The Grandmother of the Third Army

In the summer of 1876 the English language acquired a new insult.

It had been sitting in the dictionaries for some time, doing nothing in particular. Then Januarius MacGahan, an Ohio-born correspondent working for the Daily News, walked into the Bulgarian village of Batak three months after the killing and filed what he found there. The dispatches ran that August. By September William Gladstone had published Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which sold something over two hundred thousand copies in a month, and Disraeli’s government—which had spent half a century propping up the Sultan as a wall against Russia—discovered that propping up the Sultan had become a thing one could not say in public.

The word MacGahan brought home with him was bashi-bazouk.

What the word actually said

Turkish başıbozuk is baş plus bozuk, and the temptation is to read it as “broken in the head”—which would be convenient, since that is more or less what it came to mean in English. But the head in question is not the man’s own. Baş here is the head in the sense of a chief, a command, a unit one is attached to. A bashi-bazouk is a man with nobody above him: a fighter outside the line and outside the chain. The official dictionary of modern Turkish still glosses it that way—a disorderly body of men, a civilian attached to an army—and başıbozukluk survives as the word for an office in which nobody answers to anybody.

The term was administrative, and it stayed administrative at home long after it had finished its career abroad. Sir James Redhouse’s Turkish and English lexicon, printed in Constantinople in 1890, and Diran Kélékian’s Turkish-French dictionary, printed in the same city in 1911, both give the dry military sense: irregular. Thirteen years after Batak, and then thirty-five, Ottoman lexicography was still describing a category of troops. The London press had long since been using the same word to describe a category of atrocity. One word, two languages, no overlap whatsoever—and the dictionary, needless to say, lost. Propaganda does not merely tell stories. It edits the reference books.

The volunteers

One more thing about the press campaign, because it becomes relevant. The Victorian reader was offered the Eastern woman in precisely one attitude: Christian, ravished, dead or about to be. It was the single most effective image of the agitation. Hold on to it.

Two fronts

While the Grand Duke Nicholas crossed the Danube, held the Shipka pass, spent five months reducing Plevna and then took an army over the Balkans in winter to reach Adrianople, a second Russian force pushed east from the Caucasus—the same frontier that had been quiet, more or less, since the Crimean war.

On 4 November General Heimann broke Ahmed Muhtar Pasha at Deve Boynu and closed on Erzurum. He could not take it. Kars fell in the middle of the month, and Kars was the only fortress the Russians took on that front in the whole campaign. Erzurum held, and the Russian army spent the next four months encamped in front of it, on the Armenian plateau, in winter, which is a sentence that should be read slowly.

The night of 8 November

Heimann had no siege ladders, and no time or supplies for a siege proper, so he tried a surprise. It half worked. One column came up silently to the Aziziye fort on Top Dağı—the same hill from which Pushkin, half a century earlier, had watched the city being shelled—killed the sentries and took the works. The other columns got lost, arrived late, and arrived somewhere else.

At dawn the muezzin of the Ayaz Pasha mosque climbed the minaret and, instead of the call to prayer, announced that the Russians were in Aziziye.

What follows is known to every schoolchild in Türkiye. In a house on the edge of town sat a young woman whose elder brother Hasan had come back from the front the previous day with wounds he did not survive the night. When the shouting came from the minaret she left her baby indoors, took what was in the house, and went up the hill with the crowd. Her name was Nene Hatun.

The townspeople—women, old men, boys, with axes and picks and fowling pieces—went up with what was left of the garrison and had the fort back by morning. Turkish tradition puts the Russian dead at two or three thousand. Russian sources give rather over eight hundred killed and wounded, three quarters of them from the Baku regiment, against some fifteen hundred Ottoman casualties. The figures diverge, as they always do, in exactly the direction each teller requires. Nene Hatun was found unconscious, still gripping whatever it was.

Everything in that story that floats

Consider now how much of the preceding two paragraphs is firmly established. Almost none of it.

The weapon. Her dead brother’s rifle in some versions; in others a satır, the heavy butcher’s cleaver, which becomes a hatchet in the retelling and, on the monument, an axe you could fell a tree with.

The child. A three-month-old son left in his cradle; or a small boy and a three-month-old daughter.

Her age. The traditional birth year is 1857, which makes her twenty. Working from the 1953 parliamentary file on her state pension and from the civil registers, the Erzurum historian Mehmet Küçükuğurlu arrived at 1854, which would make her a hundred and one at her death. A second reading of the same petition gives 1853, and twenty-four on the night. Local Erzurum researchers, meanwhile, agree that she died at eighty or ninety—which would put her birth between 1865 and 1875 and make her a child in November 1877.

Her name. Not securely known at all. “Nene Hatun” is not a name; it is what people called her.

Even the date of her fame. The first recorded conversations with her are from 1937, when the journalist İsmail Habib Sevük came to Erzurum; she became a national figure in the early fifties. Some researchers go further and argue that the heroine in her present form was largely assembled after 1952, when Türkiye joined NATO and Erzurum became the alliance’s nearest city to the Soviet Union. The claim is contested—but it does account for Mother of the Year, and for General Ridgway arriving to kiss her hand.

So: not a deposition but a legend still settling. The details float and the figure holds, and it holds precisely because nobody knows the details.

The grandmother

About the name, since it is not one. Nene is Turkish for grandmother. Hatun, “lady, woman of rank”, is an old Turkic title, borrowed—on the standard account—from Sogdian xwatēn, where it belonged to a ruler’s wife. A young woman is called grandmother by her country, and called it with a title that reached Anatolia from Central Asia a thousand years before there was an Erzurum to defend.

The grandmother is not incidental. The European comparison reaches automatically for Joan of Arc, but the Turkish tradition builds her as the exact opposite of a maid in armour: as a mother. In 1955 the Turkish Women’s Union named her Mother of the Year, the first woman so named in the country; the army had already made her Grandmother of the Third Army. She died on 22 May of that year. Two of her sons had been killed in the Great War. She was buried by the fort, and the monument beside it shows her with an infant on her back—not a flourish, but the whole of the story: not a maiden going out to battle, a nursing mother who left the child indoors.

There is a postscript to the name. She had lived some eighty years without a surname, as had almost everyone else in the country; the Surname Law of 1934 obliged the population to acquire family names, and she was registered as Kırkgöz. It looks like “forty eyes”, and that reading is wrong: göz is not only an eye but any opening or compartment—the span of a bridge, the drawer of a chest, the mouth of a spring—and kırk in such compounds is not a number but the folkloric “many”, as in the forty thieves. Kırkgöz means forty-arched, and it is what old bridges are called all over Anatolia. A woman with no certain name and no certain birth date was issued a surname that sounds like a bridge.

Which brings us back to the image the Daily News had sold so well. The agitation of 1876 had one Eastern woman and one thing for her to be. A year later an Eastern woman did take up a weapon, and she took it up against the army that had come to liberate her neighbours.

What the maps looked like afterwards

The Russians did get into Erzurum, in the end. They walked in unopposed in February 1878 under the terms of the armistice, and held it until the Congress of Berlin. So the patriotic version—the people rose and saved the city—is exactly half true. The city was saved in November and then given away and given back in a conference room.

The war ended badly for the Ottomans, and the reasons were largely outside their control. The overland trade from Persia through Trabzon had lost its value once the Suez Canal opened; after Gladstone, defending the Sultan had become not merely unprofitable but embarrassing. France had not recovered from the Prussians or the Commune. There was nobody left to hold Russia’s coat.

San Stefano gave Russia nearly everything she wanted; Berlin took back about half of it. The residue: southern Bessarabia, Kars, Ardahan and Batum to Russia; Erzurum back to the Sultan; Bulgaria not independent but an autonomous principality under the Sultan’s suzerainty, paying him tribute; Bosnia under Austrian administration with Ottoman sovereignty intact on paper; and Cyprus to Britain, by a separate convention, without anyone firing at anything.

Both of those careful fudges expired in the same year, 1908: Bulgaria declared independence, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia. From there it is six years to Sarajevo.