Category Archives: Turkey

by Joel | 21 June 2026 · 3:17 am

Poles & Cossacks vs. Ottomans

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-131:

The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number of devastating famines caused in part by what we today call the Little Ice Age—a period of low temperatures that lasted half a millennium, from about 1350 to 1850, peaking around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The crisis afflicted Muscovy at a most inopportune time, when its Rurikid dynasty had died out and a number of aristocratic clans contested the legitimacy of the new rulers. The dynastic crisis came to an end in 1613 with the election to the Muscovite throne of the first Romanov tsar. But before the crisis was resolved, a number of candidates for the throne, some of them “pretenders” claiming to be surviving relatives of Ivan the Terrible, tried their political luck, opening the door to foreign intervention.

During the lengthy interregnum, the Cossacks supported the two pretenders seeking the Muscovite throne, False Dmitrii I and False Dmitrii II. Up to 10,000 Cossacks joined the army of Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski of Poland when he marched on Moscow in 1610. The election to the Muscovite throne three years later of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, founder of the dynasty that lasted until the Revolution of 1917, did not end Cossack involvement in Muscovite affairs. In 1618, a Ukrainian Cossack army of 20,000 joined Polish troops in their march on Moscow and took part in the siege of the capital. The Cossacks helped end the war on conditions favorable to the Kingdom of Poland. One of them was the transfer to Poland of the Chernihiv land, which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had lost in the early sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, Chernihiv would become an important part of the Cossack world. As always, however, the Cossacks both helped and hindered the Polish kings in advancing their foreign-policy agenda. In its war with Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never got the support it hoped for from the Ottoman Empire, partly because of continuing Cossack seagoing expeditions and attacks on the Ottoman littoral.

In 1606, descending the Dnieper and entering the Black Sea on their longboats, called “seagulls” (chaiky), the Cossacks stormed Varna, one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses on the western Black Sea shore. In 1614 they pillaged Trabzon on the southeastern shore, and in the following year they entered the Istanbul harbor of the Golden Horn and pillaged the suburbs, much as the Vikings had done some 750 years earlier. But whereas the Vikings had also traded with Constantinople, the Cossack expeditions were akin to pirate attacks on seashores from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. They came to rob, take revenge, and, as Ukrainian folk songs related, liberate long-suffering slaves. In 1616, they attacked Kaffa, the main slave-trading center on the Crimean coast, and liberated all the captives.

The sultan, his court, and the foreign ambassadors who witnessed one Cossack attack after another on the mighty Ottoman Empire were stunned. The Christian rulers could now take the raiders seriously as potential allies in a war against the Ottomans. The French ambassador in Istanbul, Count Philippe de Harlay of Césy, wrote to King Louis XIII in August 1620, “Every time the Cossacks are near here on the Black Sea, they seize incredible booty despite their weak forces and have such a reputation that strokes of the cudgel are required to force the Turkish soldiers to do battle against them on several galleys that the grand seigneur [the sultan] sends there with great difficulty.”

While Count Philippe was informing his king about the inability of the Ottomans to curb the Cossack seagoing expeditions, advisers to sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II were considering how to wage war on two fronts: against the Polish army on land and the Cossacks at sea. In the summer of 1620, the Ottoman army marched toward the Prut River in today’s Moldova against the commonwealth, whose troops included private Cossack armies of Polish and Ukrainian magnates. The campaign aimed ostensibly to punish the commonwealth for not curbing Cossack attacks on the Ottomans. In reality, the agenda was much broader. The Ottomans were trying to protect their vassals in the region from the growing influence of the commonwealth. The Polish army, numbering some 10,000 soldiers, and the Ottoman force, twice as large according to some estimates, clashed in September 1620 near the town of Ţuţora on today’s Moldovan-Romanian border. The battle went on for twenty days, ending with a crushing defeat for the commonwealth.

Since the commonwealth had no standing army, the court and the entire country panicked. Everyone expected the Ottomans to continue their march on Poland. Indeed they did. In the following year, a much larger Ottoman army, estimated at 120,000 soldiers and led by the sultan himself, passed through Moldavia on its way to the commonwealth. The Ottomans met a commonwealth force approximately 40,000 strong, half of it made up of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, hero of the Cossacks’ raid of 1616 on Kaffa and commander of their march on Moscow two years later. The battle lasted a whole month, waged on the banks of the Dniester River near the fortress of Khotyn, which the Ottomans besieged.

The Battle of Khotyn ended with no clear victory for either side, but that uncertain outcome was regarded in Warsaw as a triumph for the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles had stopped the huge Ottoman army at their borders and signed a peace treaty that involved no territorial losses. Everyone understood that this result would have been all but impossible without the Cossacks. For the first time—and a short time at that—the Cossacks became the darlings of the entire commonwealth. Books that appeared soon after the battle would lionize Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, whose monument stands today in the Podil district of Kyiv at the head of the street named after him, as one of the greatest Polish warriors.

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Filed under migration, military, Moldova, nationalism, Poland, Romania, Russia, slavery, Turkey, Ukraine

by Joel | 20 June 2026 · 12:35 am

Slave Trade on the Steppe

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 118-121:

IN THE COURSE of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ukrainian steppes underwent a major political, economic, and cultural transformation. For the first time since the days of Kyivan Rus’, the line of frontier settlement stopped retreating toward the Prypiat marshes and the Carpathian Mountains and began advancing toward the east and south. Linguistic research indicates that two major groups of Ukrainian dialects, Polisian and Carpatho-Volhynian, began to converge from the north and west, respectively, shifting east and south to create a third group of steppe dialects that now cover Ukrainian territory from Zhytomyr and Kyiv in the northwest to Zaporizhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk in the east and extending as far to the southeast as Krasnodar and Stavropol in today’s Russia. This mixing of dialects reflected the movement of population at large.

The origins of that profound change were in the steppe itself. The struggle that began in the mid-fourteenth century within the Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate, led to its disintegration by the mid-fifteenth century. The Crimean, Kazan, and Astrakhan khanates became successors to the Horde, none of them capable of uniting it and some even losing their independence. The Crimea became independent of the Golden Horde in 1449 under the leadership of a descendant of Genghis Khan, Haji Devlet Giray. The Giray dynasty, established by Haji Devlet, would last into the eighteenth century, but his realm would not remain independent. By 1478, the khanate had become a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire—the huge Turkic-dominated Muslim polity that replaced Byzantium as the major power in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea regions in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Ottomans, who made Istanbul, the former Constantinople, their capital in 1453, took direct control over the southern shores of the Crimea, establishing their main center in the port city of Kaffa, today’s Feodosiia. The Girays controlled the steppelands of the Crimea north of the mountains, as well as the nomadic tribes of southern Ukraine, with the Noghay Horde becoming the most powerful of those tribes in the sixteenth century.

Security concerns and commercial interests attracted the Ottomans to the region. In particular they were interested in slaves. The slave trade had always been important in the region’s economy, but it now became dominant. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the enslavement only of non-Muslims and encouraged the emancipation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of agriculture. Bad harvests generally translated into more raids to the north and more slaves shipped back to the Crimea.

All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas on their slave-seeking raids went through Ukraine. Two of them east of the Dniester led to western Podolia and then to Galicia; two on the other side of the Southern Buh River led to western Podolia and Volhynia, then again to Galicia; the last passed through what would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv to southern Muscovy. If the demand for cereals led to the incorporation of the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth century into the Baltic trade, their connection to the Mediterranean trade was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians, who constituted an absolute majority of the population of the steppe borderlands north of the Black Sea and moved into the steppes in search of grain, became the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave-dependent economy. Ethnic Russians northeast of the Crimea were a close second.

Michalon (Michael) the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew who, “seeing that our people were constantly being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count, asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from 1.5 million to 3 million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices. The fates of the slaves differed. Most of the male slaves ended up on Ottoman galleys or working in the fields, while many women worked as domestics. Some got lucky, but only in a matter of speaking. Talented young men made careers in the Ottoman administration, but most of them were eunuchs. Some women were taken into the harems of the sultans and high Ottoman officials.

One Ukrainian girl known in history as Roxolana became the wife of the most powerful of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566. Her son became a sultan under the name Selim II. Under the name Hürrem Sultan, Roxolana sponsored Muslim charities and funded the construction of some of the best examples of Ottoman architecture. Among these is the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, a public bathhouse not far from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, constructed by the best-known Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan. In the course of the last two hundred years, Roxolana has figured as the heroine of novels and a number of television dramas in Ukraine and Turkey. To be sure, her life and career were the exception, not the rule.

The Tatar attacks and the slave trade left deep scars in Ukrainian memory. The fate of the slaves was the subject of numerous dumas—Ukrainian epic songs that lamented the fate of the captives, described their attempts to escape from Crimean slavery, and glorified the men who saved and freed slaves. Those folk heroes were known as Cossacks. They fought the Tatars, undertook seagoing expeditions against the Ottomans, and, indeed, freed slaves from time to time.

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Filed under language, migration, Mongolia, nationalism, religion, Russia, slavery, Turkey, Ukraine

by Joel | 15 June 2026 · 12:49 am

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

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Filed under Greece, migration, military, nationalism, Scandinavia, Turkey, Ukraine

by Joel | 13 June 2026 · 1:09 am

Slavs Meet Byzantium

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 43-45:

THE SLAVS FIRST came to general attention in the early sixth century AD, when they showed up en masse on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, which had been weakened by the Goths and Huns, and moved into the Balkans. Jordanes, a sixth-century Byzantine author of Gothic descent, distinguished two major groups among the Slavs of his day. “Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places,” he wrote, “yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes.” He placed the Sclaveni between the Danube and the Dniester, reserving for the Antes the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper, “in the curve of the sea of Pontus.” Linguistic data suggests that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today’s Ukraine. By the time Jordanes wrote, the Slavs must have moved from their forest recesses into the steppes, creating a serious problem for Emperor Justinian the Great.

Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire between 527 and 567 and was ambitious enough to attempt a restoration of the Roman Empire in its entirety, both east and west. On the Danube frontier, where the empire faced unceasing attacks from local tribes, Justinian decided to take the offensive. Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine author who left a detailed account of Justinian’s wars, writes that in the early 530s Chilbudius, a commander personally close to the emperor, was sent to wage war north of the Danube. He scored a number of victories over the Antes, which allowed Justinian to add “Anticus” (conqueror of the Antes) to his imperial title. But the success was short-lived. Three years later Chilbudius was killed in battle, and Justinian returned to the old policy of defending the border along the Danube instead of trying to extend it.

Justinian brought back the old Roman tactic of “divide and rule.” By the end of the 530s, not without Byzantine encouragement and incentives, the Antes were already fighting the Sclaveni, while Byzantine generals recruited both groups into the imperial army. Even so, the Slavic raids continued. While at war with the Sclaveni, the Antes managed to invade the Byzantine province of Thrace in the eastern Balkans. They pillaged the land and took numerous slaves, whom they brought back to the left bank of the Danube. Having manifested their destructive potential, the Antes offered their services to the empire. Justinian took them under his wing and designated the abandoned Greek city of Turris, north of the Danube, as their headquarters.

Like many other enemies of the empire, the Antes became its defenders in exchange for regular payments from the imperial treasury. They tried to enhance their status by claiming to have captured the emperor’s best general, Chilbudius, whom they wanted to recognize as their leader. Since Justinian had granted Chilbudius the title of magister militum, or commander of all the imperial troops in the region, such recognition would have made them legitimate citizens of the empire, not merely its gatekeepers. The plot did not succeed. The true Chilbudius was, of course, long dead, his impostor was captured and sent to Justinian, and the Antes had to accept the status of foederati—allies rather than citizens of the great empire.

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Filed under Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, language, migration, military, Turkey, Ukraine

by Joel | 13 June 2026 · 12:47 am

Classical Pontic Steppe Divisions

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Ovid’s contemporary Strabo, author of the acclaimed Geographies, knew more about the Pontic steppe than did the famous Roman exile. From Strabo we learn the names of the Sarmatian tribes and the areas under their control. According to him, the Iazyges and Roxolani were “wagon dwellers,” or nomads, but the famous geographer gives us literally nothing about the sedentary population of the forest-steppe areas around the Dnieper, not to mention the wooded areas farther to the north. Unlike Ovid, however, he did not live among the peoples of the region; nor were his sources as good as those of Herodotus. They knew nothing about the “northerners,” and Strabo complained about the ignorance that prevailed “in regard to the rest of the peoples that come next in order in the north; for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus, nor how far distant they are from the Atlantic Sea, nor whether their countries border upon it.”

Strabo’s informants came from one of the colonies, but if Herodotus made numerous references to the Dnieper, Strabo seemed more familiar with the Don. His sources likely came from Tanais, a Greek colony at the mouth of the Don that belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom, the most powerful union of Greek colonies revived with the arrival of the Romans. For Strabo, the Don had a special meaning. It served as the easternmost boundary of Europe, the term used in the Aegean homeland to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world. Europe lay to the west of the Don, while Asia began to the east of it.

Thus, at the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the Romans came to the Pontic colonies, the Ukrainian territories found themselves once again at the very edge of what would become Western civilization. The northern frontier of the Hellenic world had now become the eastern boundary of Europe. There it would remain for almost two thousand years, until the rise of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century redrew the map of Europe, moving its eastern boundary all the way to the Urals.

The division of the Pontic steppes into European and Asian parts did not mean much in the time of the Romans. Strabo wrote about the Sarmatians on both the left and right banks of the Don, and Ptolemy, one of his successors, wrote in the second century AD about two Sarmatias, one European, the other Asian—a division that would remain constant in the works of European geographers for another millennium and a half. More important than the imagined eastern boundary of Europe was the real civilizational frontier between the Mediterranean colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the nomads of the Pontic steppes. Unlike the Greek colonies with their surrounding fortifications, that frontier was never set in stone, creating instead a broad zone of interaction between colonists and locals in which languages, religions, and cultures intermixed, producing new cultural and social realities.

The all-important boundary between the steppe nomads and the agriculturalists of the forest-steppe areas that was known to Herodotus became invisible for Strabo. Whether it disappeared altogether or Mediterranean writers simply did not know about it is hard to say. Geography and ecology stayed the same, while the population probably did not. It certainly refused to stay put in the middle of the first millennium AD, when we next encounter references to the region in the writings of learned Greeks.

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by Joel | 26 February 2026 · 8:18 pm

Publicizing the Auschwitz Report

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-275:

NATURALLY, THE WORKING Group always hoped that the escapees’ testimony would reach the Allied nations fighting the Third Reich. They had no clear idea how exactly it would get there; instead they cast the document upon the waters, hoping it would land on the right shore. The Auschwitz Report would be a message in a bottle.

One early copy fell into exactly the wrong hands. Oskar Krasňanský sent it to Jewish officials based in Istanbul through a courier who he had been assured was ‘reliable’. But it never arrived. Krasňanský later concluded that the messenger had been a paid spy who took the report to Hungary, only to hand it to the Gestapo in Budapest.

Another copy, also originally destined for Istanbul, followed an especially circuitous path. A Jewish employee of the Turkish legation in Budapest passed it to the head of the city’s Palestine office – representing those who were determined to turn that country into a refuge for Jews – who, keen to get the information to neutral Switzerland, passed it to a contact in the Romanian legation in Bern who, in turn, handed it to a businessman from Transylvania who had once been known as György Mandel but who had now, however improbably, become the unpaid first secretary of the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, under the name of George Mantello.

The route was bizarre, but at last the report had found the right person. Mantello was a man ready to flout convention, and if necessary the law, if that’s what it took to rescue Jews from the Nazis. And for him, the Auschwitz Report had a bleakly personal significance. As he read it, he knew that his own extended family in Hungary had already been deported. The words of Vrba and Wetzler, reinforced by Mordowicz and Rosin, confirmed that all of those relatives, some 200 people, were almost certainly dead. He resolved immediately to do what he could to spread the word.

Mantello’s copy was a five-page summary in Hungarian, produced at an earlier stage of the report’s convoluted journey by an orthodox rabbi in Slovakia, so he now enlisted the help of assorted students and expats to make immediate translations of this abridged version into Spanish, French, German and English. On 22 June 1944 he handed the document to a British journalist, Walter Garrett, who was in Zurich for the Exchange Telegraph news agency. Garrett saw the news value immediately, but he also recognised that, even in its pared down form, the Auschwitz Report was still too lengthy for easy newspaper consumption. He had his British–Hungarian secretary, one Blanche Lucas, produce a fresh translation and he then distilled the core points into four arresting press releases.

Garrett made a break from the reporters’ unwritten code, which would forbid a journalist from receiving financial help from a source: doubtless for the sake of speed, he allowed Mantello to pay for those four texts to be sent to London by telegram, costly as that was. Still, despite that departure from traditional Fleet Street practice, and in welcome contrast with Krasňanský, Garrett understood the grammar of news. His telegram despatch, wired on the night of 23 June 1944, led with what was his most stunning revelation:

FOLLOWING DRAMATIC ACCOUNT ONE DARKEST CHAPTERS MODERN HISTORY REVEALING HOW ONE MILLION 715 THOUSAND JEWS PUT DEATH ANNIHILATION CAMP AUSCHWITZ BIRKENAU . . . REPORT COME EX TWO JEWS WHO ESCAPED BIRKENAU CORRECTNESS WHEREOF CONFIRMED . . . FROM THE BEGINNING JUNE 1943 NINETY PERCENT INCOMING JEWS GASSED DEATH STOP . . . THREE GAS-CHAMBERS FOUR CREMATORIUMS BIRKENAU-AUSCHWITZ STOP EACH CREMATORIUM . . . TWO THOUSAND CORPSE DAILY STOP GARRETT ADDS ABSOLUTE EXACTNESS ABOVE REPORT UNQUESTIONABLE . . . END

As soon as those words were humming along the telegraph cables to London, Garrett acted to ensure that his story – surely one of the scoops of the century – would get the widest possible distribution. The technology of 1944 allowed for few short cuts. And so, in the early hours of 24 June, Walter Garrett rode his bike through the streets of Zurich, pushing copies of his despatch by hand into the mailboxes of the city’s newspapers. Attached was a covering letter of endorsement, supplied by Mantello, from a quartet of senior Swiss theologians and clerics, all apparently vouching for the gravity of the revelations. (In fact, none of the four had seen the report: in a typical Mantello flourish, he had put their names to the letter but had dispensed with the formality of asking their permission first.) And so the first newspaper story based on what would become known as the Vrba–Wetzler Report appeared in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung later that same day.

Mantello’s efforts had worked. Thanks to those ‘two Jews who escaped Birkenau, correctness whereof confirmed’, the word was out. Breaking the dam of censorship, the following eighteen days saw the publication in the Swiss press of no fewer than 383 articles laying bare the truth of the Auschwitz death camp, even if, by accidentally omitting the estimated 50,000 Lithuanian dead, Garrett had revised down Vrba–Wetzler’s death toll. Put another way, between 24 June and 11 July more articles appeared about Auschwitz in the Swiss press than had been published about the wider Final Solution throughout the entire course of the war in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian and the whole of the British popular press put together.

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by Joel | 15 November 2024 · 2:51 pm

For two weeks in September-October this year, the Far Outliers took a Viking cruise down the Danube River from Budapest to Bucharest. Here are some impressions from each of the countries we visited. A photo album from the trip (Danube 2024) is on Flickr.

Our first stop in Bulgaria was at Vidin, one of its oldest riverside towns. Our morning excursion was to the old mountain fortress of Belogradchik (‘Little Belgrade’) and its impressive rock formations, with steep hillsides to climb. In the afternoon we walked along the waterfront, to the old Ottoman post office, a mosque, an orthodox church, and a memorial to the victims of communism. We didn’t make it as far as the synagogue because we fell into a long conversation with a talkative schoolboy fluent in English. The captain of our Viking Ullur cruise ship was Bulgarian.

The next morning we stopped at Ruse, famous for its baroque architecture and the Friendship Bridge to Giurgiu, just across the Danube in Romania. But our daylong excursion took us south to Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria’s old capital, and the nearby Ottoman merchant city of Arbanasi, now a major tourist attraction, where we visited an Ottoman-era merchant’s house and an orthodox church hidden in a barn. We ate lunch at the Hotel Izvora (= Spring), built in traditional Bulgarian style, and with a waterwheel-driven rotisserie. On the way back to the bus, we passed two classic Russian cars, a Lada and a Moskvitch.

We passed many large farms on our bus excursions. The wheat and maize had been harvested before our October visit, but fields of young green rapeseed (canola) plants were also visible. After the fall of communism, large collective farms were broken up and given to the families who worked them, but many new owners who lacked the resources to farm their own land have leased it back to large agribusinesses. Bulgaria also has valuable specialty crops, the most famous of which are from the centuries-old Rose Valley. (We first heard of it, under the name Valea Trandafirilor, during our sojourn in Romania in 1983-84.)

After Russia attacked Ukraine’s Black Sea grain-storage ports, including Ismail in the Danube Delta, much of Ukraine’s huge wheat exports now come by thousands of trucks through Romania, across the Friendship Bridge, and back to the Bulgarian port of Varna on the Black Sea.

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by Joel | 2 November 2024 · 11:13 am

Down the Danube: Serbia

Our first stop in Serbia was the capital city, Belgrade. It wasn’t Budapest, but it was a very pleasant surprise: lively, bustling, and well supplied. We opted for the Viking “included” (at no extra cost) excursion that focused on three attractions: the white limestone-walled Fortress that gave the city its name; the spectacular Church of St. Sava on the pattern of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia (without the minarets); and the Bohemian quarter of the Old Town (with break dancers). The Fortress, now a city park, housed two unusual displays: a dinosaur park and a display of artillery. Our group’s guide was the best of our whole trip: a onetime professional singer who was now a professor of art history and a wonderfully wry storyteller. He demonstrated the acoustics in St. Sava by chanting liturgy at a central spot. On the church grounds was a statue of Nikola Tesla, born in what’s now Croatia and buried in what’s now Serbia.

Our fondest memories of Belgrade were not the architecture, the food, or the shopping, but the music. Later that Friday afternoon, when we climbed up the steep steps to the Old Town on our own, we chanced upon a crowd waiting outside a church for the wedding party to emerge. We stayed around long enough to enjoy the music and take video. In our ship’s lounge that evening, we enjoyed a Serbian troupe performing Balkan folkloric music and dance.

When we woke up the next morning, we were at Golubac, site of an old castle on a steep hillside protecting the Danube border. After touring it and slowly climbing to the top, we boarded a bus for a hillside overlooking the Iron Gates, the site of the sunken Turkish fortress island of Ada Kaleh, and Romania across the river. On the sun deck in late afternoon, we listened to the cruise director’s narration as we navigated through the narrow gorges and past the huge Decebal statue. We passed through the locks of the hydroelectric dams after dark.

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Filed under economics, language, military, music, nationalism, Romania, travel, Turkey, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 25 October 2024 · 5:58 am

Serbian & Bulgarian Peasant Leaders

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 261-263:

Though an underproductive agricultural regime also dominated the economies of Serbia and Bulgaria, a relation developed between elites and people in these countries that was more reminiscent of the Czech case, with national leaders drawn not from the gentry but rather from the common people; there was no native class of large landholders. Though like Romania, Serbia was a former Ottoman possession, where the overwhelming majority lived in the countryside, and socioeconomic development lagged, as in Bohemia, the medieval nobility had been destroyed. Also similar to the Czech areas of Bohemia, the emerging national elite was of peasant origin, and in the following generation, like the Czech lands, Serbia produced no significant native fascism.

In Ottoman times, spahis had held the land and produce of peasants in return for service, and then came janissaries, who later degenerated into marauding raiders. But although the right to extract dues and tributes remained in Turkish hands, unlike rural populations in Hungary or Romania, Serb peasants were not enserfed. When the Serb principality took form in the decades after 1817, the Turkish landholders gradually left, and the Serb leader Miloš Obrenović refused to permit the emergence of large landed estates, fearing they might dilute his power (he became fabulously wealthy). Thus, he left Serb society mostly of one class, a highly undifferentiated peasantry. Besides him, none of the few power holders who emerged after the 1840s had more than a few hundred hectares of land, and no one was tempted to trace a grand lineage to noble or racially superior forebears.

The Serb state at first seemed to rule by liberal principles. The constitution of 1868 provided for a legislature, and beginning in 1880, political parties developed. There were three centers of power: the bureaucracy, the politicians who had success in electoral politics, and the prince. Like Romania’s king, the prince constantly interfered, preventing the emergence of a bona fide democracy. The most important political movement was the Serb Radicals, co-founded as a peasant party in 1881 by Nikola Pašić, a peasant’s son who fell in with socialist circles during engineering studies in Zurich—a crossroads of East European Marxism—becoming Serbia’s and then Yugoslavia’s uncontested political leader until his death in 1926.

But rather than act in the peasants’ interest by promoting rural development, the Radicals evolved into an establishment political machine, advancing the state’s power and wealth by focusing public resources on the army, bureaucracy, railroads, and diplomatic service, fostering virtually every civic project short of the needs of peasants. In 1908, the Ministry of Agriculture received only 3 percent of the annual budget, while 23 percent of that budget went directly to the military and 28 percent to debt services (mostly interest on loans for railroads and the army). The justification for these expenditures was to spread the Serb state into areas considered ethnically Serb.

Yet because that agenda was broadly supported, the Serb Radical Party never sacrificed the loyalties of the peasantry, and indeed used the education system to stoke irredentist feeling. It helped that the per capita debt burden on the peasants decreased in the decades before World War I. But the Radicals also had good fortune in timing: they had claimed peasants’ loyalty from the first days of independence, through the semi-populist program of Pašić’s friend and mentor Svetozar Marković, Serbia’s first socialist, who promised to lessen state intervention into peasants’ lives. Although the Radicals were an establishment party, its intellectuals and professional politicians never lost contact with the villages, where they kept networks of supporters. When necessary, they could speak perfect peasant vernacular. Society and government thus remained cohesive, even if the competing wings of the Radical party vigorously debated politics and went in and out of government from 1892 to 1900.

Bulgaria was similar in terms of the landholding regime. When the Bulgarian national renaissance began in the mid-nineteenth century, the country was almost completely rural, run by Turkish landlords. After independence in 1878, the Turkish landowners were ejected, leaving Bulgaria a place of smallholding peasants who produced for subsistence. The most coherent institution, as in Serbia, was the state, which grew beginning in the 1870s, becoming a kind of “class” in itself and filling a social vacuum. But as we will see in Chapter 11, in contrast to Serbia, a major peasant movement emerged here—the Bulgarian Agrarian Union—with an original political philosophy that challenged the liberal state machine and irredentist nationalism as well as the monarch who pursued it.

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by Joel | 24 September 2024 · 5:29 am

Berlin, 1878: Prelude to Versailles, 1919

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 210-212, 238-240:

In 1878, representatives of Europe’s major powers convened in the capital of the new German nation-state for negotiations that bear all the hallmarks of the more famous effort in decolonization and democratization that transpired at Paris after World War I. At Berlin in 1878, statesmen determined the boundaries, constitutions, sovereigns, and even citizenship of four national states, which like Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1919, had to be created in the wake of imperial decline so as to secure Europe’s balance of power. We date the independence of modern Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from July 1878.

But in the interests of balance, the statesmen in Berlin traduced the spirit of nationalism by denying to Serbia territory where a plurality of the inhabitants was Orthodox South Slavs. That was Bosnia-Herzegovina, a quilt of ethnicities, which Austria-Hungary was permitted to occupy in 1878 with no purpose other than making sure it did not go to Serbia. Politicians in Vienna and Budapest viewed the prospect of a “great South Slav state” with horror, all the more so as it promised to be a close ally of Russia.

Some have called this frustrated Serb determination to expand “irredentist,” and that is both correct and misleading. The characterization is correct because Serbia felt there were Serbs beyond its boundaries who had to be included, but it is also misleading in suggesting that this agenda was unusual. In fact, every new state, beginning with Italy (where the word “irredentism” originated) and Germany, was irredentist in the sense that it “redeemed” national territory. Piedmont-Sardinia had not been Italy, nor was Prussia Germany. Without irredentism, there would be no Serbia, or any other new East European state, whether created in 1878 or 1919. Therefore, it is not hard to understand the tremendous affront that many Serbs, in and outside Serbia, felt after 1878.

But where Austria-Hungary was concerned, it was not only an affront but also the bizarre act of a troubled imperial state, now taking millions more Slavs under its rule, just a decade after dividing into Austria-Hungary precisely to keep a lid on the empire’s Slavs. But even more intriguingly and confoundingly, the man who negotiated the inclusion of more Serbs and Croats, as well as millions of Bosnian Muslims, was the beautiful hanged man, Count Gyula Andrássy, who became the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871, and whose own Hungary was trying to make loyal Magyars out of millions of Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenes, and Croats. Before the Compromise of 1867, Magyar politicians had assured representatives of those groups that their rights would be legally guaranteed. Afterward, those promises were forgotten, and demands for national autonomy were treated as seditious. Austria was not Germanizing its population, but German liberals were deeply concerned about the growing numerical superiority of Slavs. Now Vienna and Budapest took responsibility for 3 million more. How could they possibly make them into loyal citizens?

This story takes place in three acts. The first is the last major uprising of a Christian people against Ottoman rule in Europe, the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. The acts of Herzegovinian and then Bosnian peasants generated the pressures leading to the Berlin Congress. The second is the sanguineous military campaigns of Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia against the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1878, whose success triggered concern among the European powers about the growth of Russian and the decline of Ottoman power. The third is the Berlin Congress itself and how the European powers rescued peace as well as Austria-Hungary, largely by extending their blessings to four new states, each of which considered itself not an end product but rather a toehold from which the respective ethnic nation would expand.

…

Internationally, the Congress of Berlin was a major step toward the twentieth century, perhaps its inaugural event. The Congress took a principle implicit in the 1830 London Protocol founding modern Greece—that an ethnicity could be a source of sovereignty—and multiplied it by four. By implication, it also adumbrated the idea of minorities, people in the nation-state who did not belong to the nation and required protection. The idea that ethnicity was the basis of the right to rule—a principle later called national self-determination—had been foreign to the Vienna system of 1815. Berlin was not just a halfway point; it was a rupture with that system. What changed in Paris in 1919 was to make the new principle not simply a result of grudging acceptance, but an explicit and valid—indeed, universal—method of organizing statehood.

For South East European peoples, the events of 1875–1878 had a meaning like that of 1848 in Bohemia: after initial uprisings, events soon cascaded in a way that forced choices about self-identification. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox still called themselves Bosnians but increasingly desired attachment to Montenegro or Serbia, while Catholics opted for Austria and more clearly than ever identified as Croats. Religious identity was a starting place but not an endpoint; the participants in the 1875 uprising knew that they were united by religion against the “occupier” and were picking up a script from earlier in the century, when Christian populations in Serbia and Greece had likewise risen up and begun carving out autonomous zones from Ottoman territory. Yet the issue was not religion per se—the insurgents did not care about suppression of worship or doctrine—but a sense that religious belonging had condemned much of the population to subservience.

Did Bosnian identity ever stand a chance as a form of nationhood? “Of the basic criteria by which the Serb and Croat nations established themselves during this period, history, language, and religion,” writes Noel Malcolm, “only religion could apply in Bosnia, a country which had its own separate history.” But in fact, history (that is, people’s consciousness of the past) ignored the boundaries of Bosnia and focused instead on a past that Orthodox South Slavs in Bosnia believed they shared with Orthodox South Slavs in Serbia. According to epic poetry, the common history stretched back to the 1389 Kosovo battle and earlier.

In Bosnia, Orthodox and Muslims had separate imaginations: the former told stories in oral poetry of their coreligionists deceiving Turkish authorities; the latter of theirs outwitting the Austrians. And if advocates for Serb nationhood in Bosnia were inspired by the romantic nationalism that was popular at Central Europe’s universities and understood language as a people’s soul, they had to look no further than Vuk Karadžić, who had based his Serb dictionary on a dialect in Herzegovina. Against Karadžić, Benjamin Kállay had not stood a chance; probably ten times the number of schools he built would not have resulted in the Bosnian identity he intended.

If Bosnian identity amounted to anything, it was the beginning of a strategy for Muslims to oppose complete assimilation by Serb and Croat nationalism, each of which expected co-nationals to become Christian, at least nominally. What the Bosnian and Romanian stories share is a hint that twentieth-century European nationalism was vigorously and exclusively Christian, even when its carriers were fiercely secular.