ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how nation-state cartographies and the possible ethno-geographic imaginaries they permitted shaped the remembering and inscription of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman and Turkish accounts of the 1600–1601 sieges of Nagykanizsa, facilitated the performance and thus reification of ethnocultural and national identities. It focuses on Namik Kemal, Kanije, and Cavid Baysun, Tiryaki Hasan Pas¸ a ve Kanije Savas¸ i, as representative of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman and Turkish narratives of the 1600–1601 sieges of Nagykanizsa. It also makes mention of a number of other accounts. Turkish nationalism developed in a historical space structured by European imperialism and within which the Ottoman state and other nationalisms had to compete for the same cultural, geographical and ideological space. In Turkish twentieth-century histories of Nagykanizsa a preexisting popular tale has been co-opted and reinterpreted as a tool to forge national identity, inculcate audiences with a particular sense of self and Turkishness and to justify the existence of the Turkish state.
