Fatih Kerimi’s Impressions of the Turkey

The French Revolution, which paved the way for the emergence of nation-nation consciousness, brought the end of autocratic administrations by preparing the ground for radical changes that allowed societies to govern themselves democratically and to elect cadres to govern them. The developments in the political field that emerged in the 18th century had a strong impact on fields such as history, language, religion and especially education. The 18th century Ottoman environment also had its share of these developments, and the strong nationalism idea brought by the French Revolution strengthened the independence movements of the societies. These developments, which prepared the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had a multilingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural structure under the same empire, accelerated with the movements in the Balkan lands at the beginning of 1900. This situation prepared the ground for them to speak out loudly for demanding the separation of the Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian nations from the empire, who lived together with the Muslim Turkish people for hundreds of years. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the political developments in the Ottoman lands, which were of great importance especially due to the fact that caliphate was in Istanbul, were carefully followed not only by the Anatolian geography, but also by other Turkic societies in Asia and the north of the Black Sea. In this study, the impressions of different parts of Istanbul of the period will be discussed under certain themes, based on the work called “Istanbul Letters” in which Fatih Kerimi, one of the Tatar Turks, who returned to his country after receiving education in Istanbul and engaged in teaching and journalism activities, wrote his impressions of the Balkan War in which the Ottoman Empire was involved.