On an autumn evening in 2023, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stood before his supporters and spoke of Gaza. For Turkey, he declared, this embattled strip of land was no different from Adana, a sprawling city in the country’s south. The remark stuck—not for its geographic absurdity, but for its historical undertone. Gaza once belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and in Erdoğan’s words echoed the claim that this past should be politically revived.
These are not mere rhetorical flourishes from a president fond of grand imagery. For years, Erdoğan has built his politics of memory around the Ottoman Empire: mosques, museums, television dramas and schoolbooks present it as a glorious, harmonious age in which the Muslim world was united under Turkish leadership. What is left out is just as telling: the empire’s decline in the 19th century, when it was derided as the “sick man of Europe,” riddled with crises and beset by foreign powers.
Vladimir Putin follows a similar script. He too speaks of a “lost paradise”—not the Soviet Union, which he disparages as an atheistic aberration, but the Tsarist Empire. In his narrative, it was the “natural form of Russia,” shattered in 1917 and betrayed by Lenin. Putin’s wars in Georgia and Ukraine, his interventions in the Caucasus, are cast not as acts of aggression but as the recovery of “historic lands.”
Both autocrats employ the same strategy: they use imperial history as a weapon of the present. History becomes a source of legitimacy, a tool to organize politics. In textbooks, inconvenient chapters are erased—the Armenian massacres of the Ottoman Empire, the pogroms of Tsarist Russia. What remains is a glossy image of unity, pride, and unchallenged power.
Their treatment of modern founding figures is particularly revealing. For Erdoğan, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has become a symbol of the “shame of Lausanne,” for accepting the borders of today’s Turkey. Putin, meanwhile, portrays Lenin as the gravedigger of Russia, for shaping the Soviet republics in a federal form—what Putin calls a “design flaw” that allowed Ukraine and the Baltic states to become independent. Here lies the true thrust of their historical politics: to correct what they see as historic defeats.
Religion is central to this project. Putin has elevated the Orthodox Church into a kind of state ideology, sanctifying his wars. Erdoğan, by contrast, turns to political Islam, casting the Ottoman inheritance as divine order. Both men fill an ideological void, one that has deepened in many societies since the decline of universal ideologies.
The consequences are far from symbolic. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shows how lethal the rebirth of imperial dreams can be. Erdoğan acts more subtly: deploying troops to Syria, establishing bases in Qatar and Somalia, intervening in conflicts from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus. Gaza and Jerusalem feature regularly in his “spiritual geography”—a map shaped less by present borders than by Ottoman memory.
Yet the two leaders are not only kindred spirits. In Syria, Libya, the South Caucasus and even Ukraine, their interests collide again and again. Sometimes they act as partners, sometimes as rivals—but always united by the backward gaze.
The imperial nostalgia that Erdoğan and Putin so carefully stage is more than folklore. It shapes the foreign policy of two states that have become pivotal players in the 21st century. And it shows that history is never truly past. It can be a tool of power—and a fuse for the present.
