On the conquest celebrations

The more we drag our feet in confronting our history, the more often, it seems, we get stuck on scenes from history that reinforce our admiration of ourselves. When history is concerned, it is of course not possible to think of it apart from the context of today. Indeed, our interest in history is only very rarely a matter of really illuminating a past event and understanding it in its true nature. Apart from that, the ticket for every journey into history is issued entirely by a political debate or will concerning the present. That is why history is not a problem of the past; it is always a problem of the present.

Actually, without prolonging the word, I want to come to a subject I terribly feel obliged to write about at every anniversary, the conquest celebrations. This year too, we must dwell on the meaning of the culture, personality or historical consciousness produced by the conquest celebrations, which are lived with an increasingly exaggerated showiness but generally not much discussed.

Do the conquest celebrations not indeed also bring onto the agenda certain problems related to constantly commemorating and recalling a conquest, to internalizing a place? Have the 556 years that have passed still not made a city, a country sufficiently a homeland? Indeed! A conquest, whichever way you look at it, constantly also recalls what a place was before the conquest.

Well, do you know that the Conquest was never celebrated in the Ottoman period? It is as if, after conquering Istanbul, the Ottomans never looked back to the past again. The conquest was granted and reached its fulfillment, and a new page, named Istanbul, was opened for Constantinople.

The conquest celebrations come onto the agenda after the Republic, from 1939 on, and after 1953 they begin to become a ceremony of identity construction of the Turkish-Islamic ideal. It is clear that there is a typical ideological side to the conquest discourse, fed on one side by an entirely Islamic terminology, beginning to be remembered in an environment where the political and social institutions of Islam have been entirely lost. This may be a somewhat long matter to embark on here, but let us not pass without touching on it anyway: what is involved is an "asylum-seeking" in a distant past utterly detached from one's own reality. A very problematic psychology, this...

Rest assured, Turkey has no need for the jingoism, the pride in history and ancestors produced by this morbid psychology. Turkey has a surplus, not a deficit, of national pride, and these surpluses, reaching megalomania, close Turkey as a society ever more to the world and to other people. We are no longer in the world of the thirties when the conquest was remembered, either. The world of that day was trying to make up for what it had lost in the present by finding it in a glorious past. Today we are in a world where searches made in history bring no benefit to the present, and where even their costs fall within the scope of excessive luxury consumption. In today's world, those who really get work done win, advance, and advance their countries.

Moreover, the simultaneity between the period when we began to think of conquering Istanbul and the periods when we began to ruin Istanbul should be instructive enough, shouldn't it? Dücane Cündioğlu touched on this relation just right in his article yesterday. Should we not all think about the bad treatment accorded to Istanbul, so much so that, after the conquest, it brought to Cündioğlu's mind to emigrate (though it is not religiously permissible)?

"Why do we not open to proper deliberation in what state we took Istanbul, how and in what manner we have kept it alive, and what state we have reduced this dear place to in the last seventy-eighty years, and instead regard it as an accomplishment to celebrate with drums and zurnas how and when we conquered this city?"

So what should be done?

This subject of course exceeds the limits of this piece, but, if you like, let us finish by listening to the answer given by Sivilay Abla of the Taraf newspaper to a reader with the pseudonym "Başkan" who asked for her suggestions on conquest celebrations on behalf of the Istanbul Municipality:

Answer: Dear Başkan, I strongly advise you to cancel the conquest celebrations immediately and never to mention the conquest again. With every celebration you are actually saying this: "We are strangers to these parts, sister. This place belonged to others. Then we came from very far away and took the city from their hands by force."

My dear brother! Does a person still not consider himself native after 550 years have passed? What an inexhaustible state of being immigrants. Does a person give himself away with his own mouth instead of trying to make this story forgotten? If, on the day these celebrations are held, oaths of 'we will take Istanbul back' were sworn in Athens and commemoration ceremonies held, would they be committing a greater offense than we do?