No Vacancy

Approaching Beirut by night, the jet flew in low over the dark sea after banking eastward from Cyprus. Over the wing I watch as the glittering form of the city emerges out of the night. High-rise buildings rise up above the sea cliffs.

Though it is after midnight, lights still shine from the stacks of hotel room windows along the water. It is a welcome sight for Beirut, battered and blighted by decades of civil war, foreign occupation, instability and terrorism. This summer has brought more tourists than any year since the breakout of war in ‘75. But as the plane grows closer I see the others. Between the bright skyscrapers, others stand dark, like towers of negative space. In the glow from the Intercontinental Phoenicia, it is even possible to see the pockmarked façade of the old Holiday Inn, scarred from RPG and mortar fire.

I had come to Lebanon for the hell of it. In this country, where one notices a constant and sizable disconnect between reason and reality, this seems appropriate. I made the case to my skeptical parents over lunch at a Mexican restaurant. They heard me say “Beirut” and I caught my mother’s face blanch. Before they could be carried off into a nightmarish reverie of car bombs, Conkrite and kidnappings, I began to sell the idea: “Did you know: the New York Times named Beirut as the number one travel destination of the summer?” I brought out a folder of printouts from newspaper articles with titles like “Lebanon Gets Its Groove Back,” carefully excised of the inconvenient paragraphs that invariably closed each piece with the qualifications about Lebanon’s capricious stability and the constant threat of a steep descent into strife and instability.

Most people I spoke to about Beirut held two concomitant but incongruous pictures. One was of the city’s so-called “Golden Age,” (the very sounds of this phrase when spoken seem to settle with an elegant patina to the sounds of clinking glasses and Miles Davis). This Golden Age lasted for thirty years, from the end of the French Mandate following the Second World War until the outbreak of Civil War in 1975. Following the founding of Israel in 1948, Beirut took over Haifa’s position as the main exit point of Middle Eastern goods destined for the West. At the same time, Lebanon’s combination of Mediterranean beaches, exoticism, and Francophile high society attracted hundreds of thousands of Westerns every year, who flocked to see a discrete and romanticized image of the Orient.

The second is of the apocalyptic war-torn battleground that saw the two hundred and forty American servicemen killed in the 1983, the hundred western hostages taken in the 1980’s, the hijackings, the near total annihilation of downtown Beirut and fierce sectarian violence that crowded the news for two decades with tales of seemingly inescapable perennial misery.

There is an obvious - and disconcerting – disconnect between these two images. For those of my parents’ generation, the word Beirut is still evocative of the jet setting, au courant world it was when they coming of age. In the city known widely as “the Paris of the Middle East” one could laze amid ostentatious western comfort (secure in the fact that the place was run by Christians) while peering into the backdrop of a genuinely eastern culture, stocked fully with souks, Roman ruins, and bearded old Arabs playing backgammon and puffing away on narghiles under the palm trees along the Corniche.

This type of half-way immersion worked the other way as well, as the elites and Royals of the newly petrol-rich Gulf states flocked to Lebanon, drawn by its liberality and hedonism. For both East and West, Lebanon’s magnetism lay in the duality of its identity, as the point of intersection between two cultural spheres, where one could enjoy the sites and privileges of an alien world without abandoning the comforts of home. This is the place where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton may have once rubbed shoulders with a young Osama bin Laden at the legendary Saint Georges yacht club pool.

I stayed in the Hamra apartment of an English journalist friend named Alice, sleeping in the bed of her roommate Abby: out of the country covering the next day’s presidential election in Iran. After a few days in Beirut, I decided to venture south with my friend Tim, who was spending the summer in Beirut, working for an English-language online news organization called Now Lebanon. We made a reservation at the Orange House, a turtle refuge run by two Lebanese lesbians near the Israeli border (or if you believe the maps: Palestine). We were told that foreigners had to obtain a permit from the Army in Saida in order to travel south of the Litani River.

In Saida, Hariri is everywhere. The father, and the son. Rafik was born here, into a middle class Sunni family, and became the richest man in Lebanon, buying and building construction conglomerates. He was prime minister from 01 to 05, till the Syrians expunged him in a car bomb attack outside the Saint Georges. You can still see him if you pay a visit to the enormous tent erected in the shadow of his even more enormous mosque in the reconstructed downtown. His large flag-draped coffin sits splayed atop a flight of marble steps under a gallery of posters in which a smiling Rafik appears pasted repeatedly in doctored photographs, addressing parliament from half a dozen different lecterns spread throughout the room. The son – Saad - seems poised to become the next Prime Minister, though word on the street has it that he’d rather be sitting at home playing his Xbox.

Looking for the army base, we stumbled upon a massive barbed wire-enclosed block and parked down the street, approaching the prospective army base with passports in our slightly raised hands, signaling our harmlessness as if they were white handkerchiefs. We stepped toward the rifle-toting guards at the gate and Tim told them we were trying to find permits. One of the soldiers made a phone call, nodded knowingly, and gestured for us to follow. We entered the base - which seemed to be the only part of the city with any trees or shade - and walked up to a portable office trailer. He knocked, stepped inside, closed the door, came back out, led us to another trailer, knocked, stepped inside, closed the door, came back out, then to another trailer. He beckoned us to follow him into this one, where we sat on a couch while a man in a sweat-stained green uniform scrutinized our passports. He left for ten minutes, returned, had us follow him into a squat two-story administrative building, where we walked up a flight of stairs and through a series of snaking hallways before being signaled to wait outside as he entered an office, closing the door behind him.

Fifteen minutes later the door opened and we were waved inside. An overweight general sat in a plush leather chair, smoking a cigar, his boots crossed on the desk. His eyes darted to us as we entered before drifting back to an enormous flat screen television mounted on the wall next to the door, tuned to a cooking program. Good to see all that United Nations aid to the Lebanese Army is going to good use, I thought. Every few minutes he silenced a ringtone that reminded me of the theme from an old American cop show on the cell phone sitting atop a pile off papers on the desk.

He picked up our passports, examining our pictures. “Who is this?” he asked turning around one of the pictures. It was me, with a beard I had shaved off the month before. “Me,” I said. “No!” he declared with disbelief. Once I had reassured him that it was actually me, he asked why we wanted to go to the south. “To visit Habiba. She protects the turtles south of Sour,” answered Tim. The general’s face again turned to disbelief, “Why?!” He looked at my passport again, “There are turtles in LA, no? In California, yes?” “Actually, no.” I started, but he turned to Tim, “You are Jewish?” He shook his head. “A Christian?” he guessed. “Well…close enough.” Satisfied, the general scrawled something on a piece of paper, ripped off a piece and handed it to me. He dismissed us, “you can go.” The “pass” was a three-inch long scrap of paper with some scrawled Arabic numerals and a signature. I heard the dictum remarked more than once: “The French invented bureaucracy; we perfected it.”

Driving back from the bars in Gemmayzeh, we drive through the rebuilt downtown between the newly built and soon to be built skyscrapers of the resuscitated city. We get out at the Phoenicia and sidle across the street, around the block, past a sleeping guard, feet on desk in a well-lit lobby, and over a high, corrugated-steel wall, dropping ourselves quietly into a mess of concrete blocks and knotted wires. We run inside and begin our ascent up twenty-six stories to the top of the Holiday Inn. At each landing I pause and look around. Every floor is gutted; the walls that once stood between the rooms have been knocked down. Anything of any value was stolen decades ago. This was the backdrop for the famous War of the Hotels, in which Christian Phalangist and PLO militiamen occupied the high-rise hotels in the city center at the onset of the war in spring 1975. This was the overture to a war that would last fifteen years, kill two hundred thousand, and draw four different occupying armies into a country three-fourths the size of Connecticut.

From the roof we could see the lights of Beirut spread all around, creeping up the slopes of Mount Lebanon to the north and east, and reflected in the indigo sea. The rooftop opened up onto the top floor of the hotel, which looked as if it had once held a restaurant and bar with a similarly expansive view of the sprawling city. The place was eerily empty and quiet, perched high enough up in the sky not to pick up the sounds of the city below. A Japanese firm reportedly bought the property a several years ago, only to realize that the building was unsalvageable. If the peace that has prevailed since the Summer 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel continues for a few more years, the Holiday Inn will probably be brought down to make way for a new high-rise hotel or Emirati bank. We make our way down the five hundred spiraling steps to the ground, hop back over the fence out of this towering recollection of the war, into the streets of modern Beirut, hopeful for the future but too jaded to expect much from it. The now wakeful guard spots us dropping down the wall and starts to huff after us. We run down the street, and I flag down a taxi, making my escape from Beirut and heading to the airport to catch the four o’clock flight to Istanbul.

Final Essay #1

The Bosnian Parliament burns in siege of Sarajevo, 1992

On Nationalism

The nation-state was born in 1792, when France was established as a republic built around the idea of an ethnically French nation. At the time only one in five French citizens spoke French. Over the coming decades, a bold campaign was launched to teach everyone within French borders to think French, speak French, and act French. The country’s linguistic and cultural minorities were suppressed, sometimes oppressively. Thus was formed the world’s first nation-state. The mode became all the rage in Europe, constructed either along the French model of making a nation where only a state had existed before, or the later German model of creating a state out of a preexisting national identity (in this case, the German language).

Nationalism spread – creating a British people out of Englishmen, Scots and Welshmen, creating civic-minded Americans out of immigrants hailing from countless nations, creating German and Italian states out of patchworks of principalities, dukedoms and city-states. Nationalism, for our purposes, refers to an ideology of political unity and the legitimacy of state power, based on coalescing around a common nationality. Nationalities, often contrived out of a variety of shared experience, custom and ritual, often include religious, linguistic, historical and cultural factors (though in the case of some countries, like the United States nationalism can be built around devotion to civil institutions and loyalty to an ethnically ambiguous state).

The problem was that not all regions conformed, or could be molded, so easily into nation-states. Nationalism came into South-eastern Europe in the mid-19th century. The region, long on the periphery of various empires, had been fashioned by historical circumstance into a patchwork of diverse groups, defined and divided by myriad factors: religion, language, culture, ethnicity. In the field of linguistics, the term isogloss describes the line on a map between two linguistic features, showing the dividing line between two dialects. The isogloss can be extended as a useful metaphor to other modes of division. Lines of divergent Catholicism/Orthodoxy, Ottoman/Hapsburg influence, Stokavian/Čakavian dialect, legacies of Roman/Byzantine rule, etc., cut across the Balkans in a muddle that defies any attempt to impose modern conceptions of “national” boundaries.

Before the 19th century, the nationalist experience had been a weak one in the Balkans. Bosnians, Croats and Serbs shared a mutually intelligible language; Croats and Slovenes shared their Catholicism, Albanians and Bosnians their Islam; Vojvodinians, Slavonians and Slovenes a Central European culture. The border between the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire and Turkish-speaking Ottoman Empire, fluctuated back and forth in the region, imparting cultural, culinary, architectural influence but hardly even attempting to impose any sort of cultural homogeneity. Americans and Western Europeans visiting Eastern and Central Europe are often surprised to see that the main squares and streets in these capital cities are often dedicated not to generals and statesmen, but to writers and poets. This is because it was within the intellectual artistic communities that nationalism was first fomented in the region in the mid 19-century. The Slovene France Prešeren expressed a fledgling sense of nationalism in the 1844 poem “A Toast.” His statue now adorns the main square in Ljubljana and the words of his poem compose the lyrics of the Slovenian national anthem.

After the collapse of the great vast multi-national empires – the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian Empires all vanished after the convulsions of the First World War – the all-knowing, modern Western powers that had just dragged the world through the mud and filth of five years of trench warfare (which incidentally killed 40% of Serbia’s male population) gave the Balkans the gift of nation-states. Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania were established along similar borders that they now occupy. The easiest thing to do with the pastiche in the middle was to create a South Slavic state, convenient, though not exactly nationalistically scrupulous. For the first nine years it was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, but in 1927 became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Yugo means “South”). Following the brutality wrought by nationalist fervor during the Second World War (in which the ultra-nationalist Croat Utaše Regime, a Nazi puppet state, sent Serbs, along with Jews and Gypsies to its death camps) the Socialist state of Yugoslavia was established by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, as a state in which all nations, no matter their relative size, were to be equally represented. For more than forty years, nationalism was suppressed in Yugoslavia, and indeed, to many, Yugoslavia seemed the very example of a peaceful, multi-national, co-habitative state. Many Yugoslavs report that they did not even know which religion their neighbors belonged to, nor did they care. Even the Albanian Kosovars, non Slavs in the South Slavic state, did not feel fundamentally out of place. In 1985, a Kosovar even served as the President of the Federal Yugoslav Republic: an event with as much symbolic import as Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States twenty years later.

As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the late 1980’s, and in the first elections since the federation’s founding took place in 1990, nationalist parties took power in five of the six Yugoslav republics. Now, Yugoslavia has disintegrated into six, mostly homogenous, and highly nationalistic, nation-states (with Kosovo as the newest nation-state in the world, having declared independence in 2008). Slovenia is the most homogenous of these states, with next to no ethnic diversity, around 98% of the population is Catholic, and speaks Slovenian. As such, Slovenia’s independence from Yugoslavia provoked almost no dispute. Slovenian nationalism, based actually upon ethnic uniformity, gave Slovenians a certain insularism. As Yugoslavia’s political stalemate neared the point of collapse in 1991, Slovenia simply withdrew from the federation. Within the context of the bloody mess of the wars of Yugoslav Succession, Slovenia merely closed its borders. The nation-state is a far more comforting concept when there is only one nation within the state’s borders. Bosnia & Herzegovina remains as the only “Balkan” state in the Balkans: that is, the single state that is not structured around a nationality and that preserves the heterogeneity that historically typified the region. The balance is tenuous though, and probably unlikely to last. Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of two states, autonomous in all but name only (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska). UN overseers remain in charge, with the power to overturn any legislation, or remove any politician advanced through Bosnia’s democratic institutions, if they are seen as undermining stability and non-sectarianism.

Serbs made up the largest national group in Yugoslavia. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which existed from 1918 to 1944, was built as a South Slavic state, but with the Serbs clearly in charge. The capital was in Belgrade; the King a Serb. The Kingdom was envisioned by some as destined to follow the French model. The Serbs would mold the other South Slavs into a uniform body, based on Serbian-ness. During the socialist Yugoslav years, nationalism became a dirty word, and a form of political suicide if espoused. All nationalities (whether one million Kosovars or six million Serbs) were equally represented in the Federal government. Not surprisingly, some resentments were bound to build among the larger nationalities, who felt that their size should entitle to them to a greater degree of political power. This led to the Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milošević, who came to power in 1986 with designs to recentralize power in Yugoslavia along the lines of the envisioned plans of the original Yugoslav kingdom. His brand of virulent and violent nationalism instead led to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars of independence and ethnic cleansing, and the deaths of at least 150,000 people.

The nation-state is now the dominant form of political organization in the world, and it is easy to forget that it was not always the preferred mode of governance. The United Nations does not actually represent the nations of the world, merely the nation-states (where is the Catalan representative, or the Tamil delegate?). It is forgotten that the French nation did not exist, it had to be built, sometimes by force. The Western world likes to impose its values and ideals on the rest of the world, and, as is the case in the Balkans, the idea of nationalism became the vogue in places where it (perhaps) did not really belong. The creation of Greece and Turkey as independent states in the early 20th century, led to the organized transport of hundreds of thousands of Greeks from Turkey, and Turks from Greece, across the Aegean. They left their ancestral homes to reach their so-called homelands. Slovenia fits the parameters of a nation-state, but many places do not, and as has been seen countless times over - in Croatia, Bosnia, Lebanon, India – people never hate and kill so much as when they are seized by the fear of becoming a minority in their own country.

Final Essay #2

Prompt: The Balkan region exhibits both an extraordinary cultural mixing and a strong attachment to the particularities of place. The former could be identified with cosmopolitan cultural trends (those characterized by openness to external influences, hybridity, and so forth) and the latter with cultural works that emphasize the uniqueness and particularity of a given culture and its practices. Referring in your answer to at least four of the following texts/lectures (you can also talk about other texts if you like), write an essay that discusses this interplay.













When Father Was Away on Business, Emir Kusturica (1985)

The Balkans has always been on the fringe of empires. The margin between Rome’s East and West: the much fought over domain at the center of Ottoman, Venetian, and Austro-Hungarian territorial ambitions. The Croatian language betrays the country’s history and cultural receptivity to outside influence: Čaj from Turkish, voda from German, pronouns from Latin. However, though parts of the Balkans have for periods been included within diverse spheres of cultural influence, they have always remained fundamentally without them as well. The region’s tradition of borrowing and lack of encompassing cultural consistency has itself created a vibrant and robust regional singularity. This singularity has been created through a history of conquest and avoided assimilation, but it continues to be expressed clearly in the art, literature and cinema of the region.

Danilo Kiš is in many ways the prototypical citizen of the Balkans. He was born in Vojvodina (in Serbia) in 1935. His mother was a Montenegrin; his father a Hungarian Jew (who was killed at Auschwitz). He is recalled as the last truly Yugoslav writer. His famous story “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a fascinating pastiche of style and influence. In it Kiš combines fact (Davidovich was an actual figure in the Russian Revolution) and fiction (invented dialogue and characters within the framework of actual happenings). The line between reality and fantasy is blurred to the point where the two are unrecognizable. Footnotes carry the tone of factual orientation, but are in fact contrived; the story reads as an idealized metaphor, but the narrative arc is, in fact, true. Kiš was very influenced by the work of the Porteño Jorge Luis Borges in his mixing of genres (fantasy, realism, history, meditation) in a single work, and also by Karlo Steiner, an Austrian, whose diary Seven Thousand Days in Siberia coldly recounts the experience of life in a Siberian gulag under Stalin. Another story by Kiš, "Books and Dogs," written in a similar pseudo-historical style, takes place amid the persecution of French Jews in the year 1330. The unique Balkan-ness of Kiš’s writing is reflected in the fact that both of these stories take place in foreign locales, in obscure and distant historical settings, yet both comment directly on political happenings in his contemporary Yugoslavia. In addition to his diversity of influence and styles, his stories present a distinct dichotomy between engagement and disengagement with political issues.

The seminal Yugoslav filmmaker from the 1970’s, Dušan Makavejev, is known for his radical experiments with film structure and stylistic montage. His films deal with themes that are in line with other artists in this “golden” middle period of Yugoslav culture – namely their disillusionments with the Socialist system in Yugoslavia compared with the ideals of the Revolution - but the techniques he uses to explore them are totally distinct, and in many ways representative of Yugoslav society. His 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism, deals with the confluence of sexual revolution and socialist revolution in the context of the German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Like Kiš, Makavejev marries together multiple strands – self-made documentary segments about Reich and American counter-culture artists, a fictional story about a liberated Yugoslav woman who seduces a Russian ice skater with whom she argues revolutionary ideology, a 1931 Nazi propaganda film on mental patients, combined with Yugoslav patriotic hymns and footage of transvestite Jackie Curtis walking around New York dressed in an army uniform. These disparate strands can come together in different ways for each viewer, but taken in conjunction in each other they put forward a layered argument of Makavejev’s theme. The structure of this film – and others by Makavejev – can be seen as a sort of extended metaphor of Yugoslavia itself: diverse strands, though held together by a common form, coming together in a single, if convoluted, entity.

Emir Kusturica is the most internationally well-known filmmaker to come out of the former Yugoslavia, and so has in many ways shaped the Western conception of the Balkans. His second film, When Father Was Away on Business, won the Palme d’Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and was later nominated for an Academy Award. The film presents a highly evocative portrait of a young boy’s life, growing up in Bosnia in the early years of socialist Yugoslavia, shortly after Tito’s split with Stalin. The film is, stylistically, inspired by such film classics as Fellini’s Amarcord in its presentation of a coming of age story, with political overtones and bouts of magical realism. But When Father Was Away on Business is also uniquely Yugoslav. The film’s setting is distinctly Bosnian, with a tight-knit group of neighbors for whom the fact that they all belong to different religions never becomes pertinent. The world it presents is drawn with small details that reveal a love and affection for the distinct character and rhythm of everyday life in the place.

The Post-Yugoslav film No Man’s Land by Danis Tanovic, winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film is also interesting for its presentation of a unique Balkan world, obviously intended, in part at least, for a Western audience. The film shows the story of two soldiers, a Serb and a Bosnian, who find themselves trapped together in a trench between the frontlines during the Bosnian War. In one scene, the soldiers strip down to their underwear and wave around clothes to try to get help without betraying their identities to the opposing lines. Of course, it is impossible to tell who is what when their uniforms are removed, and indeed, everything in the film supports the notion that nothing divides these two, except for nationalist pride of indistinct origin. They argue endlessly over who started the war, but no one knows the answer. After the bungling intervention of United Nations peacekeepers and a female British television journalist, nothing is solved. After being rescued from the trench, the two shoot each other. Again, Tanovic adopts certain Western artistic forms (interestingly one of them is the absurdist, cyclical binary dialogue of Samuel Beckett) and distorts it into something altogether different in support of his own artistic goals.

These are, admittedly, only a few arbitrary examples of the artistic traditions of the Balkans (specifically the former Yugoslavia) in the second half of the twentieth century, but in these distinct genres and forms, can be seen several themes persistent in the culture of the Balkans as expressed through its art. These are: a readiness to adopt elements of foreign culture, an ease in dealing with various strands of identity or genre simultaneously, and a protective pride in expressing the peculiarities of their own culture and way of life. The Balkans may have spent much of its history on the fringe of empires, and on the edge of more established identities, but its inherent multiculturalism and comfort with diversity puts it right at home in the age of modern globalization, in which the whole world is seeing the type of cultural mixing that has typified the Balkans for millennia.

Istanbul, not Constantinople

In Istanbul for the long weekend before heading to France. The last paper I wrote for my history tutorial last semester was on the Fall of Constantinople, so it was pretty neat to see the Theodosian Walls alongside the highway on my taxi-ride into the city. It's a great city.

I contemplate conquering Constantinople from Rumeli:














The Rise of the Crescent Moon and Fall of Constantinople

On the night of May 22nd 1453, a crescent moon rose over the still waters of the Bosphorus. The people of the ancient city of Constantinople, the last vestige of the might and splendor of the Roman Empire, looked on in terror. In the Turkish camp, the hundreds of thousands of troops under Sultan Mehmet II - not yet “The Conqueror” – mustered outside the city walls looked up at the sky and launched into jubilant celebration. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine, in his palace on the Sea of Marmara, must have recognized the import of this portent. A centuries-old prophecy, dating back to the Empire’s most glorious days, held that the city would not fall until the full moon conferred a sign. What should have risen as a full moon that night, ascended as a slender sliver. Less than six days later the city’s defenses would fail, the last Greek Emperor would lay slain, and the churches and citizens of the city would endure three days of rape and pillage before calm would settle on the beleaguered city.

The young Sultan Mehmet had bold and deep-rooted ambitions, inherited from his father Murad, to capture the city of Constantinople. The former magnificence of the dazzling metropolis glimmered like a tarnished jewel straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, beguiling all who caught a glimpse. Sultan Mehmet saw in the decaying gem an opportunity for personal glory, but also for renovation. Mehmet’s fixation on Constantinople was one born of his sense of entitlement. The putrefying Byzantine dynasty gave the storied city a stench that was not becoming of its illustrious past. Mehmet believed that Constantinople deserved a rejuvenation of its old glory, and designed to impose that grandeur upon it. The crescent moon that rose above the Bosphorus that night signified to both sides that fate was the third party in the battle for Constantinople, and destiny was an accessory to Mehmet’s plans. The driving momentum behind the Ottoman’s rise was evident in the very stars themselves.

Mehmet had come to the throne two years previously, in February 1451, and immediately set out to subdue an Ottoman vassal state in Anatolia. Mehmet quickly proved himself a forceful leader with his quick victory and subsequent suppression of a mutiny by the Janissary corps, who demanded a cash bonus following the campaign. Sources inside the Ottoman court describe how Mehmet had already become consumed with the goal of capturing Constantinople. To Mehmet, and other powerful figures in the Ottoman regime, the continued sovereignty of a Christian city at the heart of the Muslim states of the Balkans and Near East was intolerable, especially in light of the Byzantine Emperors propensity for meddling in internal Ottoman power struggles. At the beginning of March 1452, Mehmet dispatched heralds to every governor in his empire, commanding each to bring an army to the Bosphorus to prepare for the final assault on Constantinople. The Sultan traveled to a spot on the Black Sea six miles from the city walls and began construction on a massive fortress, named the Rumeli-Hisari, where he awaited the ripening of his plans. The fortress was complete by August of that year, and together with a smaller castle built on the opposite side of the strait, effectively closed off passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. By September, approximately 50,000 men were encamped around the fortress.

Constantinople was already a dying city, in the throes of a prolonged and terminal decline lasting at least two centuries. Visitors describe a melancholy and moribund air enveloping the metropolis. From the close of the 12th century, the city’s population had declined from more than a million to less than a hundred thousand. The Byzantine Emperors faced challenges from both east and west. Slavic princes and Italian dukes seized territories, chunk by chunk, throughout the Balkans and Greek isles. In 1205, the Fourth Crusade occupied and looted the city instead of traveling through to Jerusalem, founding a Catholic Latin state that lasted several decades before the Greek Palaeologus dynasty was restored. At the same time, the newly ascendant Ottoman Turks rose up from the east, and captured the fertile Anatolian plains that had provided the majority of the Empire’s agricultural produce and a preponderance of its military conscripts. The Turks’ power and influence spread from Asia across into Europe, as they grew bolder in their assaults on Greek territories. In 1347, an outbreak of the Black Death left a third of the Empire’s population dead. The same year, at the coronation of Emperor John VI, spectators observed that the jewels in the Emperor and Empress’s diadems were actually made of glass. By the time of the Ottoman conquest, the Byzantines possessed an empire in name only, and the Imperial capital’s erstwhile splendor was markedly tarnished. The Imperial Palace still lacked roof tiles, melted down and sold by the previous emperor. Large tracts within the city walls were left unpopulated and reduced to rustic parkland.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the Emperor Manuel II embarked on a tour through the courts of Western Europe in order to shore up Christian support for the Byzantines in what promised to be troubling years ahead. Manuel was forced to rush back to his capital at news that the Ottoman sultan Bayezit was marching on the city, but chance saved it from destruction when Timurlane the Tartar laid siege to the Ottoman capital at Ankara, razing it to the ground in 1402. The Kings of France and England had received the Greek Emperor with pomp and deference, but his expedition had been a failure. Though his pleas for succor were met with pity, no aid was forthcoming. Quarrel and resentment colored the relationship between the Catholic Church in Rome and the Orthodox Church in Constantinople. Dogmatic disagreements played an increasingly divisive role in the relationship between Western and Eastern Christianity, and stuck a wedge between the Christians on either side of the Adriatic. The Byzantine Emperors, perceiving the mounting power of the Ottomans, aimed to bolster their position by ironing out these doctrinal differences and entering into a union with the Western Church. After years of stalled negotiations, the union of the Churches was made at the grand church of Hagia Sophia in December of 1453. This pageantry would, however, do little to save the city. The incense smoke merely obscured the inevitable as the ringing of church bells sounded the death knell of Christian Constantinople.

Within the city, public sentiment ran strong against the Union. The citizens of Constantinople treated the Hagia Sophia “as if it were a synagogue. There were no offerings, no sacrifices, no incense.” The Megas Doux, Loukas Notaras, is said to have declared that he would rather see a Turkish turban ruling over the city than a cardinal’s hat. Emperor Constantine may have hoped that the feelings of confederacy and obligations of Christian brotherhood brought about by the union would bring military reinforcements to his city from the Christian kingdoms of Europe, but little help came. Feelings about the Union in the west were no less heated than inside the city. Latin contemporaries looked at what they perceived to have been the Greek’s impure motives in entering into the Union as provoking God’s ire and bringing his wrath down upon the city.

In the spring of 1453, Mehmet left his capital at Edirne, where he had spent the previous winter, and returned to his camp with the intent of taking Constantinople. A fleet of three hundred Turkish ships had gathered. Though the Greeks had only about thirty vessels, they had strung a massive chain across the harbor, equipped their galleys with battering rams, and lined them up behind the margin to close up the mouth of the Bosphorus. The enterprising Mehmet ordered eighty of his ships rolled across greased timbers from the Bosphorus, behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. Enormous cannons were also wheeled overland, and in the beginning of March, heavy bombardment began on the city’s walls. For the next three months, the walls and towers that had long kept the city safe were assailed and battered. Among the Turkish artillery were the largest guns yet built, testament to the technical expertise of the Ottomans. By April, the number of Mehmet’s soldiers had swelled to over 150,000.

The Greek forces were dwarfed in number, but resolute. The Megas Doux stood guard over the harbor with four hundred horsemen, who could be dispatched anywhere in the city where they might be needed. Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese noble who had arrived in the city with seven hundred men in January, as one of the few foreigners to answer Emperor Constantine’s entreaties for aid, took an informal position of command over the city’s defenses. The daily pounding by the Turkish cannon had brought down several sections of wall and a tower of the gate of Saint Romanus on the outer Theodosian Walls, which had been considered unassailable and kept the city secure since their construction more than a thousand years before. The Emperor became convinced of the hopelessness of his situation, and deigned to seek accord with the Sultan. Constantine sent out an embassy to the Ottoman camp with instructions to offer Mehmet an extravagant yearly tribute, and proffer to submit to whatever terms the Sultan might vouchsafe in order to spare the city. Mehmet is said to have replied with austerity:
It is impossible for me to withdraw. Either I shall capture the city, or the city shall capture me, alive or dead. If you are willing to leave it, I shall allow you to live at peace in the Peloponnese, and I shall give your brothers other provinces to rule over, and we shall be friends. But if you prevent me from entering in peace, and I have to fight my way in, I shall put you and all your nobles to the sword, and I shall give all the rest of your people to my soldiers, to be their slaves; and for myself I shall keep only the city.

The Turkish Sultan’s stony-hearted proposal was no overture to Constantine, who could not give up the city without the loss of all honor and dignity. The Emperor could not however, have anticipated a magnanimous response. The cards were stacked in the Turk’s favor, and time was against the Greeks. The Ottoman blockade, which only a few audacious ships had been able to penetrate, deprived the city of much needed food, supplies, and reinforcements. With both sides determined that they were left with no option but to play through to battle, the final weeks of the siege began in earnest.

On May 16th, defenders along the city’s defenses heard noises from below, and discovered that the Turks had tunneled nearly half a mile under the foundations of the city’s walls. The Megas Doux and Emperor were informed, and work was begun on their own tunnel. When the Greeks intercepted the infiltrators’ mine, they cast fire into it, burning the tunnel’s foundations and burying the Turks inside under a mountain of earth. The meager forces of the Greeks and their Italian allies pinned their hopes on the strength of their defenses, which despite the constant pummeling received from the Turkish guns, had been repaired daily with earthworks and the tumbled stones.

Looking to the city’s east on the night of May 22nd, the dark sky and cobalt water displayed two perfect crescent moons. The city’s defenders lamented this ill omen, while the Turks, massed in their camp outside the city’s walls, rejoiced. Mehmet ordered torches to be lit throughout every tent and every ship in the fleet, and for the men to howl and yell. The effect in the city was one of great dread and dismay. Mehmet determined that the city’s walls had been damaged enough to launch his final assault. The Greek defenders took their places: the Emperor and Guistiniani with three thousand men, between the outer and inner walls by the breach in the gate of Saint Romanus, the Megas Doux in the palace with five hundred men, and the same number of archers and crossbowmen along the sea walls and ramparts. Before dawn on the morning of the 29th of May, the Sultan himself rode out with a contingent of his elite janissary corps and launched his general attack at the gate of Saint Romanus. Mehmet ordered forward throngs of troops, upon which the defenders hurled heavy rocks and flaming sulfur. Countless Turks were killed, but Mehmet did not intend on giving the Greeks a chance to rest and kept up the onslaught in a determination to broach the walls. At sunrise, the popular Giovanni Guistiniani, fighting near the frontlines on the battlements, was wounded by an arrow in the side. When the other defenders noticed the wounded Guistiniani and let down their guard, the Turkish attackers seized on this lull and climbed onto the walls. Panic seized the Christians. As the Greek and Italian defenders retreated back toward the inner walls, the Turks swarmed over the ramparts and seized control of them. After the breaching of the walls, the Turks’ appreciable advantage of numbers overwhelmed the defenders. The victorious and euphoric Ottomans ran through the city, plundering its remaining riches, raping its women, and carrying gold, jewels and captives back to their camp. The Ottoman navy made landfall behind the city to try to capture their share of loot, and some defenders and inhabitants were able to escape by sea. However, most people left within the city were either killed, or captured and sold into slavery. The Emperor was killed too, under uncertain circumstances. Blood flowed through the city’s streets like water during a storm and the corpses of Greeks and Turks alike filled the Dardanelles straits, floating out to sea like rotten melons.

After the orgy of death and destruction that followed the opening of the city’s gates, Mehmet undertook a massive project of reconstruction designed both to restore the city’s former splendor and to Turk-ify it. When Mehmet first rode into the city, he toured the great buildings and bazaars with his retinue, ending at the Hagia Sophia. The largest cathedral in the world and seat of the Orthodox Christian faith, the Hagia Sophia had deteriorated to the point where only its dome was left intact. Constantinople became known by its Turkish name Istanbul, meaning “the city.” Mehmet ordered the construction of the opulent Topkapi Palace, and an enormous Grand Bazaar, but his restoration and conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was his most important project. The brilliant gold mosaics depicting Byzantine royals and Christian saints were plastered over, minarets were constructed, and the Ayasofya - as it became known - became the centerpiece of the glorious Ottoman Renaissance that flowered in the ancient city, until the thrust of fortune abandoned the Turks, and the Ottoman Empire fell into its own decline five centuries later.

"Oh my friend from Belgrade"

"A very heartbreaking song"

full of postwar angst.

Sweat

I have a lot of it this summer.

Baalbek

Baalbek Pictures