How Erdogan reoriented Turkish culture to keep his power
At the last sunset before the first round of voting in the toughest election of his two decades of rule, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Hagia Sophia for evening prayers — and to remind his constituents of just what he had delivered.
For nearly a millennium, the Domed Cathedral was the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it became one of the most beautiful mosques in the Islamic world. In the 1930s, the new Turkish republic declared it a museum, and for nearly a century its overlapping Christian and Muslim history made it Turkey’s most visited cultural site.
President Erdogan was not so ecumenical: in 2020 he converted it into a mosque again. When Turks return to the polls this Sunday for the presidential runoff, they will vote in part on the political ideology behind that cultural metamorphosis.
Now join the crowds at the Great Mosque of Hagia Sophia, leave your shoes in the new long racks in the inner gallery and you might just catch a glimpse of the mosaics of Christ and the Virgin, today discreetly wrapped in white curtains . The famous marble floor is covered with thick turquoise carpet. The sound is more muffled. The light is brighter, thanks to gold chandeliers. Immediately at the entrance, in a simple frame, is a presidential proclamation: a monumental swipe at the country’s secular century and an affirmation of a new Turkey worthy of its Ottoman heyday.
“The Hagia Sophia is the pinnacle of that neo-Ottoman dream,” he said Edhem Eldem, professor of history at Bogazici University in Istanbul. “It’s actually a transposition of political and ideological battles, debates, polemical views, into the realm of a very, very primitive understanding of history and the past.”
If the hallmark of 21st century politics is the predominance of culture and identity over economy and class, it could be argued that it originated here in Turkey, home to one of the longest-running culture wars of all. And over the past 20 years, in grand monuments and in schlocky soap operas, in restored archaeological sites and retro new mosquesMr. Erdogan has reoriented Turkish national culture and promoted a nostalgic revival of the Ottoman past – sometimes in grand style, sometimes as sheer kitsch.
Having survived a narrow first round of voting earlier this month, he is now favored to win a second round against the joint opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu on Sunday. His resilience, as poll after poll predicted his defeat, is certainly an expression of his party’s systematic scrutiny of the Turkish government. media And Courts. (Freedom House, a democratic watchdog organization, downgraded Turkey from “partly free” to “not free” in 2018.) But authoritarianism is about so much more than votes and bullets. Television and music, monuments and memorials have all been major levers of a political project, a campaign of cultural resentment and national rebirth, culminating in May on the blue-green carpets under the dome of the Hagia Sophia.
Outside of Turkey, this cultural twist is often described as “Islamic,” and Mr Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, have indeed allowed religious practices that were once banned, such as women wearing headscarves in Turkey. public institutions. A Museum of Islamic Civilizations, complete with a “digital dome” and light projections à la the immersive Van Gogh Experience, will open in 2022 in Istanbul’s new largest mosque.
Yet this election suggests that nationalism, rather than religion, could be the true engine of Erdogan’s cultural revolution. His celebrations of the Ottoman past — and the resentment of his perceived haters, both in the West and at home — went hand in hand with nationalist efforts unrelated to Islam. The country has aggressively campaigned for the return of Greco-Roman antiquities from Western museums. The permits of foreign archaeological teams have been withdrawn. Turkey is at the bleak forefront of a trend now seen everywhere, not least in the United States: a cultural policy of perpetual resentment, which you are indignant about even in victory.
For the writers, artists, scholars and singers of this country, faced with censorship or worse, the prospect of a change of government was not so much a matter of political preference as of practical survival. Since 2013, when an Occupy-style protest movement in Istanbul’s Gezi Park came under direct fire against his government, Erdogan has been working hard to build an authoritarian regime. Numerous cultural figures are still imprisoned, including the architect Mucella Yapici, the filmmakers Mine Ozerden and Cigdem Mater, and the art philanthropist Osman Kavala. Writers love Can Dundar And Ashley Erdogan (no relation), who were imprisoned during the purges that followed a failed military coup against Mr Erdogan in 2016, live in exile in Germany.
More than a dozen music concerts were canceled last year, including a recital by violinist Ara Malikian, who is of Armenian descent, and a performance by pop-folk singer Aynur Dogan, who is Kurdish. Tensions reached a grim climax this month, shortly before the first round of voting, when a Kurdish singer was stabbed to death at a ferry terminal after refusing to sing a Turkish nationalist song.
In the days following the first round of voting, I met with Banu Cennetoglu, one of the country’s most acclaimed artists, whose memorial of a Kurdish journalist at the 2017 edition of the contemporary art exhibition Documenta received acclaim abroad but caused annoyance at home. “What is scary now compared to the 90s, which was also a very difficult time, especially for the Kurdish community, is that we could guess where the evil came from,” she told me. “And now it can be anyone. It’s much more random.”
The strategy has worked. Independent media has shrunk. Self-censorship is commonplace. “All institutions within art and culture have been extremely silent for five years,” Ms Cennetoglu said. “And for me, this is unacceptable, as an artist. This is my question: when do we activate the red line? When do we say no, and why?”
Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. “Everyone and their uncle are nationalists in this country,” Mr. Eldem remarked. And the Kemalists—the secular elite who dominated politics here for decades until Erdogan’s triumph in 2003—also used nationalistic themes to turn culture toward their political ends. Turkey’s early cinema glorified Mustafa Kemal’s achievements Ataturk. Archaeological excavations for Hittite antiquities give the new republic a past even more deeply rooted than Greece and Italy.
In the 2000s, Mr Erdogan’s mix of Islamism and reformism made Turkey knock at the door of the European Union. A new Istanbul was celebrated in the foreign press. But the new Turkish nationalism has a different cultural cast: proudly Islamic, often hostile and sometimes a little paranoid.
One of the most important cultural institutions of the Erdogan years is the Panorama 1453 History Museum, in a working-class neighborhood west of Hagia Sophia, where schoolchildren discover the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in a painted cyclorama. At one point, a painting in the round might have been immersion enough. Now it’s staged with blaring video projections, a wild nationalistic spectacle in the style of the video game ‘Civilization’. Kids can see Sultan Mehmed II charging towards Hagia Sophia as his horse rears in front of a celestial fireball.
There is a similar backward projection in the Turkish television dramas, which are hugely popular not only here but also internationally, with hundreds of millions of viewers all over the Muslim world, in Germany, in Mexico, everywhere. On programs like “Resurrection: Ertugrul”, an international hit about a 13th-century Turkish chieftain, or “Kurulus: Osman”, a “Game of Thrones”-esque Ottoman saga broadcast here every Wednesday, past and present begin to merge.
“They cast Tayyip Erdogan’s discourse in ancient times,” said Ayse Cavdar, a cultural anthropologist who has studied these shows. “If Erdogan is involved in a battle right now, it will be recast in an Ottoman context, a fictional context. In this way, not the knowledge about today’s struggle, but the feeling of it is spread through society.”
In these semi-historical soap operas, the heroes are decisive, courageous, glorious, but the polity they lead is fragile, tottering, threatened by outsiders. Ms. Cavdar noted how often the TV shows feature leaders of an emerging, threatened state. “As if this man has not run the state for 20 years!” she said.
Culture was also on the agenda during the second round, when Mr. Erdogan showed up at the new home of Istanbul Modern. The president praised the new museum on the Bosphorus designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, but he couldn’t help but bash the last century’s creations, with what he described as a misguided abandonment of Ottoman tradition.
Now, the president promised, an authentic “Turkish century” was about to begin.
Assuming he wins on Sunday, his neo-Ottomanism will have passed its toughest test in two decades. The most regrettable cultural figures are, of course, those in prison, but it will also be a bitter outcome for the academics, authors and others who left the country in the wake of Erdogan’s purges. “The AKP’s social engineering can be compared to monoculture in industrial agriculture,” he said Asli Cavusoglu, a young artist who recently had a solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York. “There’s one type of vegetable they invest in. Other plants – intellectuals, artists – can’t grow and that’s why they leave.”
The Turkish minorities may be at greatest risk. At the memorial museum for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was murdered in 2007, I flipped through copies of his independent newspaper and watched footage from his TV chat shows, each an admonishment of the curtailed freedom of speech in contemporary Turkey. “Civil society actors are becoming more cautious,” said Nayat Karakose, who oversees the museum and is of Armenian descent. “They do events in a more prudent way.”
For Mr. Eldem, who has spent his career studying Ottoman history, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia and the “Tudors” style TV dramas are all a stretch, and less confident than they seem. “Nationalism is not just glorification,” he said. “It is also victimhood. You cannot have decent nationalism if you have never suffered. Because suffering also releases you from possible wrongdoing.”
“So what the naive Turkish nationalist, and especially the neo-Ottoman nationalist, wants,” he added, “is to put together the idea of a glorious empire that would have been benign. That’s not a thing. An empire is an empire.”
But whether or not Erdogan wins Sunday’s elections, there are headwinds that no cultural nationalism can withstand: especially inflation and a currency crisis that bankers and financial analysts flashing red alarm. “There is no place for heritage in that future,” Mr Eldem said. “The Ottomans are not going to save you.”