‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethno-national mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’
This is the central question of a book arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies.
The book discusses the themes of public space/sphere, the Tanzimat reforms, millet, modernity, nationalism, governmentality, and the modern state, among others. It offers a new, thirteen-point model of modern belonging based on the concept of ruler visibility.
This article opens up a new scholarly subfield (royal-assassination-attempt commemoration) within the long-neglected field of annual (especially, provincial) ruler festivities in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. It does so by subjecting an array of untapped, geographically dispersed sources to a systematic, highly theoretically underwritten analysis. As a result, the article generates many insights into the principles and pathways of pious thought and action of Russian imperial subjects from all walks of life vis-à-vis their monarch. In the process, it provides a methodological template for future studies of the intersections between belief and belonging going into the modern age, not only in Russia, but across the world.
Chapter 3 focuses on the reign of Mahmud II’s younger son, Abdülaziz (1861–76), who maintained a remarkable continuity with his father’s and elder brother’s policies of increased ruler visibility. This sultan standardised and expanded the annual all-imperial royal accession anniversary and birthday celebrations, which grew until 1908. The chapter then demonstrates the intricate interweaving of motifs of sultanic and Bulgar communal (self) celebration as well as the gradual intersection of the more established duties to the ruler with the newly arising duties to the group. This relationship, for a while mutually reinforcing, is illustrated via a cross-section of celebrations of May 11, a recently invented Bulgar communal holiday. The concept of group memory, the discourse of communal rights and their sanctification, not to mention the more visible and commanding presence of a reified ‘Bulgaria,’ were clear indications of a novel, macro-communal consciousness. Gradually, the stream of popular excitement for the ruler was diverted towards communal causes, at first slightly and subtly, then more substantially and assertively. The centrality of the ruler even in core ruler celebrations was at first dulled, then altogether displaced.
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