Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Hagia Sophia for evening prayers at sunset for the final time before the first round of the toughest election of his 20-year rule, reminding voters of his It reminded me of what I had achieved.
For almost 1,000 years, the domed cathedral was the center of Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the mosque became one of the finest mosques in the Islamic world. In the 1930s, the new Republic of Turkey declared it a museum, and for almost a century, Christian and Islamic history overlapped, making it Turkey’s most visited cultural site.
President Erdoğan was not very ecumenical. In 2020 President Erdoğan converted it back into a mosque. When Turks return to the ballot box this Sunday for a presidential runoff, they will be voting in part for the political ideology behind their cultural transformation.
Join the crowd at Hagia Sophia Great Mosque now and place your shoes on the new long rack in the inner hallway. Then you can catch a glimpse of the mosaic of Christ and the Virgin, which today is discreetly covered by a white curtain. The famous marble floors are covered with thick turquoise carpet. The sound becomes even more muffled. The light was brighter thanks to the golden chandelier. Right next to the entrance, the president’s proclamation is displayed in a simple frame. It monumentally wipes away the country’s secular century and affirms a new Turkey worthy of the Ottoman Empire’s heyday.
“Hagia Sophia is the culmination of that neo-Ottoman dream,” said Edhem Erdem, a history professor at Istanbul’s Bogazici University. “It basically transposed political and ideological struggles, debates and polemical views into the realm of a very primitive understanding of history and the past.”
If 21st century politics is characterized by the supremacy of culture and identity over economy and class, it may be said that it was born here in Turkey, the home of one of the longest-running culture wars of all time. do not have. And for the past two decades, with grand monuments and crude melodrama, restored ruins and retro new mosques, Mr. Erdogan has been redirecting Turkey’s national culture and promoting a nostalgic revival of its Ottoman past. It was – sometimes in a grandiose style, sometimes in an epic style – pure kitsch.
He won a close first round of voting earlier this month and is favored to defeat unified opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu in Sunday’s run-off. His resilience when poll after poll predicted his defeat certainly illustrates his party’s institutional control over Turkey’s media and courts. (Democracy watchdog Freedom House downgraded Turkey from “partly free” to “not free” in 2018.) But authoritarianism means more than ballots and bullets. Television and music, monuments and monuments have all become key instruments of a political project, a campaign of cultural re-enfranchisement and national regeneration, which will be launched in May this year in the blue and green under the dome of Hagia Sophia. It reached its climax on the carpet.
Outside Turkey, these cultural shifts are often described as “Islamist,” and Mr. Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are pushing back against previously banned laws, such as requiring women to wear headscarves in public institutions. In fact, religious ceremonies are permitted. The Museum of Islamic Civilization, which opens in 2022 in Istanbul’s largest new mosque, is complete with a “digital dome” and light projections that mimic the immersive Van Gogh experience.
But this election suggests that nationalism, not religion, may be the true driving force behind Erdogan’s cultural revolution. His celebration of the Ottoman past, and the resentment of those who allegedly hated it, whether in the West or at home, were closely linked to nationalist initiatives that had nothing to do with Islam. There is. The country is running an aggressive campaign to return Greco-Roman artifacts from Western museums. Foreign archaeological teams had their permits revoked. Turkey is currently in the dark vanguard of a trend we see across the United States in particular: a cultural politics of perpetual discontent that is resented even when it wins.
For the country’s writers, artists, academics and singers, who face censorship or worse, the possibility of regime change was less a matter of political preference and more a matter of practical survival. Since 2013, when the Occupy-style protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park directly targeted the government, Erdogan has taken a tougher stance on authoritarian rule. Many cultural figures remain in prison, including architect Musela Yapici, filmmakers Main Özerden and Cigdem Mater and arts philanthropist Osman Kavala. Writers like Can Dundar and Asli Erdogan (no relation), who were jailed during the purges that followed the 2016 military coup attempt against Erdogan, live in exile in Germany.
More than a dozen music concerts were canceled last year, including a recital by Armenian violinist Ara Malikian and a live performance by Kurdish pop-folk singer Ainur Dogan. Tensions reached a terrifying climax this month just before the first round of voting, when a Kurdish singer was stabbed to death at a ferry terminal after refusing to sing a Turkish nationalist song.
A few days after the first round of voting, I met Banu Chenetoglu, one of the country’s most acclaimed artists. His work commemorating Kurdish journalists at the 2017 contemporary art exhibition “Documenta” received high acclaim abroad, but caused discomfort at home. “What’s scary now compared to the ’90s is that the ’90s were also a very difficult time, especially for the Kurdish community, but back then you could guess where the evil came from.” she told me. “And now it’s possible for anyone to do it. It’s much more random.”
This strategy worked. Independent media is shrinking and self-censorship is rampant. “All institutions involved in arts and culture have been extremely silent for five years,” Chennetoglu said. “For me as an artist, this is unacceptable. My question is: when do you redline? When do you say no? and why?”
Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. “Everybody in this country, even my uncle, is a nationalist,” Erdem said. And the Kemalists, the secular elite that dominated politics there for decades until Erdogan’s victory in 2003, have also used nationalist themes to spin culture to political ends. Early Turkish films glorified the achievements of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Archaeological excavations of Hittite antiquities were meant to provide the new republic with a past more deeply rooted than either Greece or Italy.
In the 2000s, Mr. Erdogan’s blend of Islamism and reformism led Turkey to knock on the door of the European Union. New Istanbul was being touted in the foreign press. However, the new Turkish nationalism has a different cultural character. Proud Muslims, often hostile and sometimes a little paranoid.
One of the important cultural institutions of the Erdoğan era is the Panorama 1453 History Museum, located in the working-class district west of Hagia Sophia. There, schoolchildren watch the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople on painted cyclomas. At one point, just drawing in rounds might have been immersive enough. Now it’s even more exciting with flashy video projections, a fiercely nationalistic pageant in the style of the video game “Civilization.” Children can watch Sultan Mehmed II charge towards Hagia Sophia and his horse rise before the heavenly fireball.
There is a similar back-projection in Turkish TV dramas, which are hugely popular not just in Turkey but around the world, with hundreds of millions of viewers across the Muslim world, including in Germany and Mexico. In shows like “Resurrection: Ertugrul,” a global hit about a 13th-century Turkish patriarch, and “Kurulus: Osman,” a “Game of Thrones”-like tale of the Ottoman Empire that airs every Wednesday, the past and the present begin to merge.
“They’re projecting Tayyip Erdogan’s discourse onto ancient times,” says Ayse Cavdar, a cultural anthropologist who studies these shows. “If Erdogan is facing a struggle now, it’s recast in an Ottoman context, an imaginary context. In this way, that emotion is disseminated in society, instead of knowledge about today’s struggles.”
In these semi-historical melodramas, the heroes are determined, brave and brilliant, but the politics they lead are fragile, shaky, and threatened by outsiders. Ms. Cavdahl noted that television programs frequently feature leaders of emerging and endangered nations. “As if this man hadn’t ruled the country for 20 years!” she said.
Culture was also on the agenda in the run-off, as Mr Erdogan appeared at the inauguration of Istanbul Modern’s new hub. The president praised the new museum on the Bosphorus side, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, but couldn’t help but bash the last century’s structure, saying it was a misguided abandonment of Ottoman heritage. .
The president promised that a genuine “Turkish century” was now about to begin.
Assuming he wins on Sunday, his neo-Ottomanism will pass its strongest test in two decades. Of course, those who regret this the most are the imprisoned cultural figures, but the results will also be bitter for scholars and writers who left the country in the wake of Mr. Erdoğan’s purges. “AKP’s social engineering can be compared to the monoculture of industrial agriculture,” says Asli Cavusoglu, a young artist who recently had a solo exhibition at New York’s New Museum. “The vegetables they invest in are one type. Other plants, intellectuals and artists, cannot grow, so they leave.”
Türkiye’s ethnic minorities may face the greatest danger. At the memorial to Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist assassinated in 2007, I looked through his independent newspaper and watched footage from his TV talk show. Both were warnings of restrictions on freedom of expression in modern-day Turkey. “Civil society activists are becoming more cautious,” said Nayat Karakose, an ethnic Armenian who oversees the museum. “They are conducting events more carefully.”
For Erdem, who has spent his career studying Ottoman history, the Hagia Sophia renovation and the “Tudor” TV dramas are all part of the same story, and he’s less confident than he seems. “Nationalism is not just glorification,” he says. “It’s also victimization. You can’t have a proper nationalism if you’ve never experienced suffering, because experiencing suffering also absolves you of potential wrongdoings.”
“So what naive Turkish nationalists, especially neo-Ottoman nationalists, want is to put together some idea of a glorious empire that would have been benign,” he added. “It wasn’t. An empire is an empire.”
But regardless of whether Mr. Erdogan wins Sunday’s election, there will be headwinds that no amount of cultural nationalism can stand against. In particular, inflation and the currency crisis are raising red flags among bankers and financial analysts. “There is no place for heritage in that future,” Erdem said. “The Ottoman Empire is not going to save you.”
