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Introduction
Contemporary Turkey is saturated with nostalgia for its Ottoman past. Millions tune in to television series where palace intrigues play out between sultans and women of the harem. Five centuries after her time, Hürrem--the wife of Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), commonly known as Roxelana in the West--shapes fashion statements thanks to the popular television series Muhtesem Yüzyil (The Magnificent Century), with women from different sections of society wearing replicas of her jewelry. In photography studios, people have their pictures taken in Ottoman-period costumes, enjoying and displaying memorialized versions of themselves as sultans and sultanas. Restaurants offer menus peppered with the word "Ottoman." Bookstores abound with popular books and magazines promising readers the story of the "real" Ottomans. Ottoman Turkish courses and the collecting of antiques are growing ever more popular. Lavish shopping malls feature shops selling T-shirts decorated with Ottoman tugras, the sultans' calligraphic seals. Five-star hotels and health clubs have discovered a long neglected and formerly disdained Ottoman institution and adapted it to modern consumption: the hamam, or traditional Turkish bath. Along with these popular forms of consuming the Ottoman past, the state is also promoting its own vision of the Ottoman past through such events as the celebration of the conquest of Istanbul in 1453, commemorating this event through a panoramic museum, as well as by disseminating a vision of a multicultural, just, welcoming, and peaceful Ottoman past through public speeches, textbooks, and publications.
This paper investigates the ways in which the public in Turkey makes sense of neo-Ottomanism and Ottomania as two interrelated processes of history and memory. We first discuss neo-Ottomanism as a political project aimed at reviving the Ottoman past in a variety of domains, including the urban fabric, anniversary celebrations, and foreign policy. The remainder of the paper discusses Ottomania, this project's counterpart in popular culture. As a field where struggles over meaning and representation take place, popular culture reflects how the rising interest in the Ottoman past corresponds to historical shifts in the meaning of "modernity" and "tradition." As a commercialized popular culture invades formerly highbrow domains, pleasure comes to the defense of a highly stylized and dramatized past. Thus, contemporary attempts to reinterpret...