Chapter 19 "Istanbul" Turkification of Constantinople

Like most Turks in Istanbul, I had little interest in Byzantium as a child.The word reminds me of spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests crossing urban aqueducts, Hagia Sophia, and the red brick walls of old churches.For me, these things are relics of distant times, which need not be understood.Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away.After all, these things have been superseded by the first generation of "new civilization" to which we people belong.But even if the Ottomans sound as odd as Kociu describes them, at least we recognize their names.Soon after being conquered, they disappeared without a trace, or so I was told.No one ever told me that their descendants now run shoe shops, pastry shops and haberdasheries in Beyoglu.they are family business

Ye, when we went to the draperies and my mother wanted to see the brocade for the curtains or the velvet for the cushion covers, all I could hear in the background was father, mother, and daughter chatting to each other in bursts of Greek.When I got home afterwards, I liked to imitate their odd language and the excited gestures of the girl at the counter talking to her parents. From the way my family responded to my imitation, I knew that the Greeks, like the urban poor and suburbanites, were not very "respectable."I think it must have something to do with Memet the Conqueror taking the city from them.Celebrating the quincentenary of the conquest of Istanbul—sometimes called the "Great Miracle"—was in 1953, a year after I was born, but I don't think there's anything particularly interesting about this miracle, except for the series of commemorative stamps issued outside.One stamp shows a ship at night, another shows Bellini's painting of Memet the Conqueror, and a third shows the towers of Rumeli's fortress, so it's as if A procession showing all the sacred images associated with conquest.

Often, you can tell whether you are on the East or the West simply by how you refer to certain historical events.For Westerners, May 29, 1453, was the fall of Constantinople; for Easterners, it was the conquest of Istanbul.Years later, when my wife was at Columbia University and used the word "conquer" in her exam, her American professor accused her of having a "nationalist complex."In fact, she uses the term simply because she learned it in Turkish secondary school.Since her mother was of Russian descent, she was arguably more sympathetic to Orthodox Christians.Or maybe she doesn't see it as "falling" or "conquering" and feels more like a hapless hostage caught between two worlds, with no choice but to be Muslim or Christian.Westernization and Turkish nationalism prompted Istanbul to celebrate the "Conquest". At the beginning of the 20th century, only half of the city's population was Muslim, and most of the non-Muslim residents were Greek descendants of Byzantium.When I was a kid, the more outspoken nationalists in town took the view that the people who used the word "Constantinople" were unwanted foreigners with dreams of national unity that one day, The Greeks who ruled the city in the first place are back to drive out the Turks who have occupied it for 500 years - or at least turn us into second class citizens.Thus, nationalists insist on using the word "conquer".In contrast, the Ottomans preferred to call their city "Constantinople".

Even in my day, Turks committed to the Westernization of the Republic were wary of placing too much emphasis on the word "conquest."Neither President Bayar nor Prime Minister Mandalus attended the quincentenary celebrations in 1953.Although the celebration had been planned for years, there was a last-minute decision that such an approach might offend the Greeks and Turkey's western allies.The Cold War period had just begun, and Turkey, a member of NATO, did not want to remind the world of conquest.However, three years later, the Turkish government deliberately provoked the so-called "conquest fever", allowing mobs to run rampant in the city, robbing Greeks and other minorities of their property.Many churches were vandalized and priests killed during the riots, repeating the brutality described by Western historians in their accounts of the "fall" of Constantinople.In fact, both the Turkish and Greek governments are guilty of the geopolitical crime of holding their respective minorities hostage, and as a result more Greeks have left Istanbul in the past 50 years than in the 50 years since 1453.

In 1955, when Britain left Cyprus and Greece was preparing to take over the entire island, a Turkish secret service agent dropped a bomb on the house where the founding father of Turkey was born in the Greek city of Thessaloniki.After the major Turkish newspapers spread the news in special editions, mobs hostile to non-Muslim residents of the city gathered in Taksim Square and burned, vandalized and looted all the shops that my mother and I had visited in Beyoglu. Do the same thing in other towns at night. Groups of rioters were extremely violent and caused great panic in the most densely populated areas of Greece, such as Outakoy, Baruchel, Samatia, and Fenell.Not only did they burn and loot Greek grocery and dairy stores, they broke in and ravaged Greek and Armenian women.Therefore, it is not unreasonable to say that the rioters were as brutal as the soldiers who ransacked the city after Memet the Conqueror took the city.It was later discovered that the organizers of the riot—which lasted two days in terror and made the city more of a hell than an Orientalist nightmare—had the backing of the government, who looted the city with its connivance.

Therefore, every non-Muslim who dared to walk in the streets that night risked being executed by the mob.The next morning, Beyoglu's shops were in ruins, with windows smashed, doors kicked in and merchandise looted or simply destroyed.Clothes, carpets, cloths, overturned refrigerators, radios and washing machines were strewn everywhere, and the streets were filled with broken china dishes, toys (the best toy shops were in Beyoglu), kitchen utensils, fish tanks and chandeliers which were fashionable at the time. residual debris.Among the bicycles, overturned and burned cars, smashed pianos, and broken mannequins lying on the cloth-strewn street and staring at the sky, there were tanks suppressing riots in twos and threes, but they came too late.

Years later, my family recounted these riots at length, so that the details seemed vivid as if I had seen them with my own eyes. As Christian families cleaned out their stores and homes, my family recalled my uncle and grandmother running from one window to the next, watching with growing panic the angry mob that paced our streets, Smash shop windows and curse Greeks, Christians, rich people.Crowds gather outside our apartment from time to time, but as my older brother has just taken up a hobby of the little Turkish flags that Aladdin's sells (perhaps trying to capitalize on the rising nationalist sentiment that was sweeping the country at the time), he Uncle's Dodge had a flag on it, and we think that was what kept the angry mob from overturning the car, even blowing out the windows.