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.54 Finally, he took considerable pride in the Ottoman Empire sByzantine-Balkan heritage:If the Roman Empire represented the extent of the spread of Western culture,it also played a no less important part in the structure of the Ottoman Empire.Inaddition to the contributions of the Greeks, whether converted to Islam or not, theOttomans received from the East Roman Empire the entire Balkan heritage, in-cluding Greece herself.5550 Imagining the BalkansOn the other hand, the Balkans were the first geographic region where theOttomans began to loose territory, and this shaped a feeling of resentment and be-trayal:  [T]he loss of Balkan territories has functioned as a major trauma leading to adeeper preoccupation with the survival of the state among both the members of theOttoman ruling class and the adherents of the Young Ottoman and Young Turk move-ments. The response to this trauma seems to have been an  official tendency to for-get about the Balkans, a tendency grafted on the official republican ideology thatrejected any continuity between the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.56The attitude toward the Balkans, however, is much more complex, and reflectsideological tendencies, group interests, and individual preferences.There is, for ex-ample, a meeting ground between the official republican nationalist ideology andthe radical Turkist-Turanist nationalism in their preference to forget about the Balkansnot simply as the attribute of an undesirable imperial past but also as the most trouble-some region of Modern Europe.The stress on Anatolia in the construction of the ter-ritorial aspect of Turkish nationalism has led to the widespread idea that the Balkansdiverted precious attention and energy from  the pure Turkishness of Anatolia, andin the end  betrayed the Turks.This feeling informed the popular 1960s series ofnewspaper articles and interviews by Yilmaz Çetinler in Cumhuriyet under the title This Rumelia of Ours, published later under separate cover and in a revised edi-tion.57 In the case of the Turkists, it has fueled a  revengeful, hostile and humiliatingattitude toward the Balkan nations without necessarily presupposing revanchist orirredentist designs.58It is chiefly among conservative intellectuals opposed to the republican ideol-ogy that the memory of the Balkans is kept alive.This is not, however, the almostbenevolent and romantic nostalgia of descendants of or even first-generation Turkishimmigrants from the Balkans.On the contrary, it exhibits a hostile and haughty pos-ture toward  those hastily founded states [which] cannot even be as noble as a formerslave who sits at the doorsteps of her master who has lost his fortune. 59 At the sametime, there is a matching rise of interest toward the Balkans among leftist and Westernistliberals, often from a neo-Ottoman perspective.The popular writer Nedim Gürselpublished impressions of his 1993 and 1994 visits to Bosnia, Macedonia, Greece, andBulgaria in a charming volume  Return to the Balkans, dedicated to all the dead inthe Balkan soil and to all friends living in the Balkans.It is a warm, human descriptioncalling on friendship and cooperation between all Balkan peoples, which neverthe-less falls into the trap of idealizing the Ottoman Empire as a real pax ottomana for theBalkan nations and ascribes their cessession and particularly the Balkan wars to theinstigation of imperialist states.60 Many advocate a geopolitical approach as a meansof securing Turkey s European integration.In the words of Cengiz Çandar:  TheBalkans once again make Turkey into an European and world power just like theOttomans started becoming a world power by expanding into Rumelia.ThereforeTurkey has to become a Balkan power in the course of her journey into the twenty-first century.Anatolia is a region that quenches the Turkish spirit.The Balkansintroduce Turkey to the world dimensions. 61 While there is no doubt that after sevendecades of official amnesia, the Balkans have reentered the public discourse aboutTurkish identity, the attitude toward the Balkans, multifarious as it may be, has re-mained a sideline in this discourse. Balkans as Self-designation 51The East-West dichotomy, on the other hand, is central, especially in the presentpassionate search for group identity between Islam and a secular statist Turkishness.While it prominently figures among the other Balkan nations, not a single one amongthem accepts even a minor redeeming quality about  Easternness. The Turks, whilecertainly feeling the tension between East and West, seem to have reached a certainsynthesis, not the incompatible talking at cross-purposes Kipling described in his  Oh,East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. For Ziya Gökalp, thiswas the organic blend of the Turkish people, the Islamic community and Westerncivilization; in the words of the Turkish author and critic Peyami Safa, it is a synthesisbetween East and West, between Turkishness and Islam.62 A poet like Fazîl Hüsnülarca gives a splendid articulation of this feeling in  The Epic of the Conquest ofDaIstanbul :East or West cannot be told apart.The mind heralds the funeral whose images abound.Your feet, your feetAre swept off the ground.63A new wave in the quest for Turkish identity was unleashed by the dissolution ofthe Soviet Union, particularly with the possibilities it opened in Muslim and TurkicCentral Asia.The disintegration of Yugoslavia, and especially the war in Bosnia,inflamed Islamic passions in Turkey, stronger even than the ones triggered by Cyprustwo decades earlier.The overriding slogan that Andalusia would not be repeated wasan allusion to the Spanish reconquista and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain.The lively interest toward Bosnia and to the fate of Turkish minorities in the Balkancountries, the activization of Turkish diplomacy, even the existing nostalgia in somecircles about  bizim Rumeli ( our Rumelia ) should not mislead one in overesti-mating the place of the Balkans in Turkish political and cultural priorities [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]