Abstract
How was it that a symbol of ancient Greek civilization, which played a fundamental role in the formation of modern European identity, was also appreciated and adopted by the Ottomans and later by the Turks? Günay Uslu's Homer, Troy, and the Turks: Heritage and Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1870–1915 seeks answers to this question. What makes this question striking is the prevalent assumption that long regarded the Homeric heritage as something belonging exclusively to the so-called Western world and that did not see the Ottomans and the Turks as part and parcel of it. The question becomes even more striking considering that the same assumption also charged European nations with the protection of ‘this heritage against the “barbarian” inhabitants of these regions in the East, who could not have any historical relationship to Ancient sites and antiquities’ (23). Through a detailed analysis of Ottoman archival sources and literature, Uslu attempts to explore Ottoman-Turkish engagements with Classical heritage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when ‘European anti-Turkish sentiments were reaching new heights … and … Europeans rejected the Ottoman part in their universal history of civilization’ (88). As a result of the desire to be part of the narrative of civilization, Uslu argues, the Ottomans embraced the different historical layers of their land and dealt far more with Classical heritage than historians of archaeology have hitherto acknowledged.
Uslu lays out her argument in five chapters bookended by an Introduction and an Epilogue. The first chapter focuses on the discovery of Troy in the 1870s by Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann's excavations in the region throughout the decade, his smuggling of Priam's Treasure and strained relationship with Ottoman authorities, the rise of Ottoman interest in antiquities and increasing official involvement in archaeology fall within the scope of this chapter. Chapter 2 considers the Ottoman elite's perspective on Classical heritage and developments in Troy. Exploring the ways in which Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals coped with the European exclusion of the Ottomans from Classical heritage, the chapter emphasizes that ‘the European desire to possess antiquities from Ottoman territories encouraged the Ottoman appropriation of Classical Antiquity’ (87). This was largely why, Uslu argues, the Ottoman Imperial Museum ‘developed from a small collection into an institution with empire-wide ambitions’ (83) and the Ottoman state decided to implement closer control over the activities of foreign archaeologists in the 1880s. Chapter 3 deals with such arrangements and the new Antiquities Legislation of 1884, which was adapted largely from the Greek Antiquities Law of 1834 and brought stricter measures for the protection of archaeological artefacts.
The next chapter concentrates on a different aspect of the Ottoman interest in Homer and Troy: their representation in late Ottoman literature. Tracing how Homer was read, approached and translated by the Ottomans in the second half of the nineteenth century, this chapter asserts that Homer gradually became a key point of reference in late Ottoman literature, despite all the cultural and religious reservations of Ottoman intellectuals about mythology and mythological accounts. Chapter 5 surveys the excavations carried out in Troy by Schliemann and his successor Wilhelm Dörpfeld during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter also deals with the New Hellenism movement in Ottoman literature in the 1910s that stimulated further interest in Homer and Troy among Ottoman intellectuals. Lastly, the Epilogue explains how the Ottoman Turks identified the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli with the Trojan War and themselves with the Trojans. This identification, as Uslu underlines, points to a new juncture in Ottoman-Turkish visions of Troy, which would be consecrated as a national lieu de mémoire in republican Turkey.
Revealing the much-neglected Ottoman-Turkish perspective on Troy and Homeric heritage, Uslu's book revises one of the most prevalent views in the existing literature that highlights the supposed Ottoman disinterest in Classical Antiquity and ascribes a passive role to the Ottomans in the history of archaeology. Nevertheless, the book hardly contextualizes the Ottoman interest in Homeric heritage within the framework of the development of Ottoman archaeology in the late nineteenth century. In a study which aims to explore Ottoman-Turkish engagements with Classical heritage, it would have been useful to learn more about other archaeological activities of the Ottomans in different parts of the empire and to see the connections among those, including the Ottoman involvement in Troy. The same problem also causes a difficulty in explaining one of the main arguments of the book. As a result of the neglect of the broader Ottoman archaeological interest and rising historical consciousness, Uslu cannot detail how the Ottomans ‘incorporate[d] the region's past into their imperial identity’ and ‘reformulated the imperial Ottoman ‘dynastic history along nationalist lines’, and made a point ‘to situate and secure this history’ within ‘a universal history of civilization as it was defined by the West’ (87). This criticism notwithstanding, Uslu's book provides significant insights into late Ottoman cultural and intellectual history. It also successfully brings together the Ottoman and European experiences connected with Homer and Troy and urges us to cross the established borders between European and Ottoman historiographies.