Isabel Danishmend

In Our Eyes We Mirror Him

My family’s sense of identity drifting goes beyond being migrants, it goes back to the multinational composition of the Ottoman Empire and then to its loss. They were Turkish but not quite. Connected to Lebanon, Greece, and Egypt, but not Lebanese, Greek, or Egyptian. In a world dictated by the idea of the nation state and identity politics, it was difficult to locate myself. When I was in Kindergarten and asked for a Show & Tell to present on where I was from, where I was really from, I wasn’t sure how to answer.

Moustafa Réchid Pasha (1858-1924) was my great great grandfather. I learned that he was a diplomat for the Ottoman Sultan in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. He worked and lived in Constantinople, Sofia, Bucharest, Rome, Vienna and London, and participated in the London Conference after the First Balkan War in 1913. He strongly opposed the Treaty of Sèvres, the treaty that divided the Ottoman Empire up into separate territories operated under the French, British, Greek and Italian governments. He was a Muslim Ottoman. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure where that meant he belonged. I thought maybe he identified more as Bulgarian, Turkish, Armenian, Greek or Albanian. I now understand it as the identity of an Empire that encompassed all, whether they liked it or not, the head of its ship being in Istanbul or at the time, Constantinople. 

He dedicated his entire life to the service of the Ottoman Empire, not to the unreliable turning door of Sultans, but to the Empire itself. He supported the Young Turk revolution, where the Young Turks forced the Sultan to reinstate the Ottoman constitution of 1876. An attempt at modernizing and reforming the Empire, reducing the Sultan’s power, but the consequence was the emergence of Turkish nationalism. 

I have a box of linens, some photos, medals and a memoir exclusively about his endeavours. Instead of starting with his birth like a typical memoir, it begins in 1886 when he started his career as a diplomat, and it ends in 1920 when the Empire fell. It is almost as if he himself did not exist if not serving the Ottomans. Exiled to Germany, he died a few years later, maybe of a broken heart.

But my brother, my father, my aunt and my great grandfather all have Moustafa Rechid Pacha’s distinctive downturned eyes. In our eyes, we mirror him.

Video Installation with two mirrors, 2021