Abstract
The history of the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey has been the subject of a considerable body of literature. Scholars have engaged with questions of modernization, nationalism, Westernisation and, more specifically, how contemporary actors responded to the exigencies of a state and society in transformation and turmoil. These are intricate and complex subjects and, in some ways, overwrought topics. Yet, they do retain their relevance as a significant turning point in and around the lands of Turkey, defining pressing issues for state, society and politics today. In this scheme of things, the three titles under review here, which came out over the course of the last several years, offer a fresh look into these questions, showing how older issues can be discussed in new ways and inviting us to reconsider some of the traditional assumptions in a more sophisticated and multi-levelled manner.
Not only do the three titles, each in their own way, provide a differentiated angle and carry forward our understanding of a critical juncture in the recent history of Turkey and the Balkan states, but they also give a fuller picture of developments when viewed in conjunction and comparison with one another. While the studies by Haris Exertzoglou, Dimitris Stamatopoulos and Charles King, the first two titles in Greek and the third in English, show us diverse ways and combinations of doing social, cultural and intellectual history, all the three titles have a common and particular interest towards Turkey’s multi-ethnic past.
In his Ex Occidente Lux? Hellenization and Orientalism in the Ottoman Empire (mid-19th c. – early 20th c.), Haris Exertzoglou studies the encounter between East and West, more particularly, the perception, representation and uses of the West in the East by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian urban classes of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on a corpus of newspaper reports, contemporary correspondence and writing by the same upper strata situated in the major cities of the Empire, mainly Istanbul and Izmir, the author engages in a detailed discussion of what Hellenism meant. The volume is a study of discourse and modern identity formation based on an examination of public debates and educational policies.
While Ottoman modernization, or rather modernization in the Ottoman Empire, is often studied from the perspective of the (Muslim) state and the (Muslim) majority of the population, Exertzoglou goes beyond these designated fields and articulates a narrative of transformation in the imperial space from the perspective of its Greek Christian subjects, whose history, conversely, is often confined to specific sub-topics, such as community formation and the modernization of their own ethno-religious groups. What emerges from this narrative is a multidimensional picture which not only does combine the Ottoman and Greek worlds but also retrieves a particular outlook of being Greek, through Hellenism, and the ways in which the latter operated within the Empire.
According to Exertzoglou, Hellenism aimed to identify a Greek space at the borders of Europe and was situated somewhere between East and West. It emerged as a civilizational discourse, in Western garb in the late 19th century, addressing the ‘weaknesses’ in the East such as low levels of literacy, schooling and education. Previously, the encounter of the East with the West occurred through a confrontation between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Later, with industrial and technological developments, the expansion of free trade and the cultural activities that accompanied these changes, the language of religion was replaced by the language of civilisation. The author argues that while Hellenism never confronted or negated the West, it also distanced itself from it and viewed Western Europe with a critical eye, particularly on the cultural level. Despite or perhaps because of the ancient Greek references in the evolution of Western civilisation, Hellenism recognised and championed the uniqueness of the ‘Greek nation’. In this framework, the civilizational discourse could not be separated from the national and nationalist outlook. The civilizational discourse, then, was inherently discriminating as it exclusively addressed the Orthodox Christian population including the non-Grecophones and viewed Muslims and Jews of the same society as naturally incapable of being civilised.
While belonging both to the East and to the West complicated the situation of Hellenism, there were two other situations associated with it that defied smooth categorizations, as defined in the volume. First, the Greek national idea did not necessarily encompass irredentism, considering that the said upper classes as well as the religious leaders, who were committed to the pursuit of Orthodox unity, benefitted from the shared political, social and economic networks provided by the imperial framework. The Greek nation state, particularly in the 19th century, was simply too small and weak, with restricted opportunities for empowerment, enrichment and upward mobility. Second, the Greek national idea had to situate itself vis-à-vis ancient Greece. In pursuit of legitimacy, it sought to establish a working connection to it, yet at the same time, it had to deal with the fact that it was the Orthodox elite and the religious institutions who acted as transmitters of the Greek language and culture.
It is these two issues, that is, nationalism’s relationship to empire and the past, that Dimitris Stamatopoulos takes up in his monograph Byzantium after the Nation: The Question of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies. The title of Stamatopoulos’s study evokes links to the influential work of Iorga (1935), a Romanian national tract arguing for the continuity of Byzantine-based Orthodox structures in the Ottoman Empire and their subsequent emergence in national garb during the 19th century. Stamatopoulos turns this relationship around and explores how a particular outlook on the Byzantine past was created to bolster various forms of national discourses following the establishment of Balkan nation states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a case study of nation states’ control over time (as opposed to empires’ control over geography), the author deals with the question of defining a Middle Ages for the new nation states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Turkey. Intertwined with an investigation of the goal of defining the past, the volume traces in each of these five cultural spheres the two main views on how state and society should be organised in response to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. What kind of a world did the late 19th and early 20th century intellectuals envision for the Balkan/Anatolian lands at this critical juncture? The stand-off was between the discourse for a radical nationalism, more specifically, the establishment or the consolidation of individual nation states, and the discourse for the continuity of imperial structures. This rival positioning is analysed through the writings of leading proponents of the five traditions under scrutiny: Manouel Gedeon versus Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (Greek), Gavril Krâstovič versus Marin Drinov (Bulgarian), Konstantin Leonte’v versus Marko Balabanov (Slav), Şemseddin Sami versus Sami Frashëri (Albanian) and Fuad Köprülü versus Afet İnan (Turkish), representing the ‘imperial’ and the ‘national’ views, respectively, in a chapter devoted to each tradition.
Each of these intellectuals had a view of Byzantium vested with characteristics that run parallel to their view on the contemporary situation, especially their response to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the position of ‘the nation’ in the face of this transformation. For Greek national historiography (Paparrigopoulos), Byzantium acted as the Hellenizing connector between the ancient and modern periods. For Greek imperial historiography (Gedeon), it represented both Orthodoxy and empire and connected to the Ottoman state which accommodated the Orthodox Church. The contrast between the points of view of Paparrigopoulos and Gedeon emerges most clearly in their treatment of the period of Iconoclasm, which played a crucial role in the formation of the classical identity of the Byzantine state, including its position in Christendom, relationship with the West and the state of Orthodoxy vis-à-vis the ‘heretics’.
In complicating the position and the interrelationship of the two sides, Stamatopoulos explains, focusing once again on the Greek case, that the adoption of Byzantine history as part of national continuity was not a straightforward acknowledgement on the part of nationalist intellectuals. Once came the Western approval of Byzantium in the age of German romanticism of the 19th century, so did the claim of Greeks on medieval continuity and the task of Hellenizing the Byzantium. As the author dissects the layers of Ottoman and then Western worlds in his examination of ‘Greekness’, he also engages in a comparative investigation of the Balkan paradigms in relation to Byzantine history. While historians of the Greek state adopted the Byzantine past, the perception of the Byzantine Empire in the other Balkan states was not positive as they were engaged in de-Grecifying themselves at this time, specifically establishing their own national churches separate from the hitherto unifying Constantinopolitan Orthodoxy, the upper elite of which represented and embodied Greek culture.
The book presents further comparative angles in Balkan historiographies. The pan-Orthodox view adopted by Gedeon was paralleled in the pan-Islamist pro-Empire approach of Şemseddin Sami. The latter, however, doubled as an Albanian nationalist under the name Sami Frashëri and, like other Balkan nationalist intellectuals, was interested in creating an ancient period for his country which could not have been degenerated by the Byzantines or the Ottomans. In addition, the national view in the Greek case was essentially a response to the discontinuity argument (i.e. discontinuity of the modern from the ancient period) of the German historian Fallmerayer (1835). The other national cases in the Balkans did not have a similar target. In analysing the parallels between the Greek and Turkish imperial views, Stamatopoulos further demonstrates that Gedeon integrated the history of the nation to his history of Christian universality. Köprülü did a similar thing in the Turkish context, as he subordinated the question of origins (the priority of the radical national view) to the question of continuity and championed the continuity of the empire in the nation. The outcome was a new imperial vision projected as an outgrowth of modernization that did not militate against the nation-state but went beyond it. This comparison puts a further nuance to the imperial–national dichotomy, demonstrates the interrelationship of the two structures and points to a much more complex world than could simplistically be summarised as a transition from the empire to the nation. While Stamatopoulos engages with the politico-intellectual view on the late Ottoman situation and its aftermath, the world examined in his pages inherently evokes a discussion of its multiethnic and transcultural characteristics. This is where the next book under examination comes in, showing us the social, cultural and ethno-religious complexities and tensions involved in the transformation from imperial to national structures.
Charles King’s Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul gives us a picture of how Turkey looked in the first half of the 20th century in its change to a republic. King shows that the country depicted features of both the imperial and the national. The author does this from Istanbul, the coveted city of Greek nationalism and the core of an all-encompassing Orthodoxy discussed above. He focuses on a rich and varied mix of individuals and events around the Pera Palace Hotel, in the Greek dominated Beyoğlu district, which acted as a literal and symbolic edifice of modernization, welcoming Western travellers at the end of their journey on the Orient Express, the last stop on the way to the East. In dealing with a series of historical figures, some of them better- and others less-known, and specific social and cultural developments of the early 20th century and the inter-war period, he explores continuity and change in young Turkey. There is a long list of characters and characterizations born in the empire, including the towering presence of Nazım Hikmet, perhaps the greatest modernist poet to come out of Turkey, with his Polish roots and Salonican birthplace, his relationship to communism and the idea of a nation; the White Russians who took refuge in the city following the October Revolution and dominated part of its cultural, culinary and entertainment scene; Frederick Bruce Thomas, the energetic black jazz-club owner and entrepreneur; Roza Eskenazi, the Jewish singer singing the Greek rebetika songs; Selahattin Giz (2012), another Salonica-born artist, a photographer with whose lively yet melancholy pictures the book is dotted; and Thomas Whittemore, among others, a Bostonian Byzantinist who was assigned by the Turkish state with the task of renovating the great church/mosque of Hagia Sophia before it opened as a museum in 1935.
Like Exertzoglou and Stamatopoulos, King takes an interest in the urban, mostly albeit not exclusively upper and educated classes. While Exertzoglou and Stamatopoulos focus on the ideas and ideologies of prominent members of these classes, King looks at what they did in practice. King’s world is in a sense a realisation, or an acting out, of how the intellectual figures studied by Exertzoglou and Stamatopoulos thought state and society should be. The early republican cultural world exemplified in many respects the successes of nationalism. The non-Muslim population, wealth and power began to be undermined. The country nominally was much more Muslim (although this was less the case with Istanbul). There were changes in clothing, calendar and entertainment habits. Yet when one looks beyond the surface, it is not easy to miss how the empire in certain ways lived on in the nation state. In terms of language use, cultural traditions, geographical backgrounds and the entire mentalities that these references shaped, Turkey was at the same time more heterogeneous as the diversity of the former imperial lands began to be represented within the borders of the nation state, including the influence of new communities such as the White Russians and Salonican Muslims.
Viewed from the perspective and the juxtaposition of these three volumes, modern transformation in Istanbul and the Western lands of the former Ottoman Empire reflected a more varied experience than it is often made out to be. The diversity of ideas on prospects of change around the turn of the 20th century, the echoes of imperial elements and the dominance of a heterogeneous cultural world, all played into the making of a rich tradition in the contemporary Balkan and Western Anatolian worlds. The studies under discussion show how this worked out as they zoom in and out of historical situations around the intelligentsia and individuals who made a mark in major cities of the region.