The Conquest Party

On Friday Istanbul celebrated the 556th anniversary of the capture of Constantinople*, a feat that had been preceded by the popular "siege of Constantinople" and even earlier by the unnerving "muttering under your breath at Constantinople."

The first conquest celebration in 1453 got out of hand and the Ottomans woke up the next day with a broken Byzantine Empire and a new city. In fact, the year 1453 is an important date in Turkey, and just as American children learn about conquest with “In fourteen ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” here children recite “In fourteen fifty-three, Mehmet took the infidel city” even though it doesn’t rhyme in Turkish. ^{[citation needed]}

This year, the city organized over ten thousand fireworks, giant see-through screens playing a 3-D film about the conquest projected over water, lasers, geysers and men dressed in Ottoman military garb playing marching music; teaching any remaining Byzantines who is boss.

Of course, some might point out that the Byzantine Empire is no longer a threat, what with not existing for over five centuries, but subtlety is for the vanquished. Critics like journalist Engin Ardıç argue (link Turkish):

“Why are you doing this? It’s been five hundred fifty-six years, why are you celebrating like you just got the city the other day? Why do you come back to this same point each year, reminding the world ‘this wasn’t actually ours, we came afterwards and took it by force?’ Why do you keep a six-century old affair fresh? Are you subconsciously afraid that it will be ‘taken back someday’?”

But the celebrations are more than just a high-tech version of a dog marking its territory: in a world of increasing political correctness, Istanbul still gets to celebrate Muslims kicking Christian ass.

Before the Ottomans, Constantinople was one of the capitals of Christendom and a monument to Christianity in the East. Now, the Muslims own it, and today’s conquest celebrations have a reputation for being favored by the more religious crowd while the rest of the city is busy drinking, fornicating, or applying for work-visas to Europe (sometimes all at once).

Of course, we would not seem insensitive or needlessly patriotic if we could get the rest of the world to celebrate its own conquests: for example, Spain could celebrate the 477^th anniversary of giving the Inca small-pox on November 16^th, and the Dutch just missed out on the 383^rd anniversary of buying New York for $24 on May 24^th, the last time anyone ever paid less than thirty dollars for anything in New York.

* For those who just now thought of the They Might Be Giants song Istanbul (not Constantinople), it was actually first performed by The Four Lads on the 500th year of the city’s conquest.