Abstract
Against the background of recent scholarship on the notion of nostalgia in literature and popular culture, this chapter discusses how two recent Greek historical novels set in pre-national Ottoman times in different ways make use of nostalgia as a literary device. The novels challenge hitherto perceptions of the Ottoman period as the Dark Age of the Greek nation. However, nostalgic representations of the past say more about the present and longings for a better future than about the past ‘as it was’. Therefore, the chapter suggests that the nostalgic remembrance of religious co-existence in Ottoman society and the persistence of cross-religious symbols in the novels function as proposals for a better dealing with increasing religious and cultural diversity in contemporary Greek society pointing to the transformative potential of nostalgia.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to The Seeger Center For Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, which offered me the opportunity to discuss and elaborate this chapter through a Stanley Seeger Visiting Fellowship in the spring of 2015. Special thanks to Center Director Dimitri Gondicas, Professor Theresa Shawcross, and participants at the Hellenic Studies workshop on 13 February 2015 for constructive feedback. A first version of this paper was presented at the workshop ‘Nostalgia—Loss and Creativity’ (University of Copenhagen 2013), and I thank respondent Elisabeth Özdalga and the participants for their useful comments.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2002 the Justice and Development Party won the national elections with a program that challenged Kemalism and, for the first time in modern Turkey’s history, introduced the ideology of Islamism.
- 2.
http://smyrnadocumentary.org/?lang=en&cat=1. Accessed 19 May 2014.
- 3.
In recent years the Ottoman Empire has increasingly attracted the attention of historians, sociologists, and other history-making institutions (documentary films, museums, art, and so on) as a multi-cultural empire and perhaps an exemplary society for developing cosmopolitanism. The cross-disciplinary research network Ottoman Cosmopolitanism (https://ottomancosmopolitanism.wordpress.com/), with the international conference ‘Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories’ (Birkbeck College, 26–27 June 2014), can be seen as a prime example of this new ‘paradigm’. Other examples of the trend of looking at the Ottoman Empire through the lens of cosmopolitanism are Mazower 2004 and Jasanoff 2005; see also Zubaida 2002 and Hanley 2008 for critical approaches to the phenomenon. This specific geographical and historical attention has developed out of the wider ‘paradigm of cosmopolitanism’ related to the various interpretations of the consequences of globalization (e.g. Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Appiah 2006; Beck 2002), but also out of the challenges facing Western societies in dealing with an increasingly diverse (‘multi-cultural’) population in supposedly homogeneous national communities.
- 4.
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- 6.
http://www.thessalonikiartsandculture.gr/blog/texnopersona/ti-apeginan-ta-eksairetika-othomanika-mnimeia-stin-ellada-argyris-bakirtzis#.U3yD9vl_tIE. Accessed 21 May 2014; http://www.gnomiartas.gr/afierwmata/item/6368-imaret-artas. Accessed 21 May 2014; http://www.peartas.gov.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=431:2013-09-24-11-32-08&catid=36:2011-05-31-05-48-28&Itemid=4. Accessed 21 May 2014.
- 7.
The change in Turkish foreign policy and identity politics since the Justice and Development Party gained power in 2002 has been termed by many observers, especially in Greece, neo-Ottomanism, indicating that Turkey aspires to re-establish its regional influence in the former Ottoman territories. Owing to the party’s undisguised Islamic foundation and its cultural policy, intended to rehabilitate the Ottoman era through city planning, architecture, education, and so on, it is also seen as promoting a neo-Ottoman cultural revival. In Greece, the term neo-Ottomanism is often used in the rhetoric associated with the country’s traditional rivalry with the large neighbour and enemy par excellence. See for example Karabelias 2009 and Tachopoulos 2012.
- 8.
In Greek historical and political discourse, the 1922 crushing defeat of the Greek army, the subsequent capture of the city of Smyrna by Kemal Atatürk’s forces, and the burning down of the Armenian and Greek city quarters, which caused tens of thousands of Christians to flee, goes under the designation the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’.
- 9.
Sotiriou’s novel Bloodied Earth consists of three parts. The first is called ‘peaceful life’, the second ‘the Greeks came’, and the third ‘the catastrophe’. These headlines indicate that the author distinguishes between the Greek-speaking Christians living the ‘peaceful life’ in Asia Minor and the Greeks from the Greek nation-state who ‘came’ in the second part and directly or indirectly provoked the catastrophe of the third part.
- 10.
- 11.
Kastrinaki (1998) shows that in the 1950s, Greek authors like Stratis Doukas, Ilias Venezis, Pantelis Prevelakis, and Nikos Kazantzakis revised their novels published before the German occupation (1941–1944) so that the reprehensible actions committed by Greeks in the first versions are toned down or removed. From descriptions of Greeks acting individually, there is a change of focus towards Greeks acting as a united community. Good deeds by Turks, on the other hand, are attributed to individual personalities. Thus the Greeks are presented as a homogeneous ‘ethnos’ with less focus on individual traits. Atrocities committed by Turks are not attributed to individuals but to a collective Turkish nature. Apart from individual exceptions, the Turks are presented as a homogeneous group and as the national enemy of the Greeks. Millas has also analyzed the image of Greeks and Turks in novels from this period and come to the conclusion that ‘Turks appear as negative personalities whenever they are portrayed as abstract/historical characters and as potentially positive individuals when presented as concrete/experienced persons’ (2006, 47). The same applies to Ottoman rule, which ‘is depicted negatively as a historical event, but positively in personal memories’ (ibid.).
- 12.
The Greek spelling is Νετζίπ, pronounced ‘nedsip’.
- 13.
Imarets were Islamic soup-kitchens often associated with mosques and providing care for elderly or sick people and lodging for travellers. In some cases they were also learning institutions. They were known from the fourteenth century as institutions of Islam, but during the nineteenth century their role as a unifying factor of Ottomanization was enforced by (1) the Tanzimat reforms, (2) new ideas about how to care for the poor, and (3) the increasingly widespread phenomenon of dislocation due to wars and loss of territory (Singer 2012). In Greece today, the best-known (remnants of) Imarets are the Imarets of Arta and Kavala. The Imaret of Kavala has also played a role in recent Greek literary works on cultural and religious co-existence in Ottoman times (Grigoriadis 1998; Axiotis 1999).
- 14.
All translations from Greek original texts were made by the author.
- 15.
On Ottoman clock towers see, for example, Uluengin 2010.
- 16.
The name Ismail brings to mind the first contemporary Greek historical novel that touched upon the issue of national and religious identity in the light of Ottoman history, Ismail Ferik Pasha—spina nel cuore (Galanaki 1989). Both Galanaki’s Ismail Ferik Pasha and Kalpouzos’ grandfather Ismail are Muslims with a Christian background. The first was captured by the Ottoman army as a child and forced to convert; the other is a descendant of Christians who converted to Islam. Yet it is hard to tell whether the intertextual reference is intended. The narrative strategies of the novels couldn’t be more dissimilar, but both play on double identities to reflect a past with more cultural, religious, and linguistic mixing than what has been the case in the age of national homogenization.
- 17.
Σπαχήδες in Greek refers to the Ottoman cavalry corps, the sipahis (Greene 2015, 7ff, 82).
- 18.
- 19.
Leontios is also the name of a Christian martyred in 315 AD under the Roman emperor Licinius (265–323).
- 20.
The second novel by this author, Saints and Demons—In the City (2010), plays even more on the exoticizing and Orientalizing gaze, as the Rudolf Ernst painting The Perfume Makers on the cover indicates (http://www.biblionet.gr/book/162860/%CE%86%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%BF%CE%B9_%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9_%CE%B4%CE%B1%CE%AF%CE%BC%CE%BF%CE%BD%CE%B5%CF%82_%CE%B5%CE%B9%CF%82_%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%BD_%CE%A0%CF%8C%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BD).
- 21.
An eyewitness account by a Christian (Greek) woman who was expelled from Cappadocia in 1923 describes the departure in similar terms: ‘We saw our houses for the last time, our land, and we cried. (…) We kneeled, crossed ourselves, took a handful of earth (…) and while crying we mounted the animals’ (testimony from the Center for Asia Minor Studies, Mourelos 1982, 21).
- 22.
Folkloristic realism, or ithografia, emerged as a literary trend in Greek writing from the 1880s as a result, on the one hand, of influences from European realism and naturalism and, on the other, of demands in domestic political and cultural life for a national literature of the people. It has been a recurring feature in Greek literature up through the twentieth century, and now it is being revived by the current trends in historical fiction about the Ottoman period.
- 23.
The novel Imaret can be characterized as a chronicle of the town of Arta. As such it continues a tradition in Greek literature that was perhaps initiated with Pantelis Prevelakis’ Chronicle of a Town (1937), which is a heavily nostalgic depiction of the Cretan town of Rethymnon from 1898 to 1924 and which speaks respectfully of the town’s Muslim inhabitants. To some extent it idealizes the cultural co-existence of the time before the enforced expulsion of Cretan Muslims in 1923. Recently, Maro Douka, a highly acclaimed author of historical novels, has also taken up the genre of the town chronicle, in her case of Cretan Chania, but with a narrative twist as the historical town is experienced through the eyes of a contemporary Turkish descendant of the expelled Muslims (The Innocent and the Guilty, 2004).
- 24.
- 25.
The Greek-Christian protagonist’s life depended on the nourishment he could get from the Turkish Muslim protagonist’s mother because his own mother couldn’t feed him. The successful career of the Turkish protagonist depended on the Greek education he could get by learning from his Greek friend and eventually attending his school.
- 26.
A similar plot is seen in the blockbuster movie A Touch of Spice (2003), directed by Tassos Boulmetis, which tells the story of a childhood love between a Greek boy and a Turkish girl in Istanbul in the early 1960s. The relationship abruptly ends with the Greek boy’s family’s expulsion to Greece; but the nostalgia of that love, both between the two individuals and between the expelled persons and their former home, marks the lives of the protagonists, who finally meet again as adults only to recognize that the common life they had experienced is gone forever, the common language of their childhood having been erased by the homogenizing efforts of nation-states.
- 27.
‘Pontian’ refers to Greek Orthodox inhabitants of the Black Sea region.
- 28.
In April 2002, at its eighth congress, the PKK changed its name to KADEK (Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress) and committed to fighting for a democratic solution within the existing state system instead of aiming at the creation of a Kurdish nation-state (Gunes 2012, 140).
- 29.
The crossing of religious boundaries was a more widespread phenomenon in the Ottoman Empire than is usually recognized. From oral testimonies by Greek Asia Minor refugees we know that religious holidays and sacred shrines were often shared by Muslims and Christians, even if these testimonies by Christians of Muslims approaching the Christian religion are meant to indicate the superiority of Christianity (Doumanis 2013, 110–114).
- 30.
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Willert, T.S. (2018). ‘Everything Has Its Place in God’s Imaret’: Nostalgic Visions of Co-existence in Contemporary Greek Historical Fiction. In: Raudvere, C. (eds) Nostalgia, Loss and Creativity in South-East Europe. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71252-9_5
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