On the closing sunset earlier than the primary spherical of voting within the hardest election of his two-decade rule, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey visited Hagia Sophia for night prayers — and to remind his voters of simply what he had delivered.
For almost a millennium the domed cathedral had been the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it grew to become one of many Islamic world’s best mosques. Within the Nineteen Thirties, the brand new Turkish republic proclaimed it a museum, and for almost a century its overlapping Christian and Muslim histories made it Turkey’s most visited cultural website.
President Erdogan was not so ecumenical: In 2020 he transformed it again right into a mosque. When Turks return to the poll field this Sunday for the presidential runoff, they are going to be voting partially on the political ideology behind that cultural metamorphosis.
Be a part of the crowds on the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque now, leaving your sneakers on the new lengthy racks within the internal narthex, and you may nearly glimpse the mosaics of Christ and the Virgin, in the present day discreetly sheathed with white curtains. The well-known marble flooring has been upholstered with thick turquoise carpet. The sound is extra muffled. The sunshine’s brighter, because of golden chandeliers. Proper on the entrance, in a easy body, is a presidential proclamation: a monumental swipe on the nation’s secular century, and an affirmation of a brand new Turkey worthy of its Ottoman heyday.
“Hagia Sophia is the crowning of that neo-Ottomanist dream,” mentioned Edhem Eldem, professor of historical past at Bogazici College in Istanbul. “It’s principally a transposition of political and ideological fights, debates, polemical views, into the realm of a really, very primitive understanding of historical past and the previous.”
If the mark of Twenty first-century politics is the ascendancy of tradition and identification over economics and sophistication, it may very well be mentioned to have been born right here in Turkey, residence to one of many longest-running tradition wars of all of them. And for the previous 20 years, in grand monuments and on schlocky cleaning soap operas, at restored archaeological websites and retro new mosques, Mr. Erdogan has reoriented Turkey’s nationwide tradition, selling a nostalgic revival of the Ottoman previous — typically in grand model, typically as pure kitsch.
After surviving a decent first spherical of voting earlier this month, he’s now favored to win a runoff election on Sunday towards Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the candidate of the joint opposition. His resiliency, when ballot after ballot predicted his defeat, definitely expresses his get together’s systematic management of Turkey’s media and courts. (Freedom Home, a democracy watchdog group, downgraded Turkey from “partly free” to “not free” in 2018.) However authoritarianism is about a lot greater than ballots and bullets. Tv and music, monuments and memorials have all been prime levers of a political mission, a marketing campaign of cultural ressentiment and nationwide rebirth, that culminated this Might on the blue-green carpets beneath Hagia Sophia’s dome.
Exterior Turkey, this cultural flip is usually described as “Islamist,” and Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Improvement Social gathering, often known as the A.Okay.P., have certainly permitted non secular observances that had been as soon as banned, such because the sporting of head scarves by ladies in public establishments. A Museum of Islamic Civilizations, full with a “digital dome” and lightweight projections à la the immersive Van Gogh Expertise, opened in 2022 in Istanbul’s new largest mosque.
But this election means that nationalism, moderately than faith, will be the true driver of Mr. Erdogan’s cultural revolution. His celebrations of the Ottoman previous — and the resentment of its supposed haters, whether or not within the West or at residence — have gone hand in hand with nationalist efforts unrelated to Islam. The nation has mounted aggressive campaigns for the return of Greco-Roman antiquities from Western museums. International archaeological groups have had their permits withdrawn. Turkey stands on the bleak vanguard of a bent seen throughout now, not least in america: a cultural politics of perpetual grievance, the place even in victory you’re indignant.
For this nation’s writers, artists, students and singers, going through censorship or worse, the prospect of a change in authorities was much less a matter of political desire than of sensible survival. Since 2013, when an Occupy-style protest motion at Istanbul’s Gezi Park took direct intention at his authorities, Mr. Erdogan has taken a tough flip to authoritarian rule. Quite a few cultural figures stay imprisoned, together with the architect Mucella Yapici, the filmmakers Mine Ozerden and Cigdem Mater, and the humanities philanthropist Osman Kavala. Writers like Can Dundar and Asli Erdogan (no relation), who had been jailed throughout the purges that adopted a failed army coup towards Mr. Erdogan in 2016, dwell in exile in Germany.
Greater than a dozen musical live shows had been canceled final 12 months, amongst them a recital by the violinist Ara Malikian, who’s of Armenian descent, and a gig by the pop-folk singer Aynur Dogan, who’s Kurdish. The tensions reached a grim crescendo this month, shortly earlier than the primary spherical of voting, when a Kurdish singer was stabbed to demise at a ferry terminal after declining to sing a Turkish nationalist music.
Within the days after the primary spherical of voting, I met with Banu Cennetoglu, one of many nation’s most acclaimed artists, whose commemoration of a Kurdish journalist on the 2017 version of the modern artwork exhibition Documenta received acclaim overseas however introduced aggravation at residence. “What is frightening proper now in comparison with the 90s, which was additionally a really tough time, particularly for the Kurdish group, is that then we might guess the place the evil was coming from,” she instructed me. “And now it may very well be anybody. It’s way more random.”
The technique has labored. Impartial media has shrunk. Self-censorship is rife. “All of the establishments inside artwork and tradition have been extraordinarily silent for 5 years,” Ms. Cennetoglu mentioned. “And for me that is unacceptable, as an artist. That is my query: when will we activate the crimson line? When do we are saying no, and why?”
Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. “Everyone and his uncle is a nationalist on this nation,” Mr. Eldem noticed. And the Kemalists — the secular elite who dominated politics right here for many years till Mr. Erdogan’s triumph in 2003 — additionally used nationalist themes to spin tradition to their political ends. Turkey’s early cinema glorified the achievements of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Archaeological digs for Hittite antiquities aimed to present the brand new republic with a previous rooted much more deeply than Greece and Italy.
Within the 2000s, Mr. Erdogan’s mix of Islamism and reformism had Turkey knocking on the door of the European Union. A brand new Istanbul was being feted within the overseas press. However the brand new Turkish nationalism has a unique cultural solid: proudly Islamic, typically antagonistic, and typically a little bit paranoid.
One of many sign cultural establishments of the Erdogan years is the Panorama 1453 Historical past Museum, in a working-class district west of Hagia Sophia, the place schoolchildren uncover the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in a painted cyclorama. At one level, a portray within the spherical may need been immersion sufficient. Now it’s been souped up with blaring video projections, a wildly nationalist pageant styled just like the online game “Civilization.” Youngsters can watch Sultan Mehmed II cost towards Hagia Sophia, whereas his horse rears up in entrance of a celestial fireball.
There’s an identical backward projection in Turkey’s tv dramas, that are massively widespread not simply right here however internationally, with a whole lot of thousands and thousands of viewers all through the Muslim world, in Germany, in Mexico, throughout. On reveals corresponding to “Resurrection: Ertugrul,” a world hit a few Thirteenth-century Turkic chieftain, or “Kurulus: Osman,” a “Recreation of Thrones”-esque Ottoman saga airing each Wednesday right here, previous and current begin to merge.
“They’re casting the discourse of Tayyip Erdogan within the vintage ages,” mentioned Ayse Cavdar, a cultural anthropologist who’s studied these reveals. “If Erdogan faces a battle proper now, it’s recast in an Ottoman context, a fictional context. On this approach, not the information about in the present day’s battle, however the feeling of it, is unfold by means of society.”
In these half-historical cleaning soap operas, the heroes are decisive, courageous, wonderful, however the polities they lead are fragile, teetering, menaced by outsiders. Ms. Cavdar famous how continuously the TV reveals characteristic leaders of an rising, endangered state. “As if this man has not been governing the state for 20 years!” she mentioned.
Tradition got here on the agenda throughout the runoff, too, as Mr. Erdogan confirmed as much as inaugurate the brand new residence of Istanbul Trendy. The president had reward for the brand new Bosporus-side museum, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano — however he couldn’t assist bashing the creations of the earlier century, with what he described as a misguided abandonment of the Ottoman custom.
Now, the president promised, an genuine “Turkish century” was about to daybreak.
Assuming he wins on Sunday, his neo-Ottomanism may have survived its strongest check in twenty years. The cultural figures with essentially the most to remorse are after all these in jail, however it’ll even be a bitter end result for the lecturers, authors and others who left the nation within the wake of Mr. Erdogan’s purges. “A.Okay.P.’s social engineering could be in comparison with monoculture in industrial agriculture,” mentioned Asli Cavusoglu, a younger artist who not too long ago had a solo present at New York’s New Museum. “There’s one kind of vegetable they spend money on. Different crops — intellectuals, artists — are unable to develop, and that’s why they depart.”
Turkey’s minorities could face the best hazards. On the memorial museum for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist assassinated in 2007, I seemed by means of copies of his unbiased newspaper and watched footage of his tv chat reveals, every an admonishment of up to date Turkey’s constricted freedom of expression. “Civil society actors have gotten extra prudent,” mentioned Nayat Karakose, who oversees the museum and is of Armenian descent. “They do occasions in a extra cautious approach.”
For Mr. Eldem, who has spent his profession finding out Ottoman historical past, the reconversion of Hagia Sophia and the “Tudors”-style TV dramas are all of a chunk, and are much less assured than they appear. “Nationalism is not only glorification,” he mentioned. “It’s additionally victimization. You’ll be able to’t have correct nationalism should you’ve by no means suffered. As a result of struggling offers you additionally absolution from potential misconduct.”
“So what the naïve Turkish nationalist, and particularly neo-Ottomanist nationalist, needs,” he added, “is to deliver collectively the concept of an excellent empire that may have been benign. That’s not a factor. An empire is an empire.”
However whether or not or not Mr. Erdogan wins the election on Sunday, there are headwinds that no quantity of cultural nationalism can stand towards: above all, inflation and a foreign money disaster that has bankers and monetary analysts flashing a crimson alert. “In that future, there’s no place for heritage,” Mr. Eldem mentioned. “The Ottomans should not going to avoid wasting you.”
