Vassals, servants and traitors: image of serbs in popular Turkish historiography

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1500475 (Table of Contents)

This study is established around the pre-1990 popular historiography in the Turkish Republic with a specific focus on depictions of Serbia and Serbs in the Ottoman Empire. By analyzing the events and characters from both early (i.e. the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) and late Ottoman history, the aim is to understand how the established image(s) of ''Serbia'' and ''Serbs'' functions within popular Turkish historiography, a discipline which addresses a considerable portion of the society. This work, in order to achieve a comprehensive historiography survey, consists of the evaluations of the narratives of the authors with diversified political backgrounds. By doing so the thesis strives to understand the similarities and divergences among the authors and thus encourage a comparative discussion of historiography. For the comparison Western and Turkish academical works on Ottoman history, and for the theoretical framework studies regarding Turkish historiography, theories of nationalism were used. As a result, this study offers a broad, representative and yet critical reading of the Turkish historiography on the common histories of the Ottoman Empire and Serbia as well as examples and indications of anachronisms, distortions and instrumentalization of the history.