The New Ottoman Greece in History and Fiction

Trine Stauning Willert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319938486
• eBook ISBN: 9783319938493
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores the increasing interest in the Ottoman past in contemporary Greek society and its cultural sphere. It considers how the changing geo-political balances in South-East Europe since 1989 have offered Greek society an occasion to re-examine the transition from cultural diversity in the imperial context, to efforts to homogenize culture in the subsequent national contexts. This study shows how contemporary immigration and better relations with Turkey led to new directions in historiography, fiction and popular culture in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses on how narratives about cultural co-existence under Ottoman rule are used as a prism of national self-awareness and argues that the interpretations of Greece's Ottoman legacy are part of the cultural battles over national identity and belonging. The book examines these narratives within the context of tension between East and West and, not least, Greece's place in Europe.

© The Author(s) 2019

Trine Stauning WillertThe New Ottoman Greece in History and FictionModernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93849-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The New Ottoman Greece—A Heritage in Search of Identity and Inheritors

Trine Stauning Willert¹

(1)

Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Trine Stauning Willert

End Abstract

‘Save the Ottoman Monuments of Greece’—this is the name of a Facebook group that in February 2016 was reported as being offensive and was taken down by Facebook, after an anonymous member posted an alleged ISIS video showing a beheading. The group was created in June 2010 by journalist Irini Kakoulidou,¹ with the purpose of raising ‘awareness about the plurality of Ottoman monuments in Greece’.² From the beginning the group received negative comments, insults, and threats on behalf of extreme right-wing nationalists accusing the group of glorifying a non-Greek past which, according to these critics, should be eliminated rather than brought to light. The ‘sabotage’ in February 2016 was the culmination of this crusade against the initiative. Kakoulidou launched an online petition against the censorship from Facebook;³ she initiated a great number of interventions in the press and social media and sent complaints to the administrators of Facebook. After approximately a month, the group was released—with all previous posted content, even the alleged ISIS video—and has since been active with an ever-increasing membership, not least thanks to the exposure of the group caused by the unjustified closure. As of February 2018, the number of members has reached 4570, more than double the number before the shutdown incident, and the group is very active with several postings daily, mainly contemporary or old photos of buildings, ruins, and other physical remnants from the Ottoman period.⁴ The membership is comprised of historians, archaeologists, other specialists, and lay individuals from many countries, in particular from Greece (80 per cent) and Turkey (9 per cent).⁵

Kakoulidou emphasizes that the group has an activist role in bringing attention to Ottoman monuments and in actively working for their preservation as carriers of historical memory.⁶ In October 2017, after pressure from different interest groups such as archaeologists who accused the initiative—with its emphasis on ‘saving’ the monuments—of not recognizing their efforts to preserve Greece’s Ottoman heritage, the group changed its name to simply ‘Ottoman Monuments in Greece’. The critique against the appeal to ‘save’ the monuments could also have stemmed from fear that the appeal would encourage other countries, primarily Turkey, to become engaged in the rescue of the heritage and thereby claim ownership to historical sites in Greece. That the relationship with Turkey and Turks is a very delicate issue becomes evident in some of the discussions in the group. On 20 November 2017, a group member with a Turkish name proudly posted news of the Saint George Orthodox Church in Istanbul that had been restored by the Turkish government.⁷ The following discussion showed that several members did not find the news suitable for the group as the church was not an ‘Ottoman monument of Greece’, with some members worrying that with such news ‘we are proven to be intolerant and racists and they [the Turks] tolerant and liberal’ because the news referred to Turkey preserving Greek Orthodox heritage in Turkey, while Greece has not produced a similar act of preserving Turkish/Ottoman Muslim heritage in Greece. In the end, most debaters agreed that the news was positive and relevant for the group, the most important argument being that the church is a monument built in the Ottoman era and that it was used by Ottoman Greeks. It was also seen as useful for the reciprocal interest, between the neighbouring countries, in preserving the Ottoman heritage in all its religious and cultural expressions. After a lengthy discussion, the group administrator concluded: ‘The news is very well suited for the group. There is not only the reciprocity that arises from the situation. There is also the joy that one feels when rescuing the cultural/religious wealth of the other. That constitutes a basic component and incentive of this group’.⁸ This ‘incident’ shows that defining what is Ottoman and who has the right to claim this heritage is a process that involves a number of sensitive political issues. However, the Facebook group is characterized by a high level of soberness and knowledge sharing, aiming at gathering as much information about the current state—and the history—of Ottoman monuments in Greece.

Currently, Irini Kakoulidou and other stakeholders work on guaranteeing future access in some permanent electronic form to the valuable testimonial material that is being gathered by this civil society initiative. In October 2017, a committee of four scientific experts in Ottoman studies and Ottoman monuments were associated with the Facebook group to help promote its purpose of ‘managing the cultural heritage in our electronic age’. The unique feature of this initiative is that it combines a civil society concern with the physical cultural environment relating to the past and a scientific interest in registering and interpreting that past. Such meetings of academic and lay concerns with the past are at the core of this book’s examination of the way in which the Ottoman past is reinterpreted in Greek society today.

Another example of the coming together of members of the academy with practitioners in the field of historical culture is the academic workshop ‘Histories, Spaces, and Heritages at the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State’, held in Athens in September 2017. Irini Kakoulidou participated with a talk titled ‘The Ottoman Monuments of Greece: An Unwanted Heritage in Search for Identity’. Kakoulidou brought attention to the problem of defining ‘Ottoman monuments’: with which criteria can a building, or other physical remnants of the past, be defined as Ottoman? This refers to the monuments’ ‘search for identity’. Kakoulidou also points to the fact that, since the period of Ottoman rule was characterized by its multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, it is impossible to define the monuments within the confines of the nation-state with its mono-cultural ideal. She claims that in Greece ‘we have tried to delete the Ottoman period from our historical memory’. This has been attempted, for instance, by referring to monuments from the Ottoman period as ‘post-Byzantine’ rather than as monuments dating from a historical period in their own right, that is, as Ottoman.⁹ Not only is it a problem to define the monuments’ identity but also their heirs: to whom do the monuments belong? Kakoulidou concludes that the success of initiatives such as the Facebook group show that Greek society is at the beginning of a process that will move the collective historical consciousness in Greece towards the inclusion of the Ottoman heritage as an integral part of the Greek national narrative: ‘What we’re seeing is that even if the memory of the co-habitation with the “Other” has not yet been integrated in our historical consciousness—though it survives in the collective subconscious—those who desire to integrate it are increasing in numbers with exponential speed in recent years, yet still being far from constituting a critical mass’ (Kakoulidou 2017).

In parallel with initiatives such as the above-mentioned Facebook group, public events, talks, exhibitions, guided walks, and concerts referring to Ottoman traditions and heritage are numerous today. The number of historians specializing in Ottoman history and learning Ottoman Turkish or some of the other languages spoken and written in the Ottoman Empire is constantly increasing. The revival of Ottoman traditions in artistic expression is particularly strong in the field of music. Fiction literature has also paved the way for increased public awareness of alternative approaches to the centuries of Ottoman rule through a number of popular realist historical novels throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. These trends of rehabilitation of the Ottoman as an integral part of Greek history in contemporary Greek society are a key theme in this book.

The aim of this book is to provide an introduction to the multi-faceted and in many ways contradictory discursive field regarding contemporary interpretations of Greece’s more recent pre-national past, that which in popular terms has been labelled Tourkokratía, that is, Turkish rule or Turkish occupation, from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and covering large geographic areas within and beyond the current Greek state. As Christina Koulouri has noted, the traditional perception of this period in Greece entailed that ‘the Ottoman period was interpreted particularly ethnocentrically, from the point of view of the “oppressed” nation, and the Ottoman state was presented exclusively as a mechanism of oppression’ (2000). However, as shown by the example of the Facebook group and many other initiatives that have bloomed since Koulouri published her article, this traditional perception is under pressure and a new interpretation of Ottoman Greece is emerging. It is the ambition of this book to examine the ways in which the Ottoman is reinterpreted, by whom, and which counter-reactions the revisionists are met with.

Placing This Study in the Field of Cultural Memory Studies

As I have been working on this study, I have primarily been thinking of it as a study into Greek national narratives. Coming from Denmark, where discussions about national heritage usually end up being a question of eating pork, preferably in the shape of meatballs, and decorating a live fir tree with national flags at Christmas, I have always been fascinated with the rather distinctive national guiding points that Greek citizens have at their disposal when thinking about their shared sense of belonging. The well-designed narrative of these historical guiding points will be presented later in this introductory chapter—and throughout the book. What I would like to do in this section is to discuss how such collective guiding points or national narratives can be conceived within the large field of what has come to be called ‘memory studies’,¹⁰ and whether it is useful to categorize the present study under this umbrella. In her introduction to the handbook Cultural Memory Studies, Astrid Erll forwards the definition of cultural memory as ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’ suggesting that often such interplay has been examined through ‘the study of ways of making sense of the past that are intentional and performed through narrative, and which go hand in hand with the construction of identities’ (2008: 2). The focus of such studies thus forms the nexus of ‘intentional remembering, narrative, identity’ (Erll 2008: 2). With such a broad definition, there can be no doubt that examining—as I do in this study—how the past is represented through narratives in a Greek contemporary socio-cultural context is to be considered within the framework of cultural memory studies. Yet, the question remains whether it is useful to subscribe to this disciplinary community. I tend to hold the view that we have concepts such as myth, narrative, and social representations, which can be shared in a collective space in which individual members are invited to take a position in relation to these myths, narratives, and representations, and then to reproduce, reject, or redefine them. Such processes of reproduction, rejection, and redefinition happen all the time on the individual as well as the collective level, as human beings are programmed to search for meaning and to make sense of their social (and physical) environment through labelling and characterization. What I am interested in then, is what is reproduced, rejected, or redefined in narratives about the past—since this says something about how a social group defines itself at a certain point in time. As Erll and Nünning note, it is important to keep in mind that memory is not about the past but always about the present: ‘A society’s cultural memory is always a reflection of its present interests, needs and current levels of experience’ (2005: 262).

Obviously, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The New Ottoman Greece—A Heritage in Search of Identity and Inheritors
• 2. New Approaches to the Ottoman Legacy in Historiography, Education, and Music Studies
• 3. Fearing Neo-Ottomanism: Counter-discourses and Reactions to the ‘New Ottoman Greece’
• 4. Cultivating Osmanalgia: Intersections of History and Fiction in Thessaloniki
• 5. Narrating the Nation and Its (Ottoman) Legacy: The Greek Historical Novel and the Role of Fiction Writers
• 6. Appropriating the Ottoman Past in Three Novels: Greek-Turkish Friendship, Nostalgia, and Religious Coexistence
• 7. Epilogue: Ottoman Greece from 1980 to 2018
• Back Matter