‘558. Yılı Kutlu Olsun’

ARIANA FERENTINOU

You could not miss it even if you wanted to. Stuck in an endless line of cars leading to the Bosphorus Bridge almost on a daily basis, you have no other choice but to keep yourself busy with other pastimes: looking at the slopes of fresh green grass on the side of the motorway, admiring the spring flowers where tulips in all conceivable colors make up the overall majority; gaze at groups of people obviously nostalgic about their villages, enjoying themselves just by sitting on the grass and gazing at the endless army of cars stuck in first gear in the morning traffic.

And if you’ve done all that and have gotten dead bored having visited every radio station, your eyes will inevitably wander around some more and probably alight upon a space that has become very popular for advertising in recent times: a small framed surface underneath the street lights that usually host ads from the Istanbul Municipality.

Being utterly frustrated at having again miscalculated the time I needed to cross the first bridge, I noticed the other day the latest announcement on that small ad space underneath the city lights on the side of the street: “558. Yılı Kutlu Olsun” (Happy 558th Anniversary).

It has been 558 years since Constantinople fell to the Ottomans and to their 21-year-old ingenious leader Mehmet II. Already a depopulated capital of a devastated empire, Constantinople could not survive the onslaught of the new, much-larger army of the Ottomans. It was the last act of a drama that had started perhaps two centuries earlier. So far I understand.

But I have a problem with historical anachronisms. They blur the past for the sake of the present. The fall of Constantinople and its replacement with Istanbul as the capital of the Ottoman Empire is a historical fact which has been the subject of a great number of historians all over the world. They have researched and written about the reasons of its collapse as the capital of the Byzantine Empire and the reasons for its rise as the capital of the new regional superpower, the Ottomans. This is a fascinating subject which continues to offer a wealth of new information as archaeological work unearths more fascinating evidence. Istanbul does not only have a dynamic present, it also has a dynamic past.

My objection with this year’s anniversary-and every year’s anniversary during the last decade or so, is its ceremonial aspect. On Sunday, May 29 – the actual date of the event which took place in 1453 – major ceremonial enactments of the final battles before the end of the siege six centuries ago took place. Hundreds of Turkish extras dressed as Muslim Ottomans and Orthodox Christians fought in full fake weaponry in the presence of thousands of spectators. The modern Fatih mounting his white horse entered the city under the powerful sound of the Ottoman military bands and the expensive fireworks brightened the night in the memory of the real fires of destruction and victory all those centuries ago.

With an Islamically rooted political party in power in Turkey for almost a decade and with the same party about to return to power in a few weeks’ time, I can understand the boost of Ottoman nostalgia as a means to gather more support. But if the conquest of perhaps one of the most beautiful cities in the world was so important to the conquerors, then I would have thought that the preservation of its history and cultural texture should have been equally important. To be also the keeper and protector of Istanbul’s pre-conquest past should be, I would have thought, not only a show of respect but also of cultural maturity. I know I am unrealistic or impractical but I would still put forward my idea for replacing next year’s “Istanbul Fetih Kutlamaları” with “Istanbul Kutlamaları” as a celebration for the city itself as one of the oldest urban monuments of mankind.

Perhaps not next year, but at least some time in the future. For this year, though, I will have to limit myself to a bit of gastronomic history as offered by an imaginative restaurant in the area of Sultanahmet, which has announced that this year “Between May 13 and June 3, for the 558th anniversary of the Conquest of Istanbul, our restaurant, next door to the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace, will be serving Ottoman Imperial Court dishes from the table of Sultan Mehmed.”

But it might prove to be a gastronomic disappointment because the late Stefanos Yerasimos, who wrote a book on royal Ottoman recipes in the 16th century, once said, “I tried to cook those dishes, but I must say they were not suitable to our modern palates.” He had added that the recipes lacked all those products like potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants that did not appear until the discovery of America. Ottomans used a lot of meat and honey in their recipes.

via ‘558. Yılı Kutlu Olsun’ – Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review.