264 | Ruler Visibility, Modernity, and Ethnonationalism
This poem instructs ordinary Bulgars how to treat the sultan (“expends labor,”
“exhausts life,”) and what not to do (“does not leave,” “does not spare one’s
health”). Therefore, it charts a complete moral universe. Individual behavior is
based on love, though one that is unequal. Of the five references to love in this
segment, four originate with the individual and flow toward the sultan, and only
one proceeds in the opposite direction. However, the most remarkable aspect
of this song is that it goes beyond love. The extreme call of popular duty to the
sultan transforms what would otherwise be irrational behavior (“for the smallest
need summons all the strength”) into normality, thus creating a higher, abstract
plane of activity. Here, the notion of duty to the ruler enters the territory of sac-
rifice for the ruler. Once outlined with unusual detail, this higher plane is then
taken a step further into the realm of the divine, which seals its legitimacy—
the “good-loving” becomes “God-loving.” Since Abdülmecid is referred to three
separate times as both sultan and tsar, the two terms being employed here on
an alternating basis, he enters seamlessly into a Christian theological reference
framework regarding the rightful universal ruler. Therefore, actions against the
tsar-sultan invoke notions of sin, with the ruler claiming divine protection.
Rather than being an exception, tsarist references to the sultan proliferated
throughout the 1850s and became more firmly embedded into the discourse of
Ottoman rulership. This heterogeneous yet harmonious discourse relied on uni-
versal religious concepts, such as devotion and servitude to God, framed by the
metaphor of the family, wherein the sultan was the father and all his subjects,
regardless of religious affiliation, were his children, indebted to him by a natu-
ral duty. Thus, the sultan was not only “tsar” to the Bulgars but also anax or
basileus to the Greek-speaking Christians, melech to the Jews, and so on. His
image-making policies clearly targeted all Ottoman communities. For example, a
Bulgar journal article, published a few weeks after the 1846 tour, relates the story
of a choir of twenty-five Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian schoolgirls who
greeted the sultan with “God Save the Tsar” on his exit from Friday noon prayers
in Istanbul. The article explicitly acknowledges the song’s roots—“and there they
sung to the Tsar a song, after an English Tsarist song, which began as follows:
‘God save our Tsar Abdul Mecid [sic].’” In less than two lines of text, the word
“tsar” appears twice with reference to the sultan. While future research will clar-
ify the exact relationship between Western and Eastern Christian hymns in in-
forming the origins of such celebratory practices among Ottoman non-Muslims
of the mid-nineteenth century, one thing seems clear. These practices quickly
became an integral component of a wider drive for subject loyalty at home as well
as recognition by and symbolic reciprocity with the West.
Sultanic songs infiltrated both traditional communal activities, such as
church or synagogue services or the annual school examinations, and newly
minted communal festivities under the sultan’s patronage, such as the Bulgar