Shrine diplomacy: Turkey’s quest for a post-Kemalist identity

ABSTRACT

Shrines are many things to different people: war memorials, places of pilgrimage and even venues for shared festivities. The Sultan Murad shrine complex in Kosovo was raised to commemorate the strategic Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Over the past decade, however, it has assumed significance for Turkey as at no other time in the Republic’s history. Not only is it a key part of state visit itineraries, it also hosts dignitaries of various kinds, tourists and even schoolchildren from Turkey. Taking inspiration from historical and anthropological studies on shrines and memory, this paper dissects the significance of the Sultan Murad I shrine complex in Kosovo to contemporary Turkish foreign policy imaginaries. The shrine allows us to explore the wider motifs and symbols used in presenting the state’s attachment to physical spaces outside of its borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Shrines
• nostalgia
• memory
• Turkey
• Balkans
• Islam

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank all those who took part in the ‘Ambivalent Legacies’ conference held at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen for their comments. Anonymous reviewers also provided some interesting perspectives that enriched subsequent edits. Special thanks go to Jeremy Walton for his efforts in bringing this collection together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The battle itself was a draw but nonetheless established an Ottoman foothold that would last for over 500 years. For a perspective on the role of the Battle of Kosovo in hegemonic Serbian narratives of history and memory, see Dunja Resanović’s contribution to this volume.

2. ‘Kemalism’ is the unofficial name given to the secular and statist orientation taken by Turkey’s ruling elite for much of the Twentieth century. For a thorough discussion, see Hanioğlu (2011).

3. Though beyond the scope of this present paper, it is worth noting that Kosovar elites generally eschew positive images of the region’s Ottoman past for complex historical reasons (see Endresen 2012; Jazexhi 2011; Sadriu 2017).

4. The current caretaker is Saniye Turbedar, whose family has run the tomb since the mid-1800s.

5. H. T Norris explains the system thus: ‘A levy of Christian children, widespread in the Balkans, as elsewhere, for training in order to fill the ranks of the Janissaries or to occupy posts in the service of the court and the administration’ (1993, 46).

6. Albanians make up the vast majority of Kosovar Muslims, though Turks, Bosniaks, Gorani and the ancestors of Circassian refugees can also be found, among others.

7. Debates continue in academia regarding the applicability of the term genocide to colonial endeavours more broadly. As William Gallois has shown in his study of French dominated Algeria, scholars are now considering new concepts such as ‘“genocidal moment”, “genocidal massacres” and the “genocidal continuum” … to establish a historical typology of genocidal forms’ (2013, 70). Kosovo is comparable to Algeria here both in terms of their being a clear intentionality on the part of Belgrade and the structural actualisation of such projects. For Albanian scholars there is a long history of authors referring to Serbia’s policies in Kosovo as a genocide. They cite systematic expulsions, murders and looting of properties beginning in the late Nineteenth century. See Terziu (2005), Cana (1997) and Pllana (2001).

8. Take, for example, the tomb of Süleyman Shah, the grandfather of Osman I who founded the Ottoman Empire. The mausoleum, located today in Northern Syria, is thought to house his remains and under Article 9 of the 1921 Treaty of Ankara, Turkey was granted property rights over allowed to station an honour guard there. See Jenkins (2015).

9. Such measures can be read as part of a wider Hamidian policy of centralizing the Ottoman state and promoting the Islamic prerogatives of the Sultan/Caliph more widely. See Fortna (2002).

10. From 1945, Kosovo was officially a constituent element of the larger Yugoslav federation, though still considered a province within the republic of Serbia.

11. Take, for example, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Turkey’s national anthem composer, born in Peja, Kosovo. Indeed, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself was born in the Balkans, as were many of his nationalist allies that founded the Republic.

12. A personal anecdote is pertinent here: When giving instructions to a research assistant in Kosovo about recording data from the türbe, his first question to me was ‘Where is it?’

13. Indeed, from a devotional perspective, besides members of certain Sufi sects located mainly in South-Western Kosovo, most Kosovars today are inclined to meet saint worship, shrine visitation and other such practises either as abhorrent innovations (Arabic.: bid’a) or with an indifference befitting a post-Communist society.

14. This and the following quotations from museum texts are based on photographs that I took during research at the türbe.

15. https://www.facebook.com/Meshedi.Hudavendigar/. There is also an associated website though featuring less photographs: www.sultanmurad.com. Accessed 12 May 2018. I refer to material from the Facebook page frequently in the following paragraphs.

16. Just how ‘Kemalist’ the military remains today in Turkey–that is, how much it has the power to orientate Turkey towards a secular, Western subject position to use Kardaş (2005) description–after extensive reforms and other dynamics that have transpired over the past few years is subject to debate.

17. Comments made at a conference held at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen titled ‘Ambivalent Legacies: Memory and Amnesia in Post-Habsburg and Post-Ottoman Cities’ in late April 2017.