The Young Turk Revolution and the Ottoman Empire

The Aftermath of 1908

Noémi Lévy-Aksu, François Georgeon

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784536008
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720214
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 reverberated across the Middle East and Europe and ushered in a new era for the Ottoman Empire. The initial military uprising in the Balkans triggered a constitutional revolution, in which social mobilization and the political aspirations of the Young Turks played a crucial role. The Young Turk Revolution and the Ottoman Empire provides a newanalysis of this process in the Balkans and the Anatolian provinces, outlining the transition from revolutionary euphoria to increasing tensions at local and central levels. Focusing on the compromises, successes and failures in the immediate aftermath of 1908, and based on new primary material and Ottoman-Turkish sources, this book represents an essential contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and modern Turkey.

PART I

NEW FATES: REVOLUTIONARY HEROES AND FRUSTRATED HOPES

CHAPTER 1

THE HEROES OF HÜRRIYET: THE IMAGES IN STRUGGLE

Saadet Özen

Hürriyet, literally ‘the freedom’, was one motto of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and will be used hereafter as a generic denomination of the revolutionary era, from the restoration of the Constitution in 1908 to the destitution of Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1909. Briefly revising, the ‘Young Turk Revolution’ of 1908 led by the Committee of Union and Progress (from now on CUP) against Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1909) reached its peak on 23 July 1908, when young officers in Manastır (nowadays Bitola) announced the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution suspended in 1877 by the very Sultan, Abdülhamid II. The following day Istanbul newspapers made public this restoration, however, as an imperial decree by the sultan himself. The sultan recalled the Parliament, but after nine months into the new parliamentary term, an armed insurrection broke out in the capital. The CUP reacted decisively, organizing an ‘Action Army’ composed of regular forces reinforced by volunteer units. On 24 April, the Action Army occupied the capital city. On 27 April the Parliament deposed Sultan Abdülhamid, who was succeeded by his younger brother Reşad, who ascended the throne as Mehmed V Reşad.¹

The visuals on Hürriyet, the main focus of this study, still shape our vision to a certain extent in the retrospective construction of the past. A glimpse on the pictorial depictions of the Constitutional Era would primarily hint at a common sensation: unanimous celebration of the freedom by people without apparent distinction of communal/political affiliations. At first sight they seem to be able to satisfy ‘those who want to see the revolutionary enthusiasm² ‘as says Aykut Kansu in his evaluation of Manaki Brothers’ Hürriyet album. Or, as asserted by Roni Margulies ‘… despite my special interest in the period, I only had a vague feeling, but did not really know, about the extent of popular enthusiasm for the “Proclamation of Freedom” in 1908, as documented in this album’.³

However, a close-up to this veil of undiversified joy would reveal nuances: there are postcards with the watchword ‘Long Live the Sultan!’, others praise the mottos ‘freedom, brotherhood, union’ and in some cases also the ‘justice’, some visual media exposes the sultanic portrait with the Ottoman coat of arms, the silhouette of Yıldız Palace, others the authors of the uprising against the sultan – pre-eminently Enver Bey and Niyazi Bey of Resen, and occasionally they are together with the sultan. No common agreement on the date of the restoration of the Constitution either: 23 and 24 July 1908 (10–11 July 1324 in the Ottoman-Julian calendar) alternatively enhance the images for temporal precision. The overall visual panorama calls for attention to the potential alternative premises in the making of images, and the messages they convey. Therefore in this study, I will attempt a reconstruction of the visual expressions bourgeoning following the uprising with a particular attention to the policy makers and their iconographic self- representation during and after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908: simply put, did the sultan and the CUP-affiliated authors of the uprising visually re-define this political turning point, and, if yes, why and how? And to what extent did the visual material contribute to the making of the leaders?⁴

Sources for a Visual Study of Hürriyet

In my case, the ‘visual’ would be confined to the inquiry of the photographic production of Hürriyet as an intentional visual narrative, a tool for the representation and the construction of the political turn, the revolutionary personas and their practices. As will be detailed below, the photographic records of Hürriyet have circulated in a number of ways: on paper stock, through printed matter, or in the form of postcard imagery. The reason for the exclusion of all other visual forms in this study – be they cartoons, paintings, or cinema – is multifold. First, the obvious need for limits: in the definition of Mitchell, ‘visual studies is the study of visual culture … politics, aesthetics and epistemology of seeing and being seen’,⁵ and the infinite number of domains – not only imagery, but also architecture, performance studies etc. – in which those studies necessarily intersect urges for perpetual case-based evaluation of visual practices with all the networks they encompass. The image in its conventional sense is also far from being monolithic, and each kind (cartoon, photography, drawing, chromolithography etc.) requires attention to its specific mode of production, its audience, and the way it is used to deliver messages to the viewer. Furthermore the visual culture of Hürriyet is not totally unexplored. Although few in number, studies on the cartoons in particular denote the potential of images as historical documents that could hint at the mindset following the political turn, as in Palmira Brummett's Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911.⁶

The second reason for this choice is the important corpus of available photographic material related to Hürriyet – both archival and unedited or published – and the paradoxical scarcity of analytical work upon them. Mustafa Özen's observation on the role and use of postcards and photographs in the visual making of this ‘Constitutional Revolution’⁷ has been an informative reminder, but not echoed in the current climate of debates. All the same, a number of illustrated publications provide rich visual documents: Didâr-ı Hürriyet, Kartpostallarla İkinci Meşrutiyet (1908–13) by Sacit Kutlu,⁸ Yadigâr-ı Hürriyet, Orlando Calumeno Koleksiyonu'ndan Meşrutiyet Kartpostalları ve Madalyaları, edited by Osman Köker,⁹ İkinci Meşrutiyet'in İlanının 100üncü Yılı, edited by Bahattin Östuncay,¹⁰ and II. Meşrutiyet'in İlk Yılı,¹¹ to mention the most salient examples with the wide range of visuals they propose mostly coming from private collections. Yadigâr-ı Hürriyet, for instance, brought to light the Orlando Calumeno collection of postcards and medals, impressive and promising with the number of postcards and the continuity of the story they propose: 98 pictures in total from the early days of Hürriyet until the anti-revolution of 1909 and Sultan Mehmed V Reşat's accession to the throne.

In addition to this repository, an album of 68 photographs composed in the 1910s is both informative with its content and points out to further material: Manastır'da İlân-ı Hürriyet by Manaki Brothers (Yanaki Manaki, 1878–1954, and Milton Manaki, 1882–1964).¹² Apparently in the 1990s one original edition of this album has been circulated among collectors. Reprinted in 1997, it was initially written by Manaki Brothers (Milton and Yanaki Manaki), the highly respected photographers and cameramen in the Balkans who witnessed the revolutionary days in Bitola.¹³ Not only did they take the photographs, but they enhanced them with captions that seemingly associate each one with a specific date and context, therefore offering a peculiar illustrated narrative of the revolutionary timeline between 1908 and 1909.

Yet the visual production of Manaki Brothers during the Hürriyet is not confined to this album. The Cinematheque of Macedonia, founded in 1974 in Skopje, and the State Archives of the Republic of Macedonia, Department of Bitola, respectively preserve film footage (2,477.2 metres of moving images) and pictures (17,583 photographs) by the same Brothers. The stock incorporates both moving and still images captioned for Hürriyet, although hard to evaluate in number and scope.¹⁴ The Archives of Macedonia not only provide unedited visual data, but also clarify the origins of some iconic depictions of Hürriyet – also published within the postcard collections of Orlando Calumeno and Sacit Kutlu¹⁵ – hitherto anonymous and considered as valuable and inspiring memorabilia, nevertheless not necessarily critically questioned beyond the veil of self-evidence. Therefore as both witnesses and recorders of the revolutionary period, Manaki Brothers’ work would be the outstanding source of material, but they need to be re-evaluated in comparison with other images from the publications of the period or those made available nowadays by private collections, with particular attention to alternative accounts they could compose and represent.

The Palace: A New Visual Strategy for Hürriyet?

According to what has been reiterated in both popular and scholarly writing, despite his willingness to impress the global public opinion with photography, Sultan Abdülhamid II would have avoided the camera – or any other means of pictorial depiction – for himself. The distanced attitude of the sultan towards the camera has been associated with a general policy for the public display of all kinds of imperial portrait. In this sense, the Hamidian regime would be in contrast to the previous sultans of the nineteenth century, that is, Abdülmecid and Abdulaziz, who publicly displayed both their body and images and ritualized them. Abdülhamid would forbid the display of his portraits, in other words his ‘likeness’, in public spaces.¹⁶ The revolution of 1908 would have forced the sultan to revise this visual strategy, and only at this date he would have been visible again.

Consequently, the sultanic authority in public space would be framed through the uses of invented symbols, like coat of arms, the image of the silhouette of his palace or the Friday ceremony.¹⁷ That would be his policy, to create ‘vibrations of power’ without being seen for unclear reason, for security, or orthodox application of Muslim rules over the depiction of humans, as it was asserted.¹⁸ But in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 he would embrace a new policy: he would become physically visible.¹⁹ This pre-1908 rejection, or perhaps ‘hate’, of the camera on the scale of ‘iconophobia’²⁰ had been mainly detected through few archival documents, and reminiscences of court photographers.²¹

As a matter of fact in 1908, after the restoration of the Constitution in July, it is true that the viewers had many occasions to see the sultan's images on different media. For instance, on September 1908, probably 17 September, the movie-goers in France were acquainted with three actual scenes from Istanbul shot by Pathé Films: L'incendie du Quartier de Stamboul, La Turquie renaissante, and Le Salamalick public à la mosquée hamidié.²² Le Salamalick public à la mosquée hamidié, in other words the filmic representation of a Friday ceremony in the Hamidiye Mosque will hold our attention.

Although the film has been released in September, a witness suggests the exact day of the ceremony: Şadiye Sultan, Sultan Abdülhamid's daughter, had seen ‘a man, apparently a foreigner taking pictures with a weird device’. She was particularly interested, and she opened the window of her coach to address an officer in charge. A young man who presented himself as Selim Sırrı satisfied ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I New Fates: Revolutionary Heroes and Frustrated Hopes
• Part II Still the Revolution? Freedom and Power after 1908
• Part III Constitutional Expectations and Political Horizons