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The article analyzes the strategies of historical politics in Turkey on different stages of its modern history. The politicization of history has been inherent to Turkey through most of the 20th and 21st centuries. During the formation period of republican Turkey Kemalists created a myth of the Turkish origins of the world civilization for overcoming the historical traumas caused by the defeat in the First World War and collapse of the country. Then they carried out a negative revision of the Ottoman past and totally nationalized it in the form of rebranding the “Ottoman legacy” into the “true Turkish” one. In Erdoğan’s Turkey the makers of the secular Turkish Republic became the object of the similar negative historical revision and the reference point for cultivation of historical traumas. The Ottoman Empire, on the contrary, was mythologized as a cradle of the world civilization, the most prosperous example of an Islamic empire and unique model of liberal multinational state guided by the values of multiculturalism. The rising interest in the Ottoman history, which Turkish politicians have demonstrated for the last two decades, is not a re-discovering of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, it is an attempt to use the Ottoman past on different levels according to their own interests and making the national history an area of political struggle. The invention of the “real” versus “official” history dichotomy in the 2010s, on the one hand, helped to discredit the early republican period and glorify the late Ottoman Empire, but, on the other hand, it turned history into an effective instrument for wrestling the domestic and foreign foes of the current regime.
Pavel Shlykov (Wed,) studied this question.