Empire: World History - 44. The Legacy of the Ottomans, Queen of the Desert, and giant turbans

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

How did Ataturk view the Ottomans? What is the status of the Ottoman Empire today? Who was Gertrude Bell? And how did Ottomans wear such big turbans? Listen as William and Anita answer your questions in our end of series Q&A. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptopoduk.com. And welcome to a very special empire with me, Anita Arnhem. And me, William Durham. Just don't have to say it. No, I'm not. I don't anymore.

It needs a drummer. I don't even notice it. Anyway, look, special because this is all about you. It's the Q&A sessions that we do every self. And at the end of a series in particular, so we have now come to the end of our Ottoman run. Did you like it? Did you enjoy it?

We've certainly really loved the enthusiasm that you've been showing, both in emails and on Twitter, on the Twitter. We're quite entirely sure whether the audience that had lined up to hear about the British and India would necessarily come along to hear about the Ottomans. and you have. We've brought you all with us and you're still listening, which is fantastic.

And there's no inevitability about that. And it was a slight shot in the dark going off to around the Middle East and I'm very glad we did that. But that's who we are. We are like, you know, we write the Levan Cleefs of the history world.

Although I realized now he's the bad guy, but you know what I mean. It was a p ptoo, we shot off in the dark. But also from a personal point, for me. There was, I so nearly ended up writing about the Middle East and the Ottoman world rather than being based in India, which is where I've been based 30 years. And I, there's a, you know, there's a couple of times when I so nearly moved there. And in the end, only my, from the Holy Mountain book, I think, is actually based there. But I was longing to write the last Sultan, Abdul Majid's

story. And, and that last episode we did with the Philbies. I think we may yet get a Philby father and Sunbook. Yeah, you've got a bit. I mean, I didn't realize. You should have told me when we were in these intense negotiations about where to go next that it would be all about you. I didn't know. You didn't know.

You didn't know. I should know. You should know. Going forward, I will know. Always know from now. I just wish I'd now longing to spend more time in Turkey and go around them. I haven't been back to Palestine for five or six years. We should go.

We should definitely go. Because I tell you, you know, because let it be all about me for a minute. because. We would never compete like that at all, you'd be. No, no, it's not that kind of thing. It's not. It is. It never would. The thing is, I mean, I'm always entranced, entranced by why we are in the messes that we are in today. And to have within touching distance, something that, you know, in history books, if it's presented at all, it feels so remote.

It feels so far away. And then, you know, I thought Steve Cole was just a fantastic episode where you were just stroking the face of history. It's that close. It's that place, you know. I thought that was remarkable. And it is extraordinary how much comes from that very brief window about 1914 to 1924. In those 10 years, the makeup of the Middle East, which has been kind of stable for 500 years,

or certainly 400 years in the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire. The Balkans are going back and forwards. The North African coastline is changing. but between, well, Thrace and Suez, there is 400 years when almost nothing changed. And then in this very brief window between 1914 and 1924, the fate of so many different peoples is decided whether there's going to be a Turkey or not. And we kind of assume that Turkey is an essential part of the map of the Middle East, but there were clearly plans with Lloyd George and Churchill to completely eradicate the Turks from the map in concert with the Greeks. should there have been an Armenian state should it have been where the Armenian state is now

or should it have been in Silicia where Lawrence of Arabia was planning to if you look at his map in the Middle East when his sort of version of Saix Pico the Armenians get Silasia and Hatte the corner of the corner of the Mediterranean is going to be an Armenian state

the Kurds never got anything and all this is to play then suddenly the eruption of the Saudis and the sudden weird chance whereby Wahhabism ends up on top of the oil wealth and has the ability to export itself to the rest of the Islamic world with results that we're still living with. What I, again, am struck by,

is the similarities between the two stories of empire that we've done so far. So to me, the Sykes-PICO arrangement of men sitting around a polished wood table with a map and crayons, literally it was that. If you haven't gone and heard that particular episode, I would commend it to you because it was genuinely, for me and I, opener. And it felt so much like the partition of India. It felt so much like, you know, the river from the dam, this village from that village, places that they, you know, may not have visited or had any affinity with or known anything about the culture. Bratcliffe had never been to

India. Indeed. And Sykes barely knew half the Middle East. Yeah. Yeah. What did they say about Sykes? He'd never been past Paris. You know, so these are, yeah. And Sykes who, you know. Sikes had been passed. Had been, but didn't know it as well as he said. He knew it. In Fenestim, he had lived in. in the embassy of Istanbul for a year or two. So, I mean, it wasn't like he didn't know anything. But yes, the basic principle that some visiting bird of passage can affect the fate of millions who've been rooted to their lands for thousands of years. And to this, you know, the ramifications of those Crayola marks to this day are being felt.

And the other thing I really loved about this series, we are going to come to your questions, I promise. But it's the pivot of history on personalities and just one decision that could have gone a different way. So Gallipoli, for me, was just such a huge eye-opener because I think you said it, didn't you, that, you know, had Churchill not chosen Gallipoli? Had he chosen to invade in Eskundaran, which was which Lawrence was saying. Completely different result. Also, the kind of just, you know, the role of racial prejudices, the fact that Churchill and Lloyd George were both basically phylo-Semitic, but anti-Arab, determined the fate of the Palestinian people and that the Jews who are only 10%

of population of Palestine in 1900 end up with the state of Israel, which is there in the map today, and a miracle which has saved millions from the Holocaust. But the Palestinians are largely dispossessed, scattered to the winds with their cities still under siege and horrors taking place in the West Bank and in Gaza to this day. I was very struck with people's response, and a lot of people have been getting in touch saying the narrative or the current narrative is that Islam is not pluralistic, you know, that you convert if you want to live in a Islamic state and the descriptions of the Ottoman world. And I thought Barnaby Rogerson actually was amazing on this about the plurality of the Ottoman state. It's a very, very crucial point. And it is a

controversial one because people who are from the, if you like, the conquered people to the Ottoman Empire still have a very understandable deep resentment together. Well, their children were taken off. Yeah. If you try and talk to. most Greeks, they will be horrified at the notion that the Ottoman Empire was pluralistic, or if you talk to most Armenians, they will be horrified. And yet there is a pluralism there in Ottoman lands, which does not exist in the West. And you get these figures like, was it Monsieur de la Mautre,

who's a Huguenot, escaping persecution in Europe, arrives in the Ottoman Empire and writes that from his perspective, at least, there is nowhere in the world where the practice of religion is more free. And certainly I think you see in Ottoman history that pluralism shrinking so that there are major massacres of Christians in Damascus in the 1860s and then massacres of Armenians in the 1890s and then the massive and cataclysmic 1915 Armenian genocide. That complexity trying to understand how both those things can be true. And we've tried really hard to be even-handed with this series. We were kind of worried, weren't we, about sort of talking about the Armenian genocide, because it does. It stirs up such. Well, if you look on some of the Twitter threads that have developed on that series, there is just a back and forth between the Armenian diaspora and the Turkish diaspora.

Yes. Particularly with reference to what's going on now in Azerbaijan and Armenia, where there is a hot war that is ongoing. Well, yeah, I mean, I just was sort of doing a little bit of noodling around as I do. And we talked about some of the revenge attacks in the 70s that took place after, you know, those thousands of people were killed. Armenians were killed in the Ottoman backlash or whatever you want to call it, the panic of the Ottomans or the savagery of the Ottomans, whatever way you want to describe it. And do you know, one of the last hits that I could find, and I say the word hit, advisedly, is as recent as 1980. And it's as far away as Australia. So in Australia, the consul general was a man called Mr. Sarick, Ariak, and he and his wife were shot dead in their cars in what the police at the time, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, described as a carefully planned professional murder. They were just leaving their home. So this is just in the run-up to Christmas. And the attackers were on a motorbike, full-faced motorcycle helmets. One kept the motorcycle going. The other leapt off the pillion and fired a dozen shots from a machine pistol.

at the two who were sitting in separate cars at the time. And they said it was because of the Armenian genocide that they had done this. I wrote my first articles about the destruction of Armenian buildings and Armenian Khachkas, these crossstones in Turkey in 1988. And the threat of a Sala, that's the Armenian secret army of liberation, terrorist attacks on Turkish diplomats, were still very much a thing in the air then and no one knew when they'd strike again. And I remember that very much at the background at that time.

These are all things which are still alive. And then suddenly, I mean, since then, you've had the whole issue of the caliphate returned to Hontesaw. The caliphate ended in 1924, as we heard in the Giles Milton episode, when the last caliph, Abdul-Mijid set off on the Orient Express on his road to retirement in Nice, then, Paris. And the whole horror of what happened in ISIS, which, as we've done, know was specifically a complaint at times about Sykes-Piccao. And you find some of the caliphates propaganda specifically about Sykes-Picke, which is something that's barely known by anyone in the West,

but is still a running wound for many people in the Middle East. Can I ask maybe a question or your take on this? And also just share a story. So I live by a river. And every year there is a delegation of Turkish women, largely, who carry bouquets of flowers and wreaths, and they sort of go off down the river. And only last year, I think, I stopped one. And I asked us, sort of, where are you going? And they said, we have a commemoration. We lay wreaths for Ataturk. Really? Yes, yes. And I think it's to Mark his birthday. And I said, wow, that's amazing. And can we just talk about Ataturk? Yeah. Let me just ask you this. I mean, you know, and it's a reformulation of a lot of people were were asking this on Twitter.

So I've just summed it up like this. You know, Ataturk's attitude to the Ottomans discuss. So very interesting issue. Ataturk was, in his own eyes, a terrific moderniser. And he took the view that the Ottomans represented backwardness, obscurantism, and all that he liked least about Turkish history. And so when in 1924, he creates the... Turkish Republic. He goes on this major drive to modernize Turkey as he sees it. Now, that involves

as well as sort of building roads and encouraging technology in much the same way that Nehru did at much the same time in independent India, Nehru talking about dams being the new temples. Ataturk had a very similar attitude and saw modernity, progress, science as the way forward. But among the things that get lost at that time is a great deal that is best in Ottoman culture. One of my best friends is a wonderful Turkish nay player called Kutsi Agunne. And Kutzi is Turkish. He's from the principal nay-playing dynasty from the chelibi offenders of the whirling derbishes. His ancestors have played for the dervishes in Konya for generation after generation.

And they've got their reed flutes from the same bed near Antakia for hundreds of years. And I once made a film with him on Sufi music. And we went to the reed bed and he quoted the line of Rumi about how the reed is crying for the read bed, which is the opening of the Masnavi. Now, Kutzi personally lived through a period of Turkish history when Sufi music, Sufism, Ottoman music were all effectively banned in Turkey. It was okay to do a folk dance, in inverted commas, that had the same whirling as as the the wording derbches used to do it, but it had to be in a secular context for tourists, not as part of a religious summer in a teke, which would have been the original setting for this. And I remember Cutsi describing how in his youth he'd seen vaulted library rooms

underneath some of the mosques in Istanbul where music was just lying, rotting in the damp because no one was allowed to play it. Eventually, someone threw it all out. And there were this sheet music for Ottoman music, which was just lost. And he was just lost. And he was just lost. He said, you know, so much is irreplaceable. Now, what's interesting is that since the current regime in Turkey, Erdogan, the Ottomans are back in favor, and you've seen that in a variety of different ways, such as, you know, these incredibly successful Ottoman soap operas like Ertogul. Ertigul, which is, yeah, I mean, it's just a box office smash. Massive bother.

And appealing to all sorts of parts of the globe that feel alienated by certain aspects of American popular cultures, for example, in Pakistan. It's been a massive success. But what's interesting is that all sorts of places that we filmed furtively as recently as, I don't know, 20 years ago in Turkey with Kuzi, there were Sufi teques that were lying ruined just beyond the walls of Istanbul. We had to film him playing the name furtively inside one of the Ottoman mosques. and we had to film a secret Sufi gathering with the people watching to make sure that the police didn't turn up. Now, all that has gone. It's as far distant now in history as, you know,

the Star Z in East Germany or something. Yeah, it's the opposite, affirmative now. So, I mean, you've got Erdogan who is wearing his Ottoman credentials, like a massive golden pendant, if you like. I mean, this newly built 1,000-Roman White Palace and Ankara has all the trappings of a modern sultan's palace. And he says, he comes out and he says again and again, drawing this line between him and the Ottomans,

promoting a political continuum between the Ottoman Empire and modern. He talks about the lands that we had, our lands. I mean, he's using that kind of phraseology. It's Buyuk Turkey, the greater Turkey, is the phrase they use. And I've met Turkish diplomats in Kabul, for example, coming to promote that idea to try and create something rather like a sort of union of Turkish states and this idea that you can reach out to all the Turkish people, whether they're Uyghurs or so on. But often, again, when it comes down to it, and the Uyghurs is an interesting case in point,

the Uyghurs speak a language that's very, very close to modern Turkish, although it's in fact, you know, separated by 500 years or 600 years of migration. but when it comes down to it, the Turkish government will not cross the Chinese on the whole issue of what some people even call the Uyghur genocide with all these Uyghurs being locked up in Chinese concentration camps and retrained and reeducated and so on. And I think it's difficult for the Uyghur refugees in Turkey. They're not secure as to their future because Turkey like so many countries in the way of the Belt and Road rely on Chinese. money. Well, look, we're coming up to a break now. Join us after the break where we will be

picking up out of a big old hat some of the questions that you've been throwing our way. Stay with us still then. Welcome back. You're listening to a special Q&A or as Willie likes to call it a flappy empire. A flappy flimflammery empire where we chit chat about stuff you want to know more about. I think I've got a question for you. Should we start with a question for you? Let's do that. Okay. Let us start with this one. So this is from Hamid, who says, is Mahmoud of Ghazni, does he belong to the Turks or the Ottoman? Some say he was a Turk from Central Asia. What does it mean? Is there any bloodline? Is there any Ottoman proof? More? Right. Discuss. So this was one of the issues that you may remember that Peter Frank Pan ticked us off for.

He was in quite a scoldy old mood, wasn't he? He was quite scowly. But my family enjoyed that. Yeah. So, it's my mom. So there are always said to be a whole range of Turkic-speaking tribes, usually divided between the Eastern Turks and the Western Turks. And in the traditional ethnography or historiography, the Eastern Turks go east and break through the Great Wall of China in the third.

fourth century and you get Turkic dynasties taking over bits of northern China and various of the dynasties during the time of disruption such as the northern way are Turkic-speaking Turkish dynasties. And those are the cousins of the same people who a little bit to the east in Bamyan are building the Bamyan Buddhas, that there's the westernmost, if you like, of the eastern Turks go to Bamian and the westernmost go into China. And certainly those, those Those two groups are the ones who first build the colossal Buddhas in northern China and in Bamyan. Then you get other Turkish groups who move down into India in the 12th century. And Mahmouda Ghazni is one of those groups of Seljuk Turks who establish sultanates in India at that time.

And by 1350, you're getting Turkish sultanates as far south as Madurai in Tamil Nad. And as with those who invade China and those who invade Persia and later initially, the first Turks in Anatolia, you're talking about a warrior aristocracy who are, if you like, an aristocratic ruling class over hundreds of people who are not Turkish. What becomes more complicated is what happens then in eastern Turkey after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. And at that point, you actually get a mass emigration of Turkish tribes, which is not imposing a warrior aristocracy over an existing peasantry. It's peasants taking land and farming it. And so you get this process between the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries when Turkish warrior, tribes are migrating into Anatolia, displacing the existing Byzantines in the interior, but leaving

the Greeks around the coast. So which is why, as later as the 1920s, you have large Greek Christian populations on the Turkish literal who are still in place. And they're the ones who get displaced in 1924 after the burning of Smyrna and they're swapped with the Turks who are in Greece and in Thrace. Oh yes, yes. So it's a complicated

global history, but it's again this story that you get throughout history of migrating tribes from the step moving in different directions and the Turks are... Yeah, you've reminded me of I thought it was one of the most powerful programs we did in the series,

The Burning of Smyrna, which, you know, it feels like something that, again ought to be covered in dust and was a long, long time ago, there's Pathay news footage of the place burning down. And Jalz was talking about interviewing an old lady who'd seen it. He caught the last of them. There's footage of the people, you know, being loaded on finally

into those boats to escape the slaughter. There is the story that still hangs in the air. When I think of it, the Jarls told us of the British officers were told to, for the band to play, just strain out the screaming because the crew couldn't take it. Even at the beginning of my career, I was interviewing Armenian genocide survivors in Jerusalem. And then in the late 90s interviewing their children, the children of Armenian genocide survivors, who were there in large numbers in towns like Aleppo and Beirut when I was writing from the Holy Mountain in the 1990s. So you're right, this seems like ancient history in so many ways, but it's just two generations ago.

Okay, right, you've got a question for me. I have a question for you. Gunga Campbell. Recently, I came across the film Queen of the Desert about that most extraordinary woman, Gertrude Bell, who I'd never previously heard of. I was astounded to discover that a Western woman as her could have existed. She seems to have played an extraordinary role. Can you fill out her story and role in relation to all that was going on? Can I just say, I love your name, Gunga Campbell, because that's amazing. That's like an Indian Scottish meeting. Well, no, I was thinking more. It was like sort of emblematic of us. You know, one Indian, it's got a marriage of both. And I'm so glad you've asked this question, because again, you know, you have regrets at the end of the series. Like, oh, why didn't we do a whole episode for the Gertrude Bell? She's so interesting.

Queen of the Desert, by the way, is a Nicole Kidman oove from a few years ago. I haven't seen it. It's always meant to be a disappointing film, isn't it? Yeah, well, I mean, the story is so good. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, whatever. I love the story so much. I can never bring myself to watch the film.

And yes, you're right, I had mixed reviews. But anyway, look, this is about a woman who was born in the Northeast that makes her name in the Middle East. So her name was Gertrude Margaret Lothian Bell. Again, another fabulous name. And she was born in 1868. I think that's right. And she was born to a fabulously rich family in the Northeast. So her father was a kind of an industrialist, you know, smelting iron.

He was surrounded by the great stores of iron in the northeast. And they made so much. money, hand over a fist, they were making money this family. They owned not just one stately home in the area. They owned three stately homes in the area. They were very, very grand. And unto them, a daughter is born. And this father, he's a very well-read man, but he wants to educate his daughter as well. She's very, very well-read. I remember reading one book about her, which just said that she was brought up never hearing the word no. So, you know, her father just kind of let her read what she wanted, think what she wanted. She never understood that in polite society in that

era when she was growing up, sort of in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, women were not expected to stand up and tell men how they'd gone wrong in which way they'd done everything wrong. But she was one of those women. So therefore, she was sent off, backed off to university, so she's one of the early women who go to Oxford. She's a brilliant scholar at Oxford. She does incredibly well. Just to describe her, I mean, you should get a picture of her. She's willowy. She's sort of, you know, she's almost like a pre-referral. raffalite out of her time. She's got this shock of curly red hair. Picture of her on a camel in front of a sphinx and Winston Churchill is sitting on the next door. And there you go with the drama.

That's a lot later. But in her younger life, she was a beauty. I mean, she's sort of like got this very aquiline nose, a very elegant long neck, these piercing green eyes. She's very, very beautiful, but she's too clever, do clever, clever to get married. So instead, when she graduated from Oxford, she decides that she wants to become an archaeologist. She's passionate about language. She's very good at languages. And she is drawn to the Arab world. And it is the place to go at the time.

Remember this is like Woodrow Wilson calling the whole place a disgusting scramble for the Middle East. And it is a place of ferment and turmoil. And she's an adventurous. She wants to go and she wants to see it for herself. And which is so unusual. So, you know, she goes and she goes with this matter. massive camel train, and she can afford it. There are lovely letters that she writes back home

saying, can you send me more fresh linen, cotton dresses and things? So she's fully kitted up, but she does, you know, she does the travelling, sleeps under the stars. And she becomes this amazing explorer who is accepted by Arab male society because she's such an anomaly. They call her, you know, the cartoon on the horse, the woman passing through their lands on a horse. And she learns the language, she's able to speak to them. And in a way, her passage through the Middle East, what we now call the Middle East, is very similar to T.E. Lawrence, who just, you know, T.E. Lawrence just gets up and walks in his sandals. But, you know, we don't have Gertrude on her sandals. We've got Gertrude with a massive train of protection and guns and things like that and cooking utensils and

bathing apparatus. But she does. She does go into the places that nobody else has gone. And very importantly, she gets the patronage of the British High Commissioner, a man called the Percy Cox, in Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq. And he sees something in her. He sees something in her that she might be useful. So she has sort of male patronage where other women don't, you know, and could never countenant such things. She's got money, means, she's got education, she's got the brain the size of a planet, and

she's also got Percy Cox behind her. It's a formidable combination. Yeah, and she's particularly, particularly interested in the ancient Mesopotamian culture. And she's charmed by it. In fact, even to this day, I'm told, if you mention Gertrude Bell's name in Baghdad, people will know exactly who you're talking about. Really? Mention her here, not so much.

Yeah, I know she was very much a daughter of Baghdad. But when the war breaks up, and so many of these linguists and geographers and archaeologists, like Lawrence, like T. Lawrence are kind of swept together into this web of spooks. You are wheeling and dealing and trying to mould what is left after the predicted collapse of the Ottoman Empire. She becomes that. She becomes one of those people. And she shares Lawrence's idea that the Arabs must be brought up, that Britain should do business with the Arabs. She's very friendly with them. Must be brought up or brought up?

It's an interesting question, isn't it? Is she advocating paternalistic sort of development, or is she bribing them? I think there is that. Give them money to keep them on our side. There is definitely an aspect of that. But I think it's both, actually. It's really interesting question. I hadn't thought about it in those ways.

But also that they are the ones that we can most rely on for Britain's sake. She liked them. She liked the people that she met very, very much. I'd also believe that they were the ones you could do business with. They would be the ballwalk, you know, against the chaos. And so, you know, she has this idea. I really is kind of her idea that there should be a nation state for Iraq. You know, this whole idea of a separate place for the people that she's very, very fond of.

And so, you know, when British sort of Middle Eastern policies all over the place and people are trying to work out what to do, she also, you know, throws her lot in with Lauren saying actually the Hashemite Prince Fassel, he's the one. He's the one you should be backing. And then, of course, we have the whole thing with the great betrayal and everything. I've read of her scholarly work. The only book I've read is her Christian churches of northern Syria, which I read and used a lot when I was writing from the Holy Mountain, my book about the Eastern Christians.

And what's interesting is that she didn't fight particularly for an Assyrian nation. No. Because, again, one of the competing minorities who potentially could have got a state like Israel which was a nation state for a displaced minority were the Assyrians. And she didn't champion them. And I don't believe she was a huge champion of the Amin's play. It might be wrong about that. She was a bystander and a witness to some particularly awful things.

I mean, you know, the command structure trusted her enough. I mean, she was sort of, you know, acting like a go between she was the unofficial diplomat to Mesopotamia in many ways. But she was there when the RAF was strafing. Kurds around Sulemania. And dropping poison gas. Saddam Hussein was not the first to gas the Kurds. Shamingly, the RAF did so in the 1920s. Am I right about that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's 21 that she writes about this, where the RAF are doing a practice of what they may do later. And they make an imaginary village about a quarter of a mile. Where she is, she's there as a witness. and they drop these two bombs from 3,000 feet that go straight into the middle of it, set it alight. And she describes it kind of, you know, as being wonderful and horrible. And then the bombs sort of dropping all around it to catch fugitives. And then soldiers going in on drill to, you know, with machine guns.

And she writes about it and then, you know, without being particularly repelled, I think. I mean, I've missed something here. But she is there. I'm right at saying William, isn't it? She's there at Versailles, isn't she? And she's there when the carve-up is going on. And she's advocating. She draws this, you know, with a crayon of her own,

what she thinks the borders of a new Iraq should be. I've just been looking at the borderline briefly, as you're talking, for dates. And it's November 1923 when the RAF start bombing Kurds. They also send Armoured Cars and there's pictures. There's a whole BBC article about this. And there's Armoured Cars and the entire RAF division. in Iraq that was there trying to bring order as the imperial language would have it to the Kurds.

And then you see her, as you say, she's there pictured in front of the Sphinx and the pyramid with Winston Churchill who values her opinion. And T. Louris. It's part of this weird thing that happens in war with the British when war comes to an unexpected part of the world. And often the only people that actually have any sort of detailed knowledge of it are archaeologists and fellows of all souls and so on. Yes, and this same happens, of course, in Crete when the Germans suddenly dropped parachute into Crete in the Second World War.

The people that the British sent back are Patrick Lee Fermil, who's a sort of young literary character. And he has a whole load of classicists from All Souls in the Colleges of Oxford who speak sort of Attic Greek, which is an earist thing that the British can deploy. Well, I mean, with Gertrudebaud just to bring her story to an end. So, you know, she's riding high, in everybody's estimation, particularly those people, in London who are making the decisions and carving up the Middle East. But then in 1923, patron Percy Cox, the man who's, you know, the High Commissioner who's looked after her, he leaves Baghdad. And she loses her protector. She loses the man who backs her and who gives her importance. So she kind of sort of slightly disappears into her first love of archaeology.

She establishes the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, which still exists today, I think. And if you look at her letters after this point. They are just filled with accounts of depression and illness. This isn't the world that she had thought it would be. This isn't going the way she wanted, and her life isn't working out the way she wanted it to. And in July 1926, she dies. And although, you know, the newspapers didn't say it at the time, it would seem it was suicide. She took an overdose of painkillers. And that is how Gertrude Bell exits the world. Well, I've just found something horrific. We've had some pretty awful quotes from Churchill on this podcast, most notably during the Belford Declaration, when Churchill said that he didn't think that there was anything wrong with the Palestinians being expelled.

I don't think a dog has a right to sit in a manger however long he's laying there, and he then compared the Palestinians to what he called the Red Indians and the blacks of Australia, the phrase he used, they should give way to more energetic races. Well, this is Churchill on using poison gas against the Kurds in 1923. This is a direct quote. I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I'm strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. That's Churchill, 1923.

We forget these quotes in Britain, but people do remember them elsewhere. And quite rightly, just to finish the Churchill quote here, he said it's a scientific expedient that shouldn't be prevented. by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly. I'm going to end. I mean, just this Gertrude Bell answer, and I'm sorry if it was long and windy, but I really, I think she's so fabulous.

I think she's interesting. She's fascinating. She lives in the most extraordinary times, but she also writes so beautifully. I'm just going to take you one bit of a letter she wrote in 1921. Have I ever told you what the river is like on a hot summer night? At dusk, the mist hangs in the air, white bands over the water,

the twilight fades, the lights of the town, shine out on either bank with a river dark and smooth and full of mysterious reflection like a road of triumph through the midst. But again, you know, as Tom Seger said in the Belford Declaration issue, we shouldn't allow, in a sense, the fluency of some of these people and the beautiful English they deploy to lessen the fact that these guys are dividing up the territories and... Nope. I mean, completely, completely, completely.

But you know what? It's the Olusuga razor, isn't it? Both things can be true. Both things can be true. Anyway, that is a very long answer to somebody I think is very fascinating. And you're right, Ganga Campbell. We could have given more time to it. So, Nita, I've got a question for you.

I've got two questions for you, which are linked. The first one, which is becoming consistently on our Twitter feed, is about Ottoman turbans, which are enormous. And they are very, very large turbans. And we've been tweeting some of the pictures of, Salaman the Magnificent, where he's wearing something that's about sort of three or three and a half feet across. So the question someone has asked is why did the Ottomans have such huge turbans? And sort of related to that is why is the dynasty called Ottoman and why is a

piece of furniture called Ottoman? So much to unpack. So much to unpack. And completely in my food group as well. Okay, right. So the reason that they are as big and flashy is to make a person look big and flashy. I mean, it's really quite basic. You know, you look taller and you look important. If you're wearing, it's the same reason, you know, in the West, people wore, you know, ridiculous high crowns or turret top headgear. Big hairdos like Georgina Dutters-a-Domcher. Yeah, exactly. And she had battleships in her hair, for heaven's sake. So, I mean, that's why, but I did, to find out just what was going on with the term, because a lot of people were you, tweeting me as well, going, how heavy was that? And it became an obsession. So do you know you can find a peer-reviewed

paper on this? Yes, you can. So this is from a paper from 1912, which is called The Coverings of an Empire, an examination of Ottoman headgear from 1500 to 1829 by Connor H. Richardson. I'm grateful to you, Conor H. Richardson, thank you very much. Connor H. Richardson studied this for five years of his life.

I think, I think definitely, because there is so much detail. But the reason, the structural thing, people are asking me how much material went into that, you know, to make that huge sort of tulip, bulb of a headdress. It's actually a light balserwood construction. No, underneath. Yes, I knew it.

I didn't know that. Isn't it worth looking up peer reviewed? I told you. So look, you have it. It's a light balser wood construction. Can we trust Conrad H. Richardson on this? Do any of the balsa wood survive? Is that a university?

Don't poke the souffle. Don't poke the souffle. Right, listen. So what Conner H. Richardson, who's written this paper says, it's a light balsar wood construction and then it's sort of a double turban that is wound around it to make this kind of huge

affluent royal turban but you would only wear it for state occasions and you would only wear it for sitting a portrait or any of those things it's a particular royal palace turbine but every time they went out they had a daytime turban which is much smaller and easier so there's a whole thing here

because if you look at Ottoman gravestones they are in the form of turbans. You have an upright, which looks like a, you know, a European gravestone, a rectangular, flat, stellar. And then on top of it, if it's an Ottoman gravestone, you have this enormous marble bulb, just as you said, like a tulip bulb. And I think in some way the turban is taken to represent the man, because in Sufi shrines in Turkey, they still have the turban of the saint sitting on top. of the grave. And apparently that was the case in Mogul India as well. People, early travelers to Delhi and Agra describe Humayans' turban sitting on top of his sarcophagus, you know, a century after his death, these things, this material sat there for many, many years afterwards. The one thing

I should add is that in Mogul etiquette, turbines tended to be much less. And there's a wonderful book, which I highly recommend, which I use a lot in my first Delhi book, which is called City of Jins. And it's called the Mirza Nama. And it's basically a mogul etiquette book for a prince, a Mirza. And it says basically what a plight person does in society and what they don't do. And one of the entries is on turbans. And I've always remembered this.

And it says, do not wear a very large turban, as that is normally that something of people of very low intelligence do. Oh, were they just, well, they haven't, I mean, they wouldn't be having it. are the Ottomans at that time with it? Well, it's quite possible. And certainly... I wonder if it's just being snarky. Oh, that's interesting.

There are mogul miniatures of Ottomans where the Ottomans are wearing vast turbans. So it was something that was Ottoman-specific. Can I just ask? It's the Mirza Nama, the one that also gives you an excruciatingly detailed account of how to apply perfume? No, that's a similar book.

There's a similar book, which comes out of Mandu in the 14th century, which tells you not only how to apply perfume, but where to put African-Divism. Where to rub Afritiziacs. I won't go to the details there, but you can. No, it's pornographic. Crushed sparrow brains should be rubbed on certain parts of the male anatomy. Right, okay, let's move on.

And also how to fry the perfect Samosa. Well, that's useful. It's more useful than the sparrow brain. Certainly more easily achieved. The sparrow brains. Oh, the Ottoman furniture. We haven't got away with the, we have to get the Ottoman, exactly. Okay, the Ottoman furniture.

named after an Ottoman. I could not find a peer-reviewed paper on this. I'd tried. I really tried. Samuel A. Trichison can't help you. No, but I did find some very early, when I say early, sort of like late 1800s, magazines, which had, when ladies' magazines started, started to become a thing. And it does seem to be a complete lift from the Ottoman Empire.

They were called, it's called the Ottoman, because it was from the Ottoman Empire. And it would have been just when drawing rooms, well, when drawing rooms actually changed a shape and they wanted to be space savi about it. These things could be arranged around a wall or an oddly shaped wall. And so that's why they suddenly became very popular. I thought they might have come over during the coffee house period, but the coffee house period was nothing to do with it. I mean, the Ottomans didn't come. You know, the Ottomans, as we know, its furniture didn't come there because they were long benches, long benches and long trestle tables, or not trestle tables, but long tables at that time. So it does seem to be that. One question that came quite a lot

through on Twitter was what other things like coffee do we owe to the Ottoman Empire? I was trying to think it was yogurt an Ottoman introduction? I don't know. I don't know. The Indians will have something to say about that.

There was a tulip mania in Ottoman Turkey before it got to Holland, wasn't it? Before it became a Dutch. And if you think of it all that gorgeous, isn't it? Porcelain and so on. Well, I don't think it's beyond the, yeah, I mean, all of the architecture and stuff is also very tulip-tastic, isn't it?

I don't know the arts. is the truth. Let us know. If you've written the peer-reviewed paper. Oh, no. Because there'll be one. There will be. Anyway, so I hope that clears up.

It doesn't clear up yogurt. It doesn't clear up yogurt, but we cleared up other things. Listen, we've just got so many more questions. Should we do a second episode on this? Because I feel like there's so much more that we need to know. And there are loads of questions coming here. There are a few more things. Yes, let's go for him.

Okay. All right. So join us go. We're going to do another special episode coming out this week. Join us then. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnham. And me, William Delroport. Could you say it any slower? And you have the naughtiest laugh you laugh like mutley.