It remains a celebrated remark. In September 2012 Turkey's prime minister, as he then was, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina and declared: “Sarajevo matters as much to me as Trabzon or Diyarbakır.”
A year after equating the Bosnia-Herzegovina capital with two Turkish cities, Erdoğan, who is now president, visited Pristina where this time he stated: “Kosovo is Turkey, and Turkey is Kosovo.” These words attracted no criticism in the Kosovan capital Pristina nor back in Turkey, even if they did ruffle some feathers in Serbia. Does this mean that modern Turkey now aims to 'protect' all of the Balkan lands it once held as part of the Ottoman Empire? And how is the protective shadow of the old empire today seen in the Balkans, where Turkey is making a return, on the economic front at least?
The recent reconversion of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul into a mosque caused massive outrage in Greece but no official reaction in some countries with Orthodox Christian majority populations such as Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro. The media in the Balkans in fact remained relatively muted on the issue, though it is true that, given its economic importance in the region, criticism of an ally such as Turkey is increasingly frowned on generally.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In the last decade commercial links have indeed increased between Turkey and countries in south-east Europe. This is in addition to several major investments by Turkish firms and symbolic projects such as the purchase of the airport at Pristina, the construction of the 'patriotic motorway' linking Albania and Kosovo and the delayed motorway between Sarajevo and Belgrade. These commercial ties are not just limited to countries with majority Muslim populations – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo – but also their Orthodox neighbours.
The Turkish model and the hunt for 'Gülenists'
After the abortive coup d'État attempt in Turkey in July 2016, governments in the region pledged their support to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. And they scurried to track and hand over to the authorities in Ankara any suspected supporters of the US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish leader's arch rival. The imam's supporters have set up schools and universities across the Balkans.
In May 2018 Kosovo's secret services even kidnapped five teachers and a doctor and handed them over without any due legal process to their counterparts in Turkey. These actions were part of a wider operation which violated the country's laws and provoked a political scandal that eventually forced several Kosovan police chiefs to resign.
The Kosovan incident could yet go before the international courts. In June 2019 the European Court of Human Rights censured Moldova over the similar deportation of seven 'Gülenists'. In fact, with the sole exception of Greece, none of the countries in the region have objected to taking part in the hunt, even those nations where the 'Turk' has traditionally been seen as the enemy.
Indeed, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's political approach, mixing unbridled neoliberal economics with authoritarianism, has much in common with the policies of Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov and the 'strong men' who control Montenegro and Serbia, Milo Đukanović and Aleksandar Vučić.
In North Macedonia, meanwhile, all schools with a link to Gülen networks were closed in the weeks that followed the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016. At the time the country was run by conservative nationalist Macedonians from the VMRO-DPMNE party. This party is allied to nationalists from the country's Democratic Union for Integration, which represents Macedonia's minority Albanian population. But allegiance to Turkey goes beyond political and community barriers.
According to political analyst Arsim Zekolli, just about the only policy common to all the region's countries is that of regularly going to “kiss the Sultan's slippers”. In April 2019 the Turkish defence minister General Hulusi Akar went to Skopje in North Macedonia in order to demand the extradition of fifteen Gülenists. If Skopje did not go along with this the general held out the threat that Turkey might block North Macedonia's membership of NATO.
In Albania the socialist prime minister Edi Rama is quite open about his personal friendship with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2019 a monument commemorating the victims of the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey was put up in the Albanian capital Tirana, with financial help from the Turkish development agency TIKA. This large black marble plaque was erected not far from the city's artificial lake, and bears the names of the 251 Turks who died opposing the “rebels”. The street that leads to it is called “15th of July Street of Martyrs”.
Albanians and Bosnians turn towards the Bosphorus
Edi Rama's fervent support for the Turkish leader is surprising in a country where issues of identity are still very divisive. Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912 and its elites were closely involved in the emergence of modern Turkey. At the forefront was the Frashëri family, whose members were involved both in the 'Rilindja Kombëtare' or 'Albanian Renaissance' and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
Though the Stalinist regime under Enver Hoxha banned all practice of religion in 1967, the Albanian national conscious takes pride in the country's multi-confessional nature. Alongside the majority Muslims there are sizeable Catholic and Orthodox Christian minorities, each making up around 15% of the population.
One strand of Albanian nationalism, represented in particular by the writer Ismail Kadare, rejects the idea of a “Turkish legacy”, and sees the six centuries of Turkish presence in Albania as the cause of its “backwardness”. Some even call for a collective 'reconversion' to Catholicism as a measure of the 'Europeanness' of the Albanian people.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
After the fall of communism in Albania at the start of the 1990s the right-wing prime minister Sali Berisha embarked on a closer relationship with Turkey, while at the same signing up Albania to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, now the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. At the time the Albanian Socialist Party – the inheritor of the old party from communist days – initially kept to a strictly secular stance. It even refused to take part in the debate as to whether Albania should look West or East in geopolitical terms.
That old stance has now changed. Though he is a firm supporter of Albania being politically aligned with Europe, the current Socialist Party boss and prime minister has also made clear his support for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Indeed, Edi Rama is adept at creating waves by warning other European countries that his country could “drift eastwards” if progress is not made on Albania acceding to the European Union.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina the Party of Democratic Action openly acknowldges its friendship, political, historical, cultural and religious ties with Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. The SDA, founded in 1990 by the late Alija Izetbegović, the first president of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now led by his son Bakir, promotes the notion of a “common destiny” with the Turkish people. It sees itself as the spokesperson of the Bosniak people, in other words Muslim Bosnians.
Two main approaches dominant the internal debate about Bosnia-Herzegovina's identity. One favours the idea of building a common citizenship out of all the country's communities; the other, backed by the SDA, favours a narrow denominational nationalism, limited to the Bosniaks. So Turkey is seen in this approach as the country's 'natural' protector, even if it is imperialistic, republican and secular.
Ankara as an alternative to Brussels
In this instance the connection between the SDA's 'little' Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey works both ways. Since the start of the 2000s every election meeting held by Bakir Izetbegović's party has included a 'message of friendship' from its Turkish counterpart. And Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chose Sarajevo to host a European gathering for the AKP ahead of Turkey's June 2018 Parliamentary elections, while other EU countries were opposed to Turkish political meetings being held on their soil. As a result coachloads of Turkish workers from Germany descended on the Bosnian capital.
In recent years Ankara has also produced several films and television series dedicated to the glory of Alija Izetbegović, such as the 2017 documentary by Ömer Erdoğan (no relation) called 'Alija, Islam's last rampart in the Balkans'.
During the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995) Turkey helped Bosnia-Herzegovina considerably, though at the time the AKP itself had not yet been created. In fact Erdoğan's party needed to adopt a history that was not its own in order to justify its objectives of defending Islam and defending the former empire's legacy. This makes it easier to understand why Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sometimes seems to portray the turbulent Bakir Izetbegović as a close relative.
A few kilometres from Pristina stands the Tomb of Sultan Murad I, who won the famous Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This clash saw the Ottoman forces ranged against a Christian coalition from the Balkans led by the Serbian prince Lazar Hrebeljanović. Though the Ottoman Empire's forces prevailed, Murad himself was assassinated in his own tent by the Serbian knight Miloš Obilić.
The famous tomb, which was starting to become dilapidated, was restored at the start of the 2010s by the Turkish development agency TIKA. The tomb remains a popular place of devotion as the sultan was seen as a powerful intercessor by local Muslims; believers tie little strips of cloth to trees next to the mausoleum to make a wish come true or to heal the sick.
The nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman Empire is natural here, as it is part of the popular culture of collective identity. The Murad tomb acts a a memorial depicting one version of Kosovo's history, which is a mirror image of the one the Serbs have constructed. So by renovating the tomb TIKA showed that the modern Turkish state intends to appropriate this history for itself, even lending it some renwed political significance.
It is in this way that Turkish presence in the Balkans has made itself felt since the 1990s. Sometimes purely heritage issues cross over with religious issues. For example, the Turks have been careful to preserve the original character of mosques that some zealots from the Arabian Gulf would have happily 'cleansed' of their decorations in line with purist Salafist doctrine.
The battle between 'Turkish Islam' and Salafist or Wahhabi influence – the latter term is widely used in the Balkans, often in a derogatory way – is waged in the form of a struggle for influence inside the Islamic communities across the region's different countries.
In fact, Balkan Islam still preserves some of the bureaucratic administrative structure inherited from the Ottoman era and which was strengthened under socialist Yugoslavia, which saw this bureaucracy as a means of control. The powerful Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı or Directorate of Religious Affairs – which reports to the prime minister – is the Turkish body which finances and influences Islamic institutions in the Balkans. The Diyanet is careful to exclude elements that are too radical, so that mosques remain the best means of spreading modern Turkey's 'soft power'.
From 'Ottoman yoke' to neo-Ottomanism
As for the Balkan nations themselves, they have constructed their national story as one of a long resistance to and growing liberation from the 'Ottoman yoke', which is seen as the main reason for their late development. This narrative was developed in the 19th century by liberal-minded patriotic elites and reinforced by the socialist regimes in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania after 1945.
Those regimes sought to consolidate their hold on power with a 'national communist' narrative fuelled by attacks on the “feudalism” of the Ottoman era and by extolling the virtues of a long-suffering but resilient people. In Yugoslavia, where several historical narratives were potentially at conflict with each other, the official central view was also that the Ottoman system had been socially backward. But it was particularly after the break-up of Yugoslavia that Serbian nationalism made the 'Turk' its enemy, with this term also being used to refer to all Muslims in the Balkans.
In the 1990s some Serbian establishments refused to serve 'Turkish coffee' and instead offered what they called home-made or roasted coffee. Today those same bars and cafés show Turkish television series and in particular the best-known of them, an interminable drama about the life of Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror.
These Turkish dramas have contributed a great deal to the development of 'neo-Ottomanism'. This idea, developed by academic and former Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who later fell into disgrace and became an opponent of Erdoğan, espouses the view that Turkey should have good relations with all its neighbours and in particular the former imperial possessions.
An example of this in practice came at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when Turkey opportunely sent several loads of face masks to every Balkan country at a time when the EU was banning the export of medical materials. It was a useful reminder of who, geopolitically speaking, their 'real friend' was.
But what exactly is Turkey's game plan in the Balkans? In the 2000s, when it was still hoping to join the EU, Turkey saw the Balkans as a bridge between itself and its European objective. With that ambition now thwarted, however, Ankara is seeking to position itself as an alternative to Brussels, though its regional ambitions have been undermined by the country's 2018 financial crisis which saw the value of the Turkish lira plummet.
The countries of south-east Europe no longer feel the same historical resentment towards Turkey as they once did, and cosying up to Ankara publicly can be a deliberate strategy to defy the EU. The curse of the 'little' peoples of the Balkans has often been to want to play their powerful 'protectors' off against each other. And a century after the end of the Ottoman Empire people still speak in the Balkans with a mixture of fear and fascination of Istanbul as the “imperial city”, or Tsargrad – meaning the 'city of the Caesar' or 'imperial city' - in Slavic languages.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter