SONS & DAUGHTERS OF FALLEN and ASCENDANT EMPIRES: LET US EAT TURKISH DELIGHT TOGETHER

I was at a conference of Asianists last week in the Turkish capital of Ankara, a sprawling, smoggy city full of concrete, cafes, cars, and stray cats. We met on the conference of METU, the local center of the ongoing protests the international media has studiously ignored. Clearly, the international media has not recently dined near the campus, where the smell of tear gas might disrupt their after-dinner stroll.

Middle Eastern Technical University (METU)

One of the many campus cats

Candy-colored chairs in the conference area

My hotel was fancy

I went to Turkey for the first time more than a decade ago, on a short backpacker circuit with a friend. We were delighted by what we saw of the country: the strikingly beautiful people; the otherworldly landscapes of Cappadocia and Pamukkale; the insanely inflated currency (1,000,000 lira was downgraded to 1 in 2005); the Roman ruins and modern cities.

At the time, as a full-grown partly-college-educated American human, my knowledge of Turkey was mostly limited to the following: it was famous for its baths and bathrobes, it had been a part of the Ottoman Empire (which I knew of primarily a one-time rival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire); it contained dervishes; Istanbul was [once] Constantinople.

Street sign in the city center

The national oil company has a really weird logo

Some Turkish graffiti, and in English "I love Peter Pan"

No idea on the historical context, just can't resist a statue of a lady with a book

Istanbul was (and I'm sure still is) grand by any name. It was dizzyingly beautiful evidence of a history I knew nothing of. Hagia Sophia was one of the most impressive examples: built 1500 years ago it had served as a Greek Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, a mosque, and now a museum in a secular nation. The walls bore material scars of the centuries, layers of different faiths under different rulers.

I spent a day in a fog at the museum, trying to take it all in: Anatolians, Byzantines, hellenization, Mongols, beyliks, the Silk Road, the Ottoman fricking Empire ruling huge swaths of the ancient world for 500 years. It sounds trite but it really was one of the first times my consciousness of human history expanded beyond Cleopatra, the Renaissance, the British Empire, and the American Revolution. The world expanded all around me like so many exploding universes.

Pointed at the ice cream case and hoped for the best, ended up with a sundae featuring caramel and chocolate ice cream atop berry and coconut sorbet. No regrets.

The sundae purveyor

Flags bearing the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey and "father of the Turks"

Anitkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum and memorial museum.

At the conference last weekend in Ankara I learned even more about the Ottoman Empire, the Silk Road, and the "idea of Asia." I was one of a handful of anthropologists among historians, political scientists, and international relations-ists, as well as one of a small minority of Americans among Indians, Chinese, Kenyans, Turks, and a few Europeans. In the academic circles I typically run in I often talk about China with specialists from the U.S., Europe, and sometimes China, but at a conference like this you could hear about China from a Turk, Vietnam from a Japanese, the Philippines from a Chinese, or America from a Bengali. You only ever see other places, cultures, people through implicit comparison with the places, cultures, and people you know, so as someone curious about crossing the chasms of understanding between us I always find it exciting to see things through vastly different lenses.

I cannot resist ornamental nationalism

Or child provocateurs

Or nationalistic children

I had dinner on the second day of the conference with an America couple who both study Indonesia, and we talked about how strange it was to hear the way several of the conference's keynote speakers (for some reason we had five) referred matter-of-factually to the decline of the American empire and end of American hegemony. These statements were not laments, and they were far from the focus of the speeches. These were mostly historians, with long-range views, and they were merely noting that we were coming to the end of one of many dozens of eras in human history where much of the globe was dominated by one empire, region, or nation-state.

An elegant old couple and some respectable-seeming young dudes outside the mausoleum proper

Details...

(It was dark inside the mausoleum so I didn't take many pictures. The enormous marble coffin inside is just for show. Atatürk's earthly remains are actually in another coffin somewhere under Anitkabir. In the museum, a guard stands watch next to live cam footage of the coffin surrounded by flags and fresh flowers.)

Found a nation, get your face on a necktie!

The next day I explored the old city a bit and visited Anitkabir, where a friendly security guard checked my bag and asked me where I was from in the United States. "Washington the state, or Washington the capital?" he asked, and when I told him he proudly recited memorized facts: "the capital of Washington is Olympia" and "the state was founded in 1889." I smiled, a little sheepish, told him he knew more of its history than I did.

Anywhere an American goes in the world, aside from, perhaps, North Korea, they will meet people who know far more about their native land than they can reciprocate. We blushing hegemons have a difficult time understanding how it could be any other way, or at least I do. I'm deeply worried about my nation's political and economic systems and also deeply angry at our eternally nefarious and murderous foreign policy, but I'm also, I have to admit, a little frightened about the end of American empire.

After getting a few millenia of historical context I confess I'm feeling a little better about things. I might even be feeling optimistic about what's next.

Around the park surrounding the mausoleum