ARCHIV ORIENTÁLNÍ 88, 2020 • 613 DOI: 10.47979/aror.j.88.3.613-617

The Long Shadow of a Decade in Turkish Memory: A Centenary of War (1912–1923)

Gizem Tongo

Tufan, Mesut Yaşar and İzzeddin Çalışlar (eds.). Yüz Yıl Sonra Balkan Savaşları: Ne? Nasıl? Neden; Tarafların Gözüyle Büyük Yenilginin Eleştirisi [The One Hundred Years Later: What? How? Why? A critique of the great defeat from the perspectives of the actors]. : Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2014 [2019]. 88 pp. ISBN 9786053320661. Price 24 TL.

Tufan, Mesut Yaşar and İzzeddin Çalışlar. Yüz Yıl Sonra Savaşan Çizgiler: Karikatür ve Kartpostallarla Birinci Dünya Savaşı [Drawings at War one hundred years later: The First World War in Caricatures and Postcards]. Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2017 [2018]. 216 pp. ISBN 9786053329701. Price 29,63 TL.

Turkey is approaching the end of its series of centenaries of events in a period of titanic political change in its modern history from the start of the first Bal- kan Wars in 1912 through to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This long decade irrevocably changed the country, laying the groundwork for the formation of a nation state out of a multinational empire and also for many of modern ’s achievements and problems. Innumerable Turkish films, television programs, exhibitions, and publications have commemorated as ma- jor victories the two key military events of the period: the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and the Turkish War of Independence against the Allied occupation in 1922 – two patriotic milestones in the making of modern Turkey. Yet this de- cade also included events that have been less clearly remembered, or even offi- cially suppressed, including the disastrous social experience of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the First World War (1914–1918), the fratricidal Armenian Genocide of 1915, the traumatic collapse of the in 1918, and the agonies of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The continuing centenaries have prompted the organization and publica- tion of a number of war-related events and books which have already begun to reshape Turkey’s landscapes of memory and historiography. The primary impact of recent revisionist scholarship, however – such as Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (2015), Ryan Gingeras’s Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire: 1908–1922 (2016), and Yiğit Akın’s When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great

ArOr – Issue 88.3 ISSN 0044-8699 © 2020 Oriental Institute (CAS), Prague 614 Gizem Tongo

War and the Devastation of an Empire (2018) – has been in the fields of political and social history. We still know too little about the cultural forms (both visual and literary) through which the Ottoman Empire’s final wars – the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the War of Independence (1912–1922) – were imagined and represented. The two volumes under review are welcome additions to the growing body of enquiry into the Ottoman Empire’s final wars. Lavishly illustrated and hand- somely designed, both books were prepared by the same two authors: Mesut Yaşar Tufan (a journalist, photographer, and documentary film-maker) and İzzeddin Çalışlar (a writer and collector, who also recently curated two exhibi- tions about the War of Independence in Istanbul and Ankara). Both volumes are published in the same series by Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, which has played a leading role for the last two decades publishing studies, memoirs, and diaries from the late Ottoman period. What makes these volumes particularly attractive is the wealth of illustrations which accompany the texts. There are more than one hundred images in the first volume and almost three hundred in the second, ranging from photographs of historical figures and battle scenes to propaganda postcards, illustrations, and cartoons. There are examples from various belligerent countries (such as Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia for the Balkan Wars, as well as Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, France, and Russia for the First World War), presenting novel aspects of these wars’ internationalism. The first volume is dedicated to the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), beginning with a short introductory essay and followed by a brief chronology of histori- cal events from 1876 to 1914. Resulting in defeat for the Ottoman Empire and leading to an 83 percent loss of its European territory, the Balkan Wars have often been considered “a short prelude to the First World War” (p. vii). The largest part of the book is a compendium of four periodical articles (three of which were written during the Balkan Wars), two memoirs, a letter, and a dia- ry, illustrated with contemporary photographs and other visual materials. The majority of the selected texts are by Ottoman military officers. Though these had previously appeared in Turkish, here they are arranged together in a new context for the first time. Carefully and skillfully selected, and written by both high- and mid-ranking Ottoman officers—for instance, the commander of the Vardar Army Zeki Pasha, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] (the future founder of the Turkish Republic, who was a major at the time of the Balkan Wars), and İzzettin [Çalışlar] (a staff captain during the Balkan Wars and the grandfather of one of the book’s authors) – they provide balanced information on the multifac- eted and complex realities of the battlefront among different ranks of profes- sional soldiers. One anonymous article published in a popular French journal The Long Shadow of a Decade in Turkish Memory: A Centenary of War (1912–1923) 615

in 1913 and entitled “Lectures pour tous” (Lessons for Everyone) is translated here from French into Turkish for the first time. It presents a contemporary European view of the Ottoman army and the reasons behind its defeat, includ- ing its occasional “demoralization” due to a lack of sufficient resources, the “in- sinuation of politics to the army after Young Turks came to power,” and finally the superiority of the Napoleonic warfare tactics adopted by the to the Prussian approach adopted by the Ottomans (pp. 47–57). The final and most recent text, published in Athens in 1962, was written by the Greek urban historian Elias Petropoulos, who calls certain myths of Greek nationalism into question, challenging the view that the population of Thessaloniki felt patri- otic enthusiasm for the Greek army in 1912 and emphasizing the cosmopolitan structure of the city (pp. 79–85). The essays are contextualized by many images. A photograph of a Bulgarian family saying their goodbyes to their father and husband appears on the same page as another one of a Muslim family in Istan- bul. As with many other images, including those of Greeks and Serbians, and with the invisible “enemy soldier” image that stuck in Leon Trotsky’s mind (“a dark coloured, beardless young boy, lying on his back: his entire body stiff, eyes wide open: a bullet had entered his forehead and left behind his head,” p. 64), the book manages to provide a record of the brutal effects of the Balkan Wars on both sides with unflinching veracity. The second book picks up the story at the outbreak of the First World War. For each year from 1914 to 1918 (pp. 1–197), the book presents a rich chro- nology of visual materials. This is indeed appropriate, as the First World War marked a turning point regarding the role assumed by visual media – posters, postcards, films, illustrated periodicals, and paintings. All belligerent countries, including the Ottoman state, commissioned artists to produce war-related work for propaganda purposes. The cultural initiatives led by the Ottoman gov- ernment or by semi-official patriotic organizations, such as the Navy League (Donanma-yı Osmani Muavenet-i Milliye Cemiyeti), the National Defense League (Müdafaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti), and the Red Cross (Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti), allowed some Ottoman artists to establish a more popular appeal within the emerg- ing mass culture. The aim was to drum up support for the war effort and, as the conflict progressed, to record the national endeavor. Brightly colored post- cards commonly featured portraits of military and political leaders, depictions of heroic soldiers and military equipment, Red Cross nurses, and kitsch alliance propaganda, whilst illustrated journals flooded the media space with humor- ous representations of weak enemies. This volume is notable for its excellent color illustrations, including many brilliant cartoons and postcards published in Russia, Britain, Belgium, France, Spain, and the United States, some of which the Turkish reader can see here for the first time. Further praise is due for the 616 Gizem Tongo

transliteration from Ottoman Turkish to modern Turkish of some very interest- ing cartoons that appeared in the Ottoman satirical magazine Karagöz during the First World War. While these two volumes undoubtedly constitute valuable additions to the growing literature on the Balkan Wars and the First World War in Turkey, I would like to offer two methodological suggestions, relating to contextualiza- tion and inclusiveness. A first suggestion is that despite the many intriguing visual materials the authors have selected, as non-academic books aimed at general readers, these volumes suffer from poor referencing, with images of- ten presented without sources and without any contextual analysis. Many of the images, the authors inform us in the introduction, were copied from “an archive in Paris” in the 1980s. The lack of detailed information (or reflection on its implications), where images stand alone without any consideration of the character of the material in hand, reduces the scholarly and pedagogic value of the volumes. While the texts and images in the first volume highlight the diverse history of the Balkan Wars with a more nuanced and humane under- standing, the second volume, unfortunately, seems not to have achieved the authors’ aim (stated in their very brief introduction) to encourage the readers to “experience a different history reading through ephemera” (p. vii). This is largely because the entire volume presents only a state-centered and propa- gandistic visual language, which was, however, not the only cultural response of artists – whether in the Ottoman lands, or Europe, or beyond – to war be- tween 1914 and 1918. This is not to dismiss the importance of such images, but simply to emphasize that not all artistic production was geared towards patrio- tism and propaganda. From Otto Dix to Paul Nash, from Wilhelm Lehmbruck to Avni Lifij, many artists chose to represent the First World War with dark ambivalence about its aims and consequences. My second suggestion relates to the inclusion of voices or images of and by non-combatant men, women, and children of different religious, ethnic, and class backgrounds, including those who were at odds with the system. One finds, for example, no women’s voices in either volume. The story of the Balkan Wars, for instance, is told from an entirely male perspective. Including women writers’ views on continuing conflicts, such as the 1912 anti-militarist and paci- fist article “Pavagan E!” (“Enough”), penned by an Ottoman Armenian feminist, Zabel Yeseyan, during the Balkan Wars, or a section from the highly observant and interesting diaries of the Ottoman Muslim poet Şair Nigar Hanım, would have certainly helped broaden the collections’ androcentric perspective. I won- der whether the authors might not also have given more attention to the home front, most particularly in their second volume. After all, women were not only victims of enemy aggression but also suffered from their own states’ war poli- The Long Shadow of a Decade in Turkish Memory: A Centenary of War (1912–1923) 617

cies: fear of food shortages, displacement, and losing a husband, father, or son to war. The German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s caring, loving, and mourning moth- ers hauntingly show us how war caused suffering, injustice, and brutality on the home front. The pain and distress of women on the home front can also be found in Ottoman war art. As a young painter, Namık İsmail was drafted into the Ottoman army in 1914 to serve on the Caucasian front. Having fallen ill with typhus and been invalided back to Istanbul, Namık İsmail produced an excel- lent war painting in 1917 he simply titled Tifüs (Typhus). Showing a funeral procession under shadows of crows with women in black robes lamenting for the dead, the painting brought the home front and its devastated civilian lives to the center. (Today, the work is in the collection of the Ankara Museum of Painting and Sculpture, and Yiğit Akın recently chose the work as the cover of his excellent When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devasta- tion of an Empire, 2018.). All in all, these two thoughtful and timely volumes represent a step for- ward in our understanding of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the transcultural dimensions of these conflicts, and are important contributions to a popular reimagining of the history of the period. No doubt many other war- related visual and textual materials remain to be researched and presented in future publications, including perhaps a third volume in this series looking at the visual culture of the War of Independence. I hope the last few years of cen- tenaries to 2023 will continue to provoke further engagement with Ottoman cultures of war, enabling a historical and contextual understanding of the pro- duction, distribution, and reception of these images and artefacts, as well as more nuanced and humane studies of this shadowy decade in Turkish memory.

REFERENCES

Akın, Yiğit. When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire. Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Gingeras, Ryan. Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire: 1908–1922. Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Rogan, Eugene. The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920. London: Allen Lane, 2015.