[Alumni-chat] Lighten up about the Ottoman Empire

[thanos]

Relax, Yazz.  Most of your Antioch history posts are fun and 
interesting.  It's the capsule history of entire regions that gets 
dodgy.  The Ottoman empire may seem distant and exotic to you, but 
you should know that it is a very, very complex subject that has been 
heavily simplified by generations of nationalist - or lazy - 
historians and Wikipedia is not the definitive resource.

For instance, to say 'the ancient city of Antioch (located in Syria 
for most of history until the British re-drew the map' is absurd.  
The nation of Syria was first created after World War I.  Before 
that, the land of Syria was just another province of the Ottoman 
empire and its borders ebbed and flowed over the years depending on 
who was in charge.  Before the Ottoman conquest, there were the 
Mongols, the Arab Abassids, the Romans etc. etc. and let's not even 
mention Alexander the Great.  The city of Antioch was a regional 
capital for some of its history, a dusty backwater for most, and it 
was ruled by lots of empires - but it has only ever been part of one 
nation-state:  Turkey.

Re:  'Turkey's Ottoman empire' -  The Ottoman empire was by no means 
a purely Turkish operation.  To the extent that we can even apply 
terms like 'ethnic Turk' to people in history who did not define 
their identity the same way we do, it may be that most of the Ottoman 
sultans were ethnic Turks, but not all.  I'm a bit rusty on this, but 
I think there was an Albanian sultan (even the Roman emperor 
Constantine the Great, who legalized Christianity, was born in 
Albania), there was at least one Kurdish sultan (Saladin) and 
probably an Arab one.  In any case the administration of the
Ottomans was composed of Greeks, Iranians, Bulgarians, Kurds, 
Scythians and so on etc. etc.  The scholars and even the 
nationalist theoreticians of modern-day Turkey are also quite 
ambivalent about the Ottomans.

Basically, Yazz, you wrote a capsule history that strongly implies 
all nations have been nations since forever and they've all been 
fucked over by the Brits, and it just ain't so.  History is a lot 
more complicated than that.  (Well, actually, it's probably true that 
the Brits have fucked over most of the world at one time or another.) 
  So while it's refreshing to think about ancient Antioch while 
agonizing over contemporary Antioch, try not to go overboard.

So what colour is the water in Antakya?

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