ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on visitors to the Panorama 1453 Museum, and their responses to and behaviour within the museums, to understand as fully as possible the dynamics of the encounter with the presented past. It draws on extensive visitor studies and finds that people undertake particular kinds of emotional practice in the museums, characterized by senses of pride in the Ottoman conquest, imagining themselves as the descendants of the Ottomans and often crying over the ‘sacrifice’ of their presumed forebears. This was often mixed with expressions of victimhood, accusing others of depriving them of their past. This ‘affective-discursive-loop’ connects to other instances – elsewhere in the world – of melancholic attachment to former greatness, as well as to the Neo-Ottomanist insistence on recovering status as a global power, recalling the height of the Ottoman Empire’s reach into Europe.
