Читать книгу Hamam Balkania - Vladislav Bajac - Страница 21

What would it be like if certain words, expressions or phrases from the current political glossary were applied to literary language? Here is one of my favourite words: sustainable, to which is added the necessary element, in truth, something to do with the future. Now, just imagine what kind of tomfoolery comes about when this sort of sustainability is used to augment the word ‘history’.

It is very important for us to know, according to the interpretations of European political institutions, what accompanying instrumentation goes along with such an artificial phrase. Along with them, most often a sort of intimidation occurs: if you do a and b, you will receive y and z, in which case your project is sustainable. That is the essential meaning. Certainly none of the authors of this explanation would ever admit this, but would rather talk about fulfilling various long-term conditions, not because they are blackmailing you, but rather because of the very success of the project. More succinctly, they would explain to you that, when deciding to support a program, they create a projection about its realistic future, about its ability to last and its most certain survival. Where is the truth in all that? It could be said – most likely somewhere in between the two explanations. However, it is not. It is actually closer to blackmail because, for the negation of this extortion, there is this exceptionally logical explanation which is not only partially true, but is also ideal for manipulation. It is not bogus in itself, but it simply begs to be augmented.

I would like to cite an example from one of the most authoritative (French) books on the Ottoman Empire, an anthology of texts by about twenty world famous experts, specialists not only for certain periods but also for given topics from this field, all under the direction of a man of indubitable authority, one can find a manipulation of facts in the section entitled ‘Administering the Empire’ with its extension in the chapter ‘The Levers of Power’:

‘The system was characterised by the exceptionally ethnic variegation of the ruling class in the Empire. Among forty-seven grand viziers (during the reign of eleven sultans – note V.B.) who ruled between 1453 and 1623, only five were of Turkish origins.’

Few people know of this shocking, mathematical puzzle (this time buried in history, and only later in literature): that the strongest empire for centuries on the soil of Asia and a good part Europe and Africa could so easily and consistently put the greatest power in the hands of people who were not even of its ethnic background, and most often not even (originally) of its religion! If nothing else, this fact in and of itself demands that we stop to give pause in the quotation, doesn’t it? Then the fire gets turned up:

‘Among others there were eleven Albanians, six Greeks, one Circassian, an Armenian, a Georgian and an Italian, while ten of them were of unknown origins.’

After some quick addition it is clear that this is far less than the sum of forty-seven grand viziers. So where are the other eleven? What was their background if they were not among the Turks or any of the other ethnic groups cited, or even among those ‘ten of unknown origins’?

Reading on in the same passage, there’s another infuriating anomaly: ‘The grand vizier Mehmed-pasha Sokolović, the Sultan’s own kul,³ a Serb from Bosnia, proved to be loyal to his roots when he built religious endowments in his home country or when he made the renovation possible of the Serbian Patriarchate in Peć in 1557.’

Here we have one more grand vizier, non-existent in the previous calculations! Now we are only missing ten! But I would like to suggest that the authors of the study did know who those viziers were as well. We just do not know whether this one that we discovered belongs to the ‘ten of unknown origins’ or to the other ten that are missing from the total. Obviously, the authors know everything they need to about Sokolović, yet they first denied his existence as a grand vizier, and then already in the very next paragraph of the same book, wrote him in. This leads one to believe they also know about the others, and to question why they have also left them out.

I, for example, know about at least one more of those ‘non-existent’ viziers, because that vizier was also a Serb by background. His name was Rüstem-pasha Opuković. He was born in 1500 in Bosnia, not far from Sarajevo and held the position of grand vizier twice: from 1544 to 1553 and from 1555 to his death in 1561. Twice – unusual and rare, and especially easy to remember. He was invested as the grand vizier of the empire personally by Suleiman the Magnificent after a conflict between the Grand Vizier Hadim Suleiman-pasha (the namesake of the Sultan) and another vizier, Deli Husrev-pasha (who was, as we already know, also a Serb by origins). The Sultan punished both of them by divesting them and expelling them from the capital. Thus, the authors of the study pass right over one of the grand viziers from the time of the most powerful sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who was at the very height of his imperial strength from the very beginning. The man to whom as a wife the Sultan gave his own favourite daughter Mihrimah, born out of his happy and everlasting love with Hürrem (formerly a slave-girl named Roxelana, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest!).

We could perhaps put these omissions down to forgetfulness, lack of knowledge, or coincidence, but if I were a believer in conspiracy theories, I would claim, or leave room for the possibility, that the remaining grand viziers erased in the anthology were Serbs – each and every one!

So, there is some homework for those with nothing better to do.

The missing viziers could also be of any one of the other ethnic backgrounds, as long as they exist!

And again it seems that mathematics in history can be almost as successful as it is in literature. Yet we remain with the question: what shall we do with sustainable lies?