Saturday, March 15, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
The concept of “neo-Ottomanism” has been frequently used to describe the framework in which the AKP government of Turkey formulates its foreign and domestic policy. In fact, in recent years, references to Ottoman history has been common in Turkey both in political rhetoric and in popular culture. Unsurprisingly, the rise and territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire is more often remembered than its decline and the ultimate fall. On the flip side, Ottoman nostalgia influences the way in which Turkish society remembers (or forgets) Byzantine history. In the last couple of years, two historically important churches from Byzantine era, which were converted into mosques by Ottomans and transformed into museums in the Republican period, Hagia Sophia in İznik (Nicaea) and Hagia Sophia in Trabzon, were reconverted into mosques again. In addition, Islamist circles lead campaigns for the conversion of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, currently a museum, into a mosque. These cases show that the resurrection of themes from Ottoman history is not only symbolic, but Ottoman nostalgia also has practical consequences, to the extent that symbolic Byzantine monuments are literally “reconquered” through conversion. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the resurrection of Ottoman symbols influences perceptions about Byzantine monuments in modern Turkey, looking specifically at the status of converted / reconverted churches. The constant conversions and reconversions of Byzantine churches shed light into how Turkey deals with Byzantine history, and more broadly, how Turkey manages to come to terms with its multi-religious and multi-cultural past.
