Grandiose dreams, mega projects: Ottoman nostalgia in ‘new Turkey’

Abstract

In January of 2015 Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the newly built extravagant and highly controversial presidential palace. Sixteen warriors representing all of the former Turkic empires in full costume were present at the welcoming ceremony. This paper uses Volkan's psycho-political framework to understand state-led efforts of historical revisionism which manifest itself in historical glories and nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire. The central argument posits that grandiose or mega projects strategically serve historical revisionism in Turkey, amplifying selected glories of Turkish society to bolster support for authentic and national narrative, known as “yerli ve milli (domestic and national)”.