Ottoman Empire

Other than a brief visit to Tunisia fifteen years ago (which itself was only briefly part of the empire), these weeks in Greece and Turkey mark our first visit to the old Ottoman empire. There is much to note and ponder.

When the Ottoman empire declined through the 19th century, and eventually collapsed after World War I, the territory that it once governed was partitioned and, generally, joined the European-derived system of nation-states. So today we have Greece and Turkiye, Iraq and Syria, Israel and Jordan, Bosnia and Serbia. We have also had an uncountable number of wars, uprisings, rebellions, and protests in the century since the collapse.

Katie at the 100th anniversary Republic Day celebration in Turkiye.

The kids have been trying to write effective definitions that distinguish between "nation" and "country" and "empire" and "nation-state", and finding these concepts a bit difficult to understand--much less define--having come from the US and having visited England and France and Italy, all of which more or less have overlapping nations with countries and, therefore--along with other reasons, but at least significantly--have strongly defined nation-states. 

Generally, we have this sort of background sense of empires as "bad" and nation-states as "good," but it has never been clear to me if that is merely an echo of rah-rah patriotism in the US, or a default antagonism to authoritarianism (empires have emperors, after all), or something more concrete. Even the kids share this assumption--"well, empires were old but now we have better systems." And yet, when you look around the eastern Mediterranean, the fall of the old empire created myriad new problems. 

Take the borders of the new nation-states. The borders did not line up with ethnic boundaries (i.e. the "nation" wasn't always in the right "nation-state.") So you had Turks in Greece, Greeks and Kurds and Armenians in Turkiye, Jews in Palestine, Arabs in Israel, Kurds in Iraq, Serbs and Croats and Bosnians all mixed up, and so on. 

Some of these issues were resolved with treaties--Greece and Turkiye "exchanged" populations following a war and the signing of a peace treaty in 1922, never mind that many of the people made to migrate had families that had lived on the other side for generations (some Greeks had ancestries in now-Turkish cities going back over 2500 years). 

Others, like Armenians in the east of Turkiye, were forced to emigrate or were killed. (Becca's ethnic-Russian grandmother immigrated from Kars Oblast, the Ottoman-then-Russian-then-Armenian-now-Turkish region in the east of Turkiye. Her family came to the US a few years before World War I--they were lucky, as they would have had to move in one direction or the other had they still been there after the war.) The Kurds ended up split between Turkiye and Iraq, still lack a nation-state of their own, and have occasionally and alternately been persecuted or labeled as terrorists on both sides of the border. And the tragedy of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is again all over the news these days. Yugoslavia descended into a whole series of wars and conflicts after the fall of communism.

What is remarkable is that all these populations lived together in the empire for hundreds of years, not without some strife and friction, but, apparently (?), fairly peacefully. One can imagine a Kurd and a Turk sharing a tea, eyeing one another suspiciously, and then complaining loudly together about the useless administration in far-off Istanbul. You're all just subjects, after all, in a vast empire. But as soon as you transition to nation-states, and the Turk in our hypothetical is suddenly a member of the governing majority, well, the same scene, we imagine, becomes quite different--no Kurd is going to complain about the (still far-off and probably still useless) Turkish administration and get away with it!

These problems are still quite new in this region, since the empire only collapsed a hundred years ago, but they are by no means unique or new in an historical sense. Spain had the same problems in 1492, but they expelled any remaining Jews and Moors. Pakistan is currently expelling millions of Afghan refugees. Who knows what happened to make France Frankish or England Saxon, but presumably there were some weapons involved. In Italy, Garibaldi had to create a sense of "Italian-ness," and had to fight when the status quo opposed him, since the peninsula had been fragmented for 1300 years. The US forcibly moved Native Americans out of European-controlled areas. And so on.

Two scenes of Karaköy village "ghost town," an 18th century Greek town built on the site of an ancient Greek city in southwest Turkiye, abandoned in 1922 and not re-settled. There are over 700 abandoned houses on the hillside. Many Greek towns were re-settled with Turks coming from Greece, but, the story goes, this one was thought to be haunted and no one would agree to move there. 

I'm not sure there are lessons to be learned, exactly, from all of this, but I am glad to be sitting in Istanbul and (quietly) having the conversation with the kids. The world is messy and complex and there are rarely any simple solutions to its problems. Everyone has a point, and it is possible that two sides of an argument can both be right.