TURKS RECLAIM THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
by DAN BILEFSKY
The International Herald Tribune
November 1, 2012 Thursday
France
New interest in history is helping rehabilitate a decadent part of
the past
Led by film and television, Turks today are expressing a fascination
with the country’s Ottoman history.
FULL TEXT Since the lavish, feel-good Turkish epic “Conquest 1453”
had its premiere this year, the tale of the taking of Constantinople
by the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmet II has become the highest-grossing
film in Turkey’s history, released in 12 countries across the Middle
East and in Germany and the United States. But its biggest impact
may be the cultural triumphalism it has magnified at home.
“Conquest 1453,” or “Fetih 1453” in Turkish, has spawned a television
show with the same title and has encouraged clubs of proud Turks
to re-enact battles from the empire’s glory days and even dress up
as sultans and Ottoman nobles. The producers of “Once Upon a Time
Ottoman Empire Mutiny,” a television series about the 18th-century
insurrection against Sultan Ahmet Khan III, said they planned to
build a theme park where visitors would be able to wander through
a reproduction of Ottoman-era Istanbul and watch sword fights by
stuntmen. At least four new films portray the battle of Gallipoli,
the bloody World War I face-off between the Ottomans and Allied forces
over the straits of Dardanelles and one of the greatest victories of
modern Turkey. The coming “In Gallipoli” has sought out Mel Gibson
to star as a British commander.
The Ottoman period, particularly during the 16th and 17th centuries,
was marked by geopolitical dominance and cultural prowess, during
which the sultans claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world,
before the empire’s slow decline culminated in World War I. For years
the period was underplayed in the history taught to schoolchildren,
as the new Turkish Republic created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923
sought to break with a decadent past.
Now, as Turkey is emerging as a leader in the Middle East, buoyed
by strong economic growth, a new fascination with history is being
reflected in everything from foreign policy to facial hair. In the
arts, framed examples of Ottoman-era water print designs, known as
Ebru and associated with Islamic motifs, have gained in popularity
among the country’s growing Islamic bourgeoisie, adorning walls of
homes and offices, jewelry and even business cards.
The three-year-old Panorama Museum, which showcases an imposing
360-degree, 45-foot-tall, or nearly 14-meter, painting of the siege of
Constantinople, complete with deafening cannon fire blasts and museum
security guards dressed as Janissary soldiers, is drawing huge crowds.
And in the past few years there has been a proliferation of
Ottoman-themed soap operas, none more popular than “The Magnificent
Century,” a sort of “Sex in the City” set during the 46-year reign of
Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Turkish show pulpishly chronicles
the imperial household and harem, including the rise of Suleiman’s
slave girl-turned-queen, Hurrem. Last year it was broadcast in 32
countries, including Morocco and Kosovo.
The empire’s rehabilitation has inspired mixed feelings among cultural
critics. “The Ottoman revival is good for the national ego and has
captured the psyche of the country at this moment, when Turkey wants
to be a great power,” said Melis Behlil, a film studies professor at
Kadir Has University here. But, she warned: “It terrifies me because
too much national ego is not a good thing. Films like ‘Conquest 1453’
are engaging in cultural revisionism and glorifying the past without
looking at history in a critical way.”
Faruk Aksoy, the 48-year-old director of “Conquest 1453,” said he
had dreamed of making a film about the conquering of Istanbul ever
since he arrived there at the age of 10 from Urfa, in Turkey’s rugged
southeast, and had been mesmerized by Istanbul’s imperial grandeur.
But he had to wait 10 years to make a big-budget film because the
financing and technology were not available.
The film’s budget of $18.2 million was a record in Turkey, but it has
more than recouped that, grossing $40 million in Turkey and Europe,
Mr. Aksoy said. So stirred was a crowd at a recent screening that it
roared “God is great!” as the sword-wielding Ottomans scaled Istanbul’s
forbidden walls. Mr. Aksoy recalled that one cinema manager debated
calling the police, fearing a real fight.
“We Turks are hot-blooded people,” he said. “The Turks are proud
about the conquest because it not only changed our history but it
also changed the world.”
But others warn of a dangerous cultural jingoism at work. Burak Bekdil,
a columnist for Hurriyet Daily News, mused in a recent column that
the time was ripe for a film called “Conquest 1974,” to celebrate the
Turkish invasion of Cyprus, or “Extinction 1915,” to commemorate the
genocide of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.
Death threats followed.
Critics have also faulted the film for inaccuracies and hyperbole,
though Mr. Aksoy stressed that he had employed Ottoman scholars.
Members of the court of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI –
portrayed as hedonistic boozers surrounded by nubile dancing girls
– talk in Turkish rather than Greek or Latin. Even Mehmet II, the
conquering Sultan famed for his prodigious nose, has been retooled
as a heroic pretty boy.
Alper Turgut, a leading film critic, deplored this one-dimensional
universe even as he lauded the film’s epic ambitions. “If they had
exaggerated just a bit more, it would be an absurdist comedy,” he
said in an interview.
Mr. Aksoy expressed annoyance that a film meant to entertain was
being politicized. “Would you ask Ridley Scott if he was politically
influenced?” he said.
Cultural critics noted that the film’s religious underpinning – there’s
even a cameo by the Prophet Muhammad predicting that Constantinople
will be conquered by believers – had made it popular with the growing
Islamic bourgeoisie in a country that has increasingly turned its
back on the crisis-ridden Europe and, instead, looks increasingly
eastward. (The movie has also been embraced by some members of the
governing Islamic party as an alternative to Hollywood’s “crusader
mentality.”)
Religious conservatives had been marginalized during the secular
cultural revolution undertaken by Ataturk. “For the first time we
are seeing this new Islamic bourgeoisie, its tastes and its mores,
reflected on the small and big screens,” Mr. Turgut said.
Ms. Behlil noted that the advent of big-budget television shows
and films depicting the Ottoman era owed something to the country’s
popularity in the Arab world, which was bringing in new revenue for
production companies. Last year Turkey was Europe’s largest exporter
of soap operas, pocketing $70 million in revenue.
But it is at home that the series and films are having a profound
impact, educating a new generation of Turks.
Burak Temir, 24, a German-Turkish actor who played a prince on
“Once Upon a Time Ottoman Empire Mutiny,” said he had initially been
intimidated about portraying an era he knew so little about.
The show gave him a four-month crash course in Ottoman manners that
included learning how to ride horses, sword fight, use a bow and arrow,
and puff out his chest. Even when not filming the show, he sports a
Sultan-like beard and skinny Ottoman-style pants. “It makes me proud
to be Turkish,” he said.
From: A. Papazian