Istanbul

In 1915, a group called the Young Turks had been in power since 1908 when Sultan Hamid II was overthrown. The Turks developed a distrust towards the Armenians, who were Christians and not Muslim, which the Turkish people were. The Armenians and the Turks cohabitated in the same area, the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, the Turks wanted to drive the Armenians out of their land, and the controversy got very violent. The United States government should recognize the events of 1915 in Armenia as a…

In the Medieval Middle East, three empires rose from the ashes in response to the constant invasions from the east: The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. Even though all three of these empires had huge impact on Islam and the Middle East in general, only one of these empires lasted in the 20th century. The empire that lasted was the Ottoman Empire which had enormous impact on Islam and the Middle East from a cultural and political standpoint. Although the Ottoman Empire lasted centuries it…

The Ottoman and Chinese Empires were once two of the strongest and most stable of all empires. These empires were stubborn and unwilling to change their traditional ways by refusing to modernize with Western ideals, which quickly lead to the decline of these Ancient Empires (Carabajal). The decline of the Ottoman Empire began in the 1500s and lasted through the 19th century. There were many internal and external factors that led to such a tragic demise. Early on the Sultans became unmotivated…

made themselves so important within the upper elites of the Empire that ended up paying off dividends in the end. “The Mevlevis were known for their close affiliation with the literati although their influence could be equally felt in the halls of government. In fact the [Chelebi] was given the honor of girding the new sultans with the sword of their forebear […] ”. By filling this position, the two different groups, the Mevlevi and the Ottoman elite, gained various things. Symbiotically, the…

By the end of the thirteenth century an empire would rise in what is modern day Turkey, known as the Ottomans. Before it will become an empire it was comprised of different tribes whose land was being threatened by the Mongols in the east, as well as in the west by Christian armies of the once strong Byzantine Empire. The people would bond together under a leader whose name will become the name of the empire, Osman. Osman was the founder of the empire and know to be a great general who relied…

intellectual conservatism. But in spite of these difficulties the Empire remained a major expansionist power until the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which marked the end of Ottoman expansion into Europe. The discovery of new trade routes by Western European states allowed them to avoid the Ottoman trade monopoly. The Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 initiated a series of Ottoman-Portuguese naval wars in the Indian Ocean throughout the 16th century. The Somali Muslim Ajuran…

Suleiman the Magnificent What was Suleiman the Magnificent’s greatest accomplishment and how did it impact the Ottoman Empire? In 1494, a baby boy was born in Trabzon, Turkey, to Sultan Selim I as the only surviving heir, with little knowledge of, when he came to the throne in 1520, his great destiny. His destiny would hold forty-six years of many achievements in “which the Ottomans would reach the apex of their history.” This baby’s name was Sultan Suleiman I, a ruler later recognized by his…

Istanbul: Memories and the City (2006) is a tale of an artist’s struggle not only against the conventional codes of the society but also against his own dilemmas and doubts. Eminent English novelist David Mitchell (b.1969) calls the book “an additive childhood memoir, a museum-in-prose of a city with West in its head but East in its soul, and a study of the alchemy between place and self”. Pamuk wrote this memoir at the age of fifty two, compiling all those spots of time, memories, and feelings…

In the recently published first volume of memoirs, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk describes how a 1950’s child hood among Europe -yearning cosmopolitans in the crumbling ruins of the Ottoman Empire helped to shape him as a writer. The key, he said, is to understand the concept of huzun. This turkish word describes a kind of melancholy, he says, not so much a personal state as one shared by an entire society, a mood of resigned despair for the great past - a murky, black white…

had voluntarily rescued Jews headed to concentration camps. These people risked their lives in order to save Jews even though it was illegal and could make them end up in jail or in the concentration camp too. However, in Ayşe Kulin’s Last Train to Istanbul, the heroes of the story risked their lives to help the Jewish people and this is an accurate portrayal of of history because they are similar to real people who survived the Holocaust. The children in the book had similar experiences as the…