August 2020
Coming full circle
On my forced layover in Istanbul during the start of the Coronavirus Pandemic I took multiple long walks in the city. One was along venerable, Divan Yolu Caddesi, the old imperial road that led from Rome and Constantinople. I was headed down to the Grand Bazaar, but the street was so chock full of things, I kept stopping and exploring every few steps. I saw a lovely marble building and an attached cemetery. It turns out the building was the tomb of Abdulhamid, the last true Ottoman Sultan (with ultimate power) and buried (or honored?) outside was the last Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Sultans, Ahmet Tevfik Pasha.
So what?
Ahmet Tevfik Pasha oversaw the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres which the European powers forced on the Ottomans after World War II. That treaty affected TWO places I came to know intimately - Asir, Saudi Arabia and Kurdistan, Iraq/Turkey. The Treaty of Sèvres was to make a country out of Asir (I had come to know one of its ex-royal family) AND to hold a referendum in at least part of the Kurdish region for independence (which would have won by a landslide). Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was fomenting Turkish nationalism at the time and ready to take on the European Powers. Both sides wanted to avoid conflict and agreed to sign a NEW treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne, which gave Turkey more land, avoided bloodshed, but unfortunately torpedoed any chance of Asir or Kurdistan to go it on their own as nation states. Although the people of Asir probably never learn about import of the Treaty of Sèvres in Arabian history, Kurdish people all know about it as their ultimate betrayal by the Western Powers who had, for a moment in time, promised them a long-awaited nationhood.
So I stood by a memorial (or grave) of the last Grand Vizier of the Ottomans placed next to the tomb of the last Sultan who wielded total power. Both were the end of the line for an empire that spanned centuries. There I came full circle. I saw a collection of stone pillars representing a guy who inked a treaty so reviled by the founder of the modern Turkish state that he saw it overturned: a victory for the Turks - a loss for the Asiris of the Hejaz Escarpment and Kurds of the Zagros Mountains. How might the world have been different had it stuck to the Treaty of Sèvres?
It was very odd to stumble upon a place like that by chance. I wonder sometimes if all life events really are interlinked somehow and we simply never notice?
留言