Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

institutions or did they create their own?[25] These too are serious questions
for the historian, but they lack the imbroglio of nationalist polemics, at least
in a directly perceptible way. Had Normandy been a nation-state or a province
with self-assertive Normans, the situation might have been different. Whereas,
if in the questions posed above you were to replace Normans with early Ottomans,
and Carolingian with Byzantine, you could have a whole range of settings for a
politically charged discussion, from the corridors of a university to a
coffeehouse in Istanbul or Thessaloniki. Charming as this may sound, there are
drawbacks, as illustrated by the case of Petropoulos, who was persecuted under
the Greek junta for, among other
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things, writing a book called Ho tourkikos kaphes ("Turkish coffee," which the
junta ordered to be called "Greek coffee"). Similarly, under the Turkish junta
of the early 1980s, an academician could suffer for writing about the presence
of Armenian and other Christian fief-holders in the early Ottoman armies, whose
existence is an undeniable fact. Such tensions may get more serious under
military regimes but are not limited to them; even in "normal times," one can
feel the heat generated by arguing whether Cyril and Methodius were Greek or
Slavic, or by dealing with the ethnic origins of Sinan , that most accomplished
of Ottoman architects who was recruited in the sixteenth century through a levy
that was applied to non-Muslim subjects.
True, the majority of historians have scoffed at this sort of thing, but without
directly tackling the assumption of a continuous national identity, a linear
nationhood or national essence that underlies even their own nonchauvinistic
historiography. If "we" (from the point of view of modern Turkish consciousness)
or "the Turks" (from the point of view of non-Turkish historiography) have come
on horseback from Inner Asia and established a state that replaced the Byzantine
Empire of "the Greeks;' it is only human that to be "one of us" (or "one of the
Turks") one needs to assume, or in some cases feels compelled to "prove," that
one's ancestry derives from the steppe nomads. And if one is of the Greeks, then
one "knows" that one's ancestors have been oppressed by the Turks. Fortunately,
such assumptions or presumptions can usually be made relatively easily at the
individual level, where one slips into the role of
citizen-as-member-of-the-nation (unless one is from a self-conscious minority,
in which case one is a member of another "we" in a similarly linear story). It
must have been rather traumatic, however, for a republican descendant of Köse
Mihal (Mikhalis the Beardless), one of the founding fathers of the Ottoman
state, a Bithynian Christian who joined forces with Osman, converted, and
started a minidynasty of raiders in the service of the House of Osman. The
twentieth-century Turk, proud enough to take Gazimihal as his last name, at the
same time felt compelled to write an article "proving" his glorious ancestor was
also a Turk. In this fanciful account, Mihal is one of those Christianized Turks
employed by the Byzantines who eventually chooses to join his brethren on the
right side.[26]
The essentialist trap cannot be avoided unless we, the historians, problematize
the use of "the Turks" (or any other ethnonym for that matter), systematically
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