A Past, So Distant, and Yet So Very Near

Abstract

This article analyses how the post-1908 Ottoman Empire is represented in Türk Tarih Kurumu’s historiographical journal Belleten between 1937 and 1950. The post-1908 Ottoman Empire is a marginal topic in Belleten’s first years. When it is addressed at all, it mainly focuses on Mustafa Kemal’s biography and the Turkish War of Independence. While the Constitutional Revolution is positively evaluated, and the Young Turks are partly represented as ideological predecessors to the Kemalists, the authors also use the Second Constitutional Era as a dark contrast against which they can show the Republican reforms and successes more clearly. Aspects of the recent past that relate to the Ottoman state and government institutions are strongly historicized, while simultaneous events relating to Mustafa Kemal’s biography are discursively brought close to the present by using personal memory as a legitimate source. More than half of the authors writing about the recent past hold a political office, indicating an overlap between the political and the historiographical discourse.