'Everything goes back to the Ottoman Empire, doesn't it? Sometimes I wonder: is it even dead?'
In her remarkable new book, Lea Ypi follows the concept of (in)dignity across empire’s collapse, nation-building, and the ties of family.
Lea Ypi recounts her grandmother’s life as a story of dignity, in the fate of a woman, in the bonds of a family, in the decline of an empire, and in the making of nations and states.
She weaves the story so that one of the most elusive philosophical concepts is pursued through her grandmother’s experiences and through literature. When she reimagines her grandmother’s life as a true Ottoman woman — in Salonica, at the end of empire, in the birth of Albania — Ypi, a philosopher and political theorist at the London School of Economics, probes ideas not in the abstract register of a seminar but through lived fragments of memory. There is bitterness, sadness, but also joy. The challenge gives her prose an uncommon energy.
I first met Lea when her debut book Free was published and she came to Oxford. We shared a panel. Since then I have heard her many times, read much of her work, and I must say: her dignified stance on equality, universality, and the ills of capitalism, her fearless defence of what she believes against the scorn of white privileged men who deride her anchoring of Marxist ideas, is a rare feat to watch. She is one of the most formidable thinkers of our time and a very sweet soul. All of this, the steel and the gentleness is audible in Indignity.
The book moves between variations of dignity and indignity and oscillates between two philosophical approaches: Kant and Nietzsche. For Kant, dignity is the universal and inalienable worth of every rational being, grounded in autonomy and the capacity to legislate moral law. It demands that each person be treated as an end in themselves, never as a means. Nietzsche refuses this. He argues that dignity is earned and belongs only to those who achieve self-overcoming and affirm life creatively. Artists, creators, philosophers. Those who pull up the drawbridge against herd mentality and comforting illusions. It is difficult not to moralize dignity and stand with Kant. Ypi, an expert on him, is closer to Kant, yet even she admits there are moments when the Kantian conception collapses. Moments when agency is lost, or revealed to be an illusion.
Throughout the book, questions multiply. The dignity of the individual. The dignity of the family. At times even the dignity of a nation or a state. And finally, the indignity of death.
Can a person or an empire, for that matter, die in a dignified way, or does the manner of dying measure the degree of dignity?
Grandmothers of Salonica
My grandmother’s mother and grandmother were born in Salonica in the mid-1800s, a couple of decades after the Tanzimat period. So was her father’s side. My grandfather’s parents were from Filibe, today’s Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city. They migrated first to Skopje, then to Istanbul, as his family served the Ottoman military and moved with its needs. My grandfather was born in Istanbul and became an officer of the Turkish Republic. He partly followed the footsteps of his father, but the setting was entirely different. My grandmother is born in Istanbul and became a biology teacher.
Lea’s grandmother was born into a notable Ottoman family that had moved from Istanbul to Salonica. Her grandfather, Ibrahim Pasha, had close yet ambivalent ties with the Porte and Sultan Abdülhamid II.
When the Balkans began to secede after the Tanzimat, Ibrahim Pasha’s loyalty was questioned in Istanbul because “they spoke Albanian at home.” Later, a minor dispute about tax collection swelled into an issue about reform in Armenia, and he was exiled to Salonica. A few years later Abdulhamid relented. He summoned him back and, to soothe the wound, sent a golden cage filled with 100 canaries. Ibrahim Pasha’s dignity, like the Empire’s, was on a volatile trajectory. The sick man of Europe was already locked in a brutal struggle with its rivals.
The canaries and the Sultan’s note restored him for a time, but his death a decade later shattered it. Or so thought his wife, Mediha Hanım. She insisted her honorable husband, Ibrahim Pasha, had not died after eating five pieces of baklava. That would have been a spoiler to a dignified life. A threadbare epitaph. She persuaded Doctor Ilyas Bey to record the cause as a heart attack.
At the start of the book a contemporary Albanian character says, “Everything goes back to the Ottoman Empire, doesn’t it? Sometimes I wonder: is it even dead?”
I believe it is. But the manner of its death is refracted in the memories and identities of its former subjects. In the Balkans, in Turkey, in the Middle East.
When the sick man of Europe gave its last breath and modern Turkey was founded by another Salonican, Mustafa Kemal, difficult issues had to be settled to prevent further bloodshed. As a by-product of the Lausanne Treaty, and in Lord Curzon’s phrase, “the unmixing of people” was enforced. The population exchange between Turkey and Greece — the mübadele — carried my great-grandmother from Salonica to Istanbul. A year later my grandmother was born.
Lea’s family, caught in the chaos of the exchange, decided to remain in Salonica. Years later, when Lea’s grandmother turned eighteen, she left alone for Tirana, where she met her husband and built a life.
She sometimes wondered what life would have been if they had chosen Istanbul over Salonica at the moment of the mübadele. A different path, a different family, an entirely different future would have taken shape.
The population exchange: What are you?
“Thank God for the subcommittee,” said Avni Bey, Lea Ypi’s uncle. “There was a queue, but it was all done methodically, and those gentlemen from the League of Nations were extremely respectful.” The year is 1923.
His mother Mediha Hanım and sister Selma disagreed. They saw people forced onto boats, leaving with almost nothing, screaming, abandoning homes and memories in Salonica, the place they had known until the Empire collapsed.
The subcommittee, an arm of modern bureaucracy, was tasked with deciding who stayed in Greece and who went to Turkey. And vice versa.
Avni Bey, tired of the women’s protests, read from the official criteria of ethnicity, religion, and place of origin. “There we go. Couldn’t be clearer. Now think about what you were asked today at the subcommittee: WHAT ARE YOU?”
That is the question. But it is never simple and never clear.
What are we?
Lea’s family were “brought up as Muslims, but occasionally spoke Albanian at home.” As Dr Ilyas Bey said, “It may be a grey area, but it’s still helpful. They can’t decide for you. You must choose for yourself. One of the criteria is ‘national consciousness.’”
For Lea’s family the answer was Albanian. For mine it was Turkish. Yet neither answer, whether shaped by national consciousness, religion, or language, could conjure the feeling of home. Identity alone does not deliver life back in a gift box at the Empire’s deathbed
Ypi elaborates: “They were Albanian, of course they were, but since they had never lived in Albania before, they weren’t exactly like the other Albanians across the mountains, because unlike those Albanians, they had Greek papers and when they travelled, everyone thought they were Greek, and they spoke Greek just like the Greeks. […But] they weren’t the same kind of Greek as the other Greeks, since they celebrated Eid and not Easter.”
The population exchange was one of the first indignities new nation-states inflicted on their people. A traumatic citizenship process that shaped Greek–Turkish relations for decades and revealed the first face of the modern state.
Children of Atatürk and modernity
In my family, the Ottoman past was rarely spoken of. On my mother’s side, my great-grandmother and grandfather were typical Balkan Ottomans. They must have lived among mixed languages, customs, friendships, and traditions. But migration had been traumatic, and little was passed down.
My grandmother, my mother, and my aunts would only say, “We are from the other side of the water,” or “Selanik göçmeniyiz — migrants from Salonica.” Their only pride was in saying, “Our garden wall in Salonica pressed against the garden wall of Mustafa Kemal’s house.”
They were the children of Atatürk. Children of modernity, progress, science, and order. Not of the Ottoman past, which was cast as backward and for that reason died an undignified death. This is how one was taught to see the Ottomans: the indoctrination and founding ethos of modern Turkey.
Like many Balkan-origin families, modern Turkey rose in our memory as a dignified mountain built on rupture. But over time that rupture widened into a chasm eating into the skirts of the mountain. We left the spirit of this intriguing past to be exploited as a domestic political tool and reduced to a commodified relic by the corrupt (former) Islamists who have ruled Turkey for the last two decades. What a waste of intellectual, moral, and spiritual depth.
Empires are hard to mould into nation-states. The Ottomans may have been hierarchical, unequal, and authoritarian, but they allowed pluralism. Multiple languages, laws, traditions nested under an imperial umbrella. It was the only way to govern a vast empire.
By the late nineteenth century, the system was collapsing. Reform was urgent. European powers intervened in the name of minority protection. Nationalisms grew among Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Bulgarians. Reformers in Istanbul began to imagine the empire as a nation. Competing projects emerged: Ottomanism, to bind all under a civic identity; Islamism, to lean on the caliphate; Turkism, to claim the empire as Turkish at its core. The First World War and territorial collapse left Turkism ascendant.
In 1923, when the republic was founded, the world was already organized by the nation-state principle. Multi-ethnic empires had dissolved. New states were judged by their ability to impose a singular identity. For Atatürk and his circle, this meant recasting the diverse peoples of Anatolia into one nation. It also meant cutting ties with the Ottoman past.
But it never works so mechanically, does it? Homogenization hollowed out the soul of the land. It set in motion many of the structural problems still stalking Turkish republic today.
Indignity of our time
Lea Ypi’s book traces dignity from the late Ottoman era to her grandmother’s life in Tirana, but its questions bear directly on us.
First, population exchange was an indignity: traumatic, careless, inhumane. This should be remembered whenever solutions are proposed for Palestinians under rubble and famine. I do not mean Trump’s Riviera schemes, but even well-meaning people can treat human beings as if they were potted plants. ‘What’s wrong with finding another place for genocide-torn Palestinians until Gaza is rebuilt,’ they ask. The answer is simple: Gaza cannot be rebuilt without its people, and people are not plants in pots.
Second, as anti-immigrant sentiment rises in a spate across the globe, one need only look back two generations to see that all of us are migrants. Lea’s grandmother was a migrant when she crossed from Salonica to Tirana. Lea herself became a migrant from Tirana to London. I am a migrant from Istanbul to Oxford. Our great-grandmothers were migrants after the Ottoman collapse. This is how societies are built: through movement, adaptation, creation. Hopefully, in Nietzsche’s sense, through creating dignified lives.
Third, the indignity of living under constant surveillance and authoritarian rule runs through the book. Lea’s grandmother was branded a Greek spy and monitored closely by the Albanian state. Her grandfather endured fifteen years in prison as a political detainee in communist Albania. These are not remote or ancient stories. We inhabit a similar world, ruled by erratic tricksters and bloodthirsty authoritarians, with tech oligarchs tracking our every move for profit. It is bleak but also wise to recognise that progress is not linear. It circles back, repeating with new disguises.
Finally, the world is waking to the genocide of Palestinians and remembering Kant’s version of dignity: that we are born with it, by being human. We see the system that enables Israel and the US to continue inflicting unspeakable harm with impunity. Kant wrote that everything has either a price or dignity. Not leaders, not states, but people in the end always choose dignity.
*Renée Hirschon at Oxford, with whom I have shared several panels on Turkey–Greek relations and the population exchange, is an expert on the mübadele. I strongly recommend her books if you want to read about this in an academic fashion and from different perspectives: Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus and Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey.
**Sorry for the longer post. This one is personal and it is exactly the kind of piece that made me start this Substack in the first place. It carries angles, different voices, and some serious exits. I hope you enjoy it and I would love to hear your grandmothers’ stories too. They do not have to be Ottoman.
Thanks for this wonderful post! There is so much to like and love about it! It also, btw, reminded me of something unusual Mary Beard said about Rome's plurality of deities and how they incorporated many facets of the cultures they "swallowed up", so to speak, which, to her, and I was intrigued by what she said, seemed remarkable too.
I also thought about the rich culture of the Habsburg empire.
The cities Venice and New York, so many port cities actually, show this characteristic of abundance, culturally - I think culture was and is always at it's best when people find a fruitful way of intermingling, of exchange and co-existence and it saddens me deeply to see this "feature" of humanity fade...
We should also understand that migration is a difficult and strenuous process for the people who have to master it, but that the nations receiving these people are being enriched and invigorated immensely because they don't "stew in their own brew" anymore, they get new perspectives and cultural techniques for free.
It takes vicious and vile propaganda to obscure this fact and there sadly will somehow always be political actors who use this myth of "losing out" against newcomers.
But, amongst others, Gaia Vince is right in stating the obvious, which you also rightly emphasise: we have all been migrating through the centuries.
And we will continue on this path and should find the beauty in it.
My ancestors are from Austria, Poland, Russia, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania and, if family myths are true (I haven't "genetically" checked yet but it could well be possible), even Papua New Guinea. And in my passport you can read "German".
I don't know what to say about what is happening in Israel at the moment. I just want it to stop as surely most people on this planet do right now.
I still think that the state of Israel could find a way of peaceful coexistence with the state of Palestine. It is the only viable way to ensure lasting peace. But if the Israelis can't get a majority amongst themselves to argue for this, what can we all do now?!
Just as with the Russians and Ukraine... What can we do to stop this?! I feel very powerless... We should be able to "step in" internationally, but how?!
Thanks for your work, dear Ezgi! It is absolutely excellent!