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 The Ottoman Empire |
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Most of the current discussions about Turkey's culture and identity revolve around the country's Ottoman heritage. Over the last 20 years, there has been a dramatic shift from the old view of the Ottoman past as the backward and anachronistic "other" to the current more tolerant, curious and even proud assessment of this past. The reclaiming of this heritage is by no means confined to Islamists. In 1999, official Ankara, headed by President Suleyman Demirel, celebrated the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Ottoman Empire, thereby contributing to this new sense of reconciliation with the country's Ottoman past. In popular culture, media and public discourse, one encounters numerous manifestations of "Ottomania." Ottoman art, calligraphy, miniatures and museum objects have become highly popular. Public and private funds have been used to put together special exhibitions of Ottoman art for European and US museums, in order to showcase the richness of the Ottoman heritage. An example of this is the display of the Sabanci Family's Calligraphy Collection at Harvard University's Sackler Museum. Similarly in 1999 some of the most valuable jewelry and other items from the Topkapi Palace were brought to the United States and exhibited under the title "Treasures of Topkapi" in Washington DC and in several other cities in the first half of 2000. There is equally active traffic moving in the opposite direction bringing to Turkey items in European museums from the long Ottoman rule in Eastern Europe. Not only does Ottomania serve as a means for asserting the distinct and superior identity of Turkey's cultural heritage, it also becomes a way of showing how open and "European" the Ottomans really were. It was in this connection that Gentile Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmed II was brought to Istanbul on loan from the National Gallery in London in the fall of 1999. Even though the Islamists hold Mehmed II in the highest regard for his successful conquest of Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the subtext of this exhibit was very different. Here, the liberalism and openness of this sultan and the cultural affinities between the Ottomans of the 15th century and Renaissance Europe were highlighted, and the very existence of the portrait (an art form shunned by most in the Islamic world) was used to make these very points.
As further examples of the growing popularity of things Ottoman, one can cite the proliferation of expensive gourmet restaurants such as Tugra, Armada, Asithane, Eski Osmanli and Mutfagi, all of which serve Ottoman cuisine, and the growing interest in and consumer demand for Ottoman classical music. Finally, as was the case with the Islamic revival, architecture serves as a powerful indicator of the interest in things Ottoman. The style and composition of some of the most exclusive suburban villas, such as Kemer Country outside Istanbul, make explicit references to traditional Ottoman neighborhoods, streets and houses. In addition to the restoration for tourism that has been going on since the 1980s of Ottoman palaces and konaks, the traditional large houses of the Ottoman period, there is also the construction of entirely new buildings in postmodern Ottoman imagery. The five-star "Topkapi Palace Hotel" in Antalya on the shores of the Mediterranean, a replica of the real Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, epitomizes this trend.
Given that both secular Turks and Islamists look to the Ottoman past, the re-appropriation of Turkey's Ottoman heritage does not, by itself, mark a particular ideological direction. "Ottoman heritage" is reconstructed by many different groups for various ends, often with different consequences. Islamists celebrate the "Islamic" glories of the Ottoman Empire and see Islam as the defining element of Ottoman culture, while nationalists take pride in the Turkic origins of the Ottomans. As we saw in the example of Bellini's portrait of Mehmed II above, even the Europeanists are able to find support in the Ottoman heritage for their preferred trajectory for Turkey And of course, there are others who turn to Ottomania with no deeper motivation than to profit from it by cultivating and catering to this fashion.
There is another area where this renewed interest in the country's Ottoman heritage has had clear political implications. This is the growing attention that researchers and writers have begun to pay to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of the Ottoman Empire and how it compares with the ethnic nationalism of the modern Turkish state and the intolerance of other contemporary modern nationalisms. The Balkan wars of the 1990s have created a particularly immediate context for this reassessment and led many people to regard the ethnic and religious mix of the Ottoman Empire with considerable pride. Today in Turkey there is a broader awareness of and interest in the country's multi-ethnic and multi-religious past. Non-Muslim artists, architects and musicians of the Ottoman Empire are commemorated in books and CDs. Bosnians, Albanians, Greeks, Jews and Armenians and the Levantine culture of the late Empire are the subjects of numerous theses, conferences, seminars, exhibitions, photograph collections and publications. Of the two most painful episodes of the last years of the Empire, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey is now examined more freely by researchers on both sides of the Aegean divide, sometimes even in collaboration with each other. Rather than dwelling on the high politics of the period's international diplomacy, these new studies focus on the human tragedy that was involved in the uprooting of communities from their ancestral homes in Anatolia and Thrace. The other tragic episode, the murder and deportation of the Empire's Armenian population, continues to be taboo for most historians in Turkey. But even on this topic we are seeing some movement. Turkish and Armenian historians met in two public forums at the University of Chicago in 2000, and discussed the various aspects of these painful events and agreed to hold similar conferences in the future. Together with Turkey's painful coming to terms with the Kurdish reality, these developments give reason to hope that Turkey today is more accepting of heterogeneity and ethnic and cultural diversity than at any previous point.
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TURKEYThis website is created and designed by Zebra, 2006
