folk of the Anatolian mountains and plains are capable of generous and sometimes touching hospitality toward those who know how to behave properly, or towards those in genuine distress. But such a welcome is always tinged with suspicion. The foreigner is no longer the undesirable he was, but they still do not want him and he is automatically suspect […] There is no doubt ample historical justification for this distrustful turn of mind. We will merely add that it does not ease the task of the traveller, who bears no responsibility for the Ottoman Debt and cannot tiptoe about for weeks on end, hoping to make people forget about the Treaty of Sevres.
On politics:
A democratic politician speaks in different tones when addressing the Council of Europe to when in his constituency accusing the republican opponent of being uncircumcised.
On republican reforms:
Atatürk wanted to dress his Turks like Westerners. Apart from a slender few, all he did was to turn them into a lot of old tramps.
If revolutions have their necessities and progress has its demands, beauty still has its claims which one would like to see less disregarded by modern Turkey.
The effort to effect a complete revolution was asked for from the most conservative and static of peoples […] Left to himself, it seems, the Turk would only want to do one thing: remake his bed and go to sleep on it. Perhaps this is why, as soon as he gets home, the first thing he does is to don his house pyjamas.
On minibuses:
They say quite rightly that the drivers of these boneshakers are good; the reason is simple, the others are all dead.
On travel:
A plague on those archaists who dip their mandarins’ brushes in the pot of local colour and go off to the banks of the Ganges or the Nile to utter literary bleatings over the photogenic qualities of the squalid.
It is a frequent misfortune that when you reach your destination on a pilgrimage into the past all you find is fragments of pillars buried under weeds. The ideal journey is one which leaves you with the illusions of your imagination unbroken and arrives at no destination.
Tarlabaşı’s “Hürriyet Hamamı”
December 17, 2011
[Published in Today’s Zaman (19th Jan 2012): http://www.todayszaman.com/news-269046-tarlabasis-getaway-hurriyet-hamami.html ]
It might come as a surprise to know, but after two years of living in Turkey I had yet to visit a Turkish bath until very recently. The fact is that hamams don’t really figure in the everyday lived experience of most Turks these days, so perhaps it isn’t strange that they also haven’t figured much in mine. During the Ottoman period hamams were considered important social centres, where the men got themselves washed and the women spent hours meeting friends and gossiping about the latest social news. Since this heyday they’ve been steadily closing down. Now only a fraction remain open, and those – particularly around the tawdry touristic theme park district of Sultanahmet – cater largely for foreign tourists. Number one in all the guidebooks is the Çemberlitaş Hamamı, an impeccably-restored historical hamam, built by Mimar Sinan in 1584, featuring in D.K. Publishing’s 1000 Places To See Before You Die. The price is the highest in the city, and I wouldn’t be surprised if its employees wore quaint period dress as they went about their work – you want the “authentic experience”, don’t you?
I certainly did, but was in the market for something a little earthier, something – to my own prejudiced mind – a little more “authentic”. I’ve always been intrigued by an imposing-but-exhausted-looking red building near my apartment on Kapanca Sokak, in the central district of Tarlabaşı, on the European side of Istanbul. This is the “Hürriyet Hamamı”, (or “Freedom Bath”), and if you try to find it in your guidebook you’ll be disappointed. Where better to have one’s first hamam experience? For that authentic historical deal there can’t be many more suitable places – the entrance is sandwiched between two bay windows protruding out into the street, underneath which outside are original signboards written in the Greek, Armenian and Ottoman Turkish that were once common currency around Tarlabaşı. If, however, it’s the authentic experience that I got, it’s certainly not one experienced by many locals these days, as the place was almost entirely deserted during my visit. With the planned “renewal” of Tarlabaşı continuing apace, it’s difficult to see how the place could survive. I’d put a regretful 10 lira on it not being there in a year’s time.
I walked in from a chilly December afternoon, and was greeted by the sight of a corpulent, grey-haired old man facing the entrance, snoozing on a bench. He lay horizontally on his side, his head propped up on a pile of white rags, a stained polo shirt barely stretching over a rotund paunch. He gave off a stale pong as he stood to welcome me in – not the greatest advertisement for a public bath you might think. Hasan was his name and, from the moment I handed over the 25TL for a bath and massage (“everything”, he said), he was fishing for a tip. I resisted, telling him: let’s see how it goes first.
Not being particularly well-versed in hamam etiquette, I was pretty tentative throughout my visit. I’m glad I took the time to sit in the “sauna” just before entering the bath though, as this was something unique. Despite the tray of hot stones sitting atop a dog-eared metal box in one corner (just for appearances), the only heat was produced by three industrial radiators, hidden underneath each bench and turned up to their fullest. Surprisingly enough the room didn’t smell too bad, although ominous patches of mossy dampness hung from the roof and down the walls.
The main bathing area however, (known as the sıcaklık), was splendid. A wide dome stretches above your head, studded with tiny windows like the diamond-encrusted lid of a jewellery-box. Of course – like Istanbul itself – they’re rough diamonds, but – also like Istanbul – that’s mostly where the charm comes from. The room is bathed in a half-light cast from these windows, and the tinkling of water drips steadily from the sink basins that surround the heated göbek taşı, or “‘belly’ stone”, in the centre. I stepped inside – still wearing my red shroud and sandals – and saw just one, solitary bather. That timeless image of the lithe, naked male, sitting bent-legged, bent-backed and dripping in soap, remained indistinct as it emerged through the steam from across the room. Whether out of arrogance, or absorption in his own toilette – this stranger didn’t so much as look at me throughout my entire stay. Brazen male nudity always comes as a shock, even when it is in a bathing context. I get exactly the same feeling of surprise in the changing rooms of a public swimming pool back in the UK. Nevertheless, off came my shroud, and my sandals: when in (new) Rome and all.
After washing myself once over with the sink, soap and bowl, Hasan emerged through the entrance and waddled over to my section to begin the service. He started by soaping me up and rinsing me down, before bringing out the dead skin remover. I may have been a neophyte in hamam procedure, but I’d heard rumours about this implement, and here I can only corroborate what I’d been told before: it was brutal. He scrubbed the infernal thing all over my skin, my whole body, over and over the same parts, hammering each before moving on to the next tender area. I closed my eyes in silent agony. It felt less like he was removing dead skin, more like he was ripping off layers and layers of quite healthy, quite live skin.
I dare say this torment lasted for rather less time than it felt, and once it was over Hasan rinsed the flakes of newly-dead skin from my red-raw body, before struggling across to the göbek taşı, and beckoning me over for my massage. I followed, gingerly lay myself face down on the edge, and tried to find the most comfortable position on the hard stone for my head. Things started fairly pleasantly: some gentle prodding here, some cautious probing there. Predictably enough though, things soon got rather more robust and rather less comfortable. All over my back, my legs, every pressure point was hammered relentlessly. Make no mistake: no concession was made to the inexperienced foreigner. I tried as best I could to stop myself wriggling around in discomfort, and found myself sliding uncontrollably around the göbek taşı, almost slipping off the edge because of the soap that was being slapped all over my body. Hasan manoeuvred me around like a helpless children’s toy: onto my back, seated, standing, arms up, arms down, legs crossed, arms crossed. At one point my face was squeezed against his own beefy göbek as he pushed his fingers mercilessly and methodically into the small between my shoulders, cracking my neck in both directions.
After drying off and cooling down, I sat down to talk with Hasan and one of his friends over tea in the lobby. I tried to draw them out on the history of the place, but I couldn’t get far. Apparently it was built in 1908, and from the look of it I can’t imagine the building having ever been anything other than a hamam. Hasan couldn’t tell me, as despite appearances he’s only been working there for 11 years: a relative greenhorn. He certainly felt like a confident, authoritative old hand though, and had well-earned the tip that he’d previously been fishing for. As with all massages, it wasn’t until an hour or two later that I really began to feel the benefit. I also felt a lot cleaner than I did before I went in, which itself couldn’t be taken for granted as I considered the “Hürriyet Hamamı” from outside.
Travel notes – Ayvalık
November 3, 2011
[Published by Today’s Zaman (28th Nov 2011): http://www.todayszaman.com/news-264185-a-town-attesting-to-history-along-the-aegean-ayvalik.html]
Not many trips can be traced back to the reading of one book, but that is the case with my recent hop down the Aegean coast of Turkey. I’ve always taken a passive interest in the near-history of this part of the world, and upon reading Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger – a fine account of the human effects of the Greek-Turkish population exchanges of the 1920s – I couldn’t resist visiting some of the areas described. Whilst one book inspired me to embark on the trip, one was also nearly responsible for making me pack up my bags to return home. I was accompanied most of the way by Robert Byron’s thrilling The Road to Oxiana, in which he describes marauding around the Persia and Afghanistan of the 1930s: wild horse chases across the central Asian steppe, the discovery of little-known ancient architectural treasures, dodging the Persian secret police, dysentry – it all rather put me to shame. Whilst I had nothing to rival these adventures, described below are my own peregrinations around a different, no less fascinating part of the world.
I arrived in Ayvalık exhausted after a day-long bus journey from Istanbul, which included an unexpected ferry crossing of a choppy Marmara Sea. The town is situated on the craggy north-western Aegean coast of Turkey, and for hundreds of years it was overwhelmingly home to Greeks, at the time subjects of the Ottoman Empire. After the First World War, the Greek armed forces used this western coast – with Izmir as unofficial capital – as a base to push as far into Asia Minor as possible. The reconquest by Turkish national resistance forces became one of the central, triumphant narratives of the Turkish War of Independence, and after the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923 the Greeks of Turkey and the Turks of Greece were swapped wholesale and sent to their ‘natural’ homelands. In Ayvalık, the entire Greek population was resettled on the nearby Greek island of Lesvos, and the many Turks of Lesvos went in the opposite direction. I have fond memories of childhood holidays in the small towns of Petra and Mytilene on Lesvos, which were favourite summer spots of my family. Of course, I knew little of this turbulent history at the time; all I really remember is the faint outline of the Anatolian coast high above the horizon on clear days, and the Sunday afternoon military parades on the waterfront, which I now realize carried far more significance than I could have understood then.
Two large mosques command Ayvalık, and – despite the minarets that have been put up alongside them – it’s impossible not to recognise them as Orthodox churches, as indeed they were originally intended. When the Greeks disappeared and the Turkish population swelled it was decided to simply convert these two churches (and many elsewhere) into mosques, like miniature Hagia Sophias. From the inside it’s difficult to imagine the now whitewashed walls covered in iconography, but from the outside (aside from the minaret) they obviously follow all the typical architectural conventions of a large Greek Orthodox church. They’re a magnificent sight, silently commanding the town, unavoidable once you rise to any kind of elevation. Evidence of Greek heritage is hard to miss elsewhere too, and most immediately obvious in the enigmatic backstreets behind the harbour. Roads evidently not designed for the modern vehicle wind past old wooden houses in various stages of disrepair. At night
they become even more deserted than in the day, and seem to suggest even more
secrets. Occasionally you come across a house with carved Greek lettering dating back to the 19th century, as often as not practically caving in on itself. Life goes on furtively above your head: muffled sounds behind open windows and closed curtains, from protruding bay windows that lean out and seem to touch each other across the street.
The island of Cunda is a siren call audible from the Ayvalık waterfront, and I yielded to it, postponing my onward journey by a day. Cunda has a refined air about it: the harbour is smarter than Ayvalık’s, people give the impression of being even more horizontally relaxed. On arrival I followed the instinct that I always try to satisfy upon landing on a new island: walk back and upwards as high as possible to get an idea of the place from above. Following the winding old streets, I came across the derelict old Greek cathedral on the hillside, forgotten in a kind of scrubland, unused for almost a century. Disappointingly, (but unsurprisingly), I couldn’t get in as I’d hoped, but I did manage to peer inside through the now-empty windows. It’s been so badly damaged over time – by earthquakes and neglect – that it now looks as though the whole thing is only held up by the wood scaffolding that now fills the interior: to what end one can only guess. Nearby, another old church has almost entirely collapsed into rubble, only a crumbling apse remaining – battered and open to the elements, apparently waiting to be put out of its misery. I left it forgotten and forlorn, and climbed the rest of the short way up to the top, from which, looking west, I could make out the faint outline of Lesvos.
One of the paradoxes in this corner of the world is the contrast between its surface picturesqueness and its bloody, conflicted history. The residue of the latter is evident in the thundering nationalism of the politics, a taste of which I got as I was waiting to catch the boat to take me back from Cunda to Ayvalık. It was late afternoon and I was sitting in a café by the harbour, when a loud and apparently stirring recording of the Istiklal Marşı (the Turkish national anthem) struck up entirely unannounced from somewhere nearby. Exactly who was playing it, and why, I’ve no idea, but those around me weren’t splitting any hairs. All conversation immediately stopped; I looked around and within seconds only one person (apart from me) wasn’t standing silently, hand clutching breast, eyes staring grimly into the middle distance. I thought this lone sitter must have been a Greek, but he spotted me from across the restaurant and gestured for me to stand and do the same as everyone else: puzzling as he himself remained sitting. When it had finished everybody sat back down and returned to their tea or games of tavla; I looked back and realised that the only reason the man hadn’t stood was because he was disabled.
Cunda is about as secular as you get in Turkey (the two churches here weren’t even converted symbolically – just left to go to seed), the call to prayer from the single, isolated, mosque on the peninsula doesn’t even make it to the harbour. If you measure by the nauseatingly quaint image of old men playing tavla outside backstreet tea houses, or the loquacious women holding court on the steps in front of their houses, the Greeks and Turks on either side of the Aegean are irrefutably similar. The Turks of the Aegean wave the flag as enthusiastically as anywhere, and whilst elsewhere in Turkey these days you can easily forget that the Greeks were once bitter enemies, (there are others to point the finger at now), here the older enmity is still tangible – the narcissism of small differences.
Neo-Ottomanism: hard evidence
October 10, 2011
Spotted in the lift (elevator) at my school, a sticker advertising ‘Ottoman Elevators’, “Istanbul’s fastest, most economic elevator maintenance and repair service”. Ocular proof of ‘neo-Ottomanism’: upholding the noble Ottoman tradition of quality elevator maintenance!
Turkey Book Talk 