Which Turkey Was The Best ?

[Gim]

Ottoman Empire.

[Saranidia]

I still think Suleiman Kanuni’s Turkey.

[Saranidia]

What exactly are the pros and cons of each option on the poll? I instinctively chose Byzantium since I’m a Romanophile and have a bit of a problem with Turkey’s historical atrocities against the non-Turkic inhabitants of Anatolia, but I’d like to know what’s actually good and bad about either of the ones listed.

What did Suleiman do to those groups?

[Kyria]

What exactly are the pros and cons of each option on the poll? I instinctively chose Byzantium since I’m a Romanophile and have a bit of a problem with Turkey’s historical atrocities against the non-Turkic inhabitants of Anatolia, but I’d like to know what’s actually good and bad about either of the ones listed.

What did Suleiman do to those groups?

I don’t know anything about what he did specifically but I distrust him out of principle of him being an Ottoman and my lack of knowledge.

[Rojava Free State]

What did Suleiman do to those groups?

I don’t know anything about what he did specifically but I distrust him out of principle of him being an Ottoman and my lack of knowledge.

I know America has a bad history of racism and everything but it seems like turkey has an even worse history of being violent toward people who aren't turks, including but not limited to:

•Albanians
•Bulgarians
•Kurds
•Greeks
•Assyrians
•Arabs
•Armenians
•Korean tourists in Istanbul on the wrong day

[The East Marches II]

I don’t know anything about what he did specifically but I distrust him out of principle of him being an Ottoman and my lack of knowledge.

I know America has a bad history of racism and everything but it seems like turkey has an even worse history of being violent toward people who aren't turks, including but not limited to:

•Albanians
•Bulgarians
•Kurds
•Greeks
•Assyrians
•Arabs
•Armenians
•Korean tourists in Istanbul on the wrong day

You forgot Georgians and Persians too!

Though admittedly, everybody dislikes the Albanians so I wouldn't be too hard on the Turks for that.

[Rojava Free State]

I know America has a bad history of racism and everything but it seems like turkey has an even worse history of being violent toward people who aren't turks, including but not limited to:

•Albanians
•Bulgarians
•Kurds
•Greeks
•Assyrians
•Arabs
•Armenians
•Korean tourists in Istanbul on the wrong day

You forgot Georgians and Persians too!

Though admittedly, everybody dislikes the Albanians so I wouldn't be too hard on the Turks for that.

Yeah I'm honestly surprised just how disliked the Albanians are. Especially in america

[Nakena]

You forgot Georgians and Persians too!

Though admittedly, everybody dislikes the Albanians so I wouldn't be too hard on the Turks for that.

Yeah I'm honestly surprised just how disliked the Albanians are. Especially in america

Jim Belushi is albanian.

Also the founder dynasty of modern Egypt is also descendents of albanians.

[Vistulange]

I don’t know anything about what he did specifically but I distrust him out of principle of him being an Ottoman and my lack of knowledge.

I know America has a bad history of racism and everything but it seems like turkey has an even worse history of being violent toward people who aren't turks, including but not limited to:

•Albanians
•Bulgarians
•Kurds
•Greeks
•Assyrians
•Arabs
•Armenians
•Korean tourists in Istanbul on the wrong day

If it's any consolation, it's not unique to Turkey.

[The East Marches II]

You forgot Georgians and Persians too!

Though admittedly, everybody dislikes the Albanians so I wouldn't be too hard on the Turks for that.

Yeah I'm honestly surprised just how disliked the Albanians are. Especially in america

Edit: this is famous meme, I do not endorse prejudice against Albanians.

[Europa Undivided]

The best Turkey is when it admits that it did the Armenian Genocide and pays Armenia reparations.

[Grenartia]

[Insert witty Thanksgiving joke here]

Dammit. I wanted to be the one that said "the one I ate 2 weeks ago".

[Yirophia]

Okay, well first of all, there's certainly a whole lot to unpack just in the particular use case of one specific word in that title.

The Anatolian peninsula was not dominated by the Turkic peoples since the dawn of civilisation, only cementing their presence in the region and displacing, replacing, and integrating Greek and pan-Hellenic cultures there around the dawn of the colonial age at the tail end of a series of Seljuk invasions and later Ottoman invasions and ensuing consolidations. A long and, really, unlikely string of events that nevertheless happened in our real world history, whose ultimate origin point was so far as to have essentially no effect on the peninsula beforehand, an entire civilisation away, across the pre-Turkic influence Islamic civilisation of the time and up northeast-ish of the general Persia cultural region, south of the middle longitudes of what we now call Russia, somewhere in the ex-Soviet and Russian empire territories, probably specifically somewhere in or around Kazakhstan (Edit2: No, not Turkmenistan; IIRC it's thought that the people of Turkmenistan split off from the Seljuk-to-Ottoman mainline and settled down quite a lot closer to home) before probably climate-related troubles caused their shift to more wider-travelling so-called "steppe hordes" and, in a frightening and impressive example of what a powerful mix of likely sheer desperation, hardiness as a people, sheer size of the population fielded and moved, and plain and simple having cavalry tactics that their enemies had pretty much no clue how to deal with for a very long time, ripping straight through Persia, the levant, to a lesser degree so far as India and Arabia and Egypt, and ultimately all the way into Anatolia.

The Greeks they themselves replaced were also ultimately foreigners to the land, having, over the periods of Roman rule, consolidated a messy melting pot of various Indo-European cultures that had diffused into and fundamentally fractured the relatively united earlier Indo-European culture of the Hittites even before that, whereas the Hittites in turn replaced the pre-Indo-European Hattians and Hurians who in turn are, where there's scholarly conversation and evidence at all, usually thought to have replaced the possibly first native humans in the form of the ancestral Kartvelians who still in turn replaced late, possibly culture-having, neanderthals which either replaced or culturally evolved from yet earlier neanderthals that were, at their start, probably orders of magnitude more culturally and linguistically distinct, inasmuch as they ever possessed either (which is uncertain), and even genetically distinct from the latest neanderthals as a modern American is distinct from a prototypical Kartvelian.

For that matter, neither was really any state based out of there, even the ones after that, inhabited chiefly and even ruled by ethnic and genetic Turks, decidedly "Turkey" in the sense of being a Turkish state, until very recent history. After the Ottoman ascension to power and prominence it was an empire, and the Ottoman rulers deliberately attempted to cultivate, and themselves expressed, a distilled syncretism of classical Mediterranean (culminating in Roman, particularly eastern, i.e. Greek) culture and pan-Islamic culture. For a long time this was relatively successful, even, at least insofar as maintaining stability, even though of course we see today that it had no deep-entrenching and long-lasting impact on the cultures of the area, and the Ottoman administration in its later years in many ways openly rejected nationalism as our modern sensibilities understand it, and by extension a Turkish "nation," indeed any nation.

Indeed there has only been one "Turkey," the modern, post-Ottoman, post-WW1, post-TWI Turkey. In a sense, while Turkish culture is of course much older, Turkish collective identity was fabricated during that period in response to perceptions of oppression and humiliation at the hands of the Allies. Even at that, Ataturk and his first few successors laboured very intensely, in an uphill fight, and in some ways probably not even ultimately for the best, against pre-existing old Ottoman ideals that ran counter to the central tenets of nationalism, and despite all of that work the distinctly Turkish identity as such is now, only a few decades later, under increasing threat by Erdogan's anti-nationalist, (good) pan-Islamist, (workable at least, though certainly not the best thing as many people are likely to express it) and anti-liberal (literally the worst and spoiling of all other aspects) political philosophy.

Edit: Noticing, now, that Vistulange, who happens to be my regionmate, has posted and is actually Turkish himself, I must confess that this is "the briefest possible history of Anatolia" and a labour of an informal understanding based on a history of casual, and certainly non-university-grade research which may indeed be incomplete, grossly oversimplifying, or indeed outright wrong in places; and I would welcome any insight he'd offer to respond with, previous disagreement between us set aside and irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Edit2: Oh lord, my apologies, the early Turks shifted into a social model of much farther-reaching steppe "hordes," not shitted.

[Saranidia]

I don’t know anything about what he did specifically but I distrust him out of principle of him being an Ottoman and my lack of knowledge.

I know America has a bad history of racism and everything but it seems like turkey has an even worse history of being violent toward people who aren't turks, including but not limited to:

•Albanians
•Bulgarians
•Kurds
•Greeks
•Assyrians
•Arabs
•Armenians
•Korean tourists in Istanbul on the wrong day

In the Ottoman Empire it was less about race, there were Albanian pashas and I believe there were Arab judges and scholars etc.
Slavery was not based on race(Slaves could be Syrian-although likewise Syrian Muslims could NOT be enslaved-Slavic or other.)

[Vistulange]

-snip-
Edit: Noticing, now, that Vistulange, who happens to be my regionmate, has posted and is actually Turkish himself, I must confess that this is "the briefest possible history of Anatolia" and a labour of an informal understanding based on a history of casual, and certainly non-university-grade research which may indeed be incomplete, grossly oversimplifying, or indeed outright wrong in places; and I would welcome any insight he'd offer to respond with, previous disagreement between us set aside and irrelevant to the matter at hand.

That's a surprisingly and refreshingly apt summary of the whole idea.

There's not much I'd contest there. The things that I would are largely matters of semantics and nuance, and don't affect the overall point.

[Kheshiga]

Mithradates's anti-Roman kingdom takes the cake.

[Nakena]

It seems to be from the late 1940s https://www.nadirkitap.com/mizah-karika ... 73111.html

This is appears to be from the 1920s/1930s and i've came recently along it:

You combined a beautiful Turkish woman with images of a mosque being destroyed and religion being thrown away. Did the creator of that poster ever remotely realize that I would see it?

It's quite an unusual combination of elements.

[The Greater Gothic Empire]

For Ottoman Turkey, here.

[Ard al Islam]

For Ottoman Turkey, here.

[Erkemen]

Selçuklular were badass, the Ottoman dynasty was alright up until Tanzimat, and the Cumhuriyeti was great under our hero Atatürk. Not so much with İnönü.

[Saranidia]

The best Turkey is when it admits that it did the Armenian Genocide and pays Armenia reparations.

How about they pay when the Anglosphere(except Jamaica) pays.

[North German Realm]

The best Turkey is when it admits that it did the Armenian Genocide and pays Armenia reparations.

How about they pay when the Anglosphere(except Jamaica) pays.

TIL the Anglosphere was responsible for the Armenian and Greek genocides.

[Vistulange]

For Ottoman Turkey, here.

Oxymoron.

"Ottoman" and "Turkey" is...an oxymoron.

[Asle Leopolka]

Είναι όλα κακά

[Europa Undivided]

The best Turkey is when it admits that it did the Armenian Genocide and pays Armenia reparations.

How about they pay when the Anglosphere(except Jamaica) pays.

Payment to whom?