I have known the late Prof. Dr. Erol Manisalı (20 July 1940 – 29 October 2022) for exactly 35 years, i.e. for more than half of my lifetime. All our parents, grandparents and ancestors originated from Anatolia, but when we met, he had a Turkish and I had a Greek passport. We both had studied at home and in Western Europe, but he had started and advanced in his career, as he was 16 years older than me. It was therefore normal that he (at the age 47 in 1987) excited the professional imagination of a 31-year old researcher like me. What made our encounter an extraordinary, colorful and creative experience was the extremely unusual circumstances under which it started.
I- How we met one another
After a long historical-ethnographic research trip, following a series of war front missions of journalist interest, and in the aftermath of travel by bus through Tabriz and Erzurum to Ankara and by train to Istanbul, I used to spend a few days there; this was a customary attitude, every time I moved from Syria or Iraq or Iran or Pakistan back to Greece in order to further proceed to (then West) Germany, submit another chapter of my thesis, and return, again via Greece, to the Orient. In Istanbul, I worked for many long hours in the libraries of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul and the Institut français d’études anatoliennes where my earlier notes were drafted into chapters of my thesis.
Then, after a dinner in Istiklal Caddesi, I used to go to Etap Marmara Oteli in Taksim Square for a cup of coffee and further study of my notes until midnight; in addition, in the hotel’s news stand, I used to check Turkish and international newspapers and magazines. There, I bought for the first time an English medium monthly named “Middle East Business and Banking” (MEBB). The publisher’s name was Erol Manisali; this is the prehistory of my relations with my badly missing friend.
The articles were pertinent and comprehensive, covering a wide range of topics and fields. I still remember some names of contributors, except that of the publisher: Mümtaz Soysal and Tansu Çiller. Several years before they became the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister of Turkey, few people in Turkey knew these academics. That is why I decided to call and meet Prof. Manisali next time I was in Istanbul, even more so because the magazine premises were not far from Istiklal Caddesi.
From our first meeting we both realized that, although we had experienced different paths in life, we were in distinct fields of specialization, and we were involved in divergent activities, there were two very strong common denominators in our relationship: our total attachment and dedication to the high land of Anatolia and our unwavering conviction that Kemal Ataturk was not only a military genius, the liberator of Anatolia from the colonial armies of Italy, France and Greece, and the savior of the Turks from the Ottoman yoke and disgrace, but also the perfect model of thought, the best example of correct judgment, and the absolute arbiter of the pertinent approach to practically speaking anything.
Our collaboration took first the form of contribution of several articles to the MEBB; I wrote about Iran, Greece and other Oriental countries of which I had a firsthand knowledge, because I had already lived there, after having first studied their past and monuments. My criticism of the catastrophic mismanagement of Greece by the Neo-Nazi cholera of PASOK was devastating; it also constituted an alarming warning about the rise of crypto-Nazi elements and racist rascals, the likes of Vlassis Agtzidis and Michalis Charalampidis, who had already started in the early 1980s to spread the paranoid falsehood about the so-called ‘genocide of the Pontic Greeks’. ‘Erol bey’, as I used to call him, was listening to me carefully. He used to attribute all the inconsistencies and the pathogenic situation of Greece to the long prevailed ‘monarchic-fascist’ establishment of the misfortunate South Balkan country and to the dominant role played by the Greek Orthodox Church there.
II- Hellenism, as Archaeolatry, is worse than Religion or Theology
I explained to him that the situation was different; the religious establishment had made a compromise with the pro-Western politicians, statesmen, academics and businessmen, but the latter were entirely fraudulent. Necrolatrous, archaeolatrous, Neo-Nazi in its absurd claims to a delusional Ancient Greek superiority, racist in its pretention of Greek ethnic continuity, criminal in its historical falsification, and fascist in its tyrannical manner of eliminating opponents, imposing bogus-historical dogmas, and even constitutionally banning private universities from Greece, the so-called pro-Western political establishment of Greece, in all its aspects (ultra-right, conservative, liberal, social-democrat, socialist, communist, etc.), is the disreputable caricature of a gang of ignorant cannibals, who ‘came’ to Europe only to participate in the Venetian masquerade ball that is called ‘European Union’ as the nephews of Pericles and Thucydides. Absolutely clownish, sick and inane….
Erol bey was truly astounded; he could not comprehend the derailment of the Modern Greek pseudo-Left. “There is no Left in Greece”, I told him and continued: “Papandreou is far closer to Mussolini than to Léon Blum”. At a later date, I said the plain truth: “in Greece, the Left is irrevocably Neo-Nazi”! Erol bey was befuddled. I insisted saying that, under their charlatanesque mask, the so-called Greek leftists of every denomination (believe it or not, it is a ‘religion’ to them!), i.e. the Socialists, the Communists, the pro-Berlinguer pseudo-Communists (ludicrously called as ‘those of the interior’!), the Trotskyists, the Maoists (actually, there were never Stalinists in Greece, and this says a lot!), the silly supporters of Mao’s widow, the Anarchists, the Utopian Socialists and all the other disorderly elements, were -all- indoctrinated racists.
The oxymoron of the Neo-Nazi Greek Left involves supremacists, who believe that the Ancient Greeks were superior to the great nations of the Ancient Orient. The Neo-Nazi Greek Left is constituted by non-educated or falsely educated, South Balkan idiotic barbarians, who want to breed a ‘purified’ race of so-called Hellenic god-men to annihilate the ‘impure’ Mongols (which is a deprecatory term), Turks (who often happen to also be called ‘Mongols’ with viciously disparaging intentions), Macedonians (a ‘bizarre’ nation, which -as per the intellectual leprosy of the Modern Greek Left- does not speak a ‘language’ but an ‘idiom’!! ?? !!), Bulgarians, Albanians, Turk-Albanians (which is insidiously derogatory), Vlachs (this ethnonym is also an insult in Modern Greek), ‘Gypsies’ (the Romani are heinously vilified in Greece), and others.
“Such their racist paranoia is that an ignorant and filthy prostitute wrote a book to criminally pretend that the gods of Ancient Egypt were …… ‘Greeks’, namely the supposed ancestors of today’s ‘Greeks’. This unprecedented racial discrimination will surely lead them to annihilation and extinction, but before that, it will all explode”, I told Erol bey. “Or implode”, he answered immediately. Elucidating and brief!
(Julie Pitsouli, ‘Greeks, the gods of Egypt’; Τζούλη Πιτσούλη, ‘Έλληνες οι θεοί της Αιγύπτου’; https://www.politeianet.gr/books/9789607823021-pitsouli-ioulia-alntemparan-ellines-oi-theoi-tis-aiguptou-97717)
III- Racist, Crypto-Nazi Publishing Houses of ‘Modern’ Greece
When Erol Manisali heard me speaking about these topics for the first time, he was kind enough not to show that he did not fully believe me; I realized that this was normal. It is actually impermissible that a so heinous, inhuman, vicious Neo-Nazi state exists. The fate of that country was certainly not my concern, as I was pursuing my researches and explorations in other, far away countries, but I always want to offer an accurate description and a vivid image of a place, of a society and of a state that I happen to know.
As I realized that Erol bey’s knowledge of Greece was truly incomplete or superficial, I decided to come up with historical refutations of several samples of ‘books’ published in Greece; in the process, I translated selected excerpts to be fully convincing about the obsolete, dangerous and ominous character of the Neo-Nazi Greek state. By reading the racist, nonsensical, and paranoid statements, assertions and descriptions made within books, magazines, reviews and newspapers in Greece, Erol Manisali and all the other readers of my articles would surely and actually did realize that the sick and degenerate country in the Balkan Peninsula’s southernmost confines was not only a backward and tenebrous structure, but a perilous contamination.
This decision led to the publication of several articles that shed light on the topic. The hysteric reaction of the uncouth and uneducated pseudo-academic gangsters of Greece’s universities against the solemn, all-European publication (1989-1990) of the illustrious book elaborated by Jean-Baptiste Duroselle ‘Europe: A history of its peoples’ (a historical manual which was translated into all the European languages except Greek and has ever since been taught in all the schools of the EU member states except those of Greece) only corroborated my earlier presentations and analyses. Erol Manisali started being more watchful, because the paranoia of the Neo-Nazi political establishment of Athens, which was expressed on this occasion, was a clear indication of a grave sickness. About:
https://www.academia.edu/86544955/Κοσμάς_Μεγαλομμάτης_Συνηγορία_υπέρ_της_Ιστορίας_Ντυροζέλ_1990_
In fact, Greece should have be thrown out of the EU (then European Communities) at the time and kept ever since isolated.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-12-07-8802220638-story.html
IV- Erol Manisali: his character, mentality, intellect, and culture
Erol bey had a unique ability to accurately perceive and understand topics that were unknown to him or out of his academic field and also to instantly foresee correctly their eventual repercussions. Economist of formation, he understood the nature of modern politics and did not wish to participate. He evidently needed more time for reflection and less time for action; but his strong point was always the raising of public awareness and the popularization of specialized topics. No one could beat him at this; he was a scholar for the people, and not an orator for secluded venues.
He was a very exceptional and -at the same time- a very ordinary man, happy to always explain complex situations to others, offering the correct conceptualization and the comprehensive contextualization. In addition, he was excellent in fully identifying the essentials and the basics or, if you want, in clearly discerning the skeleton of an affair. As he was a pragmatist, he knew what should be expected, what should be undertaken, and what should not become a matter of concern as regards an issue.
About Greece, Erol bey was feeling pity; the case would apparently implode.
About Iran, Erol bey was feeling horror; the case would inevitably explode.
We both anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union; he was viewing the topic as an expert in geostrategic studies, pondering on possible axes of alliance that would be formed afterwards. To me, the person, who heralded the fall of the USSR, was Ayatollah Khomeini. I understood that as early as 1979, when I was in Paris for postgraduate studies.
For Erol Manisali, the ‘comeback of the religions’ was an incomprehensible disaster or a form of paranoia. I would never describe Erol bey as an atheist or agnostic; as we were both what the French call ‘Voltairiens’ (and not at all ‘Rousseauistes’), I could say that his genuine Muslim tradition made Erol bey believe, as Voltaire describes in his masterpiece ‘Le Monde comme il va’ (The world as it goes/ch. 12 last paragraph) for the celestial angel Ituriel, that the Almighty “résolut de ne pas même songer à corriger Persépolis, et de laisser aller le monde comme il va” (“decided not even to think of correcting Persepolis, and to let the world go on as it goes”).
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Monde_comme_il_va
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde_comme_il_va
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithuriel
To me, Erol Manisali was a far more ingenious and a far more ingenuous Muslim than all the ignorant, uneducated, and fanatic theologians, the worthless sheikhs and imams, the useless qadis and muftis, who turn religion into a filthy political affair, confuse it with theology, and shamelessly defend as supposedly the ‘Islamic Faith’ the criminal interests of every uneducated, greedy rascal and evil gangster who happens to govern a country.
Erol Manisali knew that religion is every individual’s personal affair. I used to convey to him the latest news from Iran: ‘so many people decapitated’, ‘so many people left the country’, ‘so many Iranians were in the bus to Ankara’, ‘the Iranians started calling Istanbul as Iranbul’; we were laughing, because the city at the Bosporus had become second home for the wonderful people who wake up in the shadow of Elburz (البرز) or Zagros (کوههای زاگرس) – at almost 2000 m above sea level! But, sometimes, my news and pieces of info from Iran were scary and macabre.
V- Turkey and Iran
The following story shook Erol bey; it is what an Iranian friend from Tehran’s lavish northern suburb of Shemiran (شمیران) told me about a desperate and misfortunate family among his neighbors. After they sent their two children to the US (also smuggling out of Iran the largest part of their wealth), the couple applied for a permission to travel to the UK. As it was customary at the time, the Iranian authorities did not allow the wife of my friend’s friend to travel; this was the way the ‘religious’ state’s officials intended to ‘keep’ fleeing Iranians at ‘home’. Of course, the regime of the Ayatollahs was not anymore ‘home’ to those guys; so much they reviled their state.
Without having a clue about basics in aviation, the husband issued his flight ticket and sent his wife via cargo, after he duly packed her in an enormous wooden box properly prepared for the circumstance. He bribed as many employees of the airport’s cargo section as needed, and he unsuspiciously traveled to London only to take the huge package to his hotel on the next day. After seeing his wife dead (she had apparently frozen in the airplane’s cargo section), he jumped out of the hotel window, thus committing suicide. This is the cursed face of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it cannot be otherwise, anytime a stupid or bribed (by the UK or US) sheikh, politician or general intends to set up a bogus-religious state in today’s world. Erol Manisali and I terribly deplored the situation.
Quite often, I conveyed to Erol bey the progress of my explorations and publications, as well as the news and the discussions that I had with friends in the Institut français d’études anatoliennes and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul. The director of the former (for the period 1991-1994) was the great historian Jacques Thobie, who was a friend of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and heard therefore with great interest the details and the consequences of the plea that I had published in Greece in favor of the History of the French academician. The same was valid for the German prehistoric archaeologist Harald Hauptmann, who headed the latter.
https://www.ifea-istanbul.net/index.php/fr/services/biblio
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_fran%C3%A7ais_d%27%C3%A9tudes_anatoliennes
https://aujourdhuilaturquie.com/fr/hommage-a-jacques-thobie/
In memoriam. Jacques Thobie (1929-2020)
https://www.cairn.info/revue-guerres-mondiales-et-conflits-contemporains-2020-3-page-3.htm
https://www.dainst.org/archaeologieportal-istanbul
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Arch%C3%A4ologisches_Institut_Istanbul
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Hauptmann
VI- The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as the Right and Just Solution, and the Hero Rauf Denktaş
In 1994, our cooperation took another dimension, as Erol bey invited me to speak in the Onuncu Uluslararası Girne Konferansı (Tenth International Kyrenia Conference) and on that occasion, I had the honor to meet the great hero of the Turkish Cypriot nation, President Rauf Denktaş (1924-2012). My speech can be found here:
My participation in the conference offered me the opportunity to observe the net superiority of the Turkish academic class over the execrable liars and viciously racist bogus-professors of the ill-fated Modern Greek state. I also enjoyed spending several hours in Erol Manisali’s garden; several other visitors and I had the chance not only to speak with the political elite of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), but also to admire Erol’s architectural masterpieces and free time achievements.
If he was not a widely acclaimed academician, a state advisor for presidents and prime ministers, and an avidly read author and columnist, Erol bey would make a great gardener and an excellent masonry master.
VII- The Paradisiacal Gardens of Erol Manisali
The garden was an important element of Erol Manisali’s Weltanschauung. I still remember that, in presence of a friend from Ankara, while discussing about the form of an ideal mansion for each of us, he said that he would love to live in a domicile surrounded by a sizeable garden filled with antiquities, columns, inscriptions, fallen capitels and other monuments; this would make him feel more vividly the weight of History, he said. I found that statement as the unequaled expression of an intellectual with very wide horizons and with an all-encompassing calling; so despite his Istanbulite consciousness and notwithstanding his apparent Constantinopolitan heritage, Erol bey was indeed a Roman original.
I visited him several times in his Girne bahçe, and once my father and I paid a visit to his house in Levent; as the weather was good in that mid-May Istanbulite evening, we sat in the garden. Erol bey and his wife were sipping their favorite whisky, and I enjoyed a wonderful French cognac; so, my father was the only to consume a Turkish product: Boğazkere wine! The conversation was in Turkish and our hosts admired how fluently and correctly my father was speaking Turkish, almost 60 years after he had left Istanbul with his family.
Apparently, I was less fluent than the rest, and Erol bey (with whom I used to speak in English to fast discuss the topics of our agenda) asked me why I did not speak as fluently as my father. I found an immediate excuse:
– Ben Türkçe çatır patır biliyorum!
As they all exploded in laughter with this self-deprecatory confession, I felt the need for an instant comeback to the linguistic garden of my grandfather. So, at once I remembered one of his numerous sayings that I first heard when a child!
– Olursa çat pat, olmazsa aç yat!
That was incomparably my best evening in Istanbul!
And this highlights the Oriental, non-elitist, cosmopolitanism of Erol Manisali; that wonderful evening could have taken place in Istanbul before 300 years, in Esfahan before 400 years, in Delhi before 500 years or in Samarqand before 600 years. There was nothing to remind the absolutely fake, sick, rotten and evil cosmopolitanism of the French-controlled Alexandria of the early 1800s. This was the state that Kemal Ataturk created: the adaptation of technology, science, economy and education to the local needs of development and competitiveness was promoted in parallel with the absolute rejection of Western diseases, colonial mindsets, and imperialist-elitist mentalities.
VIII- Erol and his Popular-Cultural Cosmopolitanism
Culture-based national identity, moral integrity, popular religious tradition (not theological absurdities), legendary values, and egalitarian governance (which means de facto one party system) were cherished in Kemal Ataturk’s exemplarily free society and laic state where no one was a slave to the fake god of every ignorant and uneducated sheikh, whereas every inhabitant of the country was an integral personality that did not need ‘guidance’ from any stupid mufti or a kleptocratic ‘Diyanet’ that today looks rather like a Ponzi scheme.
Then, when the colonial, elitist cosmopolitanism prevails (as in Alexandria), the misfortunate local society gets divided along prefab lines: the subservient and docile Westernized elite (that totally lost its identity and integrity) vs. the heinous, ignorant and lunatic mob, which is guided by the idiotic sheikhs.
Quite contrarily, in Kemal Ataturk one-class society, the non-elitist cosmopolitanism helps people better communicate with foreigners, appreciate different cultures, and comprehend the multicultural nature of our world in its correct dimension: Russian culture is to be found in Russia, Chinese culture is dominant in China, and Iranian culture prevails in Iran. No need for abnormal amalgamation, scheduled agendas, dirty politics, fake stories about waves of refugees, and illegal business for thuggish middlemen, who exploit hundreds of millions of people in the name of their fake Allah.
For all this and much more I am deeply indebted to my departed friend; the way he revealed the political establishment of Modern Turkey to me was not only an outstanding guide but also the method that I applied in order to understand how other states in the region function and why so many failed states exist in areas earlier detached from the Ottoman Empire and colonized by the Anglo-French criminals. My current understanding of the troublesome conditions that prevail in so many countries between Mauritania and Indonesia, my constant comparisons among numerous states, my at times surprising conclusions, and my often confirmed expectations are due to his mentorship and to the initiation that Erol Manisali offered me into the world of politics and public administration.
IX- Erol Manisalı, Halit Refiğ & I: the Triumvirate of All Visions, Designs & Discussions
As it could be expected, we also disagreed many times – notably about Kemal Ataturk and the proper governance with which he endowed the new state. Erol bey was always an adamant supporter of the Constitution of 1960. Quite contrarily, for me, Turkey means the 1924 Türk Anayasası (Turkish Constitution) or if you prefer it in the then terminology ‘Teşkilât-ı Esasiye Kanunu’, which was ratified on the 29th October 1923. About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Constitution_of_1924
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Constitution_of_1961
I cannot complete my obituary without mentioning our friendship, exciting meetings and long discussions with the long lamented friend Halit Refiğ (5 March 1934 – 11 October 2009), one of Turkey’s foremost film directors, film producers, academics and writers, who was a long date friend of Erol Manisali. To the great chagrin of their beautiful, elegant, highly cultured, and very knowledgeable wives, I was able to prolong our fascinating evening conversations until very late.
When various Eurasiatic approaches to the middle 1990s’ developments were put on the table, the worldwide role of Turkey was mentioned as the sole possible obstacle to the nightmarish scenarios that were underway. Halit and Erol had a very accurate perception of the then forthcoming disastrous developments, which only started with what is now known as 9/11. Halit was anxious about the consequences on the US foreign policy that the notorious book by Prof. Samuel Huntington ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ would have. I rejected the book as a totally evil falsification of World History, convincingly stating that there had actually never ever been any ‘clash of civilizations’ throughout World History.
Erol said that what mattered most from all this stuff was the axis of strategic alliance that would emerge after the chaos that the cursed book would entail: either a South-North axis from Saudi Arabia to new states that would emerge from the (then anticipated by many) implosion of Yeltsin’s Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan, Tatarstan, etc.) or a West-East axis from Turkey to Kyrgyzstan and China.
Halit pointed out that the ‘clash of civilizations’ was merely a smokescreen term for a forthcoming clash of religions (or ‘worlds’), which would trigger a barbaric, extremist and fake ‘Islamization’ of all the secular Muslim countries and of several Christian countries as well; he described the agenda as an ‘English plan for the Islamization of world’. I replied that this plan was real and well-known for its viciously anti-Islamic scope (because it was truly standing against the Islamic Heritage, Civilization and History), but it should not be called that way, but rather the ‘English plan for the homosexualization of Islam’.
Halit laughed approving of my statement, but I insisted that it was not a figure of speech, and I drew on existing literature, notably the notorious book ‘The Homosexualization of America’ that Dennis Altman had published in the early 1980s. The atmosphere became quite sober, and I went on saying that, following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Soviet Union, considerable changes were made worldwide, and this would not bode well for Turkey, if the intention of the ruling class was to keep the country within the then borders (which are still the same today in 2022). In other words, to survive, Turkey had to indispensably expand its borders – to the east, not to the south, not to the west.
X- Post-1989 Turkey’s ‘Quitte ou Double’: Win the Horse or Lose the Saddle!
To prevent potential traps and dangers, the country had to urgently adopt a sustainable expansion plan and become the vicar of Kemal Ataturk’s secular state and laic ideas to the entire Muslim world. Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar, namely states that were steadily promoting Islamic obscurantism, had to face lethal challenges and disappear.
But for Turkey, priority no 1 was Iran, a country that was very weak at the time, due to the long duration of the Iran-Iraq War. The absurd and fake Iran of the Ayatollahs had to be dissolved, following a well-staged border episode, only to be historically-culturally ‘reinvented’. Turkey should fast annex South Azerbaijan, territories in the Zagros Mountains, and the northern plateau from Zanjan to Tehran to Gorgan.
Soon afterwards, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan could unite with Turkey, thus ushering us to a new era, namely the rise of a vast, multilingual Turan-Iran confederacy, with Turkish and Farsi as the two official languages and with a descendant of the Qajar dynasty playing a role.
This would later lead to an overwhelming attack on, invasion and annexation of the fake state of Afghanistan on which a strictly secular establishment would be imposed; subsequently, the return of the then exiled king Mohammed Zahir Shah (1914-2007) would end the paranoid regime of the Taliban gangsters. Only this bold plan would cancel the evil plans that were underway, I concluded. Halit and Erol were listening very carefully; they were regretting that few people could then think in Turkey out-of-the-box.
Erol and Halit offered me a wealth of knowledge and critical insight into the period of İsmet İnönü (president from 1938 to 1950), Celâl Bayar (president from 1950 to 1960), and Adnan Menderes (prime minister from 1950 to 1960), when Kemal Ataturk’s state was first assaulted by the evil Anglo-Saxon diplomats, Orientalist academics, and agents, as well as by their imbecile puppets, namely the various Islamist and/or crypto-Islamist politicians. We three deplored the aforementioned incompetent and disgraced statesmen.
XI- The Dark Shadow of All Bureaucrats
Intellectuals of high caliber, Halit and Erol were some of the best academics of Turkey. They had a very difficult task though; they had to force statesmen and politicians, generals and magistrates to think out-of-the-box. The Turkish state had become a cumbersome bureaucracy that was quite suitable for some politicians to easily use for their personal benefit. But a bureaucracy can accept all the filthy lies of a criminal English agent, like those of Nicholas Fishwick, the rascal who wanted to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic in the way they eliminated Lady Diana and her fiancé. About:
http://www.cnj.it/MILOS/precedenti.htm
http://www.left.ru/inter/august/elich2.html
https://cryptome.org/mi6-diana.htm
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/nick-fishwick
More than a year before that abhorrent crime that took place in Paris (to ostensibly prevent the mother of the second in the line of succession to the British throne from becoming the Muslim wife of a commoner), I met Nicholas Fishwick in the British Consulate of Istanbul only to listen to his paranoid suggestions about England being a ‘friendly country’ to Turkey and that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus ‘should not’ be internationally recognized. Poor thing! The miserable guy was on crutches, because he had broken his leg in a football match; I told him with all due contempt that this sort of ‘friends’ can be found in the market, and that Cyprus is none of England’s stupid business. However, if I had been a Turkish bureaucratic apparatchik, my response would have been different. This situation ended up in Turkey with an Islamist government because all ignorant street sellers are the best MI6 operatives, even without knowing it.
It could be even worse; in the USSR, this situation ended up with the dissolution of the Communist establishment, a process that started with the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the 4th Chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB) on 18 May 1967. By penetrating one another, the CIA and the KGB ended up becoming one organization; this crucial development is pertinently narrated by the comprehensive and highly insightful article that was recently published by the leading Bulgarian journalist and connoisseur Krassimir Ivandjiiski here: https://strogosekretno.com/323/12/33-години-от-преврата-на-10-ноември-1989-г-неговите-кулиси-и-незаглъхващи-последици.html
There were apparent similarities between the state of Kemal Ataturk and that of Lenin; to my eyes, the Soviet state was in reality weaker as structure, and that’s why it did not last more than 74 years. Its weakness consisted in the inflexibility and the unrealistic dogmatism of USSR’s magistrates and administrators; this attitude was spread the administration. The filthy parasites, i.e. the public sector’s employees, always use theories, theologies, dogmas and doctrines to secure their existence; this process turns them from humans to execrable insects.
For this trash, every new idea, every new approach, every new interpretation, every effort to think out-of-the-box and every attempt to make others function mentally and intellectually in this manner constitutes a lethal danger and has therefore to be instantly eliminated. This pseudo-Kemalist bureaucracy accepted politely Erol Manisali’s incessant suggestions, advice and admonitions only to calmly put them in a drawer and never implement them. That’s why one can establish the parallel between Russia’s Communists in the early 20th c. and Turkey’s Islamists in the early 21st c. Neither did the former reflect Marx’s ideas, nor did the latter represent the Quran and prophet Muhammad’s Hadith. Then, this development is not the result of an intruding foreign power’s interference but the inevitable imprint of the fate.
XII- Erol Manisali: Cassandra’s Distressing but Inevitable Truth
Erol Manisali was a man of honesty, decency, lucidity and farsightedness. Although I came to meet and know personally great Turkish scholars and explorers, politicians and thinkers, I do believe that he was the greatest of all because his texts reflect better the realities of his time. Had he wished to establish a balance between reflection and action, he would have made the most successful Minister of Treasury and Finance (Hazine ve Maliye Bakanı) or the most popular, and the most pedagogical, Prime Minister. But his passion for comprehension, authorship, analysis, explanation and education prevented him from eclipsing the entire political establishment of Turkey in the venue where Erol Manisali would have been most respected: the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi).
My memories are abundant but the space of an obituary is frustratingly limited. You can never write a book for an obituary and you can never contain Life in just 5000 words; even more so, if you need to describe the life of a so multitalented, erudite scholar.
If Erol Manisali lived before 500 years, his work would be similar to that of Matrakçı Nasuh; and what does it matter if Erol bey did not draw maps? His texts elucidated his topics as plainly as Matrakçı Nasuh’s designs highlighted the urban order of Soltanieh, Tabriz, Baghdad and so many other cities.
And if Erol Manisali lived before 1500 years, they would probably call him Procopius because the author of the History of the Wars, the Buildings, and the Secret History reflected the same values and demonstrated the same virtues as my departed friend in our time; both of them did not spare any criticism for the rulers of their times.
Erol the Turk, Erol the Constantinopolitan, Erol the Roman; how can I summarize his colossal legacy in few words? I think that three verses from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (lines 1240-1242) represent Erol Manisali’s insight, hindsight and foresight best, either his foolish opponents like it or not – only uttered by Cassandra:
What does it matter now if men believe or not?
What is to come will come. And soon you too will stand aside,
to murmur in pity that my words were true.
—————
See also:
Filistinlilerin Giritli Kökeni, Prof. Erol Manisalı ve ben
https://www.academia.edu/86684479/Filistinlilerin_Giritli_Kökeni_Prof_Erol_Manisalı_ve_ben
The Political Evolutions in the Balkans, Greek-Balkan Relations, and Turkey – 10th International Girne Conference (1994)
Erol Manisali for President of Turkey (18th April 2007)
https://www.academia.edu/89576785/Erol_Manisali_for_President_of_Turkey_18th_April_2007_
Erol Manisali’nin Hakkımda Kitap Bölümü – Prof. Erol Manisali’s Book Chapter about Me – Глава книги профессора Эрола Манисалы обо мне
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