If it wasn’t for the fact that Turkish authorities decided to ban the author from reentering the country due to her political journalism, the idea for writing about the former Ottoman Empire would not have come to fruition. So it is thanks to Turkey’s sensitive regime that Alev Scott wrote Ottoman Odyssey – Travels through a Lost Empire, a fascinating and somber account of the people and heritage in the countries that comprised the Ottoman Empire, a sprawling empire that spread across three continents.
Scott, a half-Turkish Cypriot and half-British reporter, had lived in Turkey for several years before suddenly finding out she was barred from the country after being refused entry from Greece. Originally intending to write about the social legacy of the empire within Turkey, she decided to broaden her scope to the wider empire. The book features people and places from Turkey to Greece to the Balkans to Israel and Lebanon.
The Ottoman Empire ruled modern-day Turkey as well as most of the Balkans, the Middle East and Egypt, which meant it encompassed Asia, Africa and Europe. While dominated by the Turks who were predominately Muslim, the empire also had a cosmopolitan nature in terms of ethnicities and religions. It is sad that modern-day Turkey is far less multicultural than it was in the 19th-century, when significant Orthodox Christian and Jewish communities thrived in Istanbul. The 20th century upheavals such as the 1919-1922 war between Greece and Turkey, which resulted in both countries exchanging their respective Muslim and Orthodox minorities, ended this cosmopolitan nature.
For these minorities, displacement and exile became the norm, which the book covers in abundance. From Turkish Greeks living on the Greek isle of Lesbos just miles from the Turkish coast, looking on at their former homes whilst not being able to go back to live there is a daily experience. On divided Cyprus, locals from the Turkish and Greek-speaking sides talk about having more in common with their fellow Cypriots than their fellow ethnic and linguistic kin from the mainland.
But in general Ottoman rule has a mixed legacy across the region, especially among its former Christian subjects in Greece, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslav republics, and not least of all, Armenia. After all, the Armenia genocide was carried out during the end of the empire by Turkish troops, as well as Kurds, amid a general unraveling. While still hotly disputed by Turkey, who refuse to acknowledge the genocide, the Armenians suffered the terrible loss of over a million people that still haunts them today.
Scott visits Armenia, though she has to keep her Turkish heritage through her Turkish Cypriot mother a secret, and tell people she is from England (which she is). She visits the capital’s Genocide Museum and leaves shaken by the experience.
Scott also travels to the Levant, the southern reaches of the former empire, specifically Israel and Lebanon. There, she weaves through the complex religious and sectarian makeup of those countries, much of which stems from Ottoman times. There are visits to Jerusalem, the stronghold of the Druze in Lebanon, and even a former IS enclave in Lebanon near the Syrian border.
Ottoman Odyssey is a poignant, sorrowful and entrancing book that does well to highlight the lingering traces of a once grand empire across its former lands.
