This chapter focuses on areas that represent current responses to the events that happened between approximately 1550 and 1686 in what was then, roughly speaking, the territory of Upper and Lower Hungary in Habsburg possession and is nowadays Slovakia.1 The first part deals with current references to that period by politicians and in politically-motivated discourse at the beginning of the 21st century.2 As will become clear, these references are made especially by extremist and xenophobic politicians on the right, nationalists, various conspiratory websites and amateur âexpertsâ on history. I have deliberately omitted more positive issues from the common Ottoman â Slovak (âHungarian) past that are not well-known by Slovaks in general and certainly not instrumentalized by politicians. At the level of local politics, I concentrate on architecture and town planning where conflicting attitudes can lead to disappointment and frustration. This was the case with the proposal of the Turkish embassy in Slovakia to erect an Ottoman fountain of friendship in the city centre of Nové Zámky, the former Ottoman seat of Uyvar province (1663â1685), which ended with its rejection by the municipal council. In the final part, the focus will be on the discussion on Islam because the Ottoman era has shaped and still shapes the perception of this religion in Slovakia in many ways. The Ottoman Turks have long been the personification of the Muslim religion itself, and in some local languages the expression âturn Turkâ signified, not so long ago, âto convert to Islamâ (Slov. poturÄiÅ¥ sa, Hung. törökké válni). The demonization of Islam even by Slovak mainstream politicians during the recent migrant crisis, for example, led to the officially proclaimed willingness to accept two hundred refugees from the Middle East, but only if they were Christians.
The study will approach all these issues at the intersection of several closely related fields: religious studies, history, anthropology, and political science. I will also make some cross-references in order to compare Slovakiaâs responses and references to the Ottoman legacy with those of three neighbouring countries: Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic. The Hungarian references are especially relevant because Slovakia at that time was an integral part of the Kingdom of Hungary and the territories falling under direct Ottoman rule in Slovakia are/were populated mostly by the Hungarian minority. Unlike in Slovakia, and in spite of its being the occupying force in the 16th and 17th centuries, Turkey has a positive historical image in Hungary, largely because the Ottoman Empire supported Hungarian self-determination and later provided refuge to Hungarian national heroes such as Ferenc Rákóczi II or Lajos Kossuth.3 In recent times, this âfriendshipâ has also been conditioned by the official Hungarian policy of the âOpening to the Eastâ and membership aspirations to the Turkic Council, an intergovernmental organization of almost all Turkic countries.4 Furthermore, even the Hungarian far-right Jobbik party switched its anti-Turkish xenophobic stance and embraced pro-Turkish attitudes.5
The Islamist attacks of 9/11 in the US and elsewhere, as well as the European migrant crisis beginning in 2015 have once again revived interest in the Ottoman age in Slovakia. Both events in fact confirm that the legacy of the Ottomans in Central Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries has a continuing impact on Slovak identity, culture and even politics.6 The confrontation with the powerful âMuslim Turkâ with whom Christian Central Europeans have been engaged in historical confrontation on their own soil has left a number of concepts, stereotypes, distortions and prejudices that influence relations between Turkey and Slovakia up to this day. The events of the past are nowadays often used in a targeted way, manipulated according to current needs or instrumentalized in a variety of ways by politicians, ordinary citizens, some intellectuals and religious figures as well. The overall instability in the Middle East in the wake of the US-led intervention in Iraq in 2003 or the formation of the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq is a contributing factor to the issues raised in this study. In 2014, for instance, a map showed the planned future expansion of the so-called Islamic state (or caliphate) with its northern borders reaching as far as Slovakia, a fact that generated a heated debate in the Slovak tabloid press (Äas 2014 and Topky 2014).
1 Frontier Orientalism in Slovakia
Similar to Austria where the siege of Vienna in 1683 turned out to be a topic that can be easily connected to contemporary religious, cultural and political arguments, the heroic descriptions of battles with the Ottomans/Muslims in Slovakia are also used to convey various agendas and messages for immediate political purposes. The Turkish immigrant community in Vienna/Austria is often confronted with the idea of the âthird siege of the Turksâ, which is regularly used in a derogatory way to highlight the fact that after two military sieges of Vienna in early modern history, this time the Austrians are threatened by their own Turkish immigrant minority.7 The politics of memory in Slovakia is also frequently full of ethnocentrism, anti-Islamic xenophobia and various propagandistic interpretations of the past that show scant regard for the rules of professionalism, but instead feed the readers with false and self-deceptive myths.
Until now it is probably fair to say that Slovak relations with the Ottoman Turks have only rarely been the subject of theorizing (MaleÄková 2021, 21).8 Therefore, in what follows I will use the methodological concept elaborated by Andre Gingrich, an Austrian anthropologist, who studied representations and images of the Turkish-Ottoman invasions in the popular consciousness in Lower Austria, Styria and Burgenland. Drawing on Gingrichâs concept of frontier orientalism â a complement to or a challenging variant of Edward Saidâs Orientalism in general â as âa relatively coherent set of metaphors and myths that reside in folk and public cultureâ which are not present in all parts of Europe nor in America but which dominate in countries like Austria, Hungary, Croatia or Slovakia, I propose to look closer at how the historical struggle against the Ottoman-Muslim colonizing forces has been transformed in Slovakia into a âmytho-historyâ that has shaped our attitudes vis-a-vis both Turks and Muslims up to the present.9 Moreover, the Ottoman-Turkish âotherâ has been widely used since the late eighteenth century also by Slovak elites, historians and writers in order to create and strengthen Slovak identity, albeit (in this case) in relation to Hungarians, Austrians, and Czechs. The Ottoman Empire alias âthe Turkâ has been and still is the incarnation of the hegemonic and imperialist enemy, and cultural antipathy vis-a-vis the Ottoman Turks in Slovakia is observable even in more scholarly synthetic publications. The glorification of victories against the Turks â often with Christian symbolism â served in the process of national awakening and emancipation at a time when no one in Hungary had ever met a Muslim Turk with a sabre in his hand. Todayâs Slovak extreme right and nationalist politicians and movements still cultivate these hostile attitudes, and various forms of nationalism, both conservative and extremist, compete in developing similar narratives. Also, according to Gingrich this âdominant confrontational version of mytho-history negates or distorts the more creative and peaceful sides of Turkish interactions with central Europe during those centuriesâ (Gingrich 1996, 110).
This essay therefore explores the methodology of Gingrichâs frontier orientalism to highlight how frontier history in regions adjacent to the Muslim periphery of past times still helps Slovaks to construct both their own identity and that of their âothers,â often labelled as national enemies. One is tempted to say that even today the long-gone struggle against the Ottomans simply gives Slovaks, or more precisely Slovak politicians, the right to exist and mobilize for the defense of their own interests.
2 The Surrogate Motif of a Cruel and Aggressive âMuslim Turkâ
One of the typical fields of anti-Turkish imagery has to do with the Turk as invader and aggressor. This theme is instrumentalized in Slovakia for instance by the extremist right-wing nationalists led by Marián Kotleba, the leader of the parliamentary neo-fascist Peopleâs Party â Our Slovakia (ĽS-NS). In March 2012, the party held a rally near the fire-damaged Krásna Hôrka castle in Slovakiaâs KoÅ¡ice region. Krásna Hôrka, considered one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Slovakia, was severely damaged by fire on March 10, 2012 and according to a police statement the fire broke out after two local boys, who were identified as Roma, accidentally set fire to grass on the castle hill while trying to light cigarettes. The invitation to the rally posted on the ĽS-NS partyâs website stated that â[W]hat the Turks didnât accomplish in the 16th century, the gypsies did in 2012â (Slovak Spectator 2012). Although the castle itself had not been the target of direct Ottoman attack, it is obviously true that the Turks approached the castle hill when engaged in battles or on their raids in territories around the castle.
By using the comparison between Turk and Roma, the authors expressed their deepest contempt not only for the actions of the two boys, but in fact for the life-styles of the whole gypsy community. Strong anti-Roma rhetoric in Slovakia remains widespread among all non-Roma population groups. The inhuman image of the Turk who is always aggressive and violent finds its equal in the ranks of the âproblematicâ Roma minority, who are nowadays mostly perceived through crime rates and inappropriate behaviour. The surrogate motif of a cruel âMuslim Turkâ is used here for a flat-out rejection of gypsies as human beings, indeed in accordance with the more general opinion about Romas as the most-unwanted minority in Slovakia. This image of a horrible Turk or Roma is the exact opposite of the romanticised view Slovaks have of themselves, their historical or/and contemporary achievements.
These trends can, however, also be observed within more mainstream political circles. The current chairman of the Slovak Parliament Boris Kollár (leader of the SME Rodina or WE ARE Family party) â an unmarried father of eleven children with ten different women â declared during the debate on tightening the conditions for the registration of churches and religious communities in 2017 that âwith this law we are helping to protect our traditions, our roots, our civilization and our way of life. We are protecting our country and we are protecting our people, we are protecting our families. Whether some like it or not, we have Christian traditions and a Christian history in Slovakiaâ (IslamOnline.sk 2017). He also noted that Slovakia is unable to deal with the Roma people, let alone Muslims.
Analyzing anti-Turkish imagery in the 21st century in the Slovak context confirms the fact that the Ottoman Turks often appear paired both with Romas and/or â even more frequently â with Hungarians. The national perspective is present on various fronts and the bias against the âTurkâ can be coupled with a distance from or hatred of everything Hungarian. An example taken from essays on Slovak history written by the tendentious historian Marián TkáÄ, a former vice-governor of the National Bank of Slovakia and director of the Slovak Matica (Slov. Matica slovenská) â Slovakiaâs prominent scientific and cultural institution â, shows that selective reading of historical events and facts, together with a lack of expertise in more theoretical issues, can result in such self-affirming statements as â[T]he Turks stayed in Central Europe for so long thanks to the collaboration and a certain admiration on the part of Hungarians â finally, when they [Hungarians] arrived in Europe during the 9th century, they were also called Turks. This did not prevent Hungarian politicians from arguing in the future that they âsaved Europeâ several times from the Turks!â (TkÃ¡Ä 2019 and TkÃ¡Ä 2018).10 TkÃ¡Ä even referred to the work of another xenophobic Slovak author, Július Handžárik, who accuses the Hungarian nobility of playing the role of Turkish butlers and janissaries and of waging five partisan wars in the service of Turkey. TkÃ¡Ä is obviously fundamentally mistaken in giving the impression that only Hungarians collaborated with the Ottoman Turks. In addition to Hungarians, the natio Hungarica (noble Hungarian nation) throughout the 16th and 17th centuries included nobles and clergy of various ethnic origins, for example Slavic in the case of Croats, but also Romanians, Szeklers, Saxons or others, and a number of them took part in political, economic and military activities, including cooperation with the Ottomans. Until the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary was not a national state, but a multi-ethnic imperial political unit, although for current nationalist ideologues this fact goes unnoticed. The attempt to convince the reader that being part of the Hungarian nation in early modern times meant the same thing as being its member in the 20th century is fundamentally incorrect. In the meantime, from the late 18th century onwards the process of national awakening took place in the Habsburg monarchy in addition to social and economic changes, rendering the national language perhaps the most important qualitative feature of nationality in Central Europe. The cited example raises many questions but at least one thing is certain: being mentioned alongside a Turk is a sign of evil. Needless to say, both TkÃ¡Ä and Handžárik look at Turks with 20th and 21st century emotions. Moreover, they interpret political developments in the 16th and 17th century as national phenomena and often completely disregard and underestimate the spread of Reformation (and later Catholic reformation) and processes connected with confessionalism.
3 Heroic Accounts and Monuments of Battles ⦠and Clashes or Skirmishes?
To return to Gingrichâs notion of frontier Orientalism, its main characteristic is that it âencompasses elements of Catholic folk and elite cultures that memorialize and celebrate decisive historical (medieval, early colonial, late colonial) encounters with the Muslim world in supremacist and militant forms and metaphors. Frontier orientalism is the folkloristic glorification of decisive local military victories in past times, either against Muslims or together with Muslims, but serving present nationalist purposesâ (Gingrich 1996, 123).11 In recent years, there has also been an increased interest especially, but not exclusively, within Slovak conservative and nationalist circles, in promoting new themes in connection with the Ottoman conquest or building memorials to commemorate the victory of âChristians over Muslims.â Significant monuments were built and memorial plaques installed in at least three places in Slovakia. In the capital, Bratislava, a memorial plaque installed by unspecified Slovak military in 1998 at the entrance of the Church of Our Lady of the Snows at Bratislavaâs Calvary commemorates the battle of Kahlenberg that ended the second siege of Vienna on 12 September 1683 and âChristian soldiers who saved also the Slovak nation from the Ottoman yoke.â A monumental equestrian statue of Polish King John III Sobieski was erected in 2008 with the support of both the Slovak and Hungarian governments in front of the Roman Catholic church in Å túrovo (Hungarian Párkány) to celebrate his 1683 victory over the Turkish armies in a battle fought, together with Charles V of Lorraine, against the Ottoman pasha of Buda Kara Mehmed. Finally, the Zsitvatorok Peace Monument in RadvaÅ nad Dunajom, a village inhabited by the Hungarian minority on the Danube river, was unveiled in 2006 to commemorate the 1606 peace treaty between the Habsburgs and Ottomans ending the Long Turkish or Fifteen Yearsâ War (1591/1593â1606).
Building monuments and celebrating ancient victories is a noble thing in itself provided that at least two conditions are met. First, we need to make sure that we have sufficient credible and convincing sources in our hands in order to claim that events happened as we recall them. In addition, however, we must also be clear about the message that we want to deliver to society about the past times we are commemorating, and identify who specifically presents these messages. A specific and detailed discussion can perhaps better express the situation that should be avoided. In 1652 a rarely-mentioned Ottoman-Habsburg clash took place near Veľké Vozokany (Hung. Nagyvezekény) in todayâs western Slovakia. Christian troops numbering about 900â950 men blocked the way of approximately three thousand Ottoman raiders who had gathered from various castles and garrisons. The event was not really significant in itself as the size of the military involved was rather modest and the outcome did not change the overall situation in the region. What made it outstanding has to do with the fact that as many as four members of the Esterházy noble family lost their lives in the engagement, including László Esterházy, the head of the family. The commemorative bronze lion statue â breaking the Ottoman flag and the enemyâs battle ornaments â commissioned by the Esterházy family was unveiled in 1897, but in 2013 it was damaged by vandals.12 The statue has since been renovated and was returned to its original location in 2016 and it is said to be the only surviving historic monument in Slovakia commemorating the anti-Turkish struggles of a local population. Nevertheless, the real issue here is connected with the outcome and significance of the âbattleâ that is expressed in differing opinions concerning its nature. Until recently the engagement was often presented in Slovakia and Hungary as a significant battle both in scholarly literature and the broader community (Bátora and Drozd 2019, 677â97).13 Moreover, during the last ten years in particular, since issues concerning Islam and the flow of migrants from the Middle East have become a topic of heated debates within the broader society, the historical event in Veľké Vozokany has started to be instrumentalized once again, mostly in right-wing and nationalist circles. Nowadays the memorial serves also as a meeting point for Slovak nationalists and local xenophobes who express their determination to defend the sovereignty of the Slovak homeland and Christian values against those fellow-citizens who allegedly support the imposition of foreign values, traditions and customs upon Slovaks.14 Meanwhile, the former chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement, Alojz Hlina, has also organized memorial events at Veľké Vozokany to commemorate the fact that âEurope is Christianâ thanks also to the âdefeatâ of the Turks at this place. On the left of the political spectrum, the former presidential candidate Eduard Chmelár has also promoted the idea of an important battle near Veľké Vozokany in 1652.
In the meantime, in 2006 the Hungarian historian Zsuzsanna J. Ãjváry, from the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, published an important paper that fundamentally changed our knowledge about the event, but with which most Slovaks still seem to be unfamiliar. Working with previously unknown archival documents, the author provided a detailed analysis of the Ottoman-Hungarian engagement. According to Ãjváry, the sources quite clearly mention that âthe engagement was a raid rather than a battle in the proper sense of the word and it was the Esterházys who exaggerated the eventâs significance laterâ (Ãjváry 2006, 970). Also, she underlines the fact that it was the Hungarian troops that left the field after more than three hours of fighting, after losing some 100 men compared with 500 casualties on the Ottoman side. She further raised the issue of the responsibility of Ãdám Forgách, the captain of Nové Zámky city-fortress (Hung. Ãrsekújvár), who took shelter with his unit behind a barricade formed by carts, and failed to help the right and left flanks attacked by the Turks. As the Ottomans withdrew in a relatively orderly manner, collecting many of their dead and wounded and taking Ferenc Esterházyâs head as a trophy, the real victory remains questionable, argued the historian. The recent field survey by Slovak archaeologists also provided very little evidence that would confirm a large clash in the area, but the research work will continue (Drozd, Neumann, and Bátora 2020).
To summarize, then, it is probably fair to state that in the folk as well as the political perception âthe bronze Lionâ nowadays lives a life of its own notwithstanding historical truth or scholarly criteria. Needless to say, current studies in historical anthropology reject superficial patriotic and heroic accounts of war, as they understand wars primarily as the hard, immediate and transforming experience of the specific people who are involved in it.
4 Changing Ottoman-Turkish Traces in Slovak Vocabulary
The heritage of Ottoman times has also left traces in the Slovak vocabulary, as evidenced by terms such as orgován, kefa, papuÄe, Äižmy or baklažán (lilac, brush, slippers, boots or aubergine) which became an integral part of the Slovak vocabulary.15 One example for all is the word janiÄiar (a janissary), whose neutral historical meaning is âa member of the elite infantry army, a soldier or worshipper in a different faith,â but at the same time there is a second meaning of âa renegade, a traitorâ with an emotional charge. From the 1990s, especially after the establishment of independent Slovakia in 1993, this term began to live a life of its own in the Slovak language; it was militarized and in political jargon it became firmly established in the sense of âa renegade, a traitor to oneâs own nation, oneâs own political party, or oneâs own group.â In an environment of constant finger-pointing and vilification, or even criminalization of political opponents, this word changed into a political weapon used mainly in nationally oriented circles, especially during the governments of Prime Minister VladimÃr MeÄiar (1992â1998). This pejorative metaphorical meaning was addressed in a short study by the distinguished Slovak linguist SlavomÃr OndrejoviÄ, who, after analyzing the Slovak press, pointed to a certain revitalization of the word janiÄiar (OndrejoviÄ 2004, 126â32). According to OndrejoviÄ, the meaning âa soldier or worshipper of a different faithâ receded completely and instead the meaning âenemy, traitor and defector from oneâs own campâ came to the fore. In this form, according to OndrejoviÄ, the word janiÄiar nowadays contains something sacred in itself and has turned into an uncompromising expression of condemnation of the adversary as the greatest enemy of the opposite political camp, one who, in addition, has betrayed his own group or party. If we compare Slovak with other languages, we find that many of them â for example English, French, Russian, Italian, but also Hungarian â distinguish in principle only the historical meaning of the word janissary. In Slovak political slang, however, the word janiÄiar could currently be substituted by other synonyms: Judas, quisling, Iago, defector or secessionist (OndrejoviÄ 2004, 127â28).
The Ottoman occupation is still associated in scholarly literature, not to mention among politicians or amateur historians, with the frequent use of emotionally charged terminology that is not common when writing about other religious communities or ethnic and national groups. We may also allude to the titles of widely used scholarly monographs on the Ottoman Turks in the Slovak language to suggest that the Ottomans represent a permanent danger even one hundred years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire: The Looting Turks (Rabovali Turci), The Turkish Danger and Slovakia (Turecké nebezpeÄenstvo a Slovensko), Slovakia in the Shadow of the Crescent (Slovensko v tieni polmesiaca) and others (Horváth 1972; KopÄan 1986; and KopÄan and KrajÄoviÄová 1983).
The use of the collective âTurekâ (the Turk) instead of the plural âTurciâ (Turks) to denote the Ottomans or someone synonymous with cruelty can be considered almost harmless (although it is an expression of contempt and aversion), but the frequent use of terms such as horda and/or poroba (horde and servitude, Ger. die Horde and die Knechtschaft) clearly distinguishes works on Ottoman Turks from any other actor in military confrontations with the local population, perhaps with the exception of the Tatars, Huns and Old Hungarians, who are mainly connected with the Early or High Middle Ages. At the same time however, the adjective âTurkishâ â though never Ottoman â is associated in Slovak phraseology with various contrasting images of Turks, with both positive and negative meanings. It is sufficient to browse through the most famous collection of Slovak proverbs and sayings by Adolf Peter Záturecký to confirm this: You are as strong as the Turk at the castle of Uyvar (Si silný ako Turek pri ujvárskom hrade), Is the Turk running at your heels? (Äo ti Turek bežà za pätami?), Smokes like a Turk (Smolà ako Turek), A Turkish renegade is worse than a Turk (PoturÄenec horÅ¡Ã Turka), Greets like a Turk (Zdravà ako Turek) and similar (Záturecký 1975). Finally, the widespread saying that â[W]henever the Turk robs our Hungarian land,/twice as much as the Turk, the German tortures itâ is a notable example of this complexity.
There are also some rare instances when the âTurkâ is considered to be useful, at least in some aspects. Slovak nationalist and patriotic circles, including amateur âexpertsâ on history, give credit to the Ottoman Turks generally only in two cases: either when they highlight passages from Ottoman sources mentioning Slovaks as a distinct ethnic group or when they emphasize that migration movements as a consequence of the Ottoman occupation changed the national composition of northern Hungary in favour of the Slovak ethnic group.16 Some politicians â e.g. Eduard Chmelár â follow the example of the Ottoman traveller Evliya Ãelebi and quote him mentioning the Slovak people as tot kavmi (speaking about the land they inhabit as tot vilayeti or Slovak country)17 in his Book of Travels (Seyahatname).18
5 Remembering ⦠but not with My Enemy
In an international context suspicious feelings and widespread anti-Muslim attitudes sometimes harm even good intentions in the area of architecture and urban planning. An example concerns the town of Nové Zámky in south-western Slovakia that developed around an anti-Ottoman fortress on the site of an older settlement between 1573â1581. The huge new fortress was one of the most modern in Europe when it was built, a prime example of the star fortress which was considered to be adapted to the advances in artillery. Between 1589 and 1663 the fortress was the seat of the Captaincy of Lower Hungary. The Ottomans captured the fortress in 1663, and soon they turned it into the seat of the newly established Uyvar vilayet and it remained in their hands until 1685 when it was re-conquered by the Habsburgs. It should also be mentioned that during World War II the town was heavily damaged by Allied bombing and virtually all its historic buildings were damaged to such an extent that they had to be demolished leaving almost no traces of its tumultuous past.
In December 2019 the Turkish embassy in Slovakia offered to pay for the construction of a fountain on Majzon Square in Nové Zámky as a gesture of Slovak-Turkish friendship. The fountain with a height of 4.3 metres and costing 100,000 euros was planned to be built in the style of classical Ottoman architecture with marble cladding placed on a reinforced concrete frame. One of the facades of the building was to bear a verse from the Qurâan, mentioning pure water as the gift of God. According to Mayor Otokar Klein, the idea of giving Nové Zámky a gift had been suggested by the Turkish ambassador after visiting the city. âThe gift was supposed to be a symbol that the Turkish side was aware of what their predecessors had done in our city. It was just a gesture by which they wished to express compassion and an apology for what went on here for 22 years,â explained the mayor. Ladislav Borbély, a member of the local council, came up with a proposal to accept the 100,000 euros from the Turkish embassy, but he suggested building another symbol of Slovak-Turkish friendship for this money (Pastorek 2019). The city council, however, rejected the idea of the fountain as none of the deputies actually voted for it.
Subsequently, in addition to hardline supporters of the councilâs rejection, some forum members on the website of the SME daily newspaper commented on the event by pointing out the positive aspects of the Turkish offer: âI donât think such a gift should be refused. The council could consult with experts, they could so to speak negotiate with the Turks on the form, size of the fountain, the place and manner of its installation. They could involve citizens in the debate,â argued someone under the pseudonym sinepko. âAfter Nové Zámky fell to the Ottomans, Christian soldiers were free to leave to Komárno and when the city was recaptured [twenty years later] by the Austrian emperor, it wasnât quite like that â¦â added sinepko. In an attempt to compare Slovak and Hungarian praxis, the discussant Martin Droppa added: â⦠After all, go and see, for instance the purely Christian Hungary, go to the spa town of Eger â there is an ancient minaret and many buildings and monuments from the time of the Turks. The minaret and monuments serve as a tourist attraction, together with thermal waters.â Notwithstanding similar opinions, the rejection has to be seen as a missed opportunity for a mutual rapprochement.
6 The Ottoman â Muslim Conjunction
Although the Kingdom of Hungary never experienced complete economic, legal and social control by the Ottomans, not even on territories occupied by the Turks, let alone any widespread Islamization, military clashes and wars along the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier brought much suffering and destruction and many casualties. In the early modern period, Central Europe had to defend itself against the Ottoman-Muslim colonization project until the end of the 17th century, and this struggle against Istanbulâs imperial plans also shaped the religious and ethnic identity of the Hungarian kingdomâs ethnic groups (Slovaks, Hungarians, Germans, Croats, etc.) in the context of military and cultural resistance against the Ottoman armies.19 Central Europe simply experienced little of what is sometimes referred to in the Turkish narrative as Pax Ottomanica. The perception of Islam in the region is until today still marked by this unfortunate Ottoman-Turkish heritage that brought devastation and looting even to unoccupied borderland regions in Slovakia (Pirický 2013, 108â29).
Terms such as Muslim or Islam were unknown during the conflicts with the Ottomans, and the most common way of referring to the âexotic and foreignâ faith was to call it the âTurkish creed.â Even in the nineteenth century, such terms as âMuslimâ and âTurkâ were quite frequently used synonymously throughout the region. In archaic Slovak or Czech, a person who converted from Christianity to Islam was often called a âpoturÄenecâ (Turkish convert, renegade). Those who converted were considered to be âworse than a Turkâ (Slov. poturÄenec horÅ¡Ã od Turka), which is a proverb still common in the Slovak language today.
In a somewhat bizarre twist, in 2016 the chairman of the Slovak National Party, Andrej Danko, came up with the idea that âIslamization starts with the kebab,â which is sold mostly by Turks in Slovakia (Kyseľ 2016 and Chovanec 2017).20 At a press conference on the âthreat of Islamization in Europe,â the party chief promised that if his party entered parliament, it would try to push through three measures: a ban on the construction of mosques and minarets, a ban on burqas and the tightening of conditions for the registration of new religious communities and churches. All that in a country where the capital, Bratislava, is the last one in the EU without a single mosque.
Indeed, as Gingrich argued, in âfrontier orientalism the metaphoric Oriental is first of all Muslimâ and as Muslim it has to be naturally seen as an eternal enemy (Gingrich 1996, 120). In 2017, Dominik Duka, the archbishop of Prague, in an interview for the Slovak conservative journal Postoj (Attitude) when responding to the question why he so openly talks about Islam when there is not even a significant Muslim minority living in the Czech Republic, argued: âBecause it is our duty. We are a part of the world that has encountered the world of Islam. From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century we were part of the world that directly encountered states that professed Islam. Just before the battle of Vienna in 1683 a Franciscan preacher said that if we do not win, we are going to become slaves. He knew it. We also have this experienceâ (DaniÅ¡ka 2017). The archbishop then added that local experience with Nazism had been much more profound and grievous than the experience of fascism in Western Europe. Finally, he recalled the experience of Central Europeans with communism which was again unique and the West had not had to face this problem either, argued Duka. Therefore, according to Duka, it is âour duty to help the West ⦠because they are prisoners.â Consequently, as we can see, Muslims and Ottomans in extremist and ultra-conservative thinking are always in bad company, here lumped together with the Nazis and Communists. Paradoxically, the Czech lands had only very limited direct experience of Ottoman-Muslim plundering on their territory (in south-eastern Moravia).
We could quote many other examples that reveal how the events of the past connected with the Ottoman Turks are manipulated according to current needs, but two will suffice. The former dissident and Christian democrat FrantiÅ¡ek MikloÅ¡ko (ex-chairman of the Slovak parliament) posed a rather xenophobic question several years ago when he asked what was the good of Vienna in 1683 if we are inviting the Turks here again (Chmelár 2005). In a similar spirit, the Slovak National Party MP Anton Hrnko claimed that Slovakia does not have to accept refugees, as French President Emmanuel Macron wishes, and he also used the Turkish threat as an argument: âIt is written on the shield of the Ottoman warrior: We will conquer you. On the shield of the Slovak warrior there is the inscription: We will not give up. Yes, we will not allow anyone to force us to deny our entire previous history,â concluded Hrnko, who is a historian by profession, when conflating the Ottomans with the migration crisis after 2015 (Parlamentné listy 2017).
7 Concluding Remarks
I have taken contemporary references mostly from radical politics on national and local levels, debates on history and theorizing on the political right in order to show how the Ottoman/Islamic presence in the early modern period still influences life in Slovakia and beyond. Although many of these issues, arguments and discourses exist also without political instrumentalization, I have focused on those that are âattractiveâ to certain politicians, jingoist undercurrents and extremist authors. We have seen that nationalism and xenophobia are patrons of the frontier orientalism that resides in Christian folk and elitist public culture.21 Some researchers even say that the convergence between cultures which began in the 20th century has now terminated, and medieval topoi are once again predominant. Though nowadays the Ottoman Empire in Central Europe represents a distant past, the examples mentioned in this essay show that the Ottomans of yesterday are easily associated with todayâs Turks and the Turkish Republic established in 1923. In stark contrast with the contemporary Turkey of President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan where the politics of neo-Ottomanism presents an almost exclusively positive reading of the Ottoman past and ignores darker issues and periods of Turkish history, the Slovak legacy of the Ottoman age seems to confine itself generally to negative aspects, thus reviving old fears of Muslim Turks (Yavuz 2020, 239).
Bibliography
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More precisely the Captaincy of Lower Hungary covering roughly todayâs Western and Central Slovakia (often also referred to as the Captaincy of Mining Towns, its headquarters changed several times but it was mostly located in Neuhäusl and Komorn, todayâs Nové Zámky and Komárno respectively) and the Captaincy of Upper Hungary centred on Eastern Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia and northeastern parts of the Great Hungarian Plain (also referred to as the Captaincy of Kaschau because of its seat in the present-day city of KoÅ¡ice). The Habsburgs initiated the creation of the Military Border (Ger. Militärgrenze) along the Ottoman-Hungarian frontier that mobilized a significant part of the population in local militias. The heavily fortified and militarized frontier regions on the Habsburg side were matched by similar efforts, measures and fortresses on the Ottoman side.
The research for this article was supported by the Slovak Agency for Research and Development under contract No. APVV-15-0030.
Although at the same time much Hungarian scholarly writing and prevailing public opinion consider the Ottoman conquest to have been the trigger for âHungarian destructionâ (Hung. magyar romlás) in subsequent centuries.
According to the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Hungary âpreserves its language, culture, traditions, respects and nurtures its Turkish roots in the modern world,â so that it is the westernmost of eastern peoples and also part of the Turkish world. Although Hungarian is a Uralic and not an Altaic (Turkic) language, the country has an observer status in the Turkic Council that was founded in 2009 (Index 2018). In addition, both Hungary and Turkey often refer to the former territories that they ceded after World War I as the âlost homeland.â
More details in Musil and Mahfoud, eds. 2013. Jobbik also emphasizes that Magyars are heirs of the Huns and the only Western nation with Eastern roots, although the most recent genetic and genomic research confirms that these ârootsâ are negligible and Hungarians are today indistinct from Western Slavs (see also Ãnen 2005).
For the most part of the Ottoman presence in the Kingdom of Hungary, todayâs Slovakia was divided between regions directly occupied (but not core Ottoman sanjaks in Hungary) or taxed by the Turks, and most of the territory was partially subject to frequent raids by both the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars. The territory of Slovakia in fact functioned as the heartland of Habsburg Royal Hungary, one of the three parts of the divided country (the other two being Ottoman Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania). This situation changed for a couple of years in the final period (1682â84) of Ottoman presence when a new entity, the Upper Hungarian Principality (Tur. Orta Macar) under the Ottoman sovereignty that was created under the leadership of prince Emeric Thököly, included most of Slovakia.
In 2002 Kurt Krenn, then diocesan bishop of Sankt Pölten in Lower Austria, in an interview with the Oberösterreichische Rundschau made the deliberately provocative remark: â[â¦] Two Turkish sieges have already occurred, we now have the third. Now itâs just taking a different routeâ (Ertl 2002).
The Turkish image in Central European literatures has been thoroughly studied by Sabatos 2020.
Like Lower Austria, Styria or Hungary, Slovakia also has its famous âanti-Turkish sitesâ dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries: these may be demolished or ruined castles and fortresses such as Fiľakovo (Hung. Fülek), but more often they are chapels on roadsides or in villages commemorating local events during the Turkish wars, or other times it may be the head of the punished (blinded) Turk on the tower of a church, as in Pukanec in south-central Slovakia.
Popular non-scholarly works today still often employ the kind of emotional language that was typical of the 19th-century discourse on the Ottomans. For two shining examples of Slovak frontier orientalism see also the publications by VontorÄÃk 2018 and TarabÄáková 2015.
Also, according to Gingrich, frontier orientalism differs from classic or colonial orientalism that is exclusively a facet of elite culture, because it is more connected with both an older Catholic elite and folk culture and relates to nearby territories (Gingrich 1996, 119).
As early as 1734 the Esterházy family erected an obelisk at the same location.
A more balanced perspective is given by TrubÃni and Lieskovský 2019, 91â107. See also Emlekhelyek.csemadok.sk 2017.
For details see Hlavné správy (Main News), a Slovak internet daily which usually ranks among the pro-Russian conspiratorial medias: Hlavné správy 2020.
However, Ottoman Turkish often mediated words of Persian or Arabic origin into the south-Slavic or Hungarian vocabularies in particular. The Hungarian or Serbian (Bosnian, Croatian) languages have had a great importance as intermediary languages for Slovak linguistic borrowings.
It is probably fair to say that the Turkish threat strengthened patriotic loyalties and ethnic bonds in early modern Slovakia. In addition, Slovak mainstream historians never fail to emphasize that as a consequence of the Ottoman occupation, migration movements changed the national composition of Upper Hungary in favour of the Slovak ethnic group (KopÄan and KrajÄoviÄová 1983, 7). In spite of this, among Hungarian historians, politicians and the wider Hungarian public this opinion is matched by a widespread consensus that the defeat at the battle of Mohács (1526) and the subsequent period of Ottoman rule caused huge losses mainly among the Hungarian population while at the same time ethnic minorities including the Slovaks gained ground. The famous Hungarian historian, the late Ferenc Szakály, in his article âTurkish roots of Trianonâ (Hung. Trianon török kori gyökerei) â the peace treaty after WW1 that split up the historical Kingdom of Hungary into successor states â summarized the widespread view that Mohács contributed to Trianon (Szakály 1990). Pál Fodor argues that it is ânot without reason that some people detect in this period the roots of Hungaryâs post-World War I dismembermentâ (Fodor 2013, 407).
Although today outdated and derogatory, the word tót (pl. tótok) signified Slovak, Slavon and/or Slovenian in Hungarian well into the 20th century and that is why the Ottomans also used the term.
Evliya Ãelebi Seyahatnamesi 2017, 161, 294, 295, 337, 338, 345 (see also Äelebi 1978, 191). The Slovaks were also sometimes called âCroatsâ (Tur. horvatlar) by the Ottomans and, together with Protestants (kalvinlar), they had been considered as leading anti-Habsburg groups in Orta Madjar (Veselá 1977, 21â22, 24).
Note that contrary to claims made by the post-colonial theorist Edward Said, author of Orientalism (Said 1978), who came up with the idea that there was only one kind of âOrientalismâ, in the early modern period the image of the Orient and Islam in Central Europe did not justify colonial expansion, but on the contrary served as a means of preserving oneâs own existence and cultural identity by opposing the colonial project embodied essentially by the âOriental Empireâ on the Bosphorus.
There are about 5,000 Muslims in Slovakia according to pewforum.org 2017. âEuropeâs growing Muslim populationâ, November 29, 2017. http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/.
Paradoxically, the Ottoman era had only a small influence on the cultural identity of todayâs Slovakia, although in the area of sixteenth and seventeenth century politics or confessionalism the Ottoman influence was significant. See also Dobrovits and Åze 2021.