The Turkish Straits. When you look at the map of the era, the Straits are the only obstacle between Russia and the Mediterranean sea. An opening to the Mediterranean sea would yield both military and commercial benefits. Unsurprisingly, the British were initially very hesitant to grant the Russians their wish. In 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War, the…

To begin with, the Turks had something Germans, Hungarians and all other ‘defeated nations’ did not. Germans submitted to the Treaty of Versailles. Though Weimar government officials continuously sought to flex the boundaries introduced by Versailles, with some success, it was the Nazis who completely rejected it. Other defeated nations had their own treaties which…

Looking at the majority of Greco-Turkish encounters in history and modern politics, people tend to believe that Turks always hated Greeks and vice versa. An important fact to remember is that the two countries enjoyed an impressive degree of cooperation following the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), until the Cyprus Crisis in the 1950s. Having…

Strictly speaking, Turkey does not claim Cyprus. The northern part of Cyprus, unlike the affair between Crimea and Russia for example, has never been formally annexed by Turkey (the northern part is governed by a scarcely recognized, only by Turkey and Pakistan.The state of Cyprus was established in 1960, by Turks and Greeks of the…

It might be useful to separate the reforms under Atatürk as social and economic reforms. Social reforms include the abolishment of the sultanate in 1922 and of the Caliphate in 1924, the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, the introduction of a law coalescing all education under secular state authority in 1924, the adoption of…

Beginning with the events of 1964. The government at the helm is led by İsmet İnönü, the second-in-command of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the Turkish War of Independence (1919-23). The umpteenth government of İnönü, that is. The experienced politician is the leader of a coalition government (to be toppled by Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party a…

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299403 Ottoman Lyric Poetry: “Entertainers: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-gay-and-lesbian-literature/from-the-pervert-back-to-the-beloved-homosexuality-and-ottoman-literary-history-14531923/5A89B629283EC32FDA1B989AFA99CE0F https://academic.oup.com/past/article/257/1/55/6524598?login=falseWest European visitors to the Ottoman Empire in the early-modern period frequently referred to sodomy. They depicted it as a common practice there, associated particularly with ‘renegades’ (converts to Islam). The report of an investigation into a sexual scandal at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in 1588, discussed here,…

Yes, wine drinking was quite a common occurrence in all parts of the empire, whose production and consumption was largely done by non-Muslims, who were generally allowed to produce and sell them to their own kind. Alcohol consumption was mainly confined to cities, with some exceptions like in the Balkans and Greece where alcohol was…