Turkey Seeks to Bury the ‘Current Byzantines’

July 5, 2022 By Raymond Ibrahim

On May 29, 2022 in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey, elaborate celebrations were held to commemorate the 569th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  During these neo-Ottoman celebrations, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that “As our ancestors buried Byzantium, let us hope that today, by building our vision for 2053, we also manage to put in the time warp of history the current Byzantines who are plotting against us.”

In order to understand the troubling significance of this otherwise cryptic remark -- most Westerners are today totally unaware of the history between Muslim Turkey and Christian Byzantium -- some background is necessary.

Towards the end of the first millennium, the Turks, whose origins lay in the steppes of Asia, had become Muslim and began to raid and conquer portions of Asia Minor, which was then and had been for a millennium Greek and Christian.  By the end of the 14th century they had conquered it entirely and began eying Constantinople, just across the Bosporus.  Although generations of Turks repeatedly besieged it, it would fall to Muhammad II (or “Mehmet”), Erdogan’s hero............Turkey Seeks to Bury the ‘Current Byzantines’