One of the contemporary wonders in the realm of media is the fascination with many Turkish TV drama series, which has reached India too. I constantly encounter someone who expresses liking for the series Feriha. The channel which brought it to India will soon be airing another Turkish series. Others may follow. India is not alone in developing an addiction to Turkish drama. Turkey produces some 70 series every year and has taken the No. 2 spot in the global exports of TV drama after Hollywood. They brought $250 million of revenue to the country in 2015. The industry targets 300 million this year and a billion dollars eventually. The audience expands from Europe and Western Asia to Latin America.
Not all Turkish drama series are historical, but there is a drama for every taste. One of the greatest exports is the historical fiction, The Magnificent Century, which narrates the life of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Emperor Suleyman ruled over an expanding empire for 46 years at the turn of the15th-16th centuries. The series brings the much-fantasised machinations of the sultan’s harem into our living rooms. The series articulates with stunning visual and dramatic display the entanglements between the wives, concubines, Ottoman princes, and the sultan himself.
A recent craze is a continuation of historical fiction drama regarding Sultana Kosem who ruled the empire from behind. These harem intrigues were happening at a time when in one of the paramount geopolitical shifts in history, the Ottomans were forcing the gates deep into Europe. It gives one a grin to see how even the mighty Sultan Suleyman struggled in the harem.
Such dramas do not guarantee accurate knowledge. Script writers feel at liberty to bend the historical facts and add intriguing scenes to carry the audience. Learned circles are not always happy. On the bright side, these series create an affinity for history. Many books depicting Sultan Suleyman’s era were published after the TV drama and became instant bestsellers. Historical awareness ties generations to each other. In the words of the noted theoretician of historical scholarship, Collingwood: “History is for human self-knowledge... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”
After Turkish drama, my most recent addiction has been the new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace, which brings to the limelight another critical period in European history, namely the Napoleonic wars since 1805. The BBC version is compact and brilliant. It is, however, nowhere close to matching the power of several Turkish series, which perhaps shows how the world is changing. That said, Tolstoy is a timeless master and it is only natural that many commentators have jumped forward to make inferences and references to the present. The Foreign Policy magazine argued that Russian classical novels, including War & Peace, provide better insight into what’s going on in the country than CIA reports full of dusty Cold War tropes, the NSA intercepts or spy satellite imagery, and the jargon-filled scholarly analyses in political science journals. It highlighted that the 1869 epic sheds light on the patriotism that fuels today’s nationalist tendencies. Tolstoy did indeed illustrate beautifully how a collusion of countless smaller events, rather than “great men”, may drive history. If Tolstoy can be criticised for anything, it can be the relentless pacifism he espoused which may justify appeasement of hostile countries.
The debate sparked by the novel and resuscitated by the TV series should be welcome. Similar debates are launched about specific histories, norms, values, mores, globalization, politics, thanks to TV drama. One should be happy that at a time when many people unfortunately rather watch than read, weightless violent crime drama with effervescent taglines is not all that we watch and debate.
Burak Akcapar is a Turkish ambassador, professor and author. You can follow him on his twitter handle @akcapar.
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