The czars’ ceaseless quest for an anchorage on the Mediterranean fueled half a millennium of battles between the Russian and Ottoman empires. But in the last two decades, it is Russian tourists – not soldiers – who have finally laid claim to the warm waters of the south.
The more than 2.5 million Russians who visit Turkish holiday resorts each year are one of the most visible signs of the strengthening ties between the two former rivals. In the Turkish resort city of Antalya, a popular destination for visiting Russians, vacationers from both countries lounge poolside at neighboring hotels decorated on the themes of their respective imperial palaces.
Chatting with her friends by the pool at the Kremlin Palace Hotel in Antalya, Elis Kashapova, 25, might as well be in the middle of Moscow’s famous Red Square. On one side stands an exact replica of Saint Basil’s Cathedral; on the other, a facsimile of the Kremlin’s walls. A bank clerk, Kashapova took a direct flight with her friends from Ufa, the capital of the Russian federal subject of Bashkortostan, for her fifth holiday in Turkey. “Friends recommended this hotel. And we got a very good price,” she said.
Waiting in the huge lobby of the 75,000-square-meter hotel to check into one of its 874 rooms, Yelyana Yemilyanova, a native of the western Russian city of Belgorod, was taking her first trip to Turkey. She was traveling with her mother, grandmother and father, who had previously visited other Turkish resorts in Belek and Alanya.
Next door, the same hotel group owns the Topkapı Palace Hotel, built around the concept of the Ottoman sultans’ home in Istanbul.
The two peoples who once ruled from Topkapı and the Kremlin have traveled a long road – from allies to adversaries and back again. As in the past, developing economic and political links are close, yet still sometimes contested.
The Russians and Ottomans were pitted against each other during World War I, which hastened the final dissolution of both empires. After history swept away both czar and sultan, the new governments facing each other across the Black Sea decided to stabilize their borders and concentrate on the challenging mission of building a new state. The Soviet Union was the first major power to recognize Turkey during its War of Independence and the nonaggression pact it signed in 1925 with the nascent Turkish Republic was followed by a brief “honeymoon” in relations.
The gathering storm of World War II, however, soon clouded relations. Determined to remain neutral this time, Turkey tried to secure a pact with Moscow, sending Foreign Minister Şükrü Saraçoğlu to Russia for a month. He returned empty handed, and Russia’s unwillingness to make a deal then is still considered a humiliation by many Turks.
“I believe it was Russia’s fault that relations entered a new phase of mistrust. They preferred hostility with Turkey. They insulted Saraçoğlu,” Murat Bilhan, the deputy director of the Turkish Asian Center for Strategic Studies, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
In the bipolar world that emerged following World War II, Turkey took its place in the Western camp, prompted in part by Russia’s continued demands to jointly administer the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits it had long coveted. When the Iron Curtain fell between the two countries, stereotypes and animosities deepened.
“Russians looked down on us. They saw us as representatives of a lower culture. With the Cold War, they also saw us as the servants of the imperialists,” said Bilhan, a former diplomat who worked at the Turkish Embassy in Moscow during the Cold War era.
In Turkey, the fear of an ideological invasion by communism ramped up the anxiety toward the country’s big northern neighbor. Thousands were jailed on accusations of spreading communist propaganda and the Turkish Communist Party was banned until the end of the Cold War. Legendary Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet fled into self-imposed exile in Moscow after being persecuted for his communist views. Anticommunism reached such a frenzied level that Turks stopped referring to potato-based “Russian salad” and began calling the dish “American salad” instead.
Even before the Cold War ended in 1991, though, the climate between Turkey and Russia had begun to warm. The 1984 natural-gas agreement between the two countries is seen as the key turning point in bilateral ties, and the gas that started flowing in 1987 has continued to do so uninterrupted to the present day.
“This was the essential agreement that laid the groundwork for the current Russian-Turkish relations,” said former diplomat Volkan Vural, who then-Prime Minister Turgut Özal appointed as the Turkish ambassador to Russia in 1988.
“Özal sent me to Russia with one specific instruction. He told me: ‘We have signed the natural-gas agreement with Russia on a barter basis. We need to increase our presence in the construction sector,’” Vural said. Under the terms of the agreement, part of the gas was supposed to be paid for in cash, while part of it would be made up in barter, by sending Turkish goods and construction services to Russia.
“We told the Russians to be extremely selective and choose from among the firms with international experience. The first [Turkish] construction companies that landed in the Soviet Union provided a useful foothold in the post-communist period,” Vural, who helped secure the Turkish firms’ involvement, recalled. “When Moscow signed the 1990 treaty reuniting Germany, Bonn agreed to finance housing for 100,000 soldiers returning to Russia. Even though German firms had priority, the Russians insisted that the Turks be allowed to bid. We won nearly half of the $5 billion project.”
Yet despite the successes of its companies, Turkey has been left facing annual trade deficits in the neighborhood of $25 billion with Russia as its rapidly growing and industrializing economy demands more and more purchases of Russian natural gas.
Though Russia says the increasing number of tourists it sends to holiday in Turkey helps compensate for the huge trade deficit, most stay in hotels offering dirt-cheap all-inclusive packages and thus feed little revenue into the overall Turkish economy. “The first and foremost reason for Russian tourists to choose Turkey is the price,” said Yana Avdeeva, a Russian travel agent who has been working in Turkey for the past six years.
“I come to Turkey because it is very cheap,” said tourist Kashapova, who bought her one-week vacation from a travel agent friend for the special price of $230 for two people.
