Presenting an Identity

The Turks were for many years the bogeyman of Europe, but for the two Turkish curators of the Royal Academy’s exhibition (Norman Rosenthal at the RA was the third member of the curatorial trioka) Turkic identity has always been a more complex issue.

 

‘It was an old wish to show how a nomadic culture developed and achieved its goal of being a state,’ says Dr Filiz Çagman of Istanbul’s Topkapi Saray Museum. ‘The Turkic people were always concerned about this idea of statehood – even today we talk about ‘father-state’ or ‘mother-state’ – but it was only when the nomads settled and adopted the system of passing the state in its entirety to the oldest son, that the ambition was realised. Mehmet II established his capital here at Istanbul but he only achieved political stability by declaring that it was legal, on succession, for the oldest son of a sultan to kill off all his brothers. I should point out that this practice changed in the seventeenth century, the period after our exhibition ends!’