Hospitality and Difference
A lean villager with a thin mustache, wearing the ubiquitous tweed flat cap and baggy suit jacket of the Turkish farmer, joined us by the fire. “Evliya (1'elcbi—kim o? Arap mi? Turk mu?” (“Evliya ^elebi—who was he? Was he an Arab? Was he a Turk?”) Evliya’s name and turbaned image on horseback were blazoned across the truck that served as our kitchen and support vehicle.
It was usually the case that the people we met had heard of Evliya but never read him. The fact that the support vehicle, when shut up for traveling, had no windows may have put the idea in people’s heads that we could have stashed away some sheep inside. At other times, people assumed that we were transporting the horses in the truck instead of actually riding them. Metin, our chef, driver, and Sufi poet, answered in his best sonorous eff'endi-like way that Evliya was Osmanli (Ottoman) and that his father was born in the Anatolian town of Kutahya, making him an Anatolian Turk, though Evliya himself had been born in Istanbul. The farmer appeared to accept this. He seemed friendly enough. He didn’t think we were sheep stealers. What he had or had not learned about Evliya at school was never to be revealed. But he was a modern republican Turk; to him, a turbaned Ottoman figure in a flowing robe, portrayed as riding a horse and bestriding the globe, was at the very least a problematic, un-modern figure.Under the rule of the Kemalists, imperial ethnic mixing, and polyglot and more cosmopolitan ways of living and feeling, were officially canceled and abandoned, and astonishingly quickly as Mutman (2008) has vividly shown. However, might not some of these policies and ways of living, thinking, and feeling have persisted nevertheless, and might they be worth recovering and understanding if they had? Did not Edward Said once remark, “I hate to say it, but in a funny sort of way, it worked rather well under the Ottoman empire, with its millet system.
What they had then seems a lot more humane than what we have now” (Said, 2005, p. 455)? Said was alluding to how the Ottomans managed coexistence with non-Muslims within an idea of empire that differed from that of Western imperium. “The well-protected domains” of the Padishah (memalik-imahrusa-iξahane) were imagined to be a place of safety as well as religious toleration of all subjects, including non-Muslims, particularly Christians and Jews (Deringil, 2011, p. 42), a site of what Carter Vaughn Findley calls “symbiosis under the banner of a multiethnic Islamic state” (Findley, 2010, p. 211).Turkishness vis-a-vis foreignness, or perhaps versus foreignness: Everywhere we went, the presence of a party of Westerners traveling with Turks on horseback aroused curiosity and polite interest and evenExpedition and Reenactment 203 amusement. But suspicion of the foreigner was there. We continued by the fire until Sedat was brought back by the jandarma, reporting that he had merely been questioned about when he was planning to complete his military service. The whole incident remained somewhat mysterious. Someone somewhere was stirring things up. Along the route there had been villagers, both men and women, whose first impulse was to meet, greet, and give sustenance to strangers without any questions being asked. But there were also those who would proceed more skeptically and cautiously, not presuming that travelers were to be trusted, indeed suspecting that they were not to be trusted, that they must have self-interested, acquisitive designs, and that theft was likely to be on the agenda.
The undercurrents we witnessed that night run deep in Turkish society. Traditions of hospitality wrestle uneasily with fear of betrayal by foreign elements. Here in Ovacik, the village identity presented was simply “Turk,” but that certainly did not guarantee unanimity. The reasons for the divisions were not revealed to us as outsiders, but they were obvious in the village’s dealings with “the outside world.” Consider then the prospect of a polity, the Turkish Republic, which was preceded by an empire that for centuries had been absorbing multiple ethnic, religious, and even national identities. Given the potential for differing views manifested in the divisions and polarizations (secular/religious, urban/rural, elite/non-elite, metropolitan/ provincial) of Turkish society and democracy, how had any sustainable peaceful system of coexistence been achieved during the Ottoman centuries? How did it survive for so long?