As an Ottoman historian living in Ireland, I must admit I have grown a bit tired of hearing about the Ottoman aid during the Great Famine. Funnily enough, this conversation is almost never initiated by the Irish, among whom the topic is practically unknown, but rather by Turkish citizens living in Turkey or abroad.
Every time I meet someone with a passing interest in history and mention that I live in Ireland, the response is almost Pavlovian: “Ah, you know the sultan helped them during the famine.”
The name of the generous sultan is not always clear to them. In all fairness, the 19th century had no shortage of Ottoman rulers whose names began with the Arabic word “Abd”, so my conversational partners might guess Abdülaziz or Abdülhamid. If they are more knowledgeable, they will correctly identify him as Sultan Abdülmecid (1839-61).
If I feel tired and sense that a historical debate will yield no results, I simply nod and say, “Yes, a great moment”. But if I see the glimmer of a good discussion, I offer a caveat: “True, but it is a complicated story.”
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The popular narrative is essentially an Arabian Nights kind of tale. The idea is that the sultan, living in his palace in Istanbul, happened to hear about the starving people from his personal Irish physician.
Deeply moved by this tragedy, he decided to send aid, also secretly dispatching ships of food to Drogheda which, the myth dictates, adopted the Ottoman crescent and star into its town crest in gratitude.
Here it is usually best not to argue that the emblem long predates this story, having been adopted in the age of the crusades with a broader Byzantine genealogy.
It is easy to see why Turkish and Irish politicians are fond of invoking this tale. It provides a disarmingly effective entry point into diplomatic conversation. The narrative is misleading and, ironically, unfair to the Ottoman empire.
By framing the sultan’s charity as an emotional reaction to a doctor’s tale, we strip the Ottoman state of its political agency. The Ottomans were not sitting in the dark; they were actively following what was going on in Ireland through their own agents and informants.
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The Great Hunger was reported in the press, and the Irish question was a recurring subject in diplomatic circles. In the 1840s, the Ottoman empire was trying to ingratiate itself with European powers and project the image of a modern state.
As part of this imperial image-making, Istanbul frequently sent money to European causes. The donation to Ireland was less about solidarity with the Irish, and much more about the Ottoman empire demanding its seat at the table of “civilised” European nations.
Some time ago, I gave a public lecture outlining these very points. Afterward, a member of the Turkish embassy remonstrated with me. He argued that the famine aid was a meaningful story that should not be undermined.
My intention was never to use this historical episode as a punching bag. But my point is that we should neither exaggerate the Ottoman help nor dress it up in orientalist folklore.
If we genuinely wish to identify a meaningful connection between Ireland and Turkey, we should look not to the 1840s, an era marked by profound inequality between the parties, but rather to the early 20th century.
The Ottoman archives hold a great number of documents on Ireland. The Sublime Porte had monitored Irish political agitation, tracking everything from the Home Rule movement to the rise of secret societies.
But as the first World War ended, this detached gaze gave way to an extraordinary historical coincidence. The last phase of Ottoman-Irish relations was defined by simultaneous struggles for national survival.
Just as Istanbul fell under allied occupation, with Britain acting as the primary occupying power, Irish republicans formed a breakaway government and declared independence in 1919.
Only a year later, the Turkish national resistance formed its own breakaway government in Ankara. From that moment until 1923, both Ireland and the remnants of the Ottoman state fought simultaneous wars of independence against British imperialism.
The sympathy for the Irish cause in Anatolia was profound. Hundreds of articles on the Irish War of Independence flooded Turkish dailies. Contemporary newspapers championed them as a heroic nation fighting against a “nine-headed dragon.”
According to French secret service documents, revolutionaries in Ankara went so far as to provide financial assistance to their Irish comrades. Here were two nations on the fringes of Europe, pushing back against the immense weight of the British empire.
Eventually, Ireland and Turkey went their separate ways. Yet, despite their vastly different starting points, and later diverging routes, in that specific postwar window, their geopolitical realities briefly and intensely aligned.
I think this gritty reality of anti-imperial defiance is far more historically meaningful, and certainly more fascinating, than any Arabian Nights fairy tale we could invent.
Murat R. Şiviloğlu, is a researcher inTrinity’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern studies
