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PAKSOY, Alaaddin-ÇOLAK, Kamil
Representation of the Treaty of Sèvres in the Istanbul Press in 1920
At the end of World War I, the Allied Powers offered the Ottomans a very limited piece of land in Central Anatolia
to inhabit. The plan was going to be realized by a peace treaty signed in Sèvres, France on 10 August 1920. If the Turkish
National Movement did not take place following World War I, most parts of Anatolia were going to be occupied by the
Allied Powers.
Referring to the comments of Esref Pasha, the Treaty of Sèvres is represented as “the death penalty” by Aksam
Newspaper on 30 May 1920. Even though it is a born dead political incident, it is strangely still alive in contemporary Turkey’s
political discussions. The treaty has never entered into force but it stayed in Turkish people’s minds as a tragedy and
transformed into a syndrome, i.e. the notion of “Sèvres Syndrome” in today’s Turkish political discourse and media agenda
(Guida, 2008).
The study seeks to explore how the Istanbul press of 1920 represented this subversive treaty to its readers. Firstly,
the study will present the overall aspects of Istanbul newspapers in terms of their political stand within the post-WWI
period. Then, the paper will deal with its empirical findings and unveil how the Treaty of Sèvres was portrayed in the Istanbul
press during the time the Ottoman Empire was bound to collapse. All news reports and opinion articles published in
7 Istanbul papers in 1920 will be included in the research sample and will be analyzed by employing a qualitative content
analysis.
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