In the introductory section entitled ‘Introduction: The New Ottoman Greece—A Heritage in Search of Identity and Inheritors’, T. S. Willert begins by reminding the reader about journalist Irini Kakoulidou’s struggle to save her Facebook group ‘Save the Ottoman Monuments of Greece’, which faced insults, threats, and sabotage by Greek right-wing nationalists who were against glorifying the non-Greek past of the country. Kakoulidou’s group, recently renamed ‘Ottoman Monuments in Greece’, has been working as a civil society initiative aiming to bring attention to Ottoman monuments and preserve these physical remnants from the Ottoman period that convey historical memory. In a talk given in 2017, Kakoulidou argued that the Greeks have tried to expunge the Ottoman period from Greece’s historical memory. The official definition of the Ottoman monuments as ‘post-Byzantine’ confirms that there is an identity problem regarding this unwanted heritage. Thus, her group wants to raise the collective historical consciousness to include the Ottoman heritage in the Greek national narrative. As a departure from questioning the denial narratives of the Ottoman past of the Greek nation, The New Ottoman Greece in History and Fiction contributes to the literature surrounding the debates on the Ottoman heritage in Greece by arguing that there has been a revitalization of the Ottoman era in the fields of history and literature.

In this context, Willert’s book focuses on the trend to rehabilitate the Ottomans as an integral part of Greek history in contemporary Greece by tracing the changes in the symbolic value attributed to the centuries of Ottoman rule, which is called Tourkokratia or “Turkish occupation” in the Greek nation-state. From a constructivist perspective, she attempts to map out the different modes of “remembering” in culture in order to understand the narratives of a shared past, reflecting on Greek society’s perspective about its national identity and which stories have contributed to constructing this identity. In this regard, she notes that Greece deals with the nation’s history and identity through two different interpretations. One Greece constructs its identity on fear and an ethnocentric narrative of the nation which assumes the period of Ottoman rule—from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries—as a dark age of Turkish rule and a disastrous age for Greek civilization. This traditional ethnocentric perception presents the Ottoman state as a mechanism of oppression. The other Greece, however, constructs its identity from a non-nationalist and revisionist Greek historiography that includes a reinterpretation of Ottoman Greece. To sum up, the book is devoted to exhibiting the multi-faceted interpretations of the Tourkokratia by examining the ways in which the Ottomans are remembered in Greece.

By examining the complex and changing discursive fields of the Ottoman period, the volume contributes to cultural memory studies that work on ways of making sense of the past within a specific framework of “intentional remembering, narrative and identity.” Within this framework, the study searches for what is reproduced, rejected, or redefined in narratives about the Ottoman past which reflect the self-definition of the Greek nation, Greece today, and its current interests. On the rising awareness of the Ottoman legacy in the Greek public sphere, she highlights that the crucial question is how this awareness will be used and which agendas it serves. The history wars in the new history schoolbooks illustrate well the challenge of non-nationalist historiography to the official exclusionist national narrative of history. Remembering Ottoman rule as 400 years of darkness and slavery, or as centuries of a successful and peaceful coexistence, represent the different interpretations of the Ottoman period. Moreover, The New Ottoman Greece observes how the revival of Turkish neo-Ottomanism under the Justice and Development Party government has contributed to these debates over the last decades. Both the discourse of fear and the admiration of the Ottoman past, namely ‘Osmanalgia’, are analyzed through Greek historiography and literature.

The book consists of six chapters. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 presents a background to Greek Ottoman historiography with a specific focus on recent developments and approaches to the revival of the Ottoman past in the cultural area. Chapter 3 covers the power struggle of the new historiographical approaches in the public sphere by analyzing the counter-discourses in the cultural battles over the Ottoman past. In particular, the fearmongering surrounding the revival of neo-Ottomanism is discussed in this part of the study. Moreover, it shows how pioneering historian Mark Mazover’s (2004) Salonica—City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950, which sheds a light on the city’s multicultural Ottoman heritage, is debated in Greece since Thessaloniki—as the symbol of the Byzantine era—is the second most glorious place in the Greek national narrative after the capital Athens. The debates demonstrate that Mazover’s book gave rise to a wave of ethnocentric and anti-Semitic reactions, and he was accused of having a hidden political agenda and inventing a history that served this agenda. Surprisingly, the chapter’s discussion of the meaning of Thessaloniki for the Turks as the national ‘other’ of Greeks was very limited, considering that it is the birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey, M. Kemal Ataturk. Besides the reactions to the New Ottoman Greece given in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 investigates Osmanalgia where history and fictional literature intersect with a review of the narratives of Thessaloniki’s Ottoman legacy.

After an examination of how the competing narratives about the Ottoman centuries have been represented in historiography and related public spaces, Chapter 5 moves on to demonstrate cultural and historical memory from the perspectives of historical novels regarding the Ottoman period. This chapter provides a rich literature review and underlines the role of fictional literature in representing, reproducing, and reshaping national narratives through interviews with authors. Following this overview chapter, Chapter 6 focuses on three Greek historical novels that present the national myths and narratives about the nation and the ‘national other’: Maro Douka’s (2004) Innocent and Guilty; Vassileious Christopoulos’s (2005) Are you Greek, too?, and Yannis Kalpouzos’s (2008) Imaret: In the Shadow of the Clock Tower. These novels illustrate the negotiations over the national memory from the perspective of different narratives of incompatibility between Greeks and Turks. They present questions of identity and boundaries between religions, languages, and ethnic communities during the period of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

In the epilogue, Willert summarizes and compares the old and new narratives on the Ottoman heritage in Greek history since the late 1990s. Consequently, the book reveals how the historical and fictional narratives played a role in reaching out to a large population with messages for the reimagination of the “self” and the “other” and provide a better understanding of how the Ottoman past is slowly and steadily becoming an integral part of Greek collective historical consciousness. In this historical account, she discusses how these new interpretations reflect the nation’s present, the self-definition of national identity in terms of being modern and European, or including a non-European past. However, one issue she does not sufficiently address is the contributions of the Western Thracian Turks in this emergence of a New Ottoman Greece. Nonetheless, the nexus of the book is Greek narratives. Having said that, this book will be valuable for both those looking for a new perspective on the debates of the Ottoman heritage in Greece as well as academics and laypeople.