Istanbul - European Capital of Culture

I’ve known for some time that Istanbul would be ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 2010. What I didn’t know was that it will, in fact, be one of three European Capitals of Culture this year, the others being Pécs and Essen.

Now I don’t wish to in any way detract from the cultural significance of Pecs and Essen. I am happy to have been given the motivation to find out where Pecs is – and I can tell you (in case you are as ignorant as I was) that it is the 5^th largest city in Hungary, and home to the country’s largest university. Of course I knew where Essen is. I can’t tell you if it is the 7^th or the 8^th largest city in Germany, but I can assure you that it was formerly one of the country’s most important coal and steel centres.

I’m not sure exactly who decides, from year to year, which cities will be designated European C of Cs. However, since the decisions are made by a committee of the European Union, I guess Turks, as non-members, should be grateful that one of their cities made the cut at all.

Nevertheless, the decision having been taken to grace Istanbul with the title, I can’t help wondering whether the honour has not been a little diluted by including it as a member of what can only be considered a fairly humble triumvirate. If you glance, as I did, down the list of previous title-holders, you will see that such relative metropolitan minnows as Cork (2005) and Patras (2006) were deemed to have no competition in their respective years; while Luxembourg (2007) was given a second bite of the cherry twelve years after its first chomp.

Well, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to bitch about other culturally worthy European cities. After all, there’s a lot of culture in Europe – undoubtedly enough to provide the gnomes of Brussels with cities for their list into the foreseeable future, even at the rate of two or three a year.

Year	Population	Year	Population
330	40,000	1914	909,978
400	400,000	1927	680,857
530	550,000	1935	741,148
545	350,000	1940	793,949
715	300,000	1945	860,558
950	400,000	1950	983,041
1200	150,000	1955	1,268,771
1453	36,000	1960	1,466,535
1477	70,000	1965	1,742,978
1566	600,000	1970	2,132,407
1817	500,000	1975	2,547,364
1860	715,000	1980	2,772,708
1885	873,570	1985	5,475,982
1890	874,000	1990	6,629,431
1897	1,059,000	2000	8,803,468
1901	942,900	2007	11,372,613

In fact, the spark that ignited this particular blog was a table I came across recently in a Turkish newspaper, which I am appending for your edification. It shows the population figures for Istanbul over a period of 1,677 years. Well, of course, it hasn’t been known as ‘Istanbul’ for all of that time – only for the last 554 years. Prior to 1453, as Constantinople, it was the capital of the Roman Empire for 1,123 years – a title it shared with the actual city of Rome for a relatively brief 146 years, before that city, as is well known, was overrun by barbarians.

You’ll notice, as you look at the table, that it hasn’t been all beer and skittles for the imperial city over that millennium and a half. Periods of dramatic growth have been followed by equally dramatic periods of decline. Given the exponential growth of the population in the last 30 years, it’s not easy to graph the figures in order to convey the fluctuations that took place at various periods of the city’s history. However, it’s obvious that those numbers want to tell us a story, and so I’ve decided to help them do it.

One point that should be made at the outset is that the very existence of these figures is a statement in itself. Clearly we would like to compare them with comparable figures for other major European and world cities but we can’t. The reason is, of course, that either the figures don’t exist – or the cities themselves didn’t. Istanbul / Constantinople has been around for a very long time; and it has been capital of civilisations that have been sufficiently organized and self-aware to be able to compile reasonably accurate population statistics. Excavations currently being carried out as part of the Marmaray Metro System have found evidence of a Neolithic settlement at Yenikapı, dating back to around 8500 years ago.

The ancient city of Rome is held by some to have attained a population of up to two million at its peak in the 2^nd century CE; but declined to a tiny fraction of this after a series of disasters lasting close to a thousand years. It probably didn’t reach 100,000 again until the 17^th century. It is nigh impossible to find figures for European cities to be able to compare them with Constantinople/Istanbul. London, for example, is estimated to have had a population of 60,000 in the 2^nd century CE at the height of its Roman period – but by 500 CE, to have declined to 5,000. Estimates of its population in 1066, when the invading Normans put an arrow through the eye of English King Harold, range from 5,000 to 40,000. It perhaps hit 100,000 when it became the mercantile centre of England in the age of Chaucer, but declined again, and didn’t reach 200,000 till Guy Fawkes narrowly failed to incinerate King James I at the beginning of the 17^th century.

Paris was probably the largest city in Europe in medieval times, apparently growing to 200,000 in the 14^th century, then remaining fairly static until the 16^th century. By 1700 it had managed to top half a million for the first time.

Apart from those cities, what can we find? Undoubtedly there were cities in ancient China that were home to very large populations. Moscow is said to have reached 100,000 in the 16^th century, before being attacked and sacked by the Crimean Tatars and falling on hard times. Italian stars of the Renaissance, Venice, Naples and Milan, hovered around the magic 100,000 mark in the 16^th century, as did Hapsburg Vienna. Madrid hadn’t even become the capital of Spain at that stage – the largest city being Toledo, with an estimated population of 65,000.

So let’s return to Istanbul, or rather, to the 4^th century CE when the Roman emperor, Constantine I decided to establish a second Rome on the site of the small Greek city, Byzantium, on the triangular peninsula at the southern mouth of the Bosporus Strait. Reasons given for his decision are: the new city stood at an important point on the trade routes between east and west; the eastern parts of the empire were more urbanized and civilized than those in the west; the western empire was increasingly under threat, and the wealth of the East allowed it to buy off aggressors as well as hire mercenaries to assist in its defence. Whatever the reasons may have been, it is clear that Constantine was serious about creating a capital city: the population grew tenfold to 400,000 within 70 years of its foundation!

If you want to read a history of the Eastern Roman Empire, you will need to look elsewhere. However, historians seem to agree that there were two ‘Golden Ages’, under the Emperor Justinian I in the 6^th century, and again, after a period of decline, in the 9^th and 10^th centuries. At this latter time, the Emperor ruled what could still reasonably be considered an empire, with its western possessions stretching through the Balkans, Macedonia, Greece and southern Italy; its armies holding their own and even making ground in the east against the forces of Islam. As John Julius Norwich, noted historian of Byzantium has claimed, if not for this resistance in the east, Muslim armies would likely have swept into Europe by the shortest route, rather than having to take the longer road, via North Africa and Spain. In that case, the history and culture of Western Europe could well have been very different. It might, for example, have been Christians asking the Muslim government of Switzerland for permission to build a church, rather than the other way around.

Anyway, we can see these two peaks of success reflected in our figures for the city of Constantinople, with the city having a population of 400,000 in 950 CE. Not long after that, however, the tide turned against the eastern Romans. In 1071 the Seljuk Turks defeated the army of the Emperor Romanus Diogenes, sealing the fate of Asia Minor/Anatolia for the next millennium, and inspiring a succession of Popes to launch their crusading hordes into the east. When the zealots of the Fourth Crusade sacked and pillaged the city of their Christian brethren in 1204, the population of Constantinople had fallen to 150,000. Although the Byzantines regained their capital 50 years later, their empire was doomed. When the Ottoman Conqueror, Mehmet II hammered the final nails into its coffin in 1453, the mighty Rome of the East had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, and the conquest was probably more symbolic than real.

But what happened next? A further slide into an under-populated, godless dark age? On the contrary, we can see from the table that, within little over a century, the population of the new Ottoman capital (whose rulers, incidentally, claimed for themselves, with some justification, the title of Roman Emperor), grew more than tenfold, to 600,000. At the peak of the Empire’s power in 1566, the ‘Magnificent’ Süleiman’s dominions stretched from the mouth of the Arabian Gulf to Algeria; from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna in an arc passing the shores of the Caspian Sea, taking in the Crimea and Hungary.

After the conquest, Ottoman Sultans, from Beyazit II on, encouraged the repopulation of the imperial city, and not just with Muslim subjects. Jews and Arabs, fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, were offered safe haven. Greeks were encouraged to return, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate being allowed to remain in the city, where it can still be found today. Armenian Christians were given the same special status to use their language and practise their religion. We may take such freedoms for granted today – but in the 16^th century, Western Europe was rather less tolerant. Apart from Spain, the French were beginning their religious purification, leading to the massacre and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Protestants. England may have adopted a less ‘final’ solution, but Acts of Parliament prevented nonconformists (i.e. to the Church of England) from holding civil or military office, or being awarded university degrees until the Catholic emancipation of 1828. The first English immigrants to North America were, of course, fleeing religious persecution in their homeland.

But I digress. Another glance at our table shows that there was a decline in Istanbul’s population after its peak in 1566 – followed by a slow rise until it topped one million around the turn of the 19^th century. This certainly reflects the decline in the Empire’s fortunes, which resulted in Western leaders’ inventing the term ‘Sick Man of Europe’. No doubt the glee with which they employed this term was in proportion to the humiliation their predecessors had felt in earlier times when their ambassadors were obliged to learn the Ottoman language and seek the grace and favour of the Grand Turk on his home turf.

Istanbul/Constantinople was still a grand city – the British Consular building, built in 1844, is testament to this, perhaps the premier posting for a British diplomat of the day. The Dolmabahçe Palace on the European shore of the Bosporus, and a host of other lesser seaside palaces further testify to the city’s continuation as a major world city. Nevertheless, its stagnation is especially stark in contrast to the rapid growth of European cities in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. London, for example, grew from a city of one million, to 6.5 million from 1801 to 1901. New York City, still hovering around the half million mark in 1850, had increased tenfold to five million by the beginning of the First World War.

Alongside these figures of enormous growth, Istanbul’s figures are unspectacular. However, we can see that the population did increase 48% to over a million in forty years to 1897. The exact reasons for this growth can be debated, but one possible explanation has been documented: according to the historian Justin McCarthy, Muslim refugees amounting to 10% of the population flooded into the Ottoman Empire as a result of ethnic purification and state terror conducted by the Russians as they expanded into the Crimea and the Caucasus. Far from contributing to its economic growth, these homeless, penniless refugees were a drain on a government already struggling to maintain solvency.

From here, further reference to our table will show another fairly spectacular decline in numbers. In the 30 years to 1927, the population declined 36% to under 700,000. Correlating this to events in history, we see that, in 1912, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The First Balkan War broke out, followed by a second a year later. In 1914 Europe exploded into the Great War, in which the Ottoman Empire, after fighting on at least three separate fronts, ended up on the losing side. The consequence of the harsh conditions imposed by the victorious Allies on the Ottoman Empire was the Turkish War of Independence, in which hostilities dragged on for a further three years until 1922. After ten consecutive years of war, it is not surprising that the numbers of Istanbul-dwellers declined.

After the declaration of the Turkish Republic, the city’s population began to increase slowly in time with the gradual recovery and economic development of the new nation. Istanbul passed one million inhabitants in the early 1950s, two million in the late 60s, and three million in the early 80s. Since then the growth has been exponential. The figure for 2007 includes the city proper, and doesn’t include the wider urban agglomeration. Whichever measure is used, various sources place Istanbul among the ten largest cities in the world. None of these sources, incidentally, ranked even the largest cities of Germany or Hungary in the top fifty.

Of course, size isn’t everything. But I can’t help feeling Istanbul deserved a ‘Cultural Capital’ year to itself.

Beyond Futility - Gallipoli Revisited

One of my first expeditions out of Istanbul was a school trip. I’d started working at a small private high school as a teacher of English. My English colleague and I tagged along with a coach-load of Turkish students and teachers. Our itinerary took in the small town of Çanakkale on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, the archeological excavations of Troy, and the Aegean seaside village of Behramkale, alongside another historical site, the ancient city of Assos.

I was really looking forward to seeing the ruins of Troy, but it turned out that Çanakkale was, in fact, the most important destination for us. It was 17 March and the town was buzzing. We stayed overnight in a hotel, rose early on Saturday morning and found vantage points near the town square to watch the parade. There was music and dancing, military bands, students from dozens of local schools regaled in traditional folk costumes – all the ingredients of a major celebration. And what was the occasion? Çanakkale Victory Day.

Well, it’s possible that you may not immediately get the significance of this, so let me go on. After the parade, we crossed to the European side of the strait and were taken on a guided tour of the graveyards, museums and battle sites of what we grandsons and daughters of the British Empire know as the Gallipoli Campaign. We saw row upon row of gravestones in neatly kept cemeteries preserving the memory of the estimated quarter of a million young men who died in this tragic sideshow of World War I. We climbed to the highest point on the peninsula, Conk Bayırı in Turkish, known in English as the ridge of Chunuk Bair. There we saw the larger-than-life statue of Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish colonel whose success here began his rise to eventual founder and first president of the modern Republic of Turkey.

Nearby, on the ridge whose name is immortalised in a play by New Zealand author Maurice Shadbolt, there is another, slightly smaller monument. No statue adorns it – merely a laconic inscription in English, ‘From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth’. It commemorates the hundreds of New Zealand soldiers who died while capturing and holding, for a brief 48 hours (undoubtedly an eternity to the few who survived) this desolate peak which, it is said, held the key to the entire campaign.

Of course others died too. West Country men, from Gloucestershire and Wales fought and died alongside the New Zealanders . . . and hundreds of Ottoman soldiers fell too, urged on by their commanders who well understood the strategic importance of Conk Bayırı. They recaptured the ridge on 10 August, 1915, and Allied forces never again succeeded in getting so near to achieving their goal, though they remained four months more on the peninsula, pouring out their blood on the beaches, the slopes and in the ravines of Gallipoli, before the bitter Thracian winter convinced their commanders that the campaign was a lost cause.

Anyway, I guess you’re with me now. You’ve realised that the futile exercise in human slaughter we refer to as the Gallipoli Campaign, is known to the Turks as the War or Battle of Çanakkale. They didn’t have much to celebrate after the so-called Great War, so they are justifiably proud of their success in defending their homeland against Allied invasion. What bothered me, however, as I toured the trenches, trying to imagine the carnage that had taken place here, eighty years before, was . . . how come the Turks are celebrating their victory on March 18, when we hadn’t even got here till April 25?

My first thought was that it might have something to do with the Islamic calendar. After all, the Ottomans continued using the old lunar reckoning based on the Prophet Muhammed’s journey to Medina, right up until their final dissolution. But, no – 18 March, it seemed, was 18 March; and 25 April, by anybody’s calculation, comes five weeks later, so long as they occur in the same year, which they did, on this occasion: 1915.

What to make of that? So I did a little digging, and it turned out that the Turks, of course, have a very good reason for their choice of dates.

It’s important to understand, first of all, what exactly the ANZACs and other sons of the British Empire were doing on that desolate peninsula, some 2000 kilometres from the action on the Western Front. In fact, the situation in France and Belgium had bogged down pretty early on in the war. First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, came up with the idea of supporting Russia to mount a major offensive from the east. Problem was, the only realistic supply route for Russia was via the Black Sea and the Bosporus Straits, which were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, who, of course, were fighting on the German side. So, you take out the Ottomans, open up the Bosporus to Allied traffic, bolster up the Russkies and pincer the Germans and their allies by opening up a second major front in the east. Very neat. And who better to sort out the Ottomans than the Royal Navy, in those pre-air force days, the world’s premier fighting force.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The Ottomans had had fortifications on the Dardanelles for 500 years, and, with a little help from their German allies, had some fairly serious shore-based firepower at a point where the straits are less than two kilometres wide. They’d also had sufficient warning of the impending assault to lay mines as an extra deterrent. Nevertheless, the British, aided by the French, felt confident of their naval superiority, and sent a force of eighteen battleships plus assorted cruisers and destroyers to force their way through to Istanbul. Despite possessing such imposing names as ‘Irresistible’ and ‘Inflexible’ (and their French equivalents) three battleships were sunk and three more severely damaged. Discretion was deemed the better part of valour, and the Entente navies retired to lick their wounds. The sea approach was crossed off the list of strategies, and Allied thoughts turned to Plan B.

Plan B? You guessed it – a land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula aimed at neutralising the Ottoman shore defences so that the battleships could sail through with less discomfort, heave to in front of the Sultan’s Palace in Istanbul, and order the Grand Turk and his Sublime cohorts to come out with their hands up. Well, Europeans had been making jokes about ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ for so long that they didn’t expect much serious opposition. Perhaps a little less gung ho jingoism, and some knowledge of history might have resulted in a more realistic approach. It hadn’t been that long since the Ottoman army was feared throughout Europe; and while they were no longer threatening to overrun Christendom, they might have been expected to put up stiff resistance to an invasion of their homeland.

Carrying out an invasion from the sea is a notoriously difficult military activity. The Allied forces achieved it at Normandy in 1944, as a result of elaborate planning, enormous investment of manpower, equipment and supplies, huge naval and air force support, not to mention the participation of the United States of America. Even so, there were horrific casualties. In 1915 aerial warfare was in its infancy, and naval bombardment seems to have been as much of a curse as a blessing for the Allied troops on the ground. Nevertheless, Plan B went ahead. Regiments of young men from all parts of the British Empire were landed on Gallipoli beaches to face the machine-guns, artillery and bayonets of entrenched and determined troops fighting for the defence of their homeland.

Predictably, Plan B was a worse failure than Plan A. A two-day naval engagement was followed by a nine-month attempted invasion. Where the loss of three battleships and around 1000 sailors had been deemed unacceptable, a war of attrition was allowed to continue from April 1915 until January 1916, in which hundreds of thousands were sent to die in inhuman conditions with no realistic hope of success.

Some semblance of justice can be said to have been effected with the metaphorical rolling of heads that followed back in London after the withdrawal from Gallipoli. Winston Churchill lost his prestigious job as First Lord of the Admiralty. The British War Secretary, Lord Kitchener, kept his job, but lost his reputation, and, in fact, died the following year. General Sir Ian Hamilton, overall commander of the campaign, was nudged into retirement, as was General Sir Fredrick Stopford, who is reputed to have slept through the landings at Suvla Bay which he was, in theory, in charge of. The Liberal Government of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost its majority and was forced into a coalition with Conservatives led by David Lloyd George, who not long after, replaced him as Premier.

Little enough consolation for the families of the men who had died; and it is even more shocking to learn that, as far as the Turks are concerned, the war had been won before the first Allied soldier set foot on those fateful beaches.  The Royal Navy was the number one fighting force in the world at the time, and if they had succeeded in forcing a passage through the Dardanelles, the war, for the Ottomans at least, would have been pretty much over. Turning back His Majesty’s battleships reduced the threat to a land invasion, which the Ottoman military backed themselves to repel.

As, in fact, they did, despite the best efforts of the Allied soldiers who fought and suffered above and beyond the call of duty for upwards of eight months. In later years, as the truth of the horror and crass stupidity came out, one positive has been the growth of a sense of nationhood among the former colonies that sent men to fight for Britain. For the Turks, of course, the Çanakkale War threw up their one victorious commander, who subsequently went on to lead the struggle to establish the Republic of Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of pilgrims who journey to the peninsula of Gallipoli on 25 April this year, and are welcomed by locals in a spirit of friendship, will have cause to remember his magnanimous words:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... You, the mothers, who sent your sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.

________________________________________________________

As an epilogue to the foregoing, I would like to mention an interesting tale I came across recently while reading a novel by the Turkish author, Buket Uzuner. One detail of the Gallipoli campaign that is often mentioned in Allied reports is the fact that the first landings were made in the wrong place. Instead of coming shore on a gently sloping sandy beach, the unfortunate soldiers found themselves facing steep ravines and cliffs. Generally the mistake is attributed to the pre-dawn darkness in which the landings were made. In her 2002 novel, ‘The Long White Cloud’, Ms Uzuner has one of her characters, Ali Osman say:

. . . [A]ccording to local legend, Turkish fishermen noticed an unfamiliar buoy moored out near Kaba Tepe and grew immediately suspicious, being already in a wartime state of mind. They reported the incident to police headquarters in Gallipoli, then, that same night, with the help of a few soldiers, moved the buoy fifteen hundred metres north to Arıburnu Cove, a most unsuitable place for a military landing. At the time, there was only one Turk who believed that the enemy might land at the Arıburnu/Anzac Cove, and that was a colonel named Mustafa Kemal. Indicating that even the Turks did not take the signal buoy very seriously at the time.’

I haven’t been able to verify the story, but it’s an interesting and not implausible one, it seems to me.

The Turkey Israel Connection

In January 2009 the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attracted considerable media attention, at home and abroad, for his spat with the Israeli Premier, Shimon Peres, at the Davos World Economic Forum. Apparently, Mr Erdoğan couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to berate his Israeli counterpart for his country’s recent actions in the Gaza conflict. Undoubtedly, there has been a cooling of relations between Turkey and Israel in recent years, especially since the accession to power of Mr Erdoğan’s AK (Justice and Development) Party.

Perhaps, then, it’s a good time to take a look at this event in the broader context of history, particularly when Turkey is being increasingly challenged to accept the accusation of ‘genocide’ against the Armenian people.

One important point that must be noted at the outset, of course, is that both Turkey and Israel are relatively ‘new’ nations – the Republic of Turkey was founded as recently as 1923, while Israel became a nation in 1948. At the same time, however, it must also be recognised that the peoples of these two ‘modern’ states have lived as neighbours for more than a millennium. Turkic invaders entered Anatolia in force after defeating the armies of the Byzantine Roman Empire in 1071 CE. Already Muslim, they mixed and intermarried with the predominantly Christian peoples they had conquered, establishing states and empires culminating in the 600-year Ottoman Empire, which lasted until it was finally dissolved after the end of the First World War. It is probably fitting, then, that its successor state, the Turkish Republic, was the first Muslim nation to recognise officially the fledgling nation of Israel.

In my previous post, we looked at the complex procession and interplay of religions that have taken place in this part of the world over three millennia of history. The so-called ‘clash of cultures’, referring to the face-off between the Christian West and the Islamic East, is largely a western construct. Its roots lie in the desire of the medieval Bishops of Rome (Popes) to add the muscle of temporal power to their presumably less satisfying spiritual leadership. In the Near and Middle East, it has been a different story.

For a start, the Muslim religion always recognised the debt it owed to its predecessor faiths, Judaism and Christianity. To Muslims, Jews and Christians are also ‘people of the book’ – followers of a great monotheistic belief system with shared history and common prophets. The ‘Christian’ crusades of the 11^th to the 13^th centuries, it can be argued, were more attempts to unite Western Christendom under the Popes of Rome, and assert its superiority over the East, whatever faith they espoused, than the more commonly held belief of a confederation of the righteous aiming to free the Holy Lands from heathens and unbelievers. As evidence of this, we can take the fact that the army of the Fourth Crusade took time, on its way to fight the Muslims, to besiege, conquer and despoil the Christian capital of Constantinople, 250 years before the Muslim Ottomans set foot in it. It has also been argued that, prior to the Crusades, genuine Christian pilgrims from other lands were not prevented from visiting and paying homage at sacred sites in the city which is sacred to all three religions.

Little of this, however, directly concerns modern Turkey. Of much more relevance to our discussion here are the actions of the Ottoman Empire since, at least in Western eyes, there is an undeniable connection between the two. 1453 is one of those dates in history that are interpreted by some as marking key transitions from one age to another. In this case, it was the year that the Ottomans, led by their youthful Sultan, Mehmet II, known to Turks as ‘the Conqueror’, finally succeeded in entering the city of Constantinople. However, far from representing the defeat of a glorious empire, the Ottoman victory was more of a final symbolic act. The Byzantine capital was, by this time, merely the rump of a former mighty empire, with a population estimated at no more than 50,000.

The city that Mehmet the Conqueror envisaged as his own imperial capital required repopulating – and the Ottoman policy knew no nationalistic exclusivity. The Sultan brought Greeks and Armenians as well as Turks from other cities to assist in the economic resurgence of the conquered city. Churches were restored as mosques were built, and the cosmopolitan character of Constantinople / Istanbul was established from the outset. The various communities had their own specialisms in terms of occupations, and each contributed its own areas of expertise. So, towards the end of the 15^th century, when Mehmet’s successor, Bayezid II opened his welcoming arms to Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, he saw it as a natural step in the economic strengthening of his empire. The Jews brought financial expertise and other trade skills which the Ottomans needed. Neither Turkish ethnicity nor Islamic belief were prerequisites for citizenship.

It is a fascinating feature of the Jewish community in Istanbul that most of them trace their ancestry back to the Sephardic refugees who made their home in the Ottoman Empire after the forced conversions and persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition. While Turkish is their first language today, their rituals and music preserve the Judaeo-Spanish dialect known as Ladino, which they brought with them from their homes in the Iberian Peninsula. As an aside, contrary to popular belief, it was Jews and Arabs who were the main target of the Spanish Catholic Inquisitors at that time, rather than Protestants, whose Reformation had barely begun, and certainly not in Spain.

A sub-branch of the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire was the dönme, followers of the 17^th century self-styled Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. This gentleman made himself unpopular with the Ottoman establishment at the time, and he and his supporters had to convert to Islam in order to remain within Ottoman borders. It is said, however, that they maintained their Jewish faith and rituals behind a Muslim façade. Unlike the Spanish, the Ottomans were, apparently content to accept the ‘conversion’ at face value, and refrained from applying unpleasant methods to identify backsliders. Two of the better-known private educational foundations in Istanbul today, FMV Işık and Terraki, are reputed to have been founded by the dönme community in Salonika, whence they moved after the population exchanges following the Turkish War of Independence.

Several sources set the number of synagogues in modern Istanbul at twenty-one, with a further eleven in Izmir, and a sprinkling in other Turkish cities. By contrast, modern Thessaloniki, formerly, during Ottoman times, regarded as the largest Jewish city in the world, has three. At that time known as Selanik, the city became part of Greece in 1912. Subsequently, a huge fire in 1917 destroyed much of the city including most of the synagogues and left many of the Jewish community homeless. After the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1942, Jews were rounded up and sent to death camps. The mortality rate is reported to have been 98%.

The Republic of Turkey maintained its neutrality for most of the Second World War until the final months. During the war, however, several Turkish diplomats did their best to alleviate the suffering of Jewish people under threat from the Nazi extermination machine. Behiç Erkin was Turkey’s ambassador to France from 1939 to 1943. During this period he worked to identify members of the Jewish community who were of Turkish origin, and to persuade the Nazi authorities that they should be repatriated to Turkey. His efforts are believed to have saved thousands of Jews from removal to concentration camps.

Necdet Kent, Turkish Consul-General in Marseilles, is recognised as having put his own life at risk to save Jews from transportation to Nazi camps. Stories are told of how he boarded a train loaded with Jews of Turkish origin bound for Germany, refusing to get off until the Jewish prisoners were allowed off too.

Selahattin Ülkümen perhaps saved fewer souls, but paid a higher price for his humanitarian efforts. As Turkish consul on the island of Rhodes during the Second World War, he worked to have many Jewish families shipped to Turkey to save them from Nazi round-ups. After Turkey abandoned its neutrality in the last months of the war to side with the Allies, his house was shelled by the Germans and his young wife fatally wounded. He himself was interned in occupied Greece until the war ended.

Undoubtedly there have been incidents in subsequent years where Jewish people have been victimised in local incidents – but for the most part, Turkey, and the earlier Ottoman Empire, have an exemplary record of good relations with the Jewish community, in
comparison with their European neighbours. Turkey has at times acted as a mediator in Middle East conflicts involving Israel. There is a free-trade agreement between the two countries, and Israel is an important supplier of arms to the Turkish military.

Prime Minister Erdoğan has a tricky task as leader of a secular, parliamentary democracy with its strategic location on the fringe of the Middle East. Much of his predominantly Muslim electorate undoubtedly sympathises with co-religionist brethren suffering from Israeli expansion (and missiles). Continually fobbed off by Europe in their attempts to join the European Union, Turkey will inevitably look to form partnerships with more accommodating neighbours. At the same time, Turkey remains committed to gaining acceptance among the civilised nations of the world – and friendship with the USA and Western Europe is a prerequisite for this. Politics, for the most part, is a business of compromise. Perhaps a little grandstanding on Mr Erdoğan’s part in front of his Islamic neighbours abroad and supporters at home is understandable, in the circumstances.

Religion in Turkey

The Turkish government has recently announced an official opening of discussions on the subject of Alevism, the second-largest religious group in the country after the majority Sunni Muslims. This ‘açılım’ in Turkish, represents a significant step forward for Alevis, who have experienced repression and even persecution, not only in the Republican period, but earlier, under the Ottoman regime.

I’m happy about this new spirit of openness that seems to be pervading Turkey’s political scene these days. There may be bumps in the road to begin with, but in the end, good will come of it. I’ve been doing a little research into the Alevi sect, and various sources confirmed what I had previously heard: that there are 10 to 20 million of these people living in the Republic. Well, even if you take the lower figure, that’s a significant group in a population of around 70 million.

Still, you’d have to wonder why the figures couldn’t be a little more precise, especially in a country which takes regular censuses, and likes to see a citizen’s religious affiliation on all forms of personal ID. I was also intrigued to note that the origins of the Alevi faith are controversial, and apparently it is even hard to define precisely what they believe.

It is generally accepted that Alevism is closer to Shi’i Islam than to the Sunni variety (the majority in Turkey); and that it has close ties to the mystical Sufism of the 13^th century saint, Hadji Bektash Veli. Some sources, however, suggest that it predates Islam, and has its roots in an earlier folk religion, perhaps Persian; and that it was influenced by close contact with the various strands of Christianity which were developing and separating in the early days of the Roman/Byzantine Empire.

It’s not my intention here to examine, in any detail, the tenets of faith of the Alevis, even if they had been clearly codified; but some general concepts have a certain appeal:

• Love and respect for all people (The important thing is not religion, but being a human being)
• Tolerance towards other religions and ethnic groups (If you hurt another person, the ritual prayers you have done are counted as worthless)
• Respect for working people (The greatest act of worship is to work)
• Equality of men and women, who pray side by side. Monogamy is practiced.
• They even, it is said, enjoy a drink now and again, and apparently consider their stricter Sunni brethren as unnecessarily rigid in their code of Islamic conduct.

Well, you may feel inclined to wonder why people holding such apparently innocuous (perhaps even laudable) beliefs would need to be suppressed or persecuted. As usual, the more you dig in this remarkable country, whether literally or metaphorically, the more details you unearth, and the more complicated the story seems to become. However, if you are a follower of this blog, or even an occasional visitor, you will likely have observed that my aim is to seek the overview, the big picture, rather than to lose my thread in scholarly minutiae.

So, I’m going to jump to an issue which generates a great deal of heat (even parliamentary fisticuffs) in contemporary Turkey – the question of whether the ruling AK Party has a hidden agenda aimed at dismantling the secular state and substituting Islamic Shariah law. ‘What’s the connection?’ you may ask, and of course, I’m going to tell you. Once again, I have no intention of plunging into the mire of Turkish politics, and examining the rights and wrongs of women wearing headscarves, or defending the record of a government which slew the dragon of hyperinflation, and kept Turkey out of the Iraq invasion without unduly damaging its friendship with America. Party affiliates are quite capable of dealing with these issues. Rather, I want to examine the deeper-seated reason why I believe Turkey will never descend into Islamic fundamentalism.

The reason is, in my opinion, the incredibly broad-based, eclectic nature of religion in this part of the world variously referred to as Asia Minor, Anatolia and the Republic of Turkey. The Alevi religion, so briefly outlined above, seems to me a microcosm of the processes that have shaped the beliefs of the people who now inhabit this ancient land, and resist all attempts to box and categorise them.

A short anecdote to illustrate my point, found in a Turkish newspaper (‘Hürriyet’): 

Hadji Burhanettin lives in the east Anatolian town of Doğubeyazit. The word Hadji before his name tells us that he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, which gives him a certain lay authority in matters of religion. His two sons came to Istanbul to start a business, and decided that manufacturing denim jeans was the way to go. Of course, it’s a competitive market, and you need to position your product carefully. According to the story, the lads decided to produce the world’s sexiest jeans, and named their brand ‘G-Point’ (I think they meant to say ‘G-Spot’ but both words have the same meaning in Turkish), with a stylized male arrow symbol as their logo. At first, their father was furious. How would he maintain the gravitas of his Hadji status when local friends and neighbours found out what his sons were up to in the sin capital of Turkey? Apparently, however, as money from sales of the sexy apparel began to flow, the patriarch found it in his heart to overcome his initial scruples and accept the obvious sign of divine approval.

There is an admirable pragmatism there, wouldn’t you agree? Even if the logic may be a little doctrinally unorthodox. Clearly, if it wasn’t ok with God, He wouldn’t let the guy’s sons make a profit. But I don’t want to make light of religion in Turkey. Rather, I want to look briefly at the forces that have molded it, and thereby come at an explanation of why things are as they are.

The people call their country ‘Türkiye’, the land of Turks – and while, prior to the First World War they were happy enough to consider themselves subjects of a diverse Ottoman Empire, they have spent the last 87 years working to persuade themselves that ‘Turks’ is what they are. We ‘Europeans’ know that ‘Turks’ were part of the heathen horde that swarmed out of the Central Asian steppes wreaking mayhem and terror on Christendom and Western civilization until they were finally turned back from the gates of Vienna in 1683. Well, we may not have known the exact date, but you know what I mean, right?

Turks themselves seem, for the most part, relatively content these days to accept a variation of the same theme, with a few details added, and warrior heroism substituted for brutish barbarianism. Back in Central Asia, of course, the religion was shamanism, but on the way westwards they became Muslim, defeated the Roman/Byzantine Empire, set up their own Ottoman Empire and eventually mutated into the present Republic of Turkey. Of course, as gross over-simplifications go, that one is staggering in its presumptuousness. Nevertheless, while it may omit one or two details, I submit that the overall picture would not be unacceptable.

Most Turks would be surprised to learn, then, that their Turkic ancestors, in their advance along the Silk Route, became Buddhist for a time, and were undoubtedly influenced by other religions moving in the opposite direction, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism to name but three, before settling on Islam after prolonged contact with Arab armies and culture moving east. It has been suggested that the adoption of Buddhism first, and later Islam by Turkic leaders may be attributable more to the desire for a unifying religion to solidify their growing temporal power, than to higher spiritual motives. And then there was the influence exerted on slave warriors in the service of Arab and Persian armies. At the same time, conversion to the new religion was made easier by aspects of theological concurrence with the old one, a point I want to return to later.

Anyway, from here (Bactria, Sogdia and other little remembered Central Asian states) it is a mere hop step and a jump to the eastern border of the Byzantine Empire, where the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arslan met and defeated in battle the heirs of the Roman Empire, who had ruled the eastern lands for 600 years after the fall of Rome. The year was 1071, and it marks the beginning of the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, and the beginning of the end of the eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire.

We can say that what followed was a gradual process whereby a predominantly Muslim Turkish-speaking Anatolia replaced the earlier Christian Greek-speaking one. However, already we have mentioned some of the influences that influenced the development of the Turkish brand of İslam that entered Anatolia at this time. Also, it is likely that, not only had these Turks lost their central Asian racial purity from centuries of miscegenation by the time they invaded Anatolia, but that the process continued after their arrival, and continues to this day.

Leaving aside the mixing of races and cultures that undoubtedly followed the invasion of Anatolia, let us look briefly at some of the religious interactions that took place.

We have already mentioned Zoroastrianism in passing. This was the predominant religion of the Iranian/Persian peoples, and its origins trace back to the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra) at least a thousand years before the Christian Era. It is sometimes claimed that Zoroastrianism was the world’s first monotheistic religion, and that many fundamental beliefs of Judaism, Islam and Christianity are derived from it. Unlike its successors, however, Zoroastrianism was apparently not ‘monolithic’ – i.e. there was some scope for divergence of opinion among believers without the need for excommunication or other forms of compulsion.

It is likely that the religion known as Gnosticism also sprang from this root. It seems to have been a more elitist set of beliefs, again, lacking a single strict dogma. While Gnosticism absorbed aspects of Christianity, it apparently placed more emphasis on the teachings of Jesus rather than his death and resurrection. Its growth as a religion kept pace with that of Christianity in the early centuries, but, lacking a central organization, it fell prey to oppression and persecution once its rival became the official state religion - a sad but typical illustration of how the oppressed are only too happy to assume the role of the oppressor as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

One thing that is very clear is that there has been, for millennia, a struggle, in this part of the world, between what one might consider the true nature of religion (the essentially personal search which attempts to give meaning to an apparently chaotic universe through an understanding of the material and spiritual natures of humanity), and the desire of succeeding rulers to impose a unified doctrine and system of religious observance which would give cohesion (not to say malleability) to their subject peoples.

One of the early great heretics of the Christian church was a gentleman by the name of Marcion, a 2^nd century theologian who lived in the Black Sea city of Sinope. The essence of his teachings was that the Hebrew God of the Old Testament and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament were separate – the latter being the superior deity, while the capricious, vengeful Yahweh was a lesser force – the demiurge that created the material world. What happened to Marcion? He was excommunicated by the mainstream church and his teachings suppressed.

Another sect of Gnosticism that acquired a following for a time was Manichaeism, inspired by its prophet Mani, who lived in the 3^rd century CE. Again it was perceived as a serious threat by orthodox Christians, but perhaps contained within it the seeds of its own downfall, encouraging, as it apparently did, strict ascetic practices and even celibacy. Women, it seems ‘were considered forces of darkness, binding men to the flesh’, which also seems unlikely to prove successful in the long-term from an evolutionary point-of-view, but may have spawned beliefs that seem to persist among some Muslim believers.

In our wanderings through Central Asia earlier, we came across a sect of Christians known as Nestorians. These were followers of an other reject from mainstream Christianity, Archbishop Nestor of Constantinople, who fell foul of his brethren for advancing the dangerous heresy that it might not be 100% accurate to call Mary the ‘Mother of God’. I have to admit I have wondered about that myself from time to time. In my travels in Turkey, I couldn’t help noticing that the area of Aegean Turkey where Mary is reputed to have spent her last years, was also important in the worship of Artemis and her divine predecessor, Cybele. Artemis was a complex creature, noted for her virginity as well as celebrated as a mother goddess – and known locally as the Lady of Ephesus.  Cybele was an earlier Phrygian earth mother deity associated with fertility, sometimes referred to as the Mother of the Mountain. Given that it is generally easier to convert people to a new religion if you can show major correspondences with their own, you could be forgiven for thinking that the process may have been at work around here. ‘Hey, that’s a coincidence. We’ve got her in our religion too – only we call her Mary!’

But to return to the Nestorians and their heretical brethren: one thing that these various sects, cults and religious deviants did achieve – it is generally accepted that the creeds formulated by Ecumenical Councils of the early institutionalised Christian church at such places as Chalcedon (Kadıköy), Ephesus and Nicaea (İznik) were a direct response to the threats they posed. So, the strange, surreal, somewhat over-the-top articles of faith that one is expected to ascribe to as a Christian reciting the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed can be understood as a kind of legalese trickery to weed out heretics and deviants who might threaten the unity of the new state-sponsored religion.

Anyway, the result was a host of breakaway groups establishing their own forms of ‘orthodoxy’ – Syriacs, Copts, Armenians and so on – not forgetting the Roman Catholics themselves, who made their final split in 1054. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. What about the Muslims, I hear you asking. Weren’t you, in fact, writing about them? And of course you are right. But it is important to recognise that these two religions, Christian and Muslim, lived side by side in Anatolia for more than eight hundred years, and for sure, their beliefs and practices rubbed off on each other. Islam, for example, is notoriously unsympathetic to anything smacking of idolatry – statues or pictures of divinities or any human beings for that matter. Undoubtedly it was a reaction to the growing popularity and power of the new religion that produced the iconoclastic movement and led to the destruction of statues, images, icons, frescos and so on in the Byzantine Christian Church in the 8^th century CE.

On the other hand, Muslims in Turkey have a rather more tolerant approach to the consumption of alcohol than their co-religionists elsewhere. Religious authorities in Turkey clearly feel the need to remind visitors to certain tombs that prayers should be addressed to God rather than to a (dead) human, and that the tying of pieces of cloth to nearby trees is discouraged. Nevertheless, these and other practices persist, and suggest a survival of belief in the intercession of saints, and probably more ancient folk customs.

The 13^th and 14^th centuries in Anatolia are notable for the rise of a mystical offshoot of mainstream Islam, Sufism. Hadji Bektash Veli and the poet Yunus Emre, for example, proposed that a person could draw nearer to the divine during his/her mortal life by following a certain path under the guidance of a spiritual master or ‘father’. Undoubtedly, the belief that enlightenment is more readily found as a result of a personal search than by following state-defined practices is strongly embedded in Turkish culture. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, banned, however, in 1925, all Sufi orders, and shut down their lodges. There is an irony here, in that the followers of these orders, like the Alevis, tend to support the secular republic, on the grounds that it is more likely to extend tolerance than a monolithic Sunni establishment. Perhaps their faith and persistence are about to be rewarded.

Whatever the outcome for the Alevis themselves, I see the new spirit of openness in debate on this and other issues long swept under the carpet, as perhaps heralding a new maturity in the development of democracy in this controversial and ambiguous meeting place of Europe and Asia. It is also interesting that the opening of such issues to discussion has been instigated by a government often accused by secular Turks of supporting a conspiracy to reintroduce Shariah law. In the end, I have confidence in Turkish people themselves. Hadji Burhanettin back east in Doğubeyazit is not likely to let religious beliefs be imposed on him by outsiders who think they know better.