Anti-Ottomanism?

[Wendell]

It would be awfully nice if Eurofed (especially) and Snake (to a lesser extent) took their argument to somewhere else, perhaps PMs, since it has nothing to do with the Ottomans one way or another.

It would be even nicer if they took it to a new thread where others could contribute and ponder what's been posted.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Wouldn't it be more accurate to state that the Greeks would have lost if Britain did not have people like Lord Byron and Russia wasn't obsessed with a warm water port?

The Greeks did lose. They were soundly beaten in both 1897 and 1922, in the latter case with significant British support.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

If the Ottomans were Persianate, why were Ottoman mosques modelled off the Hagia Sophia (a Byzantine building) rather than being built Persian-style with iwans facing a courtyard? Is it a coincidence that architecturally there is an east-west split in the Islamic world, on roughly the same line that before Islam was the Roman-Persian frontier?

Elements of Hagia Sophia went into Ottoman mosques, but the layout is much different. Suleymaniye references both Hagia Sophia and the Dome of the Rock - this evokes both Solomon's temple and Justinian's boast "Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" Suleyman is the Turkish form of "Solomon", and Suleyman consciously represented himself as "the Second Solomon".

Ottoman mosques do have iwans (eyvan in Turkish), which you can see in pre-Istanbul mosque, and they are still present thereafter, but they are de-emphasized and are not monumental. Note tiled interiors rather than mosaics, etc.

In any case, there's no pan-Iranian standard for architecture. The Ottomans were a beylik of the Seljuk Empire, which was a Persian state with a Turkish dynasty. The Ottomans used Persian (until later, and used the Persian alphabet to the end) as the language of state, Persian forms of government, wrote in Persian poetry styles, etc. etc.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

It might help if those arguing about the status of Armenians within the later years of the Ottoman Empire developed defenitions for terms like "genocide" on which all agree as a starting point to discuss the massacres in some cases of the aforementioned Armenian population.

OK, to me a genocide is a deliberate and systematic attempt to exterminate a people. On that basis, the Armenian Genocide isn't. There was no deliberate policy of extermination, massacres that occurred were not systematic, they were opportunistic, and the vast majority of deaths occurred do to privation, not murder.

What the Armenian Genocide really was was ethnic cleansing.

 

[George Carty]

Ottoman mosques do have iwans (eyvan in Turkish)

It's "eyvan" in Persian too IIRC ("iwan" is the Arabic form). Oh, and another indication of the Persian influence on the Turks - they make "namaz" (rather than "salah") five times a day.

Oh, and the other main aspect of Ottoman architecture which I regard as un-Persian is the relative absence of four-centred arches (and the equivalent in domes -- a dome is mechanically an arch's solid of revolution).