PicoBlog

Last weekend I visited Istanbul for the first time. While I was there I realized one quality that Istanbul shares with truly great cities like London, New York, and Paris: when you’re there, you’re nowhere else.

What I mean by that is the city is all-consuming. One’s senses of taste, smell, and hearing are swept up by the rush of Istanbul. Thoughts of my home in Izmir were as absent as vacant space on the shelves of the Grand Bazaar. The world shrank into the streets around Sultan Ahmet Square and its frame of towering minarets: Hagia Sophia and the stunning Sultan Ahmet “Blue” Mosque. When I ate in Istanbul – wow – I couldn’t imagine eating anywhere else.

Not even Constantinople.

This week, after returning to, er, some other city, I listened to the Four Lads’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” I have always loved that song, particularly They Might Be Giants’ spirited 1990 version. The song hadn’t entered my mind during my visit – my mind had been full of Istanbul!

Walking through Izmir today with a friend, however, I recalled a line from the song: “Why did Constantinople get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.”

I realized that I know why Constantinople is now Istanbul, and I’ll share the explanation with my readers, who are among the most knowledgeable Turkophiles on the planet. 

Before Constantinople “got the works,” consider poor Byzantium: a prosperous Greco-Roman city for 1,000 years that occupied the world’s most prime real estate: astride both the land-bridge between Asia and Europe, and the Bosphorus Strait that linked the Black and Aegean seas.

Prosperity rivaled only by Rome and Alexandria wasn’t enough to keep Byzantium Byzantium. Constantine the Great, seeking a new base for the fractious, Goth-infested kingdom, made the city the capital of his aging empire as well as the rising religion of Christianity in 330 CE. 

Soon thereafter Byzantium “got the works.” The city was now Constantinople, and it was nobody’s business but the Romans’. 

(Here I break into the narrative to point out that Constantine was Roman, and the emperors who ruled Constantinople for the next 1,120 years did not call themselves “Byzantine” but “Roman,” which was the same name as the western half of the empire which these Romans outlasted by 1,000 years. While the language of the Roman Empire changed from Latin to Greek during that time, the Turkish word for Greek people is Rum to this very day.)

The Ottomans who conquered the city in 1453 believed that the Roman Empire wasn’t gone – it continued under their rule. After taking the city, Mehmet II “The Conqueror” used the title, Kayser-i Rum or “Roman Caesar.” And while the city’s walls and defenders certainly “got the works” during Mehmet’s conquest, ”Constantinople” remained its name for another 470 years.

In the 20th Century came the Great War in 1914. The Ottoman Empire, dominated at that time by a cabal known as the Committee for Union and Progress, better known as the “Young Turks,” cast its lot with the Central Powers. The war was a mixed bag for the Turks. A disastrous winter advance over the Southern Caucasus mountain range led to major losses in the war against Russia. The empire also lost ground to Great Britain in the Middle East due to an Arab uprising assisted by T.E. Laurence (of Arabia fame).

In the lone direct conflict with the British Army, the Turks came out on the winning end at the Battle of Gallipoli, thanks to cool leadership by Colonel Mustafa Kemal.

Nevertheless, as the war turned irrevocably against the Central Powers in 1918, Turkey sued for peace. Peace is not what Turkey got. Instead, it received five more years of war. I put the blame squarely on the imperialists among the allies who, having lost millions of young men in efforts to redraw the borders of Europe, chose to redraw the borders of Anatolia and the Middle East.

And so, in the aftermath of the sultan’s capitulation, Britain occupied the Bosphorus and Constantinople. France moved into the southeast around Antioch, Italy claimed the southwest as well as the islands just offshore known as the Dodecanese, and Armenia grabbed a swathe of northeastern Anatolia.

The sultan’s acquiescence to western territorial demands was the nail in the coffin for his reign. Turkish nationalists, led by the hero of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, began to organize with the goal of (a) resisting colonial occupation and (b) maintaining the territorial integrity of Anatolia and eastern Thrace in a Turkish nation. 

(These two themes are still central tenets of Turkish identity, and they explain a lot about the country’s internal policy vis a vis the Kurds and its foreign policy.)

This might have worked had not Greece tried to grab the lion’s share of the post-war booty. On May 15, 1919, just six months after the Armistice that ended World War I, Greece invaded, landing 20,000 soldiers in Smyrna. Ottoman forces put up little resistance. 

In his book, The Shortest History of Greece, James Heneage points out a fact that I’ll never forget. For westerners, who helped Greece gain its independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s, historic Greece is Athens and the Classical Era. But for Greeks, history is Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. It was this era that post-war Greece, fueled by hubris, hoped to re-create.

In Constantinople and in Ankara, the invasion galvanized Turkish identity and empowered the forces of nationalism. The Ottoman Empire, ruled by a family, had never tracked race in official statistics – only religion. Turkey was once again at war – not for faraway provinces in Palestine or the Caucasus, but for its own people, land, and pride.

And Turkey won. The nationalists managed to garner support from both the Bolsheviks and the Americans, and they cobbled an army together, even as the Greek Army turned its attention from the Ottoman army to the nationalists. (The sultan remained in power, although he was at the mercy of the British, who had occupied Constantinople since the war). 

The Greeks pushed the nationalists almost all the way to Ankara, where at the end of August 1922 in a stunning counterattack, Turks routed them in the Battle of Dulumpinar. Five Greek generals were captured. Surviving regiments raced headlong to the Aegean and were evacuated by the Greek Navy. 

With the nationalists ascendant, it didn’t take long for the British, French, and Italians to pull their forces out of the country. The imperialists still lusted for scraps of Asia and Africa, but their populations were unwilling to sustain military losses so soon after the bloodbath of the Great War. 

Within a year, the Sultan was deposed, and a republic was declared.

You can’t go back to Constantinople because the empires that built and sustained that city for 1800 years are long gone. No one fights for Constantinople, and the last ones who did were chased out of Anatolia 101 years ago.

That happened in 1930, after a “population exchange” had expelled 1.6 million people from their homelands: Christian Greeks from Anatolia, Muslim Turks from the lands and islands of Greece. Byzantine/Greek cities were officially given the names their Turkish residents had long used. 

Constantinople became Istanbul – a name that comes from a Greek phrase, “s-timboli” which meant “in the city” and was later Turkified. Over 12,000 cities and towns were renamed: Smyrna – once home to more Greeks than Athens – became Izmir, the place where I live today. Adrianople became Edirne. Nicea became Iznik. 

And the reason – as the song rightly states – “is nobody’s business but the Turks” … and triumphant Turkish nationalism.

A few more notes about my trip to Istanbul.

My visit was with a “gal” I’ve known for most of my life, my friend, Karin. I raced from school and caught a 45-minute Pegasus Airways flight from Izmir to Sabia Gokcen International Airport on the Asian side of the city.

She was waiting in Istanbul, just like the song says. I hadn’t seen her since a short visit in 2015. As soon as I told her I was moving to Turkey, we began planning to meet on Easter Break. Since I was still in school, we only got to spend the weekend there.

We stayed near Sultan Ahmet Square, and in my two days there, we focused on the main sites. Karin is a religious studies teacher, so we visited several mosques. I bought a 50th birthday present for my sister in the Grand Bazaar (Happy Birthday, Sis!). And we took a Bosphorus cruise. 

I had the best Turkish delight I’ve ever eaten at La Fondue cafe in the Grand Bazaar. It was so much fun. Karin & I ordered Turkish coffee, which came with a nice, date-flavored piece of Turkish delight with a hazelnut in the middle (and coated with powdered sugar, of course). 

After we finished our coffee, we consulted the Internet and read each other’s fortunes. It was such a fun experience (the coffee was delicious, too). I mean, there’s conversation between lifelong friends, and then there is asking about one another’s hopes and dreams – and trying to find them among the abstract clumps of dried coffee grounds.

I can’t wait to go back. In fact I have another trip booked for the end of April with a college friend from the States.

Until then, I’m really enjoying Bettany Hughes’s Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. At 600+ pages, it’s a doorstop of a book, but it’s a thorough history of the titular cities that came to life during my visit there.

As I learn, you will learn, too, and hopefully there will be a proper Istanbul travelogue in this space soon. 

Görüşüruz!

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