Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and other Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, occasional forays into southern Italy, Spain or eastern Europe, minorities, the nation-state and nationalism — and whatever other quirks or obsessions lurk inside my head.
Below is a Twitter thread that you’re going to have to unravel or put in order by yourselves; from bottom to top helps:
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir· Guys, HOW exactly do these tests work? Are there GENES, actual DNA material that separates, say, Kurds and Armenians? Where is the biological material that separates Bosnian Serbs from Bosnian Muslims? How do you locate and identify it?
Onur Erpul@onurerpul · 19hReplying to @bradenris and @byzantinepower That’s not quite right. DNA tests are controversial not because of ethnicity but because of their potential use as paternity tests. France had (might still have) similar limitations too. You can order and use DNA kits for testing ethnicity in Turkey.
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir· Well, yeah, because “Roman” means “Greek”. There are no Hittites around anymore, so say that THEY’re your ancestors and you can relax.
Onur Erpul@onurerpul · 20hReplying to @bradenris and @byzantinepower The Islamified Roman identity is not very popular tbh. That said, most people recognize their extremely mixed heritage, including Balkan, Caucasian, and Pre-Turkish Anatolian ancestry. The 100% ethnic Turk idea is utter nonsense
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir· Instead of what Mark Mazower calls “the false continuities and convenient silences” of nationalism, I think the truth is much healthier and has the potential to bring us together rather than drive us apart. Hopelessly naive? So be it.Quote Tweet
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir · 52mThere’s a poem by Puerto Rican Fortunato Vizcarrondo: “¿Y Tu Abuela Dónde Está?” “So where’s you grandmother?” i.e. before you start acting so high and mighty and whitey here, let’s see the Black grandmother you’ve got hidden in the kitchen. Same applies to us all. https://twitter.com/jaddeyekabir/status/1223276365891457024
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir· There’s a poem by Puerto Rican Fortunato Vizcarrondo: “¿Y Tu Abuela Dónde Está?” “So where’s you grandmother? i.e. before you start acting so high and mighty and whitey here, let’s see the Black grandmother you’ve got hidden in the kitchen. Same applies to us all.Quote Tweet
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir · 1h How they could have ever looked in the mirror and seen an Uzbek and not a Greek or a Serb or an Armenian was always extremely irritating. Now it’s our turn to see the Hellenicized Slav or Albanian in our mirrors. https://twitter.com/jaddeyekabir/status/1223263274898272256
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir· How they could have ever looked in the mirror and seen an Uzbek and not a Greek or a Serb or an Armenian was always extremely irritating. Now it’s our turn to see the Hellenicized Slav or Albanian in our mirrors.
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir·…to the fact that they were the Islamicized and Turkified descendants of the populations that already inhabited Anatolia and Balkans. If they’re learning to accept it, that’s cool.
Nicholas Bakos@jaddeyekabir · 1h Oh, that bit about Turks being honest about their Balkan and Anatolian genetic descent and not Turanian/wider Turkic? No, I wasn’t being sarcastic at all. Turks used to exhibit a wildly defensive reaction…
Meraj Hasan@_merajhasan·When Gandhi visited Purana Qila to promise food, the refugees shouted that they would rather eat Pakistani chapatis. [16] Nehru, who had been impressing Edwina with theatrics of personally saving Muslims from mobs, estimated only a 1000 dead. [17]
12/nMeraj Hasan@_merajhasan·While US Ambassador Henry Grady put the death toll at 5000. [17] The scholar Gyanendra Pandey puts it at 20,000 dead. [18] Order was restored by South Indian troops. Jinnah, incensed, wrote to British PM Attlee to ask for intervention. None came. 13/n
Meraj Hasan@_merajhasan·References: [1] Sir Reginald Savory’s Diary, No. 89. [2] Nirad Chaudhary, “Thy Hand! Great Anarch!”, (1987), p. 840. [3] Carter, ed., ‘Partition Observed”, V1, p. 215. [4] Mountbatten Papers, MB1/D86. [5] Patel to Rajendra Prasad, “Sardar Patel’s Correspondence”, V4, p. 338.
Meraj Hasan@_merajhasan·[6] Azad, “India Wins Freedom”, pp. 232-233. [7] Sarvepalli Gopal, “Jawaharlal Nehru”, V2, pp. 15-16. [8] H. M. Patel, “Rites of Passage”, (2005), pp. 93-94. [9] Macdonald to Marshall, US State Dept. Records 845.00/9-1147 [10] Campbell-Johnson, “Mission with Mountbatten”, p. 186
Meraj Hasan@_merajhasan·[11] Nisid Hajari, “Midnight’s Furies”, (2015), p. 158. [12] Gyanendra Pandey, “Remembering Partition”, p. 140. [13] Carter, ed., ‘Partition Observed”, V1, p. 216. [14] Quaid-e-Azam Papers, V5, p. 465, 479, 484-488, 492. [15] Carter, ed., ‘Partition Observed”, V1, p. 182, 177.
Meraj Hasan@_merajhasan·[16] Ibid., p. 371. [17] Grady to Marshall, US State Dept. Records 845.00/9-1447 [18] Gyanendra Pandey, “Remembering Partition”, p. 124.
demßouz@ZoraizAsim·Replying to @_merajhasanMy nani used to narrate the story of her mother who was the only one in the entire neighbourhood to have been saved because she had escaped earlier. The entire neighbourhood was razed to the ground and ppl hiding out in basements/hideouts were either burnt alive or mudered.
Umer Javed@umer9227·My grandma used to tell me about herself and my grandpa. They had only my taya abbu back then. They fought their way to Pakistan. Every train station was a new battle. The entire biradari were together so that was good. They were a unit. Many did not make it and were martyred.
“So the people shouted when the Priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to passe when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell downe flat, so that the people went vp into the citie, euery man straight before him, and they tooke the citie.”
Last night I figured I’d just buck up, get over with it, and start watching the Netflix docudrama — got through first two episodes — and it’s actually pretty good. Some key notes: The Turkish perspective is not insufferably jingoistic or Islamically triumphalist, like it was in that trashy 1453 film that came out a few years ago, which I also put off watching for a while because I thought it would be disturbing, but I ended up turning off after 20 minutes, not because I was disturbed or offended but because the script and acting were so horrendous and the production values so cheap — it looked like the set was composed of stuff bought wholesale from a Moroccan antique shop in the East Village or Çukurcuma– that it was simply unwatchable.
* We’re not portrayed as craven cowards or decadent dinosaurs à la Gibbon, whose destiny it was to float off into extinction. Both Constantine and Mehmet are portrayed as equal opponents, Hector-Achilles style: it’s probably no accident; both were, I’m sure, as acquainted with the Iliad as the other. Constantine’s heroic and complex combination of resistance and resignation are portrayed as thoroughly as possible: he did everything he could until there was nothing to be done anymore; Mehmet’s impressive intellect, cosmopolitanism and warrior skills are highlighted without going overboard. And both are pretty sexy, as is Giustiniani, as is even Notaras père (costumes and sets are beautiful too). I do dread the thought of how they’re going to treat the fate of the Notarades, though. It’s much too scintillating to just leave out of the whole narrative, yet to show it to us they’d have to admit that their revered Fatih Mehmet was what we would today call bisexual, and that he was also a cruel sadist, and I don’t know how that would have sat with the Turkish side of the production.
* Unexpectedly, I thought, we’re called “Romans” from the beginning of the series, in the fictional segments (and I think some of the Italians, Giustiniani even, calls us “Greeks” at one point); there’s more “Byzantine” used in the doc segments obviously. Either way, it’s hard to say whether they wanted to take a calculated risk in doing that, because using “Romans” probably leaves all non-Greek viewers baffled, or because “baffling” and confusing were the desired result for what’s always been the Turkish state’s policy: that is, separating us from the Byzantines/Romans and not giving us our due rights to claim descent for ourselves there, by calling us something different, the same reason Turkey calls Istanbul’s 3,000* remaining Greeks “Rum” to this day, while the rest of us are “Yunan”. It’s satisfying to hear, in any event.
* Whether advertently or not, it punctures some pretty giant holes in the Turkish mythology of heroic feat. One, by admitting the fact that we were outnumbered by the tens of thousands, so that the speed with which, for example, Rumelihisarı was built doesn’t seem quite so miraculous, plus there were already foundations on the site from an older Roman fortress. Two, by showing the glaring technological disparities between the two sides, meaning, that the Siege and Fall of Constantinople was the last great military event between mediaeval fortifications and early modern cannons and artillery, so that instead of being an incredible military achievement, it was more like the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán, with as dogged and determined a defense. And enough already with the “genius” of dragging the ships over from what, I would guess, would be somewhere near Kabataş, over the ridge, down Dolapdere into the Horn. It must have taken an enormous amount of manpower — too bad Erdoğan’s tunnel wasn’t there yet — yet not everything that’s just super-hard is necessarily “genius”.
* And stop comparing it to fucking Game of Thrones. GOT was Tolkien with sex and was the most maddening piece of trash to enthrall the masses in a long time. Ottoman is about a series of deeply traumatic events in the history of a real people that still exists, and who have been persecuted and are still threatened and harassed by Mehmet’s descendants to this day: US.
All in all it’s good; watch it. I mean, wtf, whatever. Maybe the inevitable escalation of violence, especially against civilians after the entry of the Turks into the City (The Religion of Peace gave an army three days’ right to loot, murder, rape and enslave if a city resisted and didn’t capitulate on it own) will make later episodes more disturbing. And the long arm of Erdoğanism is always felt throughout the whole thing. If Netflix were to produce a series portraying the destruction of the Second Temple and the horrendous brutality with which the Romans massacred and expelled most Jews from Judaea that made the Romans look even slightly heroic for even a second — “due to be released next Tisha B’av” — there’s not even a question of whether it would face a howling riot of protest or not; it would simply never have been produced. That’s not a “Jews control Hollywood” argument. It’s the truth. Just too many people would be offended. But even as Turkey sinks deeper into self-isolating dictatorship, it does wonders projecting a certain image to the rest of us and the rest of the Ummah.
But, at best it’s an exercise in what Helequin above calls “understand-[ing] an oppenents [sic] mythology”. You don’t have to be a trained Jungian to understand (or at least try) that “myth” is the only “reality”. That means understanding the other’s myth/s is crucial to the development of empathy, the one form of intelligence that homo sapiens [?] are still tragically deficient in.
It’s certainly the only thing in Palestine, or between Hindu and Muslim in India, and in the continuing bad divorce that is Greek-Turkish relations that will inevitably make a difference. Put yourself in a Turk’s position. Think about the massive baggage of tradition around the idea of taking Constantinople that animated them. And then [smerk]… put yourself in our position: if everybody wanted it so badly for 1,200 years, it must have been one puta madre of a city we had built there.
And in the 19th and 20th centuries, we built them another real city — “over there” — the likes of which they also had never known, and they threw us out of there too.
What are you gonna do? After a certain point, anger is too tiring. And they pay and are paying the price for their political culture anyway.
************************************************************************* The number of Greeks today in Istanbul is somewhere in the 2,000 to 3,000 range, there’s an issue of whether deaths and marriages and births will keep things in the range of critical mass… Near 300,000 in a city of around a million in the 1920s, three-thousand — in a city of 15 million today.
What’s it tone like? How are we portrayed? I’m, frankly, afraid to start watching it: one, because it may be good; two, because it will be disturbing and irritating; and either way, I’ll get caught up in it, and expend a ton of energy stressing and tweeting about it. And I can’t afford to do that right now.
Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and rest of ME, Iran, South Asia
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 