"Turkey Unveiled. A History of Modern Turkey".....
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A History of Modern Turkey
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By NICOLE POPE and HUGH POPE
The Overlook Press
Tangled Roots
Galloping from farthest Asia
like a mare's head reaching for the Mediterranean
this country is ours.
Wrists drenched in blood, teeth clenched, feet bare
and soil smooth as a silken carpet
this hell, this paradise is ours.
Nazim Hikmet (1902-63)
Every school-day morning a nearly identical ceremony takes place the length
and breadth of Turkey. Children line up in school-yards from the gentle
Thracian border with Greece to the steep mountains stacked up against the
Iraqi frontier. In the massive concrete sprawl of Istanbul, in whitewashed
Mediterranean villages, in the harsh towns of the Anatolian plateau and in
hamlets hidden in the lush rain forests of the Black Sea coast, the voices
of teachers rise above the excited chatter. When silence has been imposed,
morning assembly gets under way, usually with the aid of a scratchy
amplifier. Though not officially religious, the ceremony which ensues is
part of a ritual indoctrination in the ideology of the Turkish republic
founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
`I am a Turk! I am honest! I am industrious!' the children shout in
proud unison, whatever part their ancestors may have played in Turkey's
jumbled mosaic of ethnic groups, religions and migrations. The slogans are
various, but the message is the same for the young would-be citizens of
modern Turkey. `O Great Ataturk, I vow that I will march unhesitatingly
along the road you opened, towards the goal you showed!'
Frowning down from an altar-like plinth is a black or gilded bust of
Ataturk himself, the `Father of the Turks'. His expression symbolizes
something between loving concern and implacable determination. The same
deep-furrowed brow will follow the children through their lives: from
omnipresent pictures in finely cut 1920s business suits, from cast-bronze
horses in military splendour, from eerie copies of his death mask moulded
seamlessly onto walls. Ataturk's arm is often raised, pointing to the
glittering future that so many of Turkey's leaders have pledged to their
long-suffering people, a future that has never arrived in quite the shape in
which it was promised.
The morning ceremony over, the children who have so loudly proclaimed
their Turkish identity chase each other noisily up to their classrooms. Most
have no reason to challenge the way they are educated as Turks and know no
other way to start the day. They pass slogans pinned to the wall such as `A
Book is a Friend Who Will Never Cheat Me'. Indeed, school textbooks tell few
outright lies. Even so, as they progress through their history lessons,
Turkish students are drilled in a picture of their national origins and of
the world around them that is quite different to that taught to a Christian
child in Europe or even to their fellow Muslims of the Middle East.
These school history books of the Turkish republic are no idle creation.
They are the direct descendants of four intimidating tomes produced by the
Ministry of Education in 1932. Pretty colour pictures are now permitted, but
the words are little changed. Rote learning is still the rule, and the line
between reality and legend is sometimes blurred.
The Turks are taught that at the dawn of history their ancestors, led by
a mythical grey she-wolf, started migrating outwards from the heart of
Central Asia as the numbers of their people swelled and droughts dried the
traditional grazing lands on the steppe. Some of them, they are told, even
crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, presumably becoming the
American Indians. In his later, more deluded years, Ataturk himself adopted
a bizarre creed known as the `Sun Theory', which depicts the Turks as the
mother race of all mankind.
`You're not really an American, you're a Turk,' Ataturk told a doubtless
astonished American journalist one day in the Ankara Palas hotel. `The
Turks,' he added for good measure, `discovered America fifty years before
Christopher Columbus.' The proof of this assertion, he told the journalist,
was that the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean had obviously been
named by Turks, especially since their capital was called Grand Turk. (The
islands are in fact named after a fez-shaped cactus.) Ataturk might have
been less amused to find that the only Ottoman Turks known to have reached
the New World were a boatload of prisoners dumped in the American South who
still call themselves the Melunjans, or `cursed souls'.
Setting aside such far-fetched claims, the fact is that peoples speaking
more than eighteen languages related to Turkish still inhabit not only
Central Asia but also such eastern Siberian territories as Yakutia. The
Mongols are ethnic cousins of the Turks. Even the Turkish, Korean and
Japanese languages have strange similarities, sharing a grammatical syntax
that makes it easy for Turks and Japanese to learn each other's tongues.
However, the main migrational thrust of the early Turks, which lasted
broadly for a thousand years from the middle of the first millennium AD, was
westwards. They and their flocks settled in many parts of south-west Asia.
But their strongest hold, and ultimate place of refuge, was the great
peninsula that became modern Turkey. Also known as Anatolia or Asia Minor,
it is a territory the size of Britain and France combined, with 5,500
kilometres of coastline bounded by the waters of the Mediterranean, the
Aegean, the Marmara and the Black Sea.
Almost all the people of this land, Turkish textbooks are quick to
assert, are descended from these incoming waves of nomadic Central Asian
tribes. This thesis is disputed outside Turkey. But until the 1990s, few
were allowed to challenge what this meant for millions of Turkish citizens
who knew perfectly well that they were not ethnically Turkish and who at
home spoke Kurdish, Arabic, Laz (a dialect of Georgian) or any of a dozen
other minor languages. Few had any choice but to learn the official
republican history of the Turks.
The origin of the word Turk is obscure. It seems to have been written down
for the first time in Chinese chronicles in the sixth century AD as T'u-kue,
to describe pastoralists known for their iron-working skills. According to
Western scholars, the earlier invaders of China known to the Chinese as
Hsiung-Nu were also probably Turks, and it was to keep out such `uncooked
barbarians' that the Great Wall of China was built. It is also thought that
the word Turk probably had a meaning close to `strength': Turkish textbooks
like the sound of that. `The name Turk describes and symbolizes our race and
nation,' they say, `and our history is the best proof that this meaning is
correct.'
Strangely, given the central place of ethnic Turkishness in republican
ideology -- the `heroic race' of the national anthem sung by the
schoolchildren -- the study of the ancient Turks by modern Turks is still in
its infancy, perhaps because the subject is surprisingly unfashionable and
funds are scarce. For Turks, too, there is also the fear of discovering
facts that do not fit the official republican theory, as evidenced at a rare
meeting on the subject of the origins of the Turks held in 1995. `It was not
so long ago,' one Turkish expert at that conference began, with a nervous
smile, `that even talking about the possibility of different Turkish peoples
would have landed us all in gaol.'
Such worries had made it hard for the French institute organizing the
conference even to find a venue. It was forced to settle on a little lecture
theatre in the Press Museum on Janissary Street in the heart of old
Istanbul. The motley group of those attending made the usual deferential
references to their subject, praising each others' efforts and then flatly
contradicting them: bear-like Russian archaeologists displayed new finds
from deepest Central Asia, Turkish linguists presented elaborate
interpretations of inscriptions and suave French historians kept the peace.
The presence of a bookish Hungarian reminded those present that Turcology
originally arose from his own country's nineteenth-century search for its
roots in the Turks' weak ethnic link to both Hungarians and Finns. There was
even an ageing American intelligence officer who, having spent the Second
World War in Ankara listening to the grandiose ideas of his Turkish
republican friends, had gone on to teach himself to read the ancient Chinese
chronicles to find out if any of their claims about Ataturk's `Sun Theory'
could possibly be true. He was still searching for an answer.
Republican Turkey nominates the Scythians in 1,000 BC as `the first
great state that can be called Turkish', but the international scholars
gathered in the Press Museum could only agree that the first
Turkish-speaking tribes had probably coalesced by the first century AD.
Further back than that they could not go, as the written history of the
Turks loses itself in scratchy runes carved on bones, sticks and stones. One
Turkish expert told of how in his search for an inscription he was reduced
to feeling blindly with his fingers round the back of a statue in Ulan Bator
museum in Mongolia. Sheets of syllabic decodings were passed from hand to
hand to show that the first words written in Turkish on a buried goblet may
have been: `My elder brother, this hearth is for you. Stranger, fall down on
your knees. And the tribe will have nourishment.' Or perhaps it meant
something quite different. Nobody could be sure.
These early Turkic peoples quickly covered themselves with military
glory. In the sixth century AD, as one great khan conquered the capital of
China, Turkic `White Huns' were ravaging the northwest of the Indian
subcontinent. At the same time in the west, Europe was making contact in the
hills of Champagne with the man whom Turkish schoolbooks describe as the
first all-Turkish hero: Atilla, known in the West as Attila the Hun.
Attila has made an indelibly bad impression on the Western psyche, whose
histories portray him as a barbarian who helped break the armies of Rome.
Western commentators dwell on details such as his lair in the Wallachian
forests (modern Romania); a wooden citadel in which he dined off plates of
gold, attended by a barbarian horde in ratskin tunics and goatskin leggings.
Turkish schoolchildren, however, learn their history from the other side
of the battle lines. Attila juggled his alliances as `an extremely gifted
diplomat', teachers are told to say. In tones similar to those used as
Turkey aspires to full membership of the European Union, texts note that
Attila `did not count the Romans as enemies, but waited for them to accept
him'. From the Turkish point of view, the conquering Turkic tribes from the
east civilized and improved the primitive peoples they found on the eastern
marches of Europe. The hardships of the steppes had made the Turks quick,
sharp-eyed, hard-working and disciplined. Above all, their military vocation
was supreme.
`The Turks are undoubtedly the people who gave the art of soldiering the
highest place among the civilizations of the world ... man and woman, every
Turk was always ready for war,' teachers declaim. Any pupils in doubt about
the continued importance of the army can meditate upon the fact that the
first set of quotations in their textbooks is supplied by courtesy of the
publications department of the Turkish military Chief of the General Staff.
Given this background, children are taught to take pride in an ancestry
that can hold its own among other civilizations; in a language that is one
of the `oldest and best' in the world, and in a descent that marks them out
as a single, unified Turkish people. They are not told of one of the
important lessons of meetings like that at the Press Museum, that `Turks'
are almost impossible to define ethnically at an early date, or indeed at
any other time. The ethnic mixing of Turkic blood in Asia started early and
is still far from over.
Even so, it is hard to reject completely all the parallels that Turkish
republican ideologues have sought to draw with the Central Asian past. Among
the big Black Sea noses, the curly Mediterranean tresses and the tall Balkan
blondes, there are still large numbers of Turks who boast the short, stocky
frame and high cheek-bones of the steppes.
Turkish mothers still refer to their sons as `my lion', a parental
endearment used in the first historical records written in Turkish, engraved
on a Central Asian memorial stone in about AD 730. The ancient Turkish
honorific for their rulers, beg, has been in uninterrupted use ever since.
It now serves, in its form `bey', as an honorific meaning `mister'. The word
for an army platoon is still a manga, the basic unit of ten men in a
Turkic-Mongol horde; and the word `horde' itself derives from ordu, the name
still used for the modern Turkish army. Even the horse-tails used to denote
rank in the Ottoman empire still hang in plumes from tall poles outside the
tomb of Tamerlane in Samarkand.
Whatever the rest of the world may think, the impression made on Turkish
schoolchildren is indelible: `our ancestors' were a great people with a
glorious history. One wall of the imposing entrance hall to the Turkish
military museum honours Tamerlane, Attila and other Hun dynasties by casting
their names in concrete together with those of other, later governments.
Modern Turkey, according to the republic's official ideology, has carved a
lonely path as `the last independent Turkish state'.
This remained more or less true until the break-up of the Soviet Union
in 1991, which gave birth to five more independent Turkic countries:
Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. But
the sixteen predecessor states remembered on the museum wall still huddle in
a protective circle of stars around the proud single star that represents
Ataturk's republic at the centre of Turkey's red-and-gold presidential seal.
Despite the enthusiasm of the republican ideologues for Turkifying the past,
the Turkish republic is arguably the first state to be founded on a purely
Turkish ethnic ideal. The early states founded by the Turks as they moved
westwards tended to have mixed local populations of Persians, Kurds, Arabs
and others. Indeed because Western scholarship has traditionally emphasized
the place of these dynasties in the Islamic world, it is often not realized
that some of their leaders were Turkish.
The Turks' gradual take-over of the Islamic world started early as they
moved away from the shamanism of their forefathers: a religion of nature
worship, especially of fire, water and air, through the agency of shamans or
divinely inspired holy men. The presence of Turks in the Middle East is
first recorded in AD 674, only forty-two years after the death of the
prophet Muhammad, when 2,000 Turkish archers are said to have been in the
service of the governor of Basra. The power of the Turkish mamluks, or
slave-soldiers, grew as the early Islamic Arab aristocrats came to depend
more and more on these mercenaries to control their subject populations. In
AD 833, the caliph al-Mu'tasim, who had a Turkish passion for his army --
his mother was a Turk -- stepped up the hiring of Turkish mounted archers
from his base in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Under the first of his sons to
succeed him, two Turks were appointed generals. In AD 861, the Turkish
Mamluks rose up and killed al-Mu'tasim's second son and heir, the caliph
al-Mutawakkil, and became the military arbiters of Islamic courts from Cairo
to Baghdad. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Turks seized the caliphate
itself.
Medieval Islamic history is henceforth peppered with names that in
varying degrees can be represented as Turkish. The building of India's
fabulous Taj Mahal was ordered by the Turkic-speaking Mogul ruler Shah
Jahan, while Isfahan's prized Friday Mosque was commissioned by the Seljuks,
a Turkish dynasty that ruled Iran and Anatolia. The Turks, like the Arabs,
are usually associated with Sunni Islam, the mainstream branch of the
religion that limits the role of the priesthood and adheres strictly to the
orthodox traditions of the prophet Muhammad. But Turkic speakers or their
Mongol cousins supplied most of the rulers of Iran for nearly nine hundred
years until 1925 including the illustrious Safavid dynasty. The Safavids
laid the foundations of Iran's most beautiful cities and its state religion,
Shia Islam, a minority sect that affords a greater role to the clergy and
which supported the family of the Prophet against the Sunnis in a civil war
that broke out shortly after Muhammad's death. Perhaps a fifth of Iran's
current population are Shia Muslim Azeris who speak a kindred language to
Turkish.
At this early period, the Turks did not create sophisticated court
cultures in their own language: such a culture only came with the rise of
the Ottoman empire. Mahmud of Ghazna (c. 971-c. 1031), for instance, a
Turkic ruler based in today's Afghanistan, funded one of Islam's most
brilliant courts with booty won in his raids on India. But the arts he
patronized were Iranian -- among them Firdausi's Shahnameh, the great work
of Persian epic poetry. The Turks still suffer from a sense of cultural
inferiority. Even in today's highly nationalistic Turkish republic, the
elite universities are expressly set up to teach in English, not Turkish.
The illustrious Seljuk dynasty of Konya acted with similar ambivalence
towards their Turkish origins, even though they were the first to cause
Anatolia to be called `Turkey' by the likes of Chaucer. Seljuk courts ruled
today's Iran, Mesopotamia and Anatolia from the mid-eleventh until the
mid-thirteenth centuries. Lovely high-arched stone bridges, caravanserais
and fine mosques with conical domes survive across Anatolia, attesting to
their greatness and sense of style. But their courts spoke Persian and their
rule led to the spread of literary Persian, not literary Turkish, which
barely existed. Jalal ud-Din Rumi (1207-73), the celebrated Turkish poet and
mystic who founded the religious brotherhood of the Mevlevis, known in the
West as the whirling dervishes, and whose twenty-first grandson died in 1996
in Istanbul, wrote mainly in Persian.
If the high Arabic and Persian cultures of medieval Islam gave the Turks
a civilization, in return the Turks bore the sword and shield of the
Muslims. But at times this military genius was nearly the undoing of Islam.
Turkic nomads fresh out of Central Asia made up the bulk of the hordes of
Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his sons, whose campaigns in the
mid-thirteenth century laid waste the brilliant cities and carefully tended
irrigation systems of the Middle East. These peoples were an even stronger
component of the armies of the vicious half-Turkish, half-Mongol Tamerlane,
who swept as far east as the Aegean Sea in the first years of the fifteenth
century. Like Genghis Khan, their shock tactics wiped out the population of
any city that did not immediately surrender. The Middle East was sent
reeling into a dark age from which Muslim cultural and intellectual life has
never fully recovered.
For this reason, perhaps, Turkish schoolchildren are presented with an
ambiguous image of the Mongols, as if they were somewhat unsavoury
relatives. The greatest pure Mongol leader, Genghis Khan, is not included in
the official Turkish pantheon, whilst the half-Turkish Tamerlane is. Even
so, one of modern Turkey's most popular early rock groups chose the name
`The Mongols'; and as many Turkish mothers chase after little boys called
Cengiz (Genghis) as do after those named Timur or Atilla.
In the course of these upheavals in the Islamic Middle East, wave after
wave of Turkic nomads continued to move from east to west in search of
grazing and booty. By the middle of the eleventh century, they were probing
the edge of today's Anatolia, the western marches of the Byzantine empire.
Based in Constantinople, the present Istanbul, the Byzantines were the
orthodox Christian heirs of the eastern half of the Roman empire. The memory
of this first contact is kept alive today by the Turkish word for an ethnic
Greek: a Rum, literally, a Roman.
The advancing Turkic nomads were somewhat unruly outriders for the
Seljuks -- settled Turks whose princes then held sway over much of the
Middle East. The Seljuks had to decide whether to follow these raiders or
risk losing out on the possible benefits of booty, new territorial conquests
and the blessings of a holy war against the Christian infidels. On the other
side, the Byzantines also had to confront the invaders. The Seljuk and
Byzantine armies clashed at Malazgirt (Manzikert) north of Lake Van in 1071,
an action still commemorated at the battlefield each year as one of the
turning points in Turkish history. The Byzantines suffered a humiliating
defeat and their emperor, Romanus Diogenes, was led captive to the Seljuk
king Alparslan's tent. `What would you have done had you captured me?'
Alparslan asked the Byzantine emperor. `I would have cut off your head,' the
Byzantine replied. The honest answer so impressed the king that he spared
Romanus's life; but from then on, the high central plateaux of Anatolia were
open to settlement by the land-hungry Turkic tribes and their flocks.
These Turks were mostly from the ethnic branch known as Turkmen, or
Turcomans, and their arrival in the land that was to become modern Turkey is
the basis of one of the most controversial and insecure doctrines maintained
by the republic: that Anatolia was, to all intents and purposes, always
Turkish. As one textbook has it,
Turkmen groups flowed into Anatolia and settled there, welcomed by the
people who were unhappy with the old Byzantine administration, which
certainly never represented this country. They mixed with the people of
Anatolia. Very soon it was completely Turkified. Of course they did not find
Anatolia empty. But its population was very small. A new Anatolian Turkish
civilization was born.
This official version has the grace to mention that `the Europeans never
accepted this'. In fact, Western historians estimate that by the end of the
Turkmen migrations in the thirteenth century, only a small proportion of the
population of Anatolia was ethnically Turkish. As we shall see in the next
chapters, non-Turkish populations remained predominant in most towns until
the turn of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, much of the culture of modern Turkey grew out of what was
grafted onto the Anatolian stock by the new conquerors. The Christian
populations gradually dwindled as a result of Ottoman taxation and other
discriminatory practices, conversions to Islam, migrations to the West and
terrible massacres. Even under the republic, the state targeted the
substantial minorities left in Istanbul with a crippling wealth tax in the
1940s, and had a hand in stirring up street riots in 1955 which sounded the
death knell for the Greek community in the city its ancestors had founded.
Presented with this reading of their history, it is not surprising that
Turkish schoolchildren today, even were they to doubt the official version
of events, have little cause to question the extent and history of the
Turkish-Muslim identity being preached to them. The non-Muslim minorities
who have inhabited their country are a vacuum in their minds. That does not
mean, of course, that these minorities have left no trace.
Most Turks have to wait until they reach university before they hear
anything about those who inhabited Anatolia prior to the arrival of the
first Turkish outriders. Those peoples who pose an ideological challenge to
the Turkish republic -- Greeks, Armenians or Kurds -- get short historical
shrift. It is as if Turks have been given a puzzle with several parts
missing, but which is said to be whole. Small wonder that Turkish versions
of history sometimes look oddly as though the pieces have been forced into
place.
Anatolia is extraordinarily rich in ancient peoples. It bears some of
the world's earliest traces of civilization. Like the architectural jumble
of Istanbul, where buildings have been piling up on top of each other for
millennia, the ethnic and historical origins of Turkey's peoples are
inextricably intertwined.
A drive along the old Fertile Crescent just north of the border with
modern Syria reveals settlements where people still live in conical mud huts
that seem to date back to the dawn of history. Further east it is possible
to find stone-built villages perched on an accumulation of ancient mounds
whose Syriac Christian people speak a kind of Aramaic, the language of Jesus
Christ. Such hillocks are treasure troves of history -- and not infrequently
of gold and silver too, as many a Turkish farmer with a plough or metal
detector has discovered -- where archaeologists are pushing back the limits
of our knowledge of man's earliest development.
The biggest and best-known such site is Catalhoyuk, a late Stone Age
mound on the great plain near Konya discovered in the fifties by the
charismatic British archaeologist James Mellaart, whose finds can be
marvelled at in Ankara's Museum of Anatolian Cultures. Wall paintings
illustrate hunters and bulls, showing how close the culture of the world's
first known town of 10,000 inhabitants was to that of neolithic
cave-dwellers; and showcases display mirrors of volcanic glass whose polish
remains undimmed from the time when these first townspeople reflected on
their own image.
A new 25-year excavation programme has now started at Catalhoyuk that
will include a look at the DNA structure of the bones buried under the floor
of these houses nine thousand years ago. The findings should help to answer
the question of where these first townspeople came from, and also perhaps of
their relation to the local Turkish villagers of the present day, now
performing the inevitable archaeological donkey work of carrying away the
hods of earth.
A living link has already been suggested. The Turkish carpet expert
Belkis Balpmar believes that some of the patterns on carpets and kilims that
decorate the homes of families all over the world can be traced back to
forms and ideas seen on the walls and in the artefacts of sites like
Catalhoyuk. The idea is far from satisfactorily proven. But it is tempting
to believe her theory when looking at the most common design of all, the
hooked diamond shape known to Turkish women weavers as eli belinde or
`hands-on-hips': a design that instantly calls to mind the ancient clay
statuettes of the fleshy, hands-on-hips Anatolian mother goddess.
Succeeding the inhabitants of Catalhoyuk came wave after wave of
different peoples who made Anatolia their home. The austere-looking Hittites
left formidable stone lions guarding their great fortresses, and their
possible Central Asian origin is seized on by republican ideologues seeking
to prove that the Turks have an ancient claim to Anatolia. Assyrian traders
bequeathed storehouses full of order-books written in their wedge-shaped
cuneiform script. The mystery of Troy is still being carefully sifted by a
powerful international team of archaeologists on a small hill overlooking
the entrance to the Dardanelles. Phrygian and Lydian rock tombs litter the
tourist trail along the Mediterranean, while the imposing temples and
theatres of Ephesus still radiate the strength of the Roman empire.
Alexander the Great, Xenophon, Darius and Xerxes all passed through with
their armies, as did Roman legions sent against the Parthians. As early as
the first century AD, the Greek geographer Strabo admitted being perplexed
by `the confusion which has existed among the nations of this district'.
Successive civilizations left behind pockets of their cultures
everywhere. The coastal trading colonies and cities became predominantly
Greek-speaking. The Armenians coalesced as a distinct national group in
eastern Anatolia. Xenophon mentioned the Kurduchoi, probably Kurds, in the
south-eastern mountains. All these peoples were to be gathered under the
rule of Byzantium by the Roman emperor Constantine, who in AD 330 chose this
settlement at the crossroads of Europe and Asia as his capital, and renamed
it after himself Constantinople. At first it was the capital of the whole
Roman empire, but in AD 395 the empire split and thereafter the Latin west
went its own way. For over a millennium the Byzantines ruled their own
Greek-dominated empire, and Constantinople, the new Rome, was for most of
that time the largest city in Europe and the envy of the Western world.
Steadily, however, Byzantium's borders came under attack. An Arab
expeditionary force briefly threatened Constantinople as early as the
seventh century, although they left little trace other than the alleged
grave of one of the companions of the prophet Muhammad who fell there. He is
known in Turkish as Eyup, and his tile-clad tomb is now the holiest shrine
in the city. The Byzantines had to fight off the Sassanids of Iran, lost
much of Anatolia to the Seljuks and finally lost Constantinople to the
Ottoman Turks, who slowly throttled their empire until it finally fell in
1453. Turkish textbooks today admire the mosaics, laws and even armies of
the Byzantine empire, but treat it disdainfully as a somewhat degenerate
state. Their country's large and continuing cultural debt to the Byzantines
is seldom publicly acknowledged.
Few Turks realize that the names of nearly all their major cities are
versions of Hellenistic originals. Ankara was Angora, Izmir was Smyrna,
Sivas was Sebasteia, Kayseri was Caesarea and Konya was Iconium. The Turkish
name for Constantinople, Istanbul, is simply a corruption of the Greek for
`up to town', eis ton polis. A scrub-down in the hammam may seem the
ultimate Turkish experience, but the institution is in fact the linear
descendant of the Greco-Roman bath-house. And it was Armenian architects who
designed many of the grand Ottoman palaces and even mosques that have become
poster portraits for attracting tourists to modern Turkish Istanbul. The
projecting upper storeys of houses now thought of as typically Turkish were
so common in Byzantine times that the emperors -- like today's
municipalities -- had to make special laws to keep buildings apart.
The thousands of domed mosques springing up like mushrooms all over the
Turkish urban landscape still echo the dome of the Emperor Justinian's great
sixth-century Christian basilica, Haghia Sophia in Istanbul. Even when
today's Islamist radicals stage noisy demonstrations attempting to force the
republican authorities to restore Haghia Sophia to its Ottoman position as
the country's principal mosque -- Ataturk turned it into a museum as part of
his secularization campaign in 1934 -- they still shout for Ayasofya.
This tangled history lives on in mosques like Zeyrek, the echoing former
monastery church of Christ Pantocrator. The great shipwreck of a building is
now set amid a crumbling quarter of grubby concrete apartment buildings and
collapsing wooden houses. One house has even been broken open to reveal in
its basement ancient steps leading down to an old, disused Byzantine water
fountain. Under the towering arches of the nave itself, Muslims still pray
before marble-clad Byzantine apses and a minbar built of old pieces of
Byzantine masonry. Its rough-and-ready appearance makes it seem as if the
conquest of Byzantium had only just happened, and as if the ghosts of the
monks cannot be far away.
But if Anatolia's non-Muslim inhabitants of the past are now little more
than spirits and memories, Ataturk and his republicans were making a mistake
if they thought that all Muslims would accept membership of a Turkish
ethno-religious monolith. Today different Muslim groups are increasingly
determined to have their individual identifies recognized. Kurds now
constitute a fifth of the population. Several million people count
themselves as Alevis, a heterodox sect from the Anatolian heartlands that
mixes ancient Turkish shamanist customs with Shia Islam. Speakers of Arabic,
Azeri and Laz are plentiful, and more than ever ready to speak up about
their origins.
Trips to the provinces always turn up a surprise. High in the rain
forest of the Black Sea coast can be seen the lovely faces of the girls of
the Hemsin valley. They chatter away in a dialect that can only descend from
Armenian, although their people found it advantageous to become staunch
Muslims to escape the ethnic massacres of the First World War. A similar
surprise was the discovery in the 1980s that one cabinet minister spoke
fluent Greek. His family came from a mountain village that had once been
part of the independent Greek kingdom of Trebizond but whose descendants had
also converted to Islam.
All in all, though Turkey sees itself as an ethno-cultural unit, it
turns out to be an extraordinary repository of the many peoples who have
lived, taken refuge or simply passed through here. One recent study by the
University of Tubingen has counted the relics of fifty identifiable ethnic
and religious sub-groups still present in the country. For much of the
republican era, the question of ethnic origin seemed an anachronistic
irrelevance to the modernizers. But as the republic's ideological grip has
slackened, nationalisms of all kinds have emerged. Some Kurds go so far as
to demand a separate state. And descendants of Chechen and Abkhaz refugees
from the Russian take-over of the Caucasus a century ago have shown
themselves ready to hijack ships and planes to draw attention to their
national cause. More than 200 young men even returned to the Caucasus to
pick up the fight where their great-grandfathers left off.
Like the Chechens, Abkhaz, Bosnians or Albanians, many of these groups
are descended from Muslim refugees who converged on Anatolia as the Ottoman
empire contracted. Others came from further afield. For decades, Isa Yusuf
Alptekin, a tall and dignified leader of the ethnic Turkic Uygurs of Western
China, who had represented his countrymen at the Chinese parliament in
Beijing before the Second World War, held court in an anonymous block of
flats overlooking the railway line once used by the Orient Express. And for
years the flame of the Golden Horde was kept alive in a dingy apartment on
the Asian side of Istanbul. Here, amid grainy photographs of stern-faced
Tartars and stacks of ageing magazines publicizing their forgotten cause,
sat the last living representative of the last independent parliament of the
Khanate of Crimea.
All are proud of their separate origins. But none of them can quite
compete with the court still maintained by the best-known living descendant
of the greatest Turkish dynasty, the house of Osman.
(C) 1997 Nicole and Hugh Pope All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-87951-898-7
--
E' mai possibile, oh porco di un cane, che le avventure
in codesto reame debban risolversi tutte con grandi
puttane! F.d.A
Coins, travels and more: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/golanule/my_photos
http://gogu.enosi.org/index.html
rick murphy
"gogu" <golanule_VA_DA_M...@MUIEyahoo.com> and certainly Nicole Pope
and Hugh Pope are just brain-washed, lifeless, professional Turk-hater
and a thug of Greek/Armenian/PKK Anti-Turkish Hatred Inc. who can only
hate and kill Turks unconditionally and turn around bitch about the
Turks they raped, tortured and masscred, and brag about how superior
their despicable uncivilization is.
Mhitsos**24
> Turkey Unveiled
>
> A History of Modern Turkey
This is priceless
--
http://www.saunalahti.fi/dimitrxe/trolls/kemalist_fascist_trolls_from_use.htm
http://www.saunalahti.fi/dimitrxe/frame/frame.html
Panta Rhei
> "gogu" <golanule_VA_DA_M...@MUIEyahoo.com> and certainly Nicole Pope
> and Hugh Pope are just brain-washed, lifeless, professional Turk-hater
> and a thug of Greek/Armenian/PKK Anti-Turkish Hatred Inc. who can only
> hate and kill Turks unconditionally and turn around bitch about the
> Turks they raped, tortured and masscred, and brag about how superior
> their despicable uncivilization is.
>
Bruahahahaaaaaa......!!! Dumb Turks with computers! Simply unbelievable!
But yes, those hilarious morons really exist!!! LMAO!
♥ Marjo Xenos loves Degni Filio ♥
Mhitsos**24 wrote:
> gogu wrote:
>
> > Turkey Unveiled
> >
> > A History of Modern Turkey
>
> This is priceless
How's your wife Marjo getting on with that big black cock Mr Xenos ?
Panta Rhei
writes:
No, YOU rather tell us how YOU are getting on with your fat Turkish wife's
"massive strap-on" that you mentioned the other day, psycho! LMAO!
F'up to your homegroup, wide asshole Ruttledge
--
If stupidity had financial value you'd be stinking rich, Sean Ruttledge.