Genocide, and the Procession of History

There was an interesting exhibition in Istanbul recently – a collection of paintings by an artist called Faruk Kutlu. Not that the works themselves are likely to turn the art world on its head, but the title caught my eye: ‘Kafkasya’dan Sürgün’ – in English, ‘Deportation (or Exile) from the Caucasus’. It interested me because I’d recently visited Sakarya, a small city not far from Istanbul, and people there told me that their ancestors had come from the Caucasus region. I’m irresistibly fascinated by these little historical mysteries, so I had to check it out.

It turns out that representatives of the Adygeyans (which is apparently what the Circassian people of the Caucasus call themselves in their own language) have, for some time, been lobbying the Russian Government seeking an apology for an alleged genocide that took place in the 1860s. ‘Dammit,’ I hear you say. ‘This word genocide is going to lose its meaning if it gets bandied around so frequently and lightly’ – but I have to say’ this one is definitely worth a look.

The Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991, was heir to the domain of the Russian Empire, officially dated from 1721. By the second half of the 19^th century, under Tsar Alexander II, Russia had built the third largest empire in the history of the world, and as we all know, its religion was Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Well, like most generalisations, that’s only part of the truth. In fact the expansion of the Russian border to the south was largely at the expense of central Asian and Caucasian states, which, at the time, were overwhelmingly Muslim.

The policy of successive Russian monarchs had been to ‘discourage’ the Muslim religion in the interests of civilisation, Christianisation and Russification. Perversely, the Muslim inhabitants of the Caucasus chose to reject the invitation to become part of this Orthodox Russian civilisation, and their resistance lasted from 1817 to 1864. The intervening struggle is variously known as the Caucasian War, the Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, and, apparently, the local Muslim population even had the temerity to call it the Holy War! But in the end, the result was pretty much as you would expect: the big guys beat the little guys, and the price exacted from the little guys was in proportion to the time and inconvenience they had put the big guys to.

What actually happened at this point is, of course, not easy to ascertain. Circassian sources claim that 400,000 of their people were killed and around 500,000 were forced to leave their homes and seek resettlement in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire, many of these refugees dying on the journey, or later in the crowded, insanitary conditions in which they were obliged to live on arrival. Russian sources are understandably less specific on details, but the matter of mass deportation is beyond dispute, as is the fact that Muslim populations within the expanded Russian Empire became minorities in areas where they had previously been the majority.

At this point, I want to turn my attention from the micro- to the macro-, and to introduce a political concept known as ‘The Great Game’. You are probably aware that the 19^th century saw the beginning of a period in history often referred to as the Age of Imperialism. The major European nations (including Russia) were engaged in the process of empire-building, just as some formerly powerful empires were in the process of disintegration. Key aspects of the imperialism business were: maintaining the balance of power while seeking to grab as much territory as possible for your own empire, and at the same time, limiting the growth of the others.

No doubt you are also aware that India was the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the British Empress, Victoria; and of course, Vicki and her ministers were not amused to see that jewel threatened by the southward expansion of the Russians. ‘The Great Game’ is the name given to the conflict and rivalry between the British and Russian Empires for control in Central Asia. The ‘game’ became increasingly serious from the 1850s, when oil began to assume major importance as an economic resource. Political ‘game’ it may have been considered by some, but in reality, it was played at great expense in money and human life. Take as example the three Anglo-Afghan wars fought between 1839 and 1919. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the Afghans. But that’s another story.

Running parallel to, and occasionally overlapping this ‘game’ were the power plays related to ‘The Eastern Question’. This was another driving force in the policies of the European Great Powers during the 19^th century and up to the end of the First World War. Essentially, the question can be put thus: When will the Ottoman Empire finally disintegrate, and who will get all the good bits when it does? As noted above, all the European empire-builders were keen to benefit from the Ottoman collapse; but at the same time they were equally keen that their rivals should not.

Once you grasp these relatively simple principles, a lot of the otherwise confusing activities of the European empire states, not to mention events unfolding in apparently distant unrelated places, become more intelligible.

Take, for example, the Crimean War. The Charge of the Light Brigade was no doubt a marvellous example of the incomparable bravery and discipline of the British fighting man. But what on earth were they doing over there fighting a war on Russia’s back doorstep for nearly three years? Well, in fact, they were part of a British strategy to keep Russia iced up in its frozen wastes and prevent it from gaining access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. In the 1850s, this strategy required bolstering up the Ottomans and helping them defend their realm.

Go back, however, a mere 26 years to 1827, and you would find the warships of Britain, France and Russia fighting together to destroy the Ottoman navy off the coast of southern Greece. At that time, it suited the European powers to encourage and then support Orthodox Christians to unite in a nationalist struggle and declare the independence of the Greek peninsula. We can guess that the British were keen to have a compliant puppet state in the eastern Mediterranean, but what was in it for the Russians? Most likely there was some deal going on – you help us out here and we’ll try to work something out for you over there. Turn a blind eye to what you’re doing to the Muslims in central Asia, for example? Incidentally, you might want to ask how those Russians got their ships into the Mediterranean to participate in the battle. That’s the trouble with history – you answer one puzzling question and it raises several equally troubling new ones.

But I refuse to be sidetracked. Our subject is genocide, and its euphemistic little sibling, ethnic cleansing. The Greek peninsula had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, and its population had large Muslim and Jewish elements. In fact, at this point, it will be worth our while to take a look at the composition of the Empire. The Ottomans were a ruling elite, for sure with their origins in the Turkish migrations from central Asia, but, by reason of conquest, long residence and inter-marriage, considering themselves cosmopolitan, and even (dare I say it?) European. They regarded themselves, with some justification, as the legitimate heirs of the Byzantine Roman Empire; the Sultan’s mother would almost certainly have been a Byzantine princess, or Bulgarian, or Russian, but assuredly not Turkish. Their language, although based on Turkish, had a large admixture of Persian and Arabic. Their empire included a wide range of ethnic groupings, religions and languages, and interestingly, they didn’t really try to impose uniformity.

The Ottomans recognised four millets (nations) within their boundaries, based primarily on religion. Muslim was the state religion, but this group included Arabs and others, as well as Turks. Christians and Jews were ‘people of the book’, so they were permitted to retain their religious practices and languages, especially the local varieties of Christianity, Greek Orthodox and Armenian. They, with the Jews and the Muslims, made up the four millets of the empire.

What happened at the time of the Greek ‘War of Independence’ was a forerunner of what was to follow as the Ottoman Empire fell apart. We could say that the repercussions have continued to be felt into our own times. For their own ends, the European powers encouraged nationalist sentiments among the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. They then presented themselves as protectors of the Christian minorities when Ottoman authorities, not unreasonably, came down hard on separatist movements within their borders. One side effect of the Greek War of Independence was the killing of rather a lot of Muslim civilians, whose families had been living on the Greek peninsula for centuries.

Similar scenarios were played out in Bulgaria and other parts of the Balkans in the later years of the 19^th century, as Russia and the geriatric Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire encouraged, also for their own purposes, (Christian) nationalist movements to rise up and throw off the chains of Ottoman hegemony. In fact, Muslims were still being slaughtered in the Balkans, and refugees streaming from Bulgaria into Turkey long after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, right up to the 1980s.

The fledgling state of Greece also took the opportunity to expand its territory at the expense of the beleaguered Ottomans. The important trading city of Selanik, birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and reputedly home to the largest Jewish population in Europe, was taken by the Greeks in 1912. Not long after, a catastrophic fire wiped out most of the Jewish and Muslim parts of town, and you will look hard to find a mosque or a synagogue in the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki.

When the First World War ended, the victorious vultures descended in force on the body of the dying Ottomans. It has been argued that the punitive damages imposed on Germany at that time contributed to the rise of Hitler and thence to the Second World War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Sevres, the Ottoman Empire was not merely to be punished; it was to be dismantled and the pieces given into the hands of outsiders. For the purposes of this article, the most significant event was the landing of a Greek army on the Aegean coast of Anatolia backed by the guns of warships from the European victors of the ‘Great War’.

What ensued was a three-year war, during which Christian inhabitants of the region at first welcomed their ‘liberators’ and many Muslims were killed, followed by a successful counter-attack by the newly formed Turkish nationalist forces. Needless to say, some revenge was undoubtedly exacted by the now victorious Muslims. The end result was a forced population exchange in which Muslims and Christians, who had existed side by side in relative harmony for centuries, were forcibly relocated: the Christians of Anatolia being sent to mainland Greece to be replaced by Muslims going the other way.

It’s a sorry tale, isn’t it! But history is history, and you can’t turn back its relentless tide, however much you may wish to. Before we finish, however, let’s return to the other theatre of conflict we were discussing earlier – the expanding southern borders of Russia. Of course, as the British well knew, the Great Bear would not be content with merely adding a few central Asian state-lets to its empire. A major goal was always access to the Mediterranean. Clearly the Bosporus Straits would be ever problematic, so another option was to drive a channel though eastern Anatolia, again, at the expense of the moribund Ottomans. Fortunately a pretext was available in the form of the Christian Armenians, who could be incited to rebellion, then offered ‘protection’ in the form of a Russian invasion to help them set up a nationalist state from which any inconvenient Muslims could be ethnically cleansed (though the term was not invented till later, of course). Again, we may suspect that Armenian independence would have been short-lived, or nominal.

However it was, Armenian nationalists in eastern Anatolia were enthusiastic about Russian support, and ready to create ‘incidents’ which would encourage Russian intervention on their behalf. The Ottoman government, for their part, had a clear example, in the Caucasus, of what was likely to happen in the event of the Russians gaining control. Whatever happened to the Armenian millet in 1915, and undoubtedly it was a tragic event, it needs to be remembered that, as always, there are at least two sides to the story. The Ottoman Empire was fighting for its life in a major war on at least three fronts. And, in an analogous situation, as the present-day Russian government has pointed out with respect to the Caucasus deaths, the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire was a different entity.

There is a short story, ‘The Whale’, penned by the New Zealand author, Witi Ihimaera, which ends with an elderly Maori leader weeping over the bodies of a pod of beached whales. The whales can be seen as symbolising the old culture and traditions of his people, the indigenous race of New Zealand, whose way of life has been irretrievably lost. ‘No wai te he?’ the old man cries. ‘Who is to blame?’

Understanding Turkish Politics

Recently a full-page advertisement appeared in several major Turkish daily newspapers. The ad featured three Turkish Prime Ministers, past and present, under the banner heading: ‘Demokrasinin Yıldizları’ -  ‘Stars of Democracy’.

Well, Turkey is a democratic country – and democracy requires that citizens can, within reason, say, and even publish full-page newspaper ads about, pretty much anything they want. However, the fact that someone (or a group of ‘someones’) felt the need to fund such an ad suggests that democracy itself, and those who uphold it, are not outside the realm of debate in this country. The matter of who these ‘someones’ are, is a question I will return to later.

Turkey is a young democracy. In 2010 it is celebrating its 87^th year. Not so young in terms of a human lifespan perhaps, but short enough in relation to the span of human history. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, and the first open national election was held in 1946. In 1950 a rival party was elected to power for the first time. There will be people in their 70s and 80s in Turkey today who may have seen Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the flesh – and the occasional nonagenarian who was around at the actual foundation of the Republic.

Compare the time-frame with that of France, for example, or the United States, great early leaders in the establishment of republican democracy. A five-year-old French child who witnessed the storming of the Bastille would have turned 100 in 1889 – when Atatürk himself was only eight years old. An American five-year-old present at the funeral of George Washington would have celebrated her 100^th birthday in 1894.

85 years after the US Declaration of Independence, the young republic fought a terrible civil war in which 620,000 combatants and an unknown number of civilians lost their lives. Its territorial borders were still expanding, in theory, until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were added to the list of States. In practice, the US Government was still adding to its territory by means of war against foreign nations until 1898, or perhaps even 1945 if you count territories seized from the Japanese after World War II. The Philippines never actually achieved State-hood, but, in fact, only gained independence from the US in 1946. Slavery was finally abolished nearly 70 years after the Constitution set out to ‘establish justice . . . and promote the general Welfare’, but institutionalized segregation and disenfranchisement continued into the second half of the twentieth century, accompanied by exploitation of, and violence against African Americans.

Check out the record of France in the years after the foundation of the Republic. A scant twelve years on, Napoleon had overthrown it and declared himself Emperor. After the rest of Europe ganged up and got rid of him in 1814, the French decided to restore their monarchy. That lasted, in one form or another, until it was thrown out in favour of the Second Republic in 1848. French partiality for absolutism and guys called Napoleon Bonaparte resulted in a Second Empire, which lasted from 1852 until the disastrous war with Prussia in 1870. The Third Republic seems to have come into being at this point largely by default, for want of a monarch willing to be restored, rather than from any major desire in France for democratic government. The French are currently into their Fourth Republic, which came into being after the dubious doings of the wartime Vichy regime.

Clearly getting a modern-style democracy up and running is not an easy matter, despite the simplistic beliefs of guys called George Bush (even well-established democracies seem to have a hankering for dynasties, have you noticed?). Turkey’s founder, Atatürk, himself recognized that force of arms might create a nation, but consolidating, developing and maintaining it was a more difficult and ongoing task. Perhaps farsightedly, he avoided siring any children who might have been a temptation to Turkish dynasticists.

Anyway, to return to the advertisement that began this article. The first matter that aroused controversy in Turkey was the fact that the third member of the democratic triumvirate was the current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – a man who served prison time a few years ago for supposedly threatening the Kemalist nature of Turkey; whose wife infuriates secular Turks for her insistence on wearing a head-scarf; and who is often suspected of harbouring a secret agenda to return the country to a state of Islamic Sheriat rule.

Well, I’m not party to the machinations of high-level Turkish politicians - but I have been around long enough to be able to make certain observations. From 1995 to January 1999, Turkey had no fewer than five Prime Ministers who were either pretty corrupt, pretty self-seeking or pretty old (or some combination of the three). When RT Erdoğan’s party took the reins of power in November 2002, the Turkish Lira was valued at around 1,500,000 to the US dollar, down from a high of 1.7 million in 2001. One consolation for investors for the 80%+ inflation rate was that interest rates on bank term deposits were that much or higher. Within two years, the rate of inflation had fallen to manageable single figures, allowing Erdoğan’s government to delete six zeroes from the Turkish Lira, which is currently hovering around a respectable 1.50 to the US dollar.

In March 2003, GW Bush led an anti-terrorist alliance into Iraq, to unearth weapons of mass destruction that the United Nations, in their namby-pamby, liberal wetness, had been unable to find. Leaders of the Western world, for the most part, threw their various weights behind him. ‘Crusade’ was a word Bush used early on, but realizing his mistake, he became extremely eager to have Turkey’s 99% Muslim population with him. There was talk of an $18 billion aid package to reward such loyalty and support. In the end, the Turks didn’t go – and there are no doubt many patriotic citizens of the UK who would wish that their own PM at the time had been of such an independent mind.

But what about the other PMs in the ‘Stars of Democracy’ ad? The gentleman on the left of the picture is Adnan Menderes, who became, arguably, the first genuinely elected Prime Minister of Turkey, when his Democrat party won power in 1950. You might say it was a watershed event in the progress of democracy in Turkey – but was the nation ready? The Republic had been founded on principles of secularism. The Muslim religion had been seen as a hindrance to progress and modernization, as a force for reaction – and Atatürk had done his best to pull its teeth and limit its power. The great man, however, had one major advantage over those who followed him into the seat of Turkish power: he didn’t have to win elections.

Aspiring political leaders in the post-1946 era of Turkish politics have had to come to terms with the need to win the support of an overwhelmingly Muslim electorate. As a result, many of the measures instituted by Atatürk in the name of secularization, have been undone, or undermined, by subsequent governments. For example, the use of Turkish in religious ceremonies was substituted or encouraged in place of Arabic in the new republic. The stated reason was the general move towards a pure Turkish language to replace the hybrid Ottoman of the imperial elite. It may be, however, that reformers recognized that general unintelligibility, and arcane knowledge limited to those-in-the-know, are powerful factors in the maintenance of a mass religion. As an aside, it would be an interesting exercise to trace the correlation between increasing use of vernacular languages in worship, and the decline of Christianity in the West.

Whatever the reason, Menderes’s Democrat Party reinstituted the Arabic call to prayer that sounds five times a day from minarets on Turkish mosques. His government also set up special secondary schools, called İmam Hatip, for the training of imams and preachers. Apart from these sops to the religious faithful however, the Menderes Government presided over a period of rapid mechanisation, industrialisation and economic growth, and remains the only administration in Turkey to have won three consecutive elections. It’s a little surprising, then, to learn that the end came as a result of a coup by army officers in 1960; and not content with unseating the poor guy, the military leaders actually had him hanged, along with two of his ministers.

I guess it is small consolation for his family (and the man himself, wherever he may be) but his reputation was subsequently restored to such an extent that there are now city streets and parks named after ex-PM Menderes, and even the international airport in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest metropolis. It’s possible that the soldiers who staged the coup felt they were justified, since it is widely believed in Turkey that the army has the final responsibility for upholding the secular democratic republic. However, there were two further military takeovers at ten year intervals after the first. Following the last one, in 1980, the junta actually used religion to counter the perceived threat of socialists and increased the construction of Imam Hatip high schools. Turkish politics is a complex business.

The other figure in the advertisement, the guy in the middle, is Turgut Özal. Mr Özal himself was apparently quite a strong Muslim, from a pretty orthodox background. In the 1970s, he had actually stood for parliament (albeit unsuccessfully) as a candidate for the National Salvation Party, an overtly Islamicist party, led by Necmettin Erbakan (who was later ousted from the Prime Ministership, and banned from politics, by covert military intervention). Surprising, then, that Mr Özal was one of the few politicians favoured by the military leaders of the 1980 coup, despite also having been undersecretary to the deposed PM, Süleiman Demirel. He served as deputy PM to General Kenan Evren, the leader of the coup, then became PM when his Motherland party won a majority after democracy was restored in 1983. For better or worse, Özal is credited with having brought capitalism to Turkey. Under his leadership, the country was opened to a flood of imports, the process of privatisation of state assets was begun, and a 30 year period of hyper-inflation got off to a flying start - the Turkish Lira depreciated by 1400 % against the US dollar from 1980 to 1988. A chequered career, to say the least!

As all good Christians know, there are sins of commission, and sins of omission, so perhaps it may be interesting to consider which Turkish political figures are absent from the ‘Stars of Democracy’ ad. Clearly the salient absentee is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Well, perhaps it could be argued that, whatever his credentials as military leader, reformer and statesman, he isn’t especially notable for his commitment to democratic elections, so let’s leave him aside. However, it’s also noticeable that no other leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) got into the picture either, despite its being recognised as the heir to the Atatürk legacy. But maybe that’s debatable. The military leaders of the 1980 coup, who also saw themselves as upholders of the Atatürk ‘Way’, actually banned the CHP from participating in politics – and it stayed that way until 1992. Since its re-emergence on the political scene, CHP has been conspicuously unsuccessful – this lack of electoral success finally resulting in the internal ousting just last month, of its leader of 18 years, Deniz Baykal.

In the end, then, dazed and confused by the apparent impossibility of making sense of all this, I decided the only smart thing to do was to check out who had actually funded the insertion of that full-page ad in the Turkish dailies. Well, there at the bottom of the page was the acronym SDP, and a web address, so I checked it out. That was a month or so ago, and the website was covered with ads for various Islamic institutions and events – clearly, you’d have to think, the public face of an organization with major religious interests. Then, as I was finishing this blog, I decided to check the site again, and behold . . . not an ad to be seen, nor the slightest hint of anything religious. Weird, man! Why would you suddenly clean off all the paying ads from your website? Unless, perhaps, you were concerned that curious people like myself might think you had a secret agenda.

Well, who knows? Democracy is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was not particularly noted for upholding the freedom and rights of its citizens. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) where the Second Congo War has been raging for twelve years, 5.4 million people have allegedly died, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. The occurrence of rape and other sexual violence has been described as the worst in the world, and the DRC’s people have the world’s lowest per capita GDP, according to the IMF.

I have no intention of comparing Turkey to either of the foregoing manifestly undemocratic regimes. There is no doubt in my mind that Turkey’s present government, like most of its predecessors of the past 60 years, was democratically elected. But democracy is a fragile flower. It needs nurturing – and it can be easily poisoned. I have seen, in my own country, organizations funded by wealthy individuals, or small groups thereof, hiding behind a façade of democratic good intentions in order to push their own agenda of self-interest. Again, I have no quarrel with the choice of those three worthy gentlemen as ‘Stars of Democracy’. But something about that full-page ad made me nervous at the time – and the feeling hasn’t gone away.

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.