SUCH AN UNKNOWN FAMILIAR NEIGHBOR

Who has not heard since childhood about the military gallantry of the Cossacks, the glorious Hetman Bohdan and his trusted lieutenants? Whose memory does not hold the heartfelt lines: “Hey, hey, through the valley, the Cossacks are coming.” And who never shuddered at the thought of the long-bygone Turkish captivity, and who did not sympathize with the Ukrainian captive girls who found themselves in a faraway land?

We and they, they and we... The halo of hero and the image of enemy have taken strong roots in ordinary people’s consciousness, often hyperbolized by those who used historical circumstances and the difference of religions and ethnic groups to the familiar political tactic of divide and rule. History, hidden under the shadow of empires and the common Soviet past as recently as yesterday, left so many blank spots in our neighbor’s historical image. Meanwhile, the clock of history has been ticking away the endless common points of contacts, ties, and mutual understanding from ancient times until today. The Black Sea divided, but also linked, Anatolia and Ukraine, the ancient civilizations of Asia Minor and the primordial homeland of the Scythians. The historical relationships of these Scythians, ancient Greek city-states, and Roman provinces, made the Black Sea coastal lands an integral part of the ancient world for more than a millennium, while numerous monuments of those times still astonish today’s sophisticate.

The time of new empires was coming, with Byzantium having long been a powerful source of sociopolitical and spiritual influence on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. It is from there that the spirit of Orthodoxy came to Rus’, a young state with its expanses reaching out from the Baltic to the Black Sea at the turn of the millennium. Constantinople (known as Tsarhorod in Rus’) has to reckon with the barbarian Prince Oleh who dared nail his shield to the Second Rome’s gate, admire and propose to the wise Princess Olha, and consider it an honor for the emperor to have relatives among the princes of Kyivan Rus’.

But the time of some empires gives way to that of others — young, daring, and dreaming of world domination. Different religious outlooks is by far the best way to divide the world. Both the colors of Christian Catholic Crusades and the ideals of the Muslim Jihad disguised the same goals of expanding the living space and amassing wealth by plundering the conquered population.

In the times when Rus’, now disintegrated into separate principalities and having experienced the horror of the Tartar-Mongol invasion, was paying tribute to the conquerors, who scrupulously counted the whole population of the Ukrainian lands in 1257-1259, the Muslim Orient, also having experienced the invasion of Mongolian idolaters, was on the verge of seeing the birth of the Ottoman Empire Black Sea coast opposite ours.

By the end of the fourteenth century, the Ukrainian lands had lost any immediate prospect of forming an independent state, with Polish- Lithuanian domination becoming more and more obvious. Meanwhile, the Black Sea neighbor had already become a true frontier empire, with its lands spread from the Danube to the Euphrates. In the first years, the Ottomans managed to achieve very much by carrot and stick: they officially recognized the Orthodox Church, concurrently oppressing the Catholic Church; they managed to play on the religious feelings of the Orthodox Greeks, allowing them to perform their religious worships; they did not harass the Jews, allowing them to lead a life of their own in the empire; and won over the Balkan peasants by their policy of protecting them and drastically reducing corvОe. The Ottomans pursued their military policies using janissaries, Europe’s first regular army.

Following Middle Eastern tradition, the Ottomans tried to attract merchants, craftsmen, and the rich in general from the countries they conquered to Istanbul and other cities. It is not accidental that as soon as 1477 the Orthodox Greeks, Jews, Armenians, non-Muslims from Kaffa (now Feodosiya, the Crimea — Ed.), and other Europeans accounted for almost half population the capital. After a fierce storm of Constantinople and three-day devastation and plunder, the city very quickly assumed the new face of a Muslim capital laying claim to being a worldwide metropolis: the Patriarchate was restored and religious shepherds of the Armenian and Judaic communes found shelter here.

After gaining a protectorate over the Crimea, the Ottoman Empire expanded rapidly along the North Black Sea littoral, thus becoming a real rival of Polish ambitions in the Ukrainian, and then Russian, lands. But the more actively the Ottomans intruded into new lands, the stronger became the influence of the conquered: Ottoman society was being vigorously Slavicized. In the fifteenth century, Christian women from a Serb Slav dynasty were wives of many Turkish sultans, such as, for example, Bayazid I and Murad II, while the Serbian language, as well as Greek, could be heard more and more often at court. Official documents of the time were written in three languages, including Serbian. Most of the court grandees rarely spoke Turkish.

The Slavic language continued to be spoken there in the seventeenth century. Well-known historian and politician Paolo Giovio, who had compiled an essay of Turkish history in 1531, wrote that “Slavonic” was the third most important language at the sultan’s court, with Greek trailing in fourth place. Let us remember that under Suleiman the Magnificent, when the empire blossomed, Serbo-Croatian Rustam Pasha was Grand Vizier, while the Ukrainian Roksolana was the sultan’s favorite wife. In addition, the sultan himself knew Slavic and talked to the Slav officers, who served at his court, in their mother tongue. While this was, most likely and most often, Serbian in the upper echelons, Ukrainian was heard among the captives from Ukraine whom Istanbul and other, especially coastal, Ottoman cities were literally crawling with.

After Roksolana, Ukrainian women were the wives of Osman II in the first half of the Seventeenth century and Mustafa II who ruled at the turn of the eighteenth century. His son, Osman III, was half-Ukrainian. Sultan Akhmed III — who officially recognized Ukraine’s first constitution, written in Bendery, part of the Ottoman Empire, by Ukraine’s ОmigrО Hetman Pylyp Orlyk — was one fourth Ukrainian.

So it is perhaps not accidental that Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had personally experienced the Ottoman yoke and, by the way, had a fluent command of Turkish, was sunk in deep thought before finally opting for a treaty with Muscovy. And even after the Ottomans had been driven away from the North Black Sea Coast, a great many Ukrainians continued to live in Istanbul, on the streets of which one could still hear the songs of Ukrainian blind kobzar folk singers.

Panteleimon Kulish, who visited Turkey in 1861, noted with surprise in his historical essay, “Turkish Captivity,” that he had seen with his own eyes Turks who were very far from the customary terrible image. The Turks were by no means hostile to the giaours (non-Muslims — Ed.) on marketplaces and wharves. In Istanbul, where at least 100,000 Orthodox Ukrainians resided at the time, our compatriots performed their religious services.

Great Ukrainian orientalist scholar Ahatanhel Krymsky, repressed by the Bolshevik regime in 1941, author of a unique book, A History of Turkey, for many decades inaccessible for the reader, thought it necessary to overcome artificial barriers dividing our nations. And, of course, he did not idealize the Ottoman Empire, in contrast to some medieval and modern “European intellectuals.” No, it was no “Arcadia of paradise.”

Thus we, unaware for a long time of many Ottoman studies and infected with distorted ideas about our closest neighbor, are still to understand and comprehend the true meaning of the historical proximity between Ukraine and Turkey.

№15 May 15 2000 «The Day»
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