Category Archives: Turkey

by | 24 March 2023 · 5:00 am

Smear Campaign vs. Vlad the Impaler

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 308-310:

The nickname Dracul (‘the Dragon’) probably derives from his father’s membership of the Hungarian chivalric Order of the Dragon, although in Romanian it takes on the meaning of a devil, and Vlad was certainly to earn the name with his draconian behaviour. A member of the ruling house of Basarab, he had, like Skanderbeg, been a hostage of the Turks, then turned against them, serving with John Hunyadi, and he was related by blood to King Matthias. Becoming Hospodar (lord) of Wallachia in 1448, he was promptly ousted by a rival, but in 1456 he regained power and this time took better care to keep it.

He built up a personal army of retainers, executed a number of hostile boiars [nobles] and took harsh measures against anyone else who opposed his will. He also tried to promote commerce, established Bucharest as the country’s capital, and in 1459 responded positively to Pius II’s call for a Crusade against the Turks. He withheld the Sultan’s tribute, killed Ottoman emissaries sent to deal with him, and then, in the winter of 1461–2, carried out a devastating assault into Ottoman territory. In a night attack, he routed an Ottoman force that had driven him back across the Danube – an occasion marked by a great slaughter of Turks.

At this point Vlad’s luck began to change. The Turks supported a bid by his half-brother Radu the Handsome to replace him and the movement gained increasing support within Wallachia, partly because of party interests, not least because it promised peace. Then, late in 1462, when the reluctant crusader King Matthias at last reached the ‘Saxon’ city of Brasov in Transylvania at the head of his troops, Vlad went to meet him, expecting, as did the Pope himself, that they would launch a joint operation against the Turks. Instead, Matthias arrested Vlad, took him back to Buda and kept him imprisoned there for thirteen years.

Vlad’s diminishing support in Wallachia no doubt prompted Matthias to have second thoughts about the crusading action he had promised the Pope, though there was another consideration: in an attempt to enrich Wallachia, Vlad had tried to regain territories that had been lost and wrest control of the profitable oriental trade away from the ‘Saxon’ cities of Transylvania (which supported pretenders to his throne) and even attacked them. A new Turkish-backed regime in Wallachia promised to restore the old pattern of trade and, for his part, Matthias was anxious to reassure them, for Transylvania, and the prosperous Saxon cities in particular, constituted an important source of income to the Hungarian treasury. However, he now had to justify his actions to the Pope. This he did so by mounting a highly effective campaign of disinformation against Vlad, incidentally drawing our attention to a facet of humanist activity that is sometimes overlooked: the manufacture of propaganda. In fact the Dracula legend was largely the creation of humanist officials at Matthias’s court.

The motive was both strong and simple: Pope Pius had to be convinced that, so far from being a doughty Crusader, Vlad was an oppressor, a murderer, a sadist – a disgrace to the Christian cause, from whom he should at all costs distance himself. To this end Janos Vitez, who was to become Primate as well as Chancellor of Hungary, Janus Pannonius, later Bishop of Pecs, and other literary talents at the court of Matthias were set to work. They used the complaints made by the Saxon merchants and stories put about by Vlad’s enemies in Wallachia in their apparently successful attempts to convince Pius; and these stories were essentially true. Vlad had undoubtedly had many people impaled (it was a commonplace form of execution in the region); he had fired many villages (as part of a scorched earth policy in the war against the Turks) and put many Ottoman subjects to death (though Matthias’s own father had once slaughtered a thousand Turkish prisoners).

However, by carefully ignoring the reasons for his actions, and by inventing new tales (for example about his allegedly favourite pastime in prison: slowly picking off the limbs of live insects) they were able to create the impression that Vlad was a traitor, a capricious despot, a sadist and a psychopath. A Latin poem by Pannonius picturing Vlad as a tyrant gained wide currency, and in 1463, as part of a wider propaganda effort, the printing, in German, of the ‘Story of Prince Dracula’ was arranged. It proved highly popular and was subsequently republished many times with embellishments and in several languages. Ultimately it was to provide Bram Stoker with the inspiration to invent a modern, fictional, Dracula. Opinion manipulators of our own times would have had little new to teach a Renaissance humanist.

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Filed under Balkans, Hungary, publishing, religion, Romania, Turkey, war

by | 17 March 2023 · 9:59 am

Early Ottoman Rule in the Balkans

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 302-305:

There had been a good deal of peaceful interchange as well as fighting between Byzantium and the Ottomans in the decades preceding 1453; and not a little intermarriage. Mehmet’s own ancestors included Byzantine Christians. Besides he entertained considerable respect for some aspects of the Byzantine tradition; he was invited to think of himself as ‘Emperor of the Romans’, like the Byzantine Emperors of old, and came to believe that he could unite all Christendom under his rule. More immediately he used certain Byzantine institutions as models for the system he set up to run his Empire. Thus the Byzantine fief seems to have been the inspiration of the sipahi system; Byzantine offices, taxes and even ceremonials became bases for Ottoman administrative and court practices, and certain posts, particularly those involving foreign affairs, became almost a monopoly of Greeks. This is not to suggest, however, that much about the new regime was not alien and burdensome.

The Ottoman state was run by a system of slavery, even though the Sultan’s slaves constituted an administrative and military elite. Furthermore, the Turks took an irregular levy of children (devshirme) from their subject Christian population and made Muslims of them, even though they also trained them for their service and set them on ladders of opportunity which enabled them to reach the highest offices of state. Furthermore, Christians were made to feel their inferiority. They were forbidden to wear green or to paint their houses in bright colours, forbidden to ride horseback in the presence of Muslims, and restricted in the number and the height of their churches. On the other hand there was freedom of worship; non-Muslims were not obliged to do military service; and they were largely subject to their own justice within their own religious millets, of which by far the largest was the Orthodox, administered by the Patriarchate of Constantinople whose latest incumbent was invested in office by the Sultan himself. The Great Church was largely in captivity, but it retained most of its autonomy. The monasteries of Mount Athos were not disturbed, and the Turks did not distract the monk Gabriel of Rila from his life’s work, a vast compilation of the sayings of St John Chrysostomos.

The Ottoman Turks also breathed new life into decrepit Byzantine cities and above all into Constantinople which they called Istanbul. Christians, Muslims, Armenians and Jews were brought from all over the Empire and settled there. Hence the population which had shrunk to about 10,000 in the immediate aftermath of its fall increased by as much as tenfold within thirty years. Most came voluntarily recognising opportunity or responding to concessions, though some were forcibly resettled; and huge building and rebuilding projects were soon under way. Water supplies, sewage disposal, street-paving and street furniture were soon renewed or supplied for the first time; ruined structures were rebuilt, others restored and new palaces, fountains, public baths and hospitals erected. Also a great bazaar – for the Ottomans had long recognized the importance of commerce.

In the Balkan countryside Ottoman domination replaced uncertainty and periodic anarchy with an orderly system that did not at first always unduly disturb existing social relationships. Local lords who submitted to the sultan were generally left in possession of their estates in fief provided they served the Ottomans as loyal vassals. They were encouraged to convert to Islam and embrace Ottoman culture, of course, but pressures to do so tended to be applied gradually over a period of two or three generations, by which time many had gravitated naturally to the ways of the new elite. Lower down the scale peasants could gain privileges such as certain tax exemptions by serving as military auxiliaries or local police; most monasteries that had not earned the Sultan’s displeasure continued in the possession of most of their estates; and the populations of some regions, notably the heretical Bogomils of Bosnia, positively welcomed the Turks.

In two other respects the Ottoman system can be regarded as superior to some others in the Europe of the time. It was unequivocal about the ultimate ownership of property belonging to the state, eliminating powerful lordships, bases of individual power which could be exercised capriciously; and it did not permit the military class to become too numerous. Christian servicemen surplus to requirements were reduced in status and lost their privileges. This was not the case in Poland and Hungary, where, as we have seen, a swollen nobility and the virtually unrestricted power of lords were to be conducive to great harm. Furthermore the Turks provided security for the great majority of the Balkan population to live in tranquility in accordance with a familiar culture. By uprooting and changing Byzantine institutions, it has been said to have decapitated Byzantine high culture. On the other hand, as we have seen, Byzantine civilization had made some impression on the Turks themselves; and its cultural legacies, to both Eastern and Western Europe, were particularly rich.

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Filed under Balkans, economics, migration, military, philosophy, religion, slavery, Turkey

by | 14 March 2023 · 6:28 am

Eastern Europe After Mohacz

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 250-252:

The political consequences of the battle of Mohacz were also considerable. Louis II had died childless; and the Habsburgs of Austria, long-sighted dynastic politicians and shrewd diplomatists, became the leading contenders for the thrones of both Hungary and Bohemia, and soon gained both. But in Hungary there was strong backing for a local candidate, John Zapolyai, and he, too, was crowned king. This political division weakened resistance to the Turks, who by the end of 1541 had occupied the southern and central parts of the country, including the capital Buda; and gained suzerainty over the east, which became a largely autonomous principality, Transylvania.

The death of Louis had ended one Eastern European dynasty. Two others failed to survive the sixteenth century. The last Jagiellonian King of Poland-Lithuania died in 1572; the last of Russia’s ancient Riurikid dynasty in 1591. In both instances political hiatus encouraged tumults, though, as we have seen, the long-term outcomes were quite dissimilar. While Russia returned to dynastic rule, Poland abandoned it. In this respect she came to resemble the smaller polities in the region, the Danubian Principalities, self-governing tributaries to the Turk, which also lacked dynastic rule: The instability of their domestic politics is suggested by the fact that, in the course of one century Wallachia had twenty-four, and Moldavia no fewer than forty, changes of ruling prince, or hospodar.

These religious and political changes were obvious to contemporaries. But there were other shifts, no less profound in their effects, which were much less noticeable at the time, or recognized only in retrospect.

Europe’s centre of economic gravity had been moving from the Mediterranean to the countries bordering on the North Atlantic; from the basin of the River Po to that of the Rhine (where it has remained); and from the emporia of Istanbul and Venice to that of Amsterdam. Furthermore, a surge in the population of Western Europe, and in particular of its cities, was stimulating a sharply increasing demand, and hence higher prices, for imported foodstuffs which Eastern Europe was able to supply. This was to have marked social as well as economic effects, especially on those regions with access to the Baltic, not least in encouraging the rise of serfdom.

At the same time the importation of silver from the Americas was promoting a sharp increase in the money supply and hence serious inflation. This was to throw the finely-tuned mechanisms of the Ottoman state out of kilter and prove a major factor in its subsequent decline. And there was one change perceived by very few, if at all, the indirect effects of which were felt by almost everyone. This was ‘the little ice age’, a slight but insidious drop in the average temperature beginning late in the sixteenth century. By restricting the latitude and height at which agriculture was viable this precipitated famines, population movements and the great disorders which were to overtake most of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, turning the frontier lands especially into a crucible of violence.

And there was a plethora of other factors which intervened at various points with varying intensity to influence the course things took. Linguistic differences, for example, sometimes fed into religious and political struggles; and social classes sometimes gained or lost constitutional rights according to the religion they embraced at a particular moment. Low population density in Poland-Lithuania contributed to the enserfment of the peasant; yet high population density in the Ottoman Empire contributed to the disruption of that state. Sometimes the effects seem paradoxical. The Turkish presence, so often assumed to be a wholly negative influence, slowed down and even reversed the process of enserfment in Hungary for a time. The Baltic grain boom had helped to promoted serfdom, yet the end of the boom around the turn of the century served not to remove serfdom, but to entrench it. And though Protestantism is often associated with the origins of modern science Copernicus was a priest whom Polish Protestants rejected, while the patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler was a Habsburg. The interactions of circumstances and catalysts that shaped Eastern Europe in the period from 1526 to 1648 far exceeded in complexity the most complicated transmutation process in any alchemists’ laboratory.

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Filed under Britain, Eastern Europe, economics, food, Germany, migration, military, nationalism, Netherlands, religion, science, slavery, Spain, Turkey

by | 10 March 2023 · 9:08 am

Rough Road to Greek Nationhood

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 206-208:

It was difficult for Bulgarians to think in terms of liberation other than through the church, which was dominated by Greeks, so that Bulgarian national feeling emerged almost as much in reaction to the Greeks as to the Turks.

The Greeks themselves present a different case, for they included important mercantile and administrative classes. These elements formed a cultural community of sorts, but they were distanced from the common people, who had also built up a tradition of self-defence, especially in the mountain areas and some of the islands. The Greek elite was also widely dispersed geographically. Their trading network ramified throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Black Sea littoral, while the Phanariotes staffed much of the Ottoman diplomatic service and bureaucratic machine besides ruling the Romanian principalities (often corruptly, but sometimes in the spirit of enlightened despotism). The Greek elite constituted fertile ground both for conspiracy and manipulation by foreign powers.

The Greek diaspora extended to Paris, and beyond; and French agents had been active in the Greek world since the later 1790s. Revolutionary notions were to grip members of the merchant class (though not the more substantial of them), some Orthodox clergy (though few bishops), and even an occasional potentate in the Ottoman service. But it was on Russian, not French soil, that the Greek revolution got off the ground. In 1814 expatriate Greeks formed a friendly society (Philiki Etairia) in Odessa. Like others founded earlier in Paris and Vienna its aims were cultural; unlike them, however, it aimed to liberate ‘the motherland’.

In 1821 it mounted an attempt to do so, launching an invasion of the Danubian Principalities. But Vladimirescu’s followers provided none of the support they had hoped for, and the Turks soon mopped them up. The conspirators succeeded, however, in sparking an insurgency in the Peleponnese and some of the islands. Though the Russians withdrew their ambassador from Istanbul, and Metternich opined (quite rightly as it happened) that Greece was merely a geographical expression, the Powers supported neither side. Then the Turks executed the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, even though he had roundly denounced the rebellion – and the idealists of Europe rallied to the cause of Greek independence. The volunteers (including Byron), the money, and, not least the publicity which they supplied contributed greatly to the success of the cause. Albeit indirectly, they also helped to ensure that the emergent state of Greece would adopt a Western-type constitution highly unsuitable for a society that was largely traditional and innocent of Western values. Events were to demonstrate that although the seeds of Western democratic ideas were to germinate in Eastern Europe, unlike the rampant bean-stalk of nationalism, the plants that grew out of them would be weak and spindly.

Greece’s first head of state, Capodistrias, understood the problem. He was an authoritarian in the mould of the enlightened despots. He set out to build sound administrative and educational systems, to improve communications and the economy. He also favoured land reform. Anticipating Stolypin, he regarded a free and prosperous peasantry as the foundation of a stable society. Traditional interest groups, whom he held in contempt, and idealists starry-eyed with Western ways, all hated him. In 1831 he was assassinated. When the ensuing anarchy finally subsided, independent Greece found herself (thanks to an agreement between Russia, France, and Britain) with a sizeable Western loan, a Bavarian King [Otto] and a small Bavarian army.

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Filed under Britain, Bulgaria, economics, France, Greece, language, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 11 December 2022 · 6:14 am

Rebuilding the Crimean Bridge

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 31-32:

Paradoxically, the two [Armenian] Hotel Fortuna employees were the most miserable people I came across in Taman. Everyone else in the small town was in high spirits; I met barely anyone during my three-day stay who did not rejoice in the bridgebuilding. Those who had found work on the huge building site, or who were hoping to make a living from tourists from every corner of Russia who would soon pass through their town on their way to Crimea, rejoiced. Those who had relatives on the peninsula rejoiced that they would no longer have to take the sluggish, chronically overloaded ferry to visit them in the summer. The director of the local history museum rejoiced because her display cases were now full to bursting with archaeological artefacts – Cimmerian horse harnesses, Roman drinking vessels, Genoan coins – found while the bridge’s groundworks were laid. Last but not least, the joy of Taman’s residents was shared by the 2,500 entrants into a nationwide poetry competition that the office responsible for the bridge’s construction had recently launched to encourage patriotic eulogies of their feat. The victor had not yet been chosen when I was there, but here is a sample of what I read:

Crimea and Russia
Forever inseparable
Wedded by a bridge
That looks like a temple

The bridge was indeed something of an unexpected windfall for Taman. The town, with a population of 10,000, had hitherto wallowed in such oblivion, even by Russian standards, that its old name of Turkish origin, Tmutarakan, had become a national byword for any godforsaken provincial backwater – a kind of Russian Hicksville. Soon though, thanks to the bridge, Taman would no longer be a dead end on the tip of a promontory but Russia’s last stop before Crimea.

There was as yet little sign of this earth-shaking change. The bridge was a building site, the holiday season had not yet begun, and Taman seemed to be only just stirring from hibernation. The local museum was open but deserted, the model Cossack village on the edge of town still closed. A Soviet tank on blocks in the market square stood as a memorial to the Great Patriotic War, and its aerial counterpart, a fighter plane, greeted you on the road into town. Both of them were mounted on concrete pedestals with the constantly cited – and constantly wrong – dates carved into them: 1941–1945. As everywhere else in the former Soviet Union, the hushedup war years of 1939 and 1940 – when Stalin was still making common cause with Hitler to carve up Central Europe – were missing.

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Filed under economics, education, language, migration, military, nationalism, Russia, travel, Turkey, Ukraine, war

by | 7 December 2022 · 6:42 am

Fate of Bulgarian Turks

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 182-185:

Gürcan had spent the second half of his life in Turkey and the first half in Bulgaria, where he was born in 1969 as one of just under 800,000 Turks whose forefathers had escaped the expulsions of the early twentieth century. Later, in the socialist era, Bulgaria had been suspicious of its Muslim minorities but, for cynical reasons, expulsions were no longer the political weapon of choice. During the Cold War, the Turkish–Bulgarian border had hardened into the Iron Curtain, the stated objective of which was to keep the proletariat in the country. This meant that the Bulgarian Turks were trapped in the Eastern Bloc alongside the Bulgarians themselves.

Nevertheless, they remained a thorn in the side of the regime in Sofia. Centuries of Ottoman dominance in the Balkans had not been forgotten, and the mere presence of a Turkish minority stoked old fears. Nearly one in ten inhabitants of socialist Bulgaria was a Turk, and the ratio was rising slightly because the Muslims had more children than the rest of the population. This led the authorities to hatch a dastardly plan in the mid-1980s: they might not be able to get rid of the Turks, but they could make them disappear, make them invisible, by destroying their identity.

Gürcan was sixteen when soldiers appeared one day in his hometown of Kurkariya. They made their way through the factories, the collective farms, and the schools, taking the Turks aside in each one. The soldiers had a simple request: the Turks were to choose new names. Bulgarian ones.

Gürcan’s father, who had been called Enver Süleymanov all his life, was known as Encho Stanishev after the renaming campaign. Gürcan’s own new identity card was marked Gensho Stanishev.

He was still at school at the time. It was clear, he said, that his Bulgarian teachers were embarrassed by the campaign. ‘From one day to the next, they had to get used to calling us by different names. They were obviously ashamed, but not one of them dared not to go along with it.’

What made matters worse was that it was customary in Bulgaria to use patronyms in addition to first names and surnames. Gürcan’s full name, when his father was still called Enver, was Gürcan Enverov Süleymanov. Now he was called Gensho Enchev Stanishev. The situation was more complicated for Gürcan’s father, whose own father was long dead when renaming began. He and hundreds of thousands of other Turks were nonetheless compelled to adopt Bulgarian patronyms, which meant that they had to give their dead fathers posthumous new first names.

‘They forced us to change dead people’s names. Can you believe it? People long buried in the cemetery! What kind of a person thinks up such things?’

Gürcan’s expression was so indignant that it was as if the matter had occurred mere days back, not three and a half decades ago.

The official designation of this campaign harked back to the name chosen by the nineteenth-century Bulgarian resistance movement against Turkish domination: the regime spoke of a ‘process of renaissance’. In macabre fashion, this was quite apt for a scheme to rename the dead. Above all, however, it brought home to Turkish Bulgarians what the state really thought of them. Concurrently with the renaming campaign, they were banned from using their language. There was also a more severe crackdown on their religion, which had never been welcome in socialist Bulgaria.

Individual Turks who were not willing to be reborn as Bulgarians resisted the directives in the late 1980s. Riots broke out and people died. Ultimately, when communism’s imminent collapse seemed nigh, the regime decided to sort out the problem in the traditional fashion after all. For a three-month period in the summer of 1989, the Iron Curtain was raised exclusively for Muslims, and party secretary Todor Zhivkov proclaimed that the path abroad was open to anyone who wished to take it. The Turks understood that this was not an invitation but an ultimatum. That summer, around 350,000 of them packed up whatever they could lash to the roofs of their Soviet cars, and the roads south were black with people. It was Europe’s largest ethnic cleansing campaign since the end of the Second World War.

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by | 6 December 2022 · 7:10 am

Fate of the Circassians

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 118-120:

Paintings of the Caucasus by the Russian Romantics feature a recurring figure on horseback: a warrior in a black felt coat, with cartridge belts crossed over his chest, a rifle slung at an angle across his back, a dagger and sabre in his belt, his mouth a cruel slit, and his eyes under a felt hat proud, hard, glowing like coals.

Of the many mountain tribes against which tsarist Russia waged its bloody nineteenth-century war of conquest, it was the Circassians who epitomised the Caucasus in the Russian imagination. Over half a million of them lived in the mountain villages to the north and west of the mountain range’s spine at the time, making them the most populous group in the regional ethnic mosaic. When Russia, still drunk on victory from Catherine the Great’s conquest of the Black Sea coast, pressed southwards into the Caucasus from the late eighteenth century onwards, the Circassians put up the most stubborn resistance to its advance. In alliance with the other mountain peoples – including their close relatives, the Abkhazians – they ensnared the tsar’s troops in a gruelling guerrilla war that went on for several generations.

Nowadays, there are three autonomous republics in the Caucasus named after the Circassians and their ethnic subgroups: Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Adygea. In the most recent censuses, around 700,000 people there described themselves as Circassians. There are, however, a far higher number of Circassians who no longer live in the Caucasus.

When Russia temporarily broke the mountain peoples’ stubborn defiance in the mid-nineteenth century, it was clear to the army high command that war could flare up again at a moment’s notice as long as the Circassians were able to entrench themselves in their inaccessible mountain villages. A plan took shape, bluntly referred to by officers as ochishchenie (‘cleansing’).

The Circassians were given an ultimatum: they could either be resettled in the more easily controlled foothills on the northern flanks of the Caucasus or leave the Russian Empire, which now extended beyond the mountain range. Emissaries of the tsar travelled to Istanbul and put the Ottomans, who had recently been defeated in yet another Russo–Turkish war, under pressure to open their empire to Circassian ‘emigrants’.

There is debate about how many people were forced to leave the Caucasus around the fateful year of 1864. The Russian high command talked about a good 400,000; some people say it was two or three times that number. There is also debate about how many people did not survive the deportation. At least 50,000 people, or maybe even more than twice as many, perished as the Circassian villages emptied and the homes of displaced families were razed. Some died of hunger; others didn’t survive the forced marches into the Ottoman Empire; others again were driven onto overloaded refugee ships, some of which never reached the Turkish coast. Virtually no other people has drowned in the Black Sea in such large numbers as the Circassians. There are individuals living along the coast who will not touch seafood to this day on principle; they refuse to eat fish whose ancestors have gnawed at the bones of their own forefathers.

The Circassians who did make it to the Ottoman Empire were mainly resettled within the borders of modern Turkey, and various sources have estimated that between 1.5 and 2.5 million of their descendants currently live in the country. Others moved farther afield. There are about 100,000 Circassians in Syria and approximately half that number in Jordan, where they still form the king’s bodyguard in their traditional battle garb. A few thousand live in Israel, Europe, and the United States, and a few hundred in Egypt.

‘My grandfather still spoke Circassian to me,’ Bassel said, changing up a gear as he drove me southwards out of Sukhum, ‘back home in Damascus.’

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by | 3 December 2022 · 6:20 am

Fate of Meskhetian Turks

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 34-36:

When he revealed to me on our first taxi journey that he was a Turok – that is to say, a Turk – I studied his face somewhat quizzically from the side. The skullcap; the pointy, hawklike face; the salt-and-pepper moustache; the gold teeth.

‘A Turk?’ I asked. ‘You mean, a Tatar?’

‘A Turk.’

‘Really? Türkçe konuşuyor musunuz?’

His answer in Turkish was fluent, unlike my stammered question about his language skills. Having taken a Turkish course in Berlin a few years earlier, I’d been capable of ordering a kebab quite fluently ever since. Pasha, on the other hand, had grown up in the language.

It took me a few taxi journeys to understand that he and his parents were Meskhetian Turks. That is, Georgian Turks – or Turkish Georgians, depending on your point of view. The Meskhetian Turks had lived on the southern margins of Georgia, close to Turkey, since the sixteenth century. Where they originally hailed from remained an unresolved matter that only attracted their neighbours’ interest when the Turks and Georgians along the border discovered nationalism. In Turkey, they were henceforth regarded as Turks who had emigrated and assimilated to Georgia, whereas to the Georgians they were Georgians who had adopted Islam and the Turkish language under Ottoman influence. And so, both the Georgians and the Turks claimed the Meskhetians as their own while also viewing them as a bastardised, second-class people of mixed heritage. In this sense, Pasha’s ancestors shared a fate with countless ethnic minorities in the regions bordering the Black Sea. They fell through the cracks in the mosaic of emerging nation-states, and it was not they themselves but rulers in distant capitals, irked by this melee of peoples on the margins of their supposedly pure nations, who decided to which state they should belong.

One aggravating factor for the Meskhetian Turks was that Ioseb Jughashvili – aka Joseph Stalin – though no fan of nation-states, was a partisan of good old Russian-style imperialism. Scenting an opportunity to annex border areas of Turkey during the Second World War, the Soviet dictator pre-emptively expelled the Meskhetian Turks from their homeland. In light of his plans, they suddenly struck him more like Turks who might just, who knows, feel more loyal to the enemy than to the Soviet motherland. Stalin was an advocate of simple solutions. Justifiably or not, the Meskhetian Turks were a headache. No more Meskhetians, no more headaches. They had to go.

Pasha’s parents were newlywed at the time. His father was twenty and his mother eighteen when, out of the blue, one winter’s day in 1944, soldiers came pounding on their door in the southern Georgian village of Zarzma. Along with over 100,000 other Meskhetian Turks, they were herded into cattle wagons that rolled eastwards from Georgia and only came to a halt several thousand miles later. Roughly a third of them died during their deportation or shortly afterwards from hunger, thirst, hypothermia, disease, or a broken heart. Ultimately, Stalin’s planned expansion into Turkey came to nothing, but the ‘leader of peoples’ had managed to purge his mind entirely of one.

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Filed under Caucasus, migration, nationalism, religion, Turkey, USSR

by | 2 December 2022 · 5:46 am

Second Annexation of Crimea

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 12-14:

I have a very clear memory of the moment the Black Sea suddenly moved from the margins to the forefront of European perception.

I was on a pleasure cruise around Sevastopol’s harbour in March 2014. Less than a fortnight earlier, Russian soldiers had appeared in Crimea and surrounded Ukrainian barracks. Although their uniforms bore no insignia or rank, no one had any doubts about where they came from. Parliament had been dissolved and replaced with puppets under the Kremlin’s orders, a hastily arranged referendum on Crimea’s integration into the Russian Federation had been announced for the next day, and Ukrainian and Russian warships were facing off in the harbour – and yet tour boats continued to ply their trade between the destroyers as if everything were completely normal.

I had travelled to Sevastopol as a journalist to report on the act of political piracy that was taking place. I had no idea at the time that in 1773, not far from that same harbour, on the south-western coast of Crimea, Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen had laid the groundwork for Catherine the Great’s annexation of the peninsula. All I knew was that I was witnessing Russia’s second annexation of Crimea.

The tour boat passed close to the warships’ towering grey hulls. The Ukrainian and Russian Black Sea fleets still shared the port in that tense time before the Crimean referendum, and I had hoped that out on the water I might gain a better understanding of their muddled positions. The boat was full of Russians from Sevastopol, high on alcohol and patriotism, who made no secret of the fact that they wished a plague on the Ukrainians.

‘Fascists!’ they roared at the ships flying blue-and-yellow flags. For weeks now, Russian propaganda had constantly dubbed all Ukrainians fascists. The same old story, I thought. A country on the warpath in search of some barbarians to fight. One man stood slightly apart from the others by the railing, staring silently out to sea. He was the only person apart from me who didn’t join in with the shouting. As we disembarked at the end of our tour, I approached him to enquire why he was there.

‘To say goodbye to the sea,’ he said tersely.

He was a Tatar. He had been born in Uzbekistan after his parents were deported under Stalin, and only when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Crimea and the rest of Ukraine gained its independence, had he been at liberty to return to the land of his ancestors.

‘Now the Russians are taking over again,’ he said gloomily. ‘I’m not going to wait for them to expel us a second time. My wife has family in Ankara. The day after tomorrow, we’re going to put the kids in the car and leave.’ His lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘It won’t be the first time we’ve had to start from scratch.’

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Filed under Central Asia, migration, military, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine

by | 1 December 2022 · 5:39 am

Black Sea Neighbors

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 14-15:

The Black Sea is bounded by six states. Clockwise, in the order I visited them, they are Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine.

Six and a half, if you count Abkhazia, a renegade part of Georgia that is kept on life support by Russia to prevent Georgia from joining any Western alliances.

Seven, if you count Moldova, formerly known as Bessarabia, which lost its coastline in the Second World War when Stalin moved the border inland.

Seven and a half, if you count Transnistria, a renegade part of Moldova, which is kept on life support by Russia to prevent Moldova from joining any Western alliances.

Eight, if you count Poland – the old Poland at its point of maximum expansion when szlachta noblemen persuaded themselves that their country’s ruling class was descended from the Sarmatians, an ancient barbarian tribe.

Eight and a half, if you count the Donetsk People’s Republic, a renegade part of Ukraine, which… you can fill in the rest.

Eight and a half, if Crimea belongs to Ukraine. Eight and a half, if Crimea belongs to Russia. Nine, if you’d prefer to let Crimea stand alone.

Nine and a half, if you count the ruined empire of ancient Greece, whose vestiges I encountered on every shore in the form of weathered stones; in place names mangled by foreign tongues; in family stories of scattered Black Sea Greeks; on the menus of countless Aphrodite Restaurants, Poseidon Cafés, Olympus Hotels and Amazon Bars, written in Cyrillic, Latin, and Georgian letters; and in the deep-seated Black Sea tradition of always expecting the worst from your neighbours.

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Filed under Bulgaria, Caucasus, Greece, nationalism, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine