I walked along the old Byzantine walls on the edge of the city’s Fatih district. On either side were the sounds of busy highways, car horns, and the thousands of people who lived nearby. While the rest of the city carried on as it had for nearly 600 years, I stood atop the battlements and pictured the inevitable armies of Mehmet the Conqueror as they defeated the unyielding last of the Christian Romans, who held the city until the very end. Thomas Madden, in his Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World, proclaims that the city’s strength “was never solely in its mighty walls or its well trained militaries, but in the determination of its inhabitants to hold firm to it no matter the cost.” Nevertheless, the Islamic Ottomans would prevail over the Christians who first founded the magnificent city 1700 years ago. A short distance into the old city, the effects of this monumental event are still felt. The nearby Chora Church, now Karriye Mosque, stands as one of the last places where Byzantine iconography can still be seen.
Undoubtedly the most significant symbol of the great Islamic victory is the Hagia Sophia. Flanked by a skyline of minarets and mirrored by the splendour of the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia remains a contentious reminder that this city was once the greatest Christian city in the world. Provocations between Christians and Muslims still continue within, and I too lamented seeing the beautiful mosaics of Mary and Jesus crumble and be covered by white sheets. A rich knowledge of history and fervor for religious faith leaves Constantinople a continual symbolic battleground between Eastern Christians and Muslims. Madden fittingly describes the city as “a meeting place and a battlefield for cultures...too important to abandon. Too strategic to avoid. Too beautiful to resist.” As a devoted Catholic and lover of history myself, especially Roman history, it was easy for me to want to dive into the historical nostalgia battle of Christian Byzantine against Islamic Ottoman, to lament the loss of a city and empire that fell 600 years ago. However, my encounter with the city revealed a somber truth that would make Mehmet and Constantine brothers despair. The splendour of Constantinople and the old world from which it came is fading. This fading is due neither to Christians nor Muslims, but to new forces that most of the world has already embraced. Secularism, consumerism, postmodernism, nationalism, the new order of the world has many labels and characteristics. Which ideology one blames for the fading of the old world is irrelevant. The world is forgetting, sometimes intentionally, the virtues and beauty of the past and the things that made Constantinople a magnificent city in the first place, under both Christians and Muslims.
Constantinople was the crossroads of the world—a place where east and west met, and where an Islamic realm met Christendom. Even after the Ottoman conquest, Constantinople continued to be home to a vibrant community of many Christian Greeks and Armenians, alongside Jews, Italians, and Muslims. It was a hub of international trade and home to dozens of different religious, philosophical, and scientific movements. Ottoman sultans built huge mosques across the city, almost as if to outdo the magnificence of the Byzantines before them, who had once built the city with a similar mindset. Caroline Finkel’s book Osman’s Dream expressed the Ottoman’s sense of divine purpose in its founding myth, in which the first sultan, Osman, “saw that a moon arose from the holy man's breast and came to sink in his own breast. A tree then sprouted from his navel and its shade encompassed the world..." Across both regimes, Constantinople’s magnificence was driven by its imperial character as a city that bridged many worlds and eras, ruled by men with bold ambitions and a deep religiosity.
The view of Constantinople and the premodern era that I have presented thus far is undoubtedly a romanticized view of history, one that does not take into account the many nuances and darker events of the past. Indeed, even as I toured the Topkapi Palace, the beauty and magnificence of the old Ottoman seat of power was constantly stood in juxtaposition with a history of fratricide, slavery, and a somewhat dehumanizing marriage system. Similarly, the beauty of the Hagia Sophia as a great temple to God appears in somewhat of a contradiction given that its patron, Emperor Justinian, had 30,000 rebels massacred within the city hippodrome. History is indeed filled with contrasts and darker elements that shouldn’t be ignored, but this doesn’t mean that an eye for nostalgia or romanticism has no place in society or politics. Across time and culture, nostalgia can be a tool not for turning back the clock and potentially reviving past evils, but instead for mapping out a future that restores certain diminished values from the past.
Many modern secularists and so-called enlightenment thinkers made the mistake of assuming that progress required a complete sterilization of the premodern world, that the more archaic practices and undesirable elements of the past somehow meant that all premodern values must be false or a hindrance to the future. Turkey is a prime example of this. Ataturk’s reforms brought about many promising changes for Turkey’s future, including vast improvements to the education system, deepened ties to the western world, increased international trade, and established a modern military. However, Ataturk and the Turkish Republic would simultaneously push religion out of the public sphere and in many respects repudiate the pre-republic history of Turkey, following the laïcité philosophy of the French Revolution. Under the modern republic, all national attention became detached from the transcendent interests of the premodern era.
Ironically or perhaps poetically, the modern state of Turkey is far less diverse than the Ottoman era, with a less than favorable track record on human rights or human dignity. During the rise of Turkish nationalism and into the early decades of the republic era, Greeks, Armenians, and other non-Turkish communities faced persecution, expulsion, and policies that ultimately transformed Turkey into a far more ethnically and religiously homogeneous nation. Madden details these events, bringing specific reference to the 1923 population exchange, 1955 pogrom, and 1964 expulsion all targeting Greek citizens. According to Madden, Greek Christians comprised nearly 150,000 out of 1 million total residents in 1896. By 2000, there were fewer than 1,000 left in the city. Despite its apparent indifference to religion and pluralistic philosophy in contrast to the explicitly Islamic Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Republic was arguably more oppressive to religious minorities and undoubtedly less diverse as ethnic-based nationalism replaced premodern identities centered on religion.
These historical realities suggest that secularism and modernism are not necessarily conducive to greater tolerance. In fact, Turkey has only become more friendly to Greeks and to Christianity in recent years under President Erdogan, himself an Islamist and often described as a “neo-Ottoman.” During my time exploring Constantinople, I spoke with several Greek Christians in the city (as well as Ankara), all of whom agreed that life in Turkey had improved over the past 30 years. The reopening of Orthodox seminaries and the presence of the Turkish national police protecting Christian and Jewish places of worship were among the examples of improved relations between the Turkish government and religious minorities that residents mentioned. It is no coincidence that these changes occurred under the current Turkish government. Like the Ottomans they admire, the current Turkish government is reviving a more religious and transcendent societal outlook, representing a turn from their more secular predecessors. Despite being illiberal and outwardly Islamist , the current Turkish government shows more tolerance for religious minorities than had previously existed.
The feeling of nostalgia exists across many times and places, and my experience in Turkey reflects a sentiment felt by travelers across many ancient places. The poet Rumi, one of the most prolific authors of the premodern Islamic world, wrote a poem known as “The Song of the Reed.” Part of the poem goes as follows: “Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.” The reed laments being cut from its original reed bed, torn from its divine source and longing to come home. I see this poem as a metaphor for the human soul longing for its divine creator, but it also fits as a metaphor for nostalgia, as it reflects a longing for a return to our premodern roots and to a world where the divine was not shunned from public life. Nostalgia, when understood in its proper context and without dismissing objective views of history, opens a window of opportunity for the future. Nostalgia allows a society to recall values and transcendent goals from the premodern era without undoing the progress that the modern world has brought.
References
Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Madden, Thomas F. Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World. New York: Viking, 2016.
Rumi, Mevlana Jalaluddin. The Pocket Rumi. Edited and translated by Kabir Helminski. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2017.