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ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
When will some Turks start to love İstanbul?
16 July 2010, Friday
by ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
Today’s Turkey, Anatolia, has hosted so many civilizations. What kind of relations, as Turks, do we have with these civilizations?
This question first came to mind when I visited Ephesus many years ago. It seemed to me that this ancient city was in no way a part of Turkey. It is geographically in Turkey, but culturally, historically and most importantly emotionally, is not a part of our story. We are tourists when we step into Ephesus.
I remembered these thoughts when I heard one of my close friend’s remarks about a quite thought-provoking event. “During the Greece-Turkey football match some Turkish fans unfurled a banner that said ‘Since 1453 İstanbul.’ The match was being played in İstanbul, and Turkish fans wanted to irritate the Greek fans who were in the stadium with this historical ‘reminder.’ Actually by this reminder they were saying quite the opposite of what they intended to say. Actually, this banner’s motto is another way of saying, ‘I do not feel that this city belongs to me. It is yours but I seized it, I captured it’.” I agree with my friend.
Some time ago I heard there are vast remains of the Byzantine Empire under İstanbul that have not been unearthed. The friend who gave me this information also added this comment: “The city would have seemed too Greek with all these monuments.”
I believe all these complex feelings and inferiority complexes started after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic and as a result of the policy of the Turkification of Anatolia. When we got rid of the old inhabitants of Anatolia, we lost the feeling of being a part of Anatolian civilizations. Once we started to send away non-Muslims, a vicious circle also started. The remaining non-Muslims remind us of the past, and we engage in a hopeless struggle to get rid of every single trace of them. Look at the history of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Turkey. Look at what Fatih did for this institution and what happened to them after the foundation of the Turkish Republic.
Fatih (Mehmed II) conquered İstanbul in 1453. He was fully aware of the importance of his own actions. He wanted İstanbul to be a world city and applied a determined policy of protecting the Christian heritage of Constantinople. He equipped the Orthodox Patriarchate with many powers that it did not even have during the Byzantine Empire. During the time of the republic, though, Turkey did everything in its power to strangle this historic institution.
Turkish identity is based on denial and detachment from the past. We are a nation that was supposedly born 90 years ago. We deny our Ottoman past. We deny the heterogeneous structure of our society; we proclaim that there are only Turks in Turkey. We deny our history with non-Muslims. There is, of course, a fundamental antagonism with this “new nation” and İstanbul, which cannot exist without history, without its non-Muslims, without the heritage of Ottoman and Byzantine empires. I cannot imagine that the banner, “Since 1453,” would be on display within the Ottoman context. Fatih undoubtedly saw himself as the sultan of the Byzantine-Ottoman Empire. He had great respect for the soul of the city.
Modern Turks have had an endless struggle with this “soul” of Turkey that is mostly represented by İstanbul. This soul has the potential of stirring so many feelings and memories that we do everything to escape from. Our love for İstanbul is an unsophisticated one. Our love is like an uneducated man’s love for an extremely sophisticated woman. While the woman has so many features, the man focuses only on her physical beauty. Like this unsophisticated man, our love is also possessive. We do not love this woman for what she really is. These stupid fans in the stadium who carry the banner 1453 actually say: “I am not sophisticated enough to embrace the beauty of this city. I can only posses her body; I am not capable of understanding her soul.”
If Turks have peace with this soul, they will feel much more complete, much more grounded and much richer and will have much more peace. If Turks could weep for what they have lost, the pain would be followed with real self-confidence, inner peace and self-love. Then, we could start to love this extremely sophisticated woman, İstanbul-Constantinople, whose soul is as beautiful as its physical appearance.
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