In his text, Seyfullah describes one of their first actions as a group, which was the building of an illegal printing press for the reproduction of leaflets and pamphlets. In the terminology of the activists, this was referred to as setting up the “technique” or “device”. The action consisted of securing a location for the Gestetner (a duplicating machine), mounting it, translating leaflets, reproducing them, dismantling the Gestetner once more, and hiding it in parts. The Gestetner was a stencil-method duplicator that used a thin sheet of paper coated with wax; at the beginning of the forties, it was considered amongst the most dangerous of devices, and every communist worth his salt had to know how to operate it. To prevent discovery, the heavy device often had to be unmounted and remounted in a new place; a task which similarly implied an amount of risk due to its bulk. Seyfullah recounts a formidable story about hiding pieces of the Gestetner under the tomb of the Yesil Baba mausoleum; a place surely no one would think to look. Due to the solidarity expressed by local dervishes, the communists’ printing device was hidden in some of the most sacred spaces for the Muslim population in Skopje. In 1942, after he had joined the Partisans, Seyfullah came secretly to Skopje — as the only one who knew the whereabouts — to collect the letters and parts from under the Yesil Baba tomb, from which a new printing press was constructed in the woods.

The initial activities of Seyfullah and the others, were performed under the umbrella of the legal organisation “Yardım” (Help), a youth-led humanist organisation with leftist leanings, which was especially engaged in encouraging the development of a workers’ culture through theatres, free libraries, and sport. In a roundtable discussion with the original members of the Muslim Cell, organised by the Birlik and Flaka e Vllaznimit newspapers in 1959, one can read more about these activities, including their translations of Nazim Hikmet (into Albanian and into the spoken Turkish of those living in Skopje), popular comedies directed against corrupt Muslim bureaucrats, sports competitions, and numerous camps (kir gezintisi) in the nature. The Turkish transcript of this conversation was made by Şükrü Ramo and can be read under the title ‘Üsküp Müslüman Parti Birliği/Skopje Muslim Party Unity’, in Birlik, 15 July 1959. 

The objective for forming the Muslim Cell was not based on the politics of identity, as Seyfullah and Karahasan emphasise in the aforementioned discussion; they never felt like an “ethnic” addition to the pan-Yugoslav anti-fascist and internationalist uprising. They were an equal part of the international movement. They aimed to mobilise Albanian and Turkish speaking populations against oppressive structures in Macedonia and Kosovo, including those of Serbian colonisers, Bulgarian occupations, encroaching Italian and German fascists, and the local feudal collaborators. It was a tiny cell, initially with just eleven members, all organically connected in what Antonio Gramsci would have called a “molecule”; or, the first molecule of a new form, a new organisation. That was the role of the Muslim Cell, a catalyst for broader change. And, when the right time approached they disbanded by joining other Partisan guerilla units and moving deeper underground. 

The “cell” was Kemal Seyfullah’s platform; his individual trajectory is evidence of the expansion of this molecule to a new form of socialist hegemony. Seyfullah, twice wounded and imprisoned during the war, became a high-ranking Partisan by the end of the Second World War, the Mayor of Skopje from 1951 to 1954, a member of the Central Committee, the Yugoslavian ambassador to Zambia and Botswana, and a board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in the sixties. He was an avid collector of contemporary art, an internationally active communist, translator, writer, and the biography of Seyfullah is yet to be written. The only document available today about Seyfullah is a small extract from Füruzan’s Balkan reportage in which she interviews Kemal’s brother, Lütfü Seyfullah. Lütfü tells her about the adventures of his brother, Tito’s attachment to him, visiting him in Zambia, his purchase of a Picasso for the Museum of Contemporary Art, his support for Milovan Djilas, a temporary dissent from communist institutions, his theoretical writings and anti-bureaucratic life, his distaste for  nationalism, and so forth. Lütfü concludes the interview by remarking that it was “good [Kemal] didn’t [live to see] these days” (Füruzan, Balkan Yolcusu, Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1996). 

Both Lütfü’s recollections, and Füruzan’s commentary have to be taken with a pinch of salt. What can be recommended though, are the writings of Kemal Seyfullah himself, which mostly deal with questions of nation. A collection of his writings on nationalism was published in 1972 as Ulusallık Sorunu (The National Question, Sesler, Skopje, 1972); they offer a conceptual framework for the discussion of nationalism in relation to international politics, and most importantly, develop from perspectives of class, gender, and cultural emancipation. The chapters — each published as separate essays in the journal Sesler — address this theory from several angles: ‘The National Question Today’ (originally published in the first issue of Sesler in 1965), is the opening text, and sets the terms of discussion with the national question as a contemporary problematic, and thus a problematic within socialism, ‘The Economic Relation between Nations and Nationalities’, ‘International Relations and the Question of Culture’, ‘Lenin on the National Question’, etc. Seyfullah also wrote more technical reports on the national question, including the ‘Yugoslav Communist League and National Minorities’ (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije i Nacionalno Pitanje, Kultura, Belgrade, 1959); and ‘The National Minorities in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia’, translated into both English and French (‘Jugoslavia’, Belgrade, 1965). 

These books, reports, and analyses became the core theoretical and institutional documents forming the Turkish speaking national ideologies during socialism in Yugoslavia. In following months we will critically engage with these materials, and propose a new narrative for the complexities of Turkish and other national formations in Kosovo and Macedonia during the socialist period. 

Seyfullah was a comrade of Ferit Bayram, a partisan fighter and theoretician of nationalism, who read the eulogy at his burial. Based on Devrimci Ferit Bayram, and its references, Altay Suroy (born 1949), a lawyer and researcher based in Prizren, directed a documentary about Bayram in 1986, and contributed to a conference paper on the role of Ferit Bayram in disclosing the murder of Zef Lush Marku (in 1985). Lush Marku was an Albanian speaking communist activist from Kosovo, murdered secretly by the Serbian police in 1920 in Gjakova, while on his way to Prizren. Bayram, with his influence as a member of the Parliament—where he was elected through the Yugoslav Communist Party ticket—unearthed the killing and pressed the police to accept responsibility for the gruesome murder, which they never did. Marku was one of the first victims of monarchist terror against leftists and libertarian thinkers, which was to last until the end of the Second World War. Soon, with the declaration of a monarchist dictatorship in Yugoslavia (the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovens) in the end of 1920, Bayram lost his post, and subsequent immunity as a member of the parliament, and went on to survive years of humiliation and repression which later emerged, again as an activist within the anti-fascist movement in the Second World War, now sixty years old and temporarily living in Mitrovica in Kosovo. 

Ferit Bayram lived almost all his life in Skopje, together with Nakiye Bayram, who, alongside Rosa Plaveva, was one of the early women socialists active in Macedonia and Kosovo. Ferit’s politicisation started with joining the revolutionary Young Turks organisation Ittihat ve Terakki in 1908, and was active in efforts to overthrow the absolute monarchist power of the Sultan. Disappointed with the reactionary bourgeois position of Ittihat ve Terakki he left the organisation and became involved in the formation of the first Social-Democratic Party in Skopje, aligning itself with the German Socialist Party programme. This led to further politicisation; a May Day celebration in 1909, the translation of the Communist Manifesto into Turkish, his joining the Balkan federation, and most importantly his anti-war activities during the Balkan Wars and the First World War. After the Great War, Bayram joined the newly founded Yugoslav Communist Party and participated as a delegate to its foundational second congress in 1919, in Vukovar. He was editing Socijalisticka Zora and Sosyalist Fecri, agitating, together with Lush Marku among the Muslim polulation in Kosovo and Macedonia; he was active in the Skopje municipality, and, as a member of the Communist Party, was a member of the short-lived democratic parliament of the First Yugoslavia. 

He was a product of the Balkan socialist tradition, torn between three great empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian), and countless small nations. These were activists theorising in the field; figuring out, from scratch, a new model of organisation that would be at the same time anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, and anti-capitalist. On top of all these difficulties, they had to present this progressive model of socialist vision in language (Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian) to an illiterate peasant population who were far behind the developments happening elsewhere.

These obstacles did not deter the activists. Ferit Bayram, armoured with new socialist theories of the conception of nation, wrote the first Turkish language alphabet in 1947, worked as an advisor to the Ministry of Education of Macedonia, and continued to propagate progressive ideas among the Turkish speaking community in Macedonia and Kosovo until his death in 1965. His work influenced future theoreticians and writers in the Turkish language in Yugoslavia, such as Kemal Seyfullah, Necati Zekeriya, Hayrettin Volkan, Mustafa Karahasan, Şükrü Ramo and others who laid the grounds for all of the progressive and socialist ideas after the Second World War, including as well, the democratic and egalitarian understanding of the national question.

Çevren, on the other hand, was one of the most important cultural journals printed in the Turkish language in Yugoslavia. It was active from 1973 until 1992, it produced ninety-two issues, and was published in Prishtina by the publishing house, Tan. 

Folić’s text tells a brief and episodic history of the CPY in Kosovo and Macedonia, from 1919 until 1921, a time when the national and political contradictions were sharpening, eventually having to be interrupted by the police forces of the then Kingdom of Serbia. It also shows the crucial position that the Sosyalist Fecri newspaper held during these struggles. Sosyalist Fecri, or Socijalisticka Zora in Serbian (meaning, Socialist Dawn), was the newspaper of the Socialist Labour Party of Yugoslavia (the party’s name was changed to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the second meeting held in Vukovar, in 1919.) The newspaper was issued in Serbian, however, there was a brief period when it also came out in Turkish (with Arabian lettering). 

According to Folić, there was another newspaper with the same name, Sosyalist Fecri, which was initially and only briefly published in 1910, in Kosovo and Macedonia. In this period, socialist organisations were already active in the region, and were mostly influenced by the Second International and German Social Democrats. Some years later, when the German Social Democrats took a side in favour of participating in the First World War, the socialists felt disappointment with their political ‘model.’ Just a couple of years before that, the socialist congress held in Basel had fiercely opposed the imperialist war in the Balkans and supported the fraternity of people against all forms of national chauvinism. This jump, from being against the war to supporting it, was devastating for international socialist movements. However, in the middle of the war, the October Revolution intervened in the course of history, changing the coordinates of politics and extending huge amounts of energy to the masses all over the world. The revolution was also important as it showed that the industrial proletariat was not the only political subject and it emphasised the liberation of oppressed nations. These ideas were already in circulation when the Sosyalist Fecri newspaper started being re-published, on February 1st, 1920.

The articles in the newspaper were mostly written by party members, or by locals who were close to the party. Texts included the weekly activities of the CPY in Kosovo and Macedonia; the violent measures and tortures committed by the Serbian regime’s police; the poverty and the miserable conditions of the working class and of the peasantry. The issue of oppressed nations was raised many times, albeit, not in a systematic way. Still, the newspaper played a very important role in the union of many nations against common oppressors. Besides the aggressive Serbian bourgeoisie, a crucial block against the people’s emancipation, were the local landlords — as Folić addresses in his article. These landlords supported the most conservative and comprador bourgeois organisations, such as Cemiyet, who were in favour of collaborating with the state and the remnants of the old regime. These organisations were fiercely attacked in the pages of Sosyalist Fecri.

To some extent, Sosyalist Fecri was successful in mobilising and uniting the oppressed classes and nations against the regime. For example, many people from the region participated in the May Day rallies in 1919 and 1920, shouting slogans like “More bread, less police.” The May Day of 1920 was experienced akin to a dress rehearsal for the local elections that were held later that year. Many candidates from the PCY campaigned in Prizren, Peja, Mitrovica, Zveçan, Bitola, Skopje and Ohrid for the local elections. A party pamphlet from this period read: “The communist party is not promising anything to people, but it calls the workers, the peasants and the poor people in cities and in villages to fight against everything that exploits them…” Folić recounts how the bourgeoisie and local landlords were frightened by the possible union between Albanians, Turks, Bosnians and Macedonians. For example, Ethem Bulbulović, a respected Muslim intellectual, was a candidate from the PCY in Zveçan. Since he was capable of speaking to both the poor muslim and non-muslim population, his existence was seen as a threat by the landlords. 

There was another very important religious figure supporting the PCY: Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paqarizi. Paqarizi was a highly respected poet and religious leader of the Melami lodge in Prizren. He contributed to the Sosyalist Fecri with his poem, ‘To Worker and Peasant Comrades,’ and helped in writing the election manifesto of the PCY in Prizren. In this manifesto, he wrote “Socialism is nothing but humanity, it brings happiness to people.” The text was written both in Turkish and in Albanian. 

Despite the violent measures taken by the regime, three PCY members managed to be elected in the region: Ilija Krasojevic and Milorad Pantić in Prizren; and Ethem Bulbulović in Zveçan. After the elections, the Serbian regime, concerned by the perceived danger, substantially increased police violence. The murder of Zef Lush Marku, a party member from Skopje,  in Gjakova in December 1920, was the turning point. The regime refused to clarify the events of the murder. At the same time many members, including Ilija Krasojevic and Haxhi Ymer Lutfi Paqarizi, were sabotaged, tortured and pushed into silence. Another member from Prizren, Muharrem Taranbaba, was forced into exile. After a few weeks, the government banned the party, arrested many people and prohibited the publication of Socialist Fecri. 

Sosyalist Fecri was the platform for the most progressive intellectuals and activists writing in the Turkish language in Yugoslavia, like Ferit Bayram who was on the editorial board of the newspaper. After the Second World War, the work of this newspaper and its legacy was a standard for future internationalists like Kemal Seyfullah. 

Still today, there is a street in the centre of Skopje called Socijalisticka Zora/Sosyalist Fecri, a testimony to the internationalism of socialist throughout  the Balkans.

            Ismail Eren was a scholar from Macedonia who lived and worked in Istanbul. The text we present here was published in Bosnia in Serbo-Croatian. This trajectory alone supplies a foundation to the objective of our project; which is to study the formation of nationalism through concrete political institutions that were genuinely international. During socialist Yugoslavia, Eren contributed many scholarly articles on late Ottoman modernisation, urban life, and some highly regarded articles of research into folklore. 

            Eren’s article on the press in Yugoslavia uses the scholarly apparatus, a rigorous archival study and gives an overview of the journals, newspapers, and periodicals printed in the Turkish language in Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. As well as imparting a picture of the richness and variety of printed materials in Turkish in Yugoslavia—which Eren laments as being less prolific and interesting than those in Bulgaria and Greece—the article depicts the context of this production very thoroughly. It makes us aware that these Turkish language periodicals published in Yugoslavia have to be understood by way of their social and political implications. The intensification of the publication of newspapers and magazines after the Second Constitutional Era (İkinci Meşrutiyet), which was established after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, is one of the topics the author deals with, pointing particularly to the modernising effect of the press, that was evidenced by the easing of legislation surrounding censorship and the liberalisation of the centralised control. That particular and very contradictory form of post-Empire modernisation, which in Yugoslavia lasted almost until the Second World War, presided over the publication of dozens of periodicals like Tarik, Muallim, and Misbah, written in Old Turkish (Arabic) script but using the Serbian-Bosnian language. This new mixture contributed to an unprecedented popularisation of printed material, as Eren writes, resulting in the reprint of some magazines’ issues from the back catalogue. Another outcome of this strange combination—Serbian literature written in Arabic script—was the emergence of the new style called arebica, or matufovica, which comes from matuf, in Arabic meaning old, but used colloquially to means upside-down, silly, strange, queer. (In recent years, in Bosnia, there have been attempts to reanimate this variant of writing the Bosnian language, as is the case with the comic book “Hadži Šefko i Hadži Mefko”, in 2005, backed by New Muslim Kids blog). 

            As Eren himself notes, there were some quite excessive examples of this turbulent history as well. For example, journals published by Ittihat ve Teraki with very bizarre militarised titles as Silah, Hançer, Bıçak, Bomba [Weapon, Dagger, Knife, Bomb], published in Skopje and Bitola, Top [Cannon] and Kurşun, Süngü, Kasatura [Bullet, Bayonet, Sword] in Skopje, all of which were opposition press and often in conflict with the ruling parties. 

            There are many other unusual outcomes of these politically driven prints. Perhaps the most obscure of all is Doğu ve Batı: Kültür, iktisat, sosyal ve siyası mecmuası [East and West: Culture, economy, society, and politics journal] published in Zagreb during the Second World War. As a publishing project, Doğu ve Batı is a pure historical anomaly. It is known as the first journal published in the Turkish language in Croatia, and the first Turkish language journal with Latin script published in Yugoslavia. There are eight numbers of this journal published between 1943 and 1944. It was an unsuccessful and aborted project of the Ustasha regime of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska/The Independent State of Croatia, active in 1941-1945] government, which attempted to use this journal as the platform for cultural diplomacy, to attract the ruling bourgeoisie of Turkey to recognize the independence of fascist Croatia. 

            Eren’s article is also very good in presenting an image of the strong network of publishing activities within different Yugoslav and Balkan regions (vilayet), which also had a political dimension. Some of these periodicals were the most lasting, for example, Kosova (first issue published in 1877) was active for 35 years, and Manastir (first issue 1885) was active for 28 years. These intra-vilayet publishing activities required a multilingual platform, which was also how most of these publications were printed. As Eren convincingly demonstrates, the content and form of these publications were genuinely multi-lingual and trans-national; they were published in Serbian and Turkish (as Bosna, Prizren, Neretva), Albanian and Turkish (Üsküp/Shkupi in Skopje, Ittihad-i Milli/Bashkimi Kombit in Bitola). In the Balkans, there were even more diverse examples, such as newspaper Edirne, in every page including Turkish, Bulgarian, and Greek language texts, or Selanik, published between 1869 and 1871 which featured Hebrew language texts in addition to Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian.

            In the twenties, the press in Turkish developed into more explicit political platforms of different political parties; Sada-yi Millet [Voice of People] of conservative and right-wing Radical Party (1927-1929), Işık [Light] of liberal Democrat Party/Zajednica (1927-1928), and the short-lived, but certainly most progressive, Sosyalist Fecri [Socialist Dawn]which published only thirteen hard to find issues, in 1920.  After the dictatorship established by King Alexander I, the king of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, in 1929, all parties and all press, including almost all press in the Turkish language, was banned in Yugoslavia. The next thing to be printed in Turkish, in that highly conservative and repressive atmosphere, was a newspaper published by The Islamic Community of Macedonia called Doğru Yol/Pravi Put [Right Path] in Turkish and Serbian. The following endeavour was also a newspaper of similar religious opportunist morality called Muslimanska Sloga [Muslim Consent] published in 1940, on the eve of the war. 

Eren’s text finishes when the socialist period begins, which introduced the further expansion of publishing activities, especially of books, with even more diverse content. Eren briefly mentions that during the Second World War in 1944 in Skopje, the Turkish language newspaper of the National Front called Birlik [Unity] appears, which after the liberation was followed with other publications of Socijalistički Savez Radnog Naroda [The Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia], Pioner Gazetesi [Pioneer Newspaper], Yeni Kadın [New Woman], Tomurcuk [Sprout], Sevinç [Joy], and Sesler [Voices]. 

The new life of the Turkish language in the socialist print in Yugoslavia arrives with these seeds, which will be the subject of the rest of the posts in this blog. 

Nation Formation researches ways in which the Turkish speaking community in Yugoslavia perceived its national identity during the socialist period. By studying this period of the recent history, it will also be possible to reveal new aspects of socialism and nationalism, especially how they were woven in the complex web of the modernization project of socialist [or Second] Yugoslavia, which meant emancipation from the constraints of a traditional and feudal society. The aim of the project is to untangle this web of modernisation from obscurantist approaches which mystify nationalism and to show the concrete dynamics and structures involved in the making of this history, which is still reverberating today.

Relying on printed sources, the scope of the research covers the cultural, artistic and intellectual productions in Turkish language in Kosovo and Macedonia from 1945 to 1991. The core argument of the research is based on the theory that the continuity of national ideologies can be traced in concrete material effects linked to precise political institutions. The aim here is to detect these existing institutions and to discuss their importance in imagining nationalisms. By this, the researchers claim that nationalism does not exist on its own, or to say in other words, it does not live its own life in the realm of symbols. Nationalism and national identities can exist only within concrete institutions; nationalism always breathes the air of the institutions.

The overall working hypothesis of the project argues the delimitation of nationalism, meaning that following their theoretical approach, Boynik and Rada will argue also an activist side of their research, which is to point at the limits of nationalism. By pointing out these limits and forms of nationalism, the ultimate aim is to envisage new ways of community solidarity that go beyond given particularities of ethnic identities. The two fundamental theses that the research studies are:

·     The intertwinement of Turkish nationalism in Yugoslavia with the ideological and political institutions of socialism. This implies the existence of an inherent contradiction in what is understood as local, ethnic, national elements within the multinational socialist institutions in Yugoslavia. This fundamental dispute has determined the Turkish nationalism in Yugoslavia.

·    Apart from ideological and political contradictions, this uneven national form is also linked to the process of modernisation. By studying this phenomenon, a contribution to larger social questions related to modernisation in Kosovo and in Macedonia is being made.

At the initial stages of the project, due to the limits imposed by the current pandemic and global closure, the focus will be on discussing the already existing documents that were crucial in the formation of the Turkish national identity during socialism. These documents are scientific studies, articles, essays, statistical reports, bibliographical materials, popular textbooks, city guides, and memories published during socialist Yugoslavia. Every week there will be a publication of a document from that period, together with an introduction written by the researchers, explaining the context and merits of that particular material. 

This will be a two-year project including an in-depth study of existing documents, research on private and public archives, and interviews with protagonists involved in the formation of the Turkish national ideology in socialist Yugoslavia. 

Starting from next year, the project will result with the publication of a series of booklets, each dealing with one particular aspect of the specificity of Turkish national formation in Yugoslavia. Apart from publications, the project contains organized discussions, lectures, and exhibitions addressing the relevance of these historical dynamics in today’s context of shifting national identities.