One of the most famous statues on Prague's Charles Bridge depicts an Ottoman Turk in front of a Christian prisoner surrounded by the Trinitarian founders, monks who ransomed Christians from the Ottomans in North Africa. The Ottomans never reached Prague, or any part of the Bohemian Crown Lands during their European campaigns, but nonetheless, the country has numerous statues, images, folklore, and writings that depict Ottoman Turks. These images, however, do not simply support the standard east / west dichotomy as was so famously described in Edward Said's Orientalism; instead, according to Charles D. Sabatos in his intriguing monograph, “Central European writers occupy a middle ground between Western and Eastern European representations of the Turks,” neither as colonizers nor as colonized peoples of the Ottoman Turks (xiii).
Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich's concept of “frontier Orientalism” to chart the history of depictions of Turks in central Europe, focusing mostly on Slovakia but with helpful comparisons to both the Czech and Hungarian traditions. After outlining the theoretical background of the work, Sabatos marks five stages of development of Turks in central Europe, beginning with early travels to the Ottoman empire, including in captivity narratives, moving to folk legends and the Romantic revivalists’ use of them in constructing the nation, then shifting forward to the rise of historical fiction in the late nineteenth century, leading to the ahistorical Turk in the early twentieth century that stood in for any foreign oppressor, and finally pushing to the contemporary era, when authors used the Turk to deconstruct the national narratives of the past century. In each of these five chapters, Sabatos analyzes Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian texts, charting the changes in the depiction of Turks in central Europe over almost half a millennium.
Sabatos contributes to a growing field of analyses using frontier Orientalism, particularly examining the former Habsburg lands, such as by Jitka Malečková and Andrei Terian. As one of the few scholars who knows not only Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian, but also Turkish, Sabatos's text provides truly transnational insight into Turkish-central European relations. For example, the Czech travelogue and captivity story of Václav Vratislav z Mitrovic influenced Orhan Pamuk's novel The White Castle (8), and the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet wrote about his travels to Prague and his Ferhat and Shirin became the basis for the Czechoslovak film A Legend of Love (119). These transnational exchanges show how the relationship between central European countries and Ottoman and Turkish peoples was far more complex and layered than a simple east / west divide.
One of the most fascinating figures Sabatos addresses is Peter Macsovszky, an author who writes in in both Hungarian and Slovak. In tracing the history of his native Nové Zámky, Macsovszky rejects the traditional colonial interpretation of Ottoman rule; instead, “Macsovszky's ‘non-binary’ assessment of the Ottoman past questions the biases of frontier Orientalism, just as his own bilingualism challenges traditional definitions of national identity” (152). Instead of imagining the Ottoman era as a colonial enterprise, Macsovszky views the period through a positive lens of multiculturalism, as an antidote to the contemporary nationalist divisions between Hungarians and Slovaks.
The text is filled with erudite analyses of Slovak and central European texts, offering an almost encyclopedic account of depictions of Turks in the region. The sheer number of figures addressed, however, is simultaneously one of the work's drawbacks: at times the text privileges comprehensiveness over the connective tissue of the argument. More could be said about the connection of postmodernism, post-colonialism, and post-socialism, especially in what is otherwise the best chapter on more recent literature. It is not entirely clear how both Milan Kundera, who views the world through a more standard Orientalist lens, squares with the more open views of Macsovszky, or how Ivan Klíma's short reference to the statue on Charles bridge fits into the larger argument.
Regardless of these small critiques, Sabatos has crafted an excellent text that pushes the scope of post-colonial discourse in central European studies. The transnational elements of the text set it above other critical works on the subject. Because of the largely chronological structure of the book, chapters can be easily excerpted for teaching, making it useful for undergraduates, graduates working on central European literature, and of course scholars wanting to know more about the literary representations of Turks and the cultural relations between central Europe and Turkey more generally.
