Imagining an imminent Victory: an imagological analysis of the Ottoman caricature of the beginning of the First Balkan War

Abstract

The article presents the results of the study of the images of the Ottoman caricature of the initial period of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) from the point of view of the efficiency and effectiveness of the work of the Ottoman military propaganda. Starting with the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The Ottoman Empire did not win a single war. In many ways, the reason for the defeats of the Ottoman Empire was its technological backwardness from other countries. By the time the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 began, propaganda had already been spread throughout Europe as a purposeful method of fighting against the enemy. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 1910s, the Ottoman Empire also had propaganda tools and knew how to use them. Methodologically, the article is based on the tools of imagology, the essence of which is to study the nature, character, purpose and meaning of the image. This approach makes it possible to decode caricature images of Ottoman magazines in more detail. The author examines the issue of efficiency and effectiveness of Ottoman propaganda in coverage through the caricature prism of the initial period of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). The results of the analysis of the cartoons show to what extent the Ottoman propaganda was able to use the mechanisms available to it to mobilize the masses within the country. Special attention is paid to the cartoons of the Balkan Wars from the magazines "Cem" ("Cem") and "Black-eyed" ("Karagöz"), one of the most popular publications of the early 1910s. They allow us to see how the Ottoman visual propaganda was used in the period before the First World War (1914-1918), which remains little studied in Western and Russian Ottoman studies.