Answers: The legacy of the Ottoman Empire
November 17 marks 102 years after the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed VI Vahideddin fled Istanbul and Turkiye, never to return. This makes it an appropriate day to post the answers to my quiz on the Ottoman empire. I had published the questions on March 3 this year, the 100th anniversary of the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate on March 3, 1924. Members of the royal family were forced into exile, marking the end of the Ottoman Empire which had controlled at its peak large parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. From the 16th century the Ottoman Sultan had also held the title of Caliph, a position representing leadership of the world's Muslims.
From its 16th century zenith under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire shrank over the 19th century, losing ground to Russia and western colonial powers. Defeat in the First World War along with Germany and Austria-Hungary hastened its end. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire was accompanied by massacres, mass displacement and the creation of nation-states based on ethnic and religious homogeneity. Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them, Palestine was placed under British administration by the League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration promising ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine was announced.
While the victorious Allied Powers gained control of parts of modern-day Turkiye following the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, Turkish nationalist forces led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk successfully pushed back. They abolished the Ottoman sultanate in 1922 and in the next year signed the Treaty of Lausanne establishing Turkiye’s present-day borders.
Answers
1) This reformist movement transformed the Ottoman Empire through a revolution in 1908 but some of its actions during World War I remain controversial. The name of the movement has been widely used worldwide to represent groups of young politicians advocating change.
A group of Republicans in the U.S. in the 1960s known collectively after the Turkish group ensured the election of X as House Minority Leader. He later became president.
While in India, Y along with a few others led a ruling party faction in the 1960s that advocated for socialist policies, which was named after the Turkish group. Y went on to become Prime Minister later.
Name the Turkish reformist group, X and Y.
The Young Turks, X is Gerald Ford and Y is Chandra Shekhar. Shekhar was India’s Prime Minister for seven months from 1990 to 1991. Shekhar and his group firmly rallied behind Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1969 against the conservative old guard known as the Syndicate when the governing Indian National Congress split in 1969. But the Young Turks opposed Indira Gandhi’s declaration of an internal Emergency in 1975, spent time in jail and crossed over to the opposition. They were part of the newly-formed Janata Party’s stunning electoral win over the Congress in 1977. Another Young Turk, Krishan Kant, later became India’s Vice-President from 1997 to 2002.
In the 1980s another group of young Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives was known as the Young Turks. Their key figure, Newt Gingrich, led the party to a House majority in 1994 and became Speaker. It was the first time since 1952 that the Republicans took control of the House.
A group of mid-ranking military officers in Thailand came to be known as Young Turks. They were involved in coups in 1976 and 1977 but were thwarted in 1981 and 1985 when they attempted to seize power. More here, here, here and here.
2) The Dodecanese (twelve islands in Greek) chain of islands are controlled by Greece. They are located off the Turkish coast (one of them, Kastellorizo is just two kilometres away from Turkiye’s Mediterranean coast). There’s been heated rhetoric over the islands at various points in the past few decades. Another European country had seized the islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 along with parts of North Africa. Greece gained control in 1947 after the Second World War. Which country controlled the Dodecanese from 1912 until the 1940s?
Italy. More here, here and here.
The Dodecanese include 15 large islands and about 150 small islands, many of which are uninhabited. You can see Kastellorizo, just off the Turkish coast near the right end of the map below. Just beyond Kastellorizo is Strongyli, Greece’s easternmost island where a road is being built for the first time.
Courtesy: Google Maps
3) This island was conquered by the Ottomans in 1571. In 1878 a secret agreement was reached between the Ottoman Empire and Britain under which the island would be administered by the British while remaining under Turkish sovereignty. It was annexed by the British Empire in 1914. Which island?
4) Fears that the caliphate would crumble with the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I prompted Muslim politicians in another country to launch a campaign against British policy. X (non-Muslim) who was leading the country’s independence movement found common cause with the agitation to restore the powers of the caliphate. But the movement collapsed in 1924 with the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the abolition of the caliphate. Name the country and the leader X.
India and Mahatma Gandhi. The movement in support of the caliphate was known as Khilafat Movement. More here and here.
Mir Osman Ali Khan, the Nizam of Hyderabad who was described by Time magazine in 1937 as the ‘richest man in the world’ was projected as the Caliph’s successor. He got one son married to the last Caliph Abdulmecid II’s daughter, while another married the niece of Abdulmecid II. A tomb was built for Abdulmecid II in Aurangabad, then part of the princely state of Hyderabad. Abdulmecid II in his will named Mir Osman Ali Khan’s grandson Mukarram Jah as the inheritor of his lost caliphate. Hyderabad was integrated into newly-independent India in 1948 following military action, after Mir Osman Ali Khan refused to join the Indian Union.
5) The Soviet communist party organ Pravda and associated Soviet-era newspaper Izvestia, thanks to Commissar for Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky, revealed in full a secret document from the Tsarist imperial archives in 1917. The Manchester Guardian published the leaked document in full three days later. (Hint: The document in question was prepared in 1916 and also approved by Italy and Czarist Russia).
Pravda and Izvestia revealed the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France signed in 1916 and approved by Italy and Imperial Russia. It aimed to divide the Ottoman territories in the Middle East between the British and the French. Their World War I allies Italy and Russia were allotted parts of Turkiye. While the Sykes-Picot borders did not directly come into force, it formed the basis for the subsequent colonial borders in the Middle East after World War I.
6) The tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire is located in another country. Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne the tomb remained Turkiye’s land, guarded by its soldiers. The tomb was relocated due to the construction of a dam in 1973 and again in 2015 amid fighting. This Turkish exclave is located within which country?
7) Who resigned as the UK’s First Lord of the Admiralty (civilian head of the navy) after a failed naval assault on the Dardanelles, a narrow strait separating Europe from Asia in 1915. The Allied Powers also suffered huge losses in their bid to land on the Gallipoli peninsula.
8) While a protectorate under the Ottoman Empire for more than 300 years, this was a Muslim-majority region. It was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783. Since then hundreds of thousands of Muslims were forced to leave and it became a Russian-majority region. In the 1940s Stalin oversaw a major deportation of the Muslim community. Which region?
9) What was the result of an agreement signed between Turkiye and Greece on January 30, 1923? (Hint: a major move towards forming two homogeneous nation-states.
A mass population exchange with ethnic Greeks forced to move to Greece and ethnic Turks to Turkiye. More here, here, here, here, here and here. The Treaty of Lausanne signed in January 1923 ratified the first compulsory population exchange in modern times. Governments in Europe envisioned ethnic homogeneity through population transfers as a way of preventing war, by forcing out minority groups and sending them to countries where they had ancestral links. The end of World War II was followed by the largest population movements in European history as ethnic minorities were forced out of countries. Millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from Central and Eastern European countries, a policy endorsed by the victorious Allied powers.
The British Peel Commission report in 1937 had cited the compulsory exchange of ethnic Greeks and Turks while recommending the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state alongside an international zone containing the holy sites. Both sides rejected the plan. More here and here.
Greeks in Istanbul as well as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide) were exempted from the population exchange along with Muslims in Greece’s Western Thrace.
Ethnic Greeks and Turks were part of another mass migration in the 1970s after military figures in Cyprus advocating merger with Greece staged a coup in 1974 and Turkiye subsequently invaded Northern Cyprus.
10) The Ottoman Empire lost which part of its territory leading to the reorganisation of that region following the Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin in 1878?
Balkans. Serbia and Montenegro became independent as well as Romania.
Courtesy: Alexander Altenhof, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
11) What was converted from a mosque to a museum under Ataturk in 1934? It returned to being a mosque in 2020.
12) This community was persecuted in Turkiye during World War I. The League of Nations failed in its efforts to ensure a nation-state for the community after the war. The largest number of the displaced were concentrated in and near Aleppo and Beirut under French control and those who stayed were granted Syrian and Lebanese citizenship by 1928. Others moved to the Soviet Union while many benefited from the League of Nations’ Nansen passport, which allowed its holders to cross borders for work and protected them from deportation. Which community?
Armenians. More than 30 countries including the U.S. in 2021 have recognised the mass killing of Armenians as genocide. You can read the Turkish official perspective here.
More here about Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, scientist and diplomat who was the League of Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees from 1921 to 1930. He was the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1922. More about the Nansen passport and how it benefited Armenian refugees here.
13) One for the Tintin fan. This word, one among the many insults in Captain Haddock’s repertoire, comes from the name given to mercenaries/irregular volunteers used by the Ottoman Empire in conflicts. Name the word. (Hint: the Turkish term translates as ‘headless’ in English)
Bashi-Bazouk. More here and here. This question was part of my earlier quiz on Tintin.
Answers: Tintin and the world of Herge
1) This word, one among the many insults in Captain Haddock’s repertoire, comes from the name given to mercenaries/irregular volunteers used by the Ottoman Empire in conflicts. Name the word. (Hint: the Turkish term translates as ‘headless’ in English)