Migration Stories

22 September 2009, Day 1: The mosque at Hersek was our first clue— traces of Balkan-Anatolian synergy began here. Many times restored, the mosque was built by Hersekzade Ahmed Pa⅞a, who is buried in the garden.

We were on the track of Ottoman imperial relationships with the Balkans and other territories beyond Anatolia from which the empire drew its strength.

Donna’s Diary Entry: 23 September 2009, Day 2: We are in the Bagdat Restaurant (named for its proximity to the “road to Bagdat”) at lunch­time, our horses tethered in the woods. The owners proudly tell us that the surrounding villages are peopled by Bosnians, and, further south, Bulgarians, and by Laz (from the Black Sea), Circassians and Tatars. As the empire shrank, and there were Balkan wars especially, people were packed into villages—not indiscriminately, but with different groups sent to different villages. All, however, were expected to get along. Query: Does the Ottoman multicultural model work when the empire shrinks in this way?

In villages just off the major highways between Istanbul and Izmir we found Bosniaks, Georgians, Circassians (including Adigeyans), and Bulgarians, with Bosniaks identifying themselves as dating from the migra­tions of either the 1890s or the 1990s. There were also Turks who confided that their ancestors had arrived following the battle of Manzikert in 1071, when the Selcuks defeated the Byzantines, heralding the first major wave of Oghuz Turkish migrations into western Anatolia from Khorasan. Nearby were villagers who claimed Yoruk heritage (more recently settled nomads of Oghuz descent, who are often Alevis), and further south were those who regarded themselves as originally Germiyans or Selcuks or, going much fur­ther back in time, Phrygians. Adjacent to the battlefield of Dumlupinar, villages staked their identity not on an origin story but on their staunchness during the War of Independence against the Greeks. In one such village, Buyuk Oturak, between Afyon and U⅞ak, we found the yellow autumn cro­cus Sternbergia lutea, a Balkan species introduced by Bulgarians, known for its medicinal as well as ornamental uses. Traces of migrations and transgeo- graphical crossings, of decades and even centuries of people and species in transit and resettlement, were everywhere.

How were these heterogeneous collectivities faring? Some with long­term settlement in Turkey had done very well.

Some of the more recent arrivals were struggling with certain govern­ment attitudes, though they were understandably proud of their more mod­est achievements. Two days before, in Kizilhisar, a village high in the hills beyond Iznik, we had been equally warmly welcomed by Bosniak farmers who plied us with fresh milk, yogurt, and bread and joined us around the campfire. They lamented that the government was trying to increase the size of individually owned plots of cultivatable land that would be eligible for subsidies and loans. They regarded much of the village’s land—orchards and grazing as well as arable—as held in common. They were also worried about being forced to buy seeds instead of conserving their own. Having come from the former Yugoslavia, they were happy working in a socialist-collective and sustainable way. This meant that in practice they had something in common with older Turkish traditional farmers, those often referred to as “real farm­ers,” who preserve biodiversity by continuing to plant landrace crops from their own seeds (Aksoy, 2005, p.

The same was true for Caucasian refugees, who were to be found in the Domaniq mountains: mountain villages for mountain people. The Georgians of Bahqekaya and the Adigeyan Circassians of Hacikara were long-term residents, dating to the later 19thcentury migrations following Ottoman-Russian wars. The older generation in Hacikara looked upon our horses with knowledgeable, nostalgic eyes (Finkel et al., 2011, p. 74), testifying to the Circassians’ formidable reputation as equestrian people. There are 21 Georgian villages in the district of Inegol (Zhuzhunadze, 2015). As the borders of the empire shrank, ethnic cleansing took place on the frontiers, with consequences for what Findley calls “the equilibria among religious communities,” as “the old interfaith symbiosis” was disrupted (Findley, 2010, p. 116). Although not all refugees were ethnically Turkish, as Findley notes, nevertheless the arrival of refugees from the late 19th cen­tury onwards “made the population both more Turkish-speaking and more Muslim” (Findley, 2010, p. 175) as new arrivals sought and found protection within the Ottomans’ “well-protected domains” according to the ideal of protection-within- difference.A densely woven multiethnic, though no longer multifaith, fabric of migrants from elsewhere, therefore, persist in the Turkish body politic, but how harmonious is this mixture? The residents of Babasultan, one of the villages proudly reporting that they had “come with” Manzikert, told us that they did not allow their daughters to marry residents of villages of more recent provenance.

How different our reception might be now, given intensified internal antagonisms since the authoritarian crackdown following the failed coup of 2016, remains unclear. But hospitality to migrants remains a relative matter, in which Turkey’s long history (both Ottoman and republican) of resettle­ment policies undergirds a certain receptivity to incomers not common else­where. The first wave of refugees from Syria following the outbreak of civil war in 2011 often reported being offered opportunities to work and contrib­ute, and thereby feeling more at home in an environment more familiar to them than any European setting would be:

Around 3.5m Syrians live in Turkey, the largest number of refugees any­where in the world. Turkey is not fully signed up to the 1951 Refugee Convention so, although Syrians there get access to health care, educa­tion and a small stipend, partly paid for by the European Union, they do not receive the many benefits that refugees in the EU get, such as accommodation and child benefit. Nevertheless, Turkey is proving a better refuge for many than Europe.

(The Economist, 2018)

Following the March 2016 deal with the EU, the Turkish government was paid to resettle Syrian refugees (European Council, 2016), but as Turkey’s suspension of the deal in July 2019 shows (Turkish Minute, 2019), it would be a mistake to sentimentalize some infinitely absorbing or accommodating property of contemporary Turkish society. The question of Turkishness and of a bounded nationalist identity hostile to alterity, must also be reckoned with, perhaps now more than ever before. Once again, the officially unac­knowledged or absent presence of Kurds within nation-state discourses, practices, and policies, and the state’s failure of acceptance of Kurdish dif­ference, is a remarkable and tragic exception to the much-vaunted rule of accommodation, absorption, and welcoming of difference.

That the weave of ethnicities, pattern of migrancy (whether chosen or forced), and service to society and the state has a long history of precedents comes alive in Evliya’s writing. This is particularly true in his account of his time in the entourage of his mother’s Abkhazian kinsman, Melek Ahmed Pa⅞a, who served as grand vizier in 1650 and then as a provincial governor in posts as far apart as Bosnia, OchakovZOzu (spanning eastern Bulgaria and Romania along the Black Sea into Ukraine), Diyarbekir, and Van before his death in 1662. There were other Abkhazians besides Melek Ahmed in gov­ernment service, as well as other Caucasian groups (Georgians, Circassians, Armenians), and there were also Bosniaks and representatives of the other Balkan regions, including Greeks and Albanians, to say nothing of Kurds and Arabs from the southeast. All these ethnic identities were at one time or another present in Ottoman administrations. At any given moment, a polyphony of accents and dialects was likely to be recorded. Evliya, who is even now a resource for historical linguists—so acute was his ear for lan­guages, especially for scurrilous or scandalous sayings, curses, and puns or jokes (Dankoff, 1991)—delights in recording dramatic action and dia­logue. When Melek Ahmed is serving as grand vizier, Evliya satirizes the “saber rattling” of his Kurdish deputy Kudde Kethuda from ^ermik, who has already been described speaking “in his Diyarbekir dialect,” now incit­ing repressive action against the citizenry during a period of rebellion in Anatolia and a tradesmen’s uprising in Istanbul (Dankoff and Murphey, 1991, pp. 83, 63). Citing the presence of “3,000 warriors” in the imperial barracks, “Abkhazians, Circassians, Georgians, Kurds, and Albanians,” all “tried in battle” (Dankoff and Murphey, 1991, p. 83), Kudde echoes the mixed ethnic origins of the imperial bureaucracy. (Evliya, himself both Abkhazian and Anatolian-Turkish, sympathizes with the ordinary people of Istanbul, protesting against administrative profiteering and indicating that the tradesmen have a point.) Evliya never fails to note the origins of administrators, whether Gurcu (Georgian) (Dankoff and Murphey, 1991, p. 92), Abkhaz, or Kurdish, and often finds confidantes on his travels from elsewhere, such as “Bo^nak Ali Zaim of Esztergom” (a Bosnian from Hungary), one of his mentors during his participation in a diplomatic mis­sion to Vienna (Dankoff and Kim, 2010, p. 234).