Orientalist Representations of Anatolia Imagined by an Appropriative Narrator

Uluslararası İnsan Çalışmaları Dergisi, cilt.8, sa.15, ss.80-95, 2025 (Hakemli Dergi)

This paper aims to explore how Anatolia was

represented by the orientalist perspective of

the British intelligence officer William John

Childs, who traversed across Asia Minor on

foot in 1911 in the last decade of the Ottoman

Empire during the turmoil that preceded the

First World War, prior to the impending

collapse of the empire in 1918 and the

foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. It

also attempts to investigate how Asia Minor

not only repelled, but also enchanted the

Western traveller. Furthermore, this study

intends to shed light on how the British

colonialist traveller portrayed the peoples of Asia Minor from an imperialist vantage point.

Regarding the British as the genuine inheritors

of the ancient Greek spirit that he believed he

had come across in Anatolia, Childs

appropriated the legacy of the ancient

Hellenic civilisation in the name of Britain,

considering that the peoples of Asia Minor

could not live up to its fame. Disregarding the

fact that the peoples of Asia Minor had a lot in

common and shared certain similar

characteristics as the subjects of the Ottoman

Empire who had been living together for

hundreds of years, the imperialist officer

sought to underline the differences between

the ethnic communities of Anatolia, bent on

spoiling a sense of having a common destiny

and fostering an unfortunate sense of hostility

among its peoples. In accordance with the

colonialist and imperialist agenda of the

British Empire, Childs misrepresented the

peoples of Anatolia as savage, primitive,

uncivilised and parochial bigots so that it

would be just to allow the British Empire, as

opposed to the Germans and the Russians, to

take over. Childs’s descriptions of the

Anatolian landscape demonstrate how he

embodies the colonial desire to penetrate the

mysteries of the land that he rendered

impregnable.