For all that we sympathise with the unfortunate people of Turkey, there is one small consolation in the recent catastrophe: there is no more resilient people anywhere. They are strangers to self-pity. When they have finished retrieving their injured and burying their dead, the job of reconstruction will start, without complaint, and without waiting for outsiders' assistance. Their energies are extraordinary, their dedication unique.
It was surely one of the great tragedies of this century that the Ottoman empire was seized and broken up in a vastly cynical land-grab by the British and the French. For all that the Ottoman empire was jeered at as the sick old man of Europe, the lands it governed never knew better government once Ottoman rule had ceased; but they have known war aplenty.
Ambiguous
Europe is ambiguous, uneasy about Turkey. It does not want to be racist or sectarian, but it does not feel Turkey is 100 per cent European. Nor is it. Why should it matter? Being European is not so very wonderful. The great cities of Turkey - Istanbul and Edirne, known to the Greeks and history as Constantinople and Adrianople - were taken by conquest, and held to this day. To be sure, Ankara is the capital of Turkey, but the country's vibrant heart beats beside the Bosphorus, in Istanbul, one of the most intoxicating, amiable melting-pots on earth. It teems with tinkers, gypsies, Kurds, Armenians, Jews and Greeks: the Ottoman empire is dead, but its tolerant spirit and its multinational character live on in modern Turkey.
And we might reflect that earthquakes were not always so hostile towards the Turkish interest as they are today. Five hundred years ago, the Golden Horn remained in Greek hands, but Ottoman rule had already reached the Asian shores of the Bosphorus - Bosferos, the same as Oxford in English and Ath na mBo or Annamoe in Irish. The Greek rebel-regent Cantacuzenos, rather like Diarmuid Mac Morrough soliciting Norman assistance, sought help from the nearest Turkish bey in his conflict with his young imperial charge in Constantinople.
The Turks were ferried across to Gallipoli by Greeks loyal to Cantacuzenos; but the peninsula remained dominated by its royal fortress for two more years, until the night of March 4th, 1356, when an earthquake struck, levelling the castle which dominated the straits. The Turks promptly occupied the ruins; and the noose was slipped around the great imperial capital of the Roman Empire of the East. It wasn't tightened for another century, as the Ottoman empire flowed into Europe, into the badlands which have filled our headlines for the past half-decade, but which under Ottoman rule discovered that precious commodity, predictable government, free of arbitrary whim. Prosperity duly followed.
This did not mean the Ottoman empire was not savage; it was, ferociously so. After the battle of Nicopolis in 1396, and the defeat of the Teutonic Knights and the Hungarian Army, the Turks - no doubt moved by the earlier and similar fate of their garrison at Widdin - began to kill their captives, until at vespers the Sultan succumbed to pleas for clemency from his own men and halted the slaughter. By then 10,000 men had been beheaded.
Loyalty
But along the Asian-European marches, that is how men behaved then, and have behaved very similarly this century, this decade, this year, and for all I know, this very day. Despite its barbarisms - which were no greater than the rival political systems of the region - the Ottoman administration worked on key rules - loyalty, regardless of religion, language or race, being the foremost, but subtlety of law being a close second. If those were the bricks of the Ottoman Empire, the glue was a policy of conscious assimilation.
When Constantinople fell to the Sultan Mehmet, he halted the looting by victorious troops, which was theirs by right of Koranic law and the military convention of the time. The main Christian church was turned into a mosque, the Hagia Sophia, but all other Christian churches were untouched. He sought out the Greek scholar Gennadius and appointed him patriarch and archbishop of Heraclea. A chief rabbi was appointed from Jerusalem; and the Armenian patriarch was summoned from his palace beside the sea of Marmora to be appointed master of his flock in the new capital of the Ottoman empire. Was Western, Christian rule as enlightened, not merely then, but for hundreds of years to come?
Sarajevo
Perhaps no city embodied the true Ottoman spirit of accommodation and immensely subtle law as Sarajevo. It prospered because camels bearing gold and carpets from Anatolia grew sick there, and their freight was transferred to pack-mules. One 17th-century traveller noted that Sarajevo's thousand shops sold merchandise from as far apart as India and Bohemia. It had 169 fountains, and the Christian Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1697 had time to count 120 mosques in the city, before he burnt it and them down.
Sarajevo is just one of many cities to have known so much suffering since its removal from Ottoman authority. Much of the Ottoman spirit fills modern Turkey, with its many and splendid peoples: intelligent, resourceful, energetic. No one on earth should have to face the travails which that country is now passing through; and no one is more deserving now of your financial assistance.