Abstract:

This study focuses on the reflections of the idea of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, which emerged in the period called the age of nationalism. The Ottoman Empire managed to preserve its multicultural social pattern for a long time and managed to overcome the problems it faced by making the millet system functional. However, with the rapid rise of nationalism, which firstly affected the whole of Europe and then almost the whole world, the multicultural structure of the Ottoman Empire began to erode, and the peoples living in the Ottoman Empire began to demand national rights and struggled to obtain these demands. Christian elements of the Ottoman Empire were firstly to act with a national consciousness. Completing the objective conditions of being a nation earlier; reaching a certain level of consciousness by opening educational institutions since the 17th century; The Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians, who formed a bourgeois class, albeit small, by holding trade and art in their hands in general and instrumentalizing religion with the support of their Church, took action in this framework and entered the struggle to gain independence from the Ottoman central power. On the other hand, the Muslim peoples of the Ottoman Empire; Kurds, Turks, Arabs and Albanians, defended the integrity of the state and stayed away from the idea of nationalism, both because they could not sufficiently create the objective conditions of being a nation and because they saw themselves as an element of the nation's domination. However, this situation changed over time. When the Committee of Union and Progress took power adopting a Turkist understanding, other Muslim elements acted and started to raise national demands.

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