Imaginative encounters: Turkish neo-Ottomanist dreams in the Balkans and the Muslim minorities

Abstract

Turkey’s political, financial, and cultural investments in Southeastern Europe are often analyzed through “soft power” frameworks that read its neo-Ottomanist ambitions unidirectional and cast Balkan Muslims as passive recipients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2018–2022) with diverse Muslims in North Macedonia and Kosovo, this article challenges such accounts by showing how local actors actively engage with, reinterpret, and redirect Turkey’s imperial revival projects. Using takhayyul—a Non-Eurocentric formulation of imagination—as the theoretical framework, the analysis embraces the messiness of imaginative encounters across intersecting historical narratives and political aspirations. It traces how Balkan Muslim communities deploy sophisticated strategies of selective appropriation, maintain historical agency while navigating Turkey's diverse investments. Juxtaposing resurrection themes in Turkish Islamic revivalism with local pride narratives of Islamic primacy and resistance, the article demonstrates how imagination functions as political currency across post-Ottoman spaces, revealing the inadequacy of linear or hierarchical models of influence for understanding contemporary Islamist formations.

Turkey presents the boldest and, thus, one of the most studied cases in imperial revivalist formations of populist Islamisms (Bargu 2021; Islam 2021; Oğuzlu 2007; Taglia 2016; Tokdoğan 2018; Walton 2010; Yavuz 2020; Çetinkaya 2020). Its international politics and its political, financial, and cultural investments in southeastern Europe, known as the Balkans (a controversial military term just as the Middle East is), are often referred to as “Soft Power” in the international relations literature as well as in the European media. In a number of academic and non-academic works, it is studied through a framework as to how Erdoğan-led Turkey’s Islamist imperial dreams started gaining political currency amongst Sunni Muslims in the former Ottoman lands during the last decade.

Indeed, a series of neo-Ottomanist cultural projects of the Turkish state are observed across post-Ottoman geographies. There have been several works about Turkey’s “soft power” (a term popularly coined these days) over the Balkans (Adar and Yenigun 2019; CNNTürk 2010; Finkel 2007; Göksu 2013; Harrison 1991; MacClancy 2002; Makdisi 2002; Tokdoğan 2018). The common theme in those investments is the revivalist dreams, presenting the Ottoman legacy as a protector of Muslim minorities in the Balkans to Sunni Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa (Bargu 2021; Cagaptay 2009; Cetin 2014; Küçük and Türkmen 2018; Rüma 2010; Tabak 2016; Walton 2010; Yavuz 1998). However, many such analytical narratives signify a need for a more nuanced and complicated account of the minority Muslims in Eastern Europe.

While soft power scholarship has effectively documented Turkey’s strategic goals and instruments in projecting neo-Ottoman influence, this article decenters Turkey as the primary analytical focus and instead foregrounds the imaginative landscapes of Balkan Muslim communities, examining how these ambitious projects encounter sophisticated local actors whose own political imaginaries, historical claims, and identity projects actively shape the meanings and outcomes of these encounters.

This article moves beyond reading Turkish neo-Ottomanism through intention and strategy alone. Although Turkish political narratives circulate widely in the Balkans, focusing on Ankara’s projection risks flattening the complex imaginative work undertaken by local Muslims themselves. This article therefore centers local Muslim agency rather than Turkish state intentions. Here, Balkan Muslim publics are not audiences of Turkish soft power but active producers of political meaning: receiving, refracting, and sometimes reversing Turkey’s imperial imaginaries through their own historical pride, religious vocabularies, and national projects.

This article treats imagination as political currency while centering the perspectives of Albanian, Torbeshi, and Turkish Muslims in North Macedonia and Kosovo—communities whose viewpoints have been largely marginalized in existing scholarship. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2022, the analysis traces how religious, social, and political imaginaries are connected, exchanged, challenged, and navigated within what Maria Todorova describes as “geographical knowledge transmitted through tradition” (2009,7) regarding the complex topographies of imagination that shape contemporary Balkan Muslim identities.

To address this complexity, I triangulate my reading on the political circulations of political imaginaries and their encounters. It is essential to see the common themes in Turkey’s political imagination in forming imperial dreams and aspirations. Through the narratives, political imagination is formed and has gained currency. Therefore, the first pillar I review would be on the theme of resurrection as a new form of Islamic revivalism from the perspective of Turkey and its contemporary politics. In the second pillar, I examine several narratives shared with me during my fieldwork in Kosovo and North Macedonia by various Sunni Muslims in the region. The diverse narratives provide an overview of the multiplicity of imaginative references to history and historicity. In the third pillar, I connect these two separate political imaginaries around religion, ethnicity, and nationhood through an ethnographic encounter that took place in Skopje during the 2018 Turkish presidential elections. I use this ethnographic vignette as a reference to complicated processes of imaginative encounters across multiple parties: of the Turkish state, its media, Turkish minorities of the Balkans, as well as of non-Turkish Muslim minorities.

This article employs the concept of takhayyul (Sehlikoglu 2025) as a theoretical lens to analyze the complex interplay between Turkish neo-Ottomanist projects and their reception among diverse Muslim communities in the Balkans. Takhayyul—a concept with deep roots in classical Arab scholarship—offers a way to understand imagination not as something opposed to reality, but as a terrestrial yet also prophetic form of imagination that informs political action and expands possibilities.

A crucial contribution of takhayyul theory is its rejection of the dualistic approach that separates reality from imagination. Instead, takhayyul proposes a trialist structure: the sensible, the imaginable, and the intelligible. This trialist dimension of takhayyul offers “a great advantage over dualist thought that proposes only two realms of the sensible, or matter, and the intelligible, or ideas” (Sehlikoglu 2025, 335). By transcending the false binary between “real” and “imagined,” takhayyul provides an ideal framework for understanding the messiness of imaginative encounters where multiple political imaginaries interact, blend, contest, and transform one another.

Methodology

This article draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2022 in North Macedonia and Kosovo. ¹ The research involved thirty in-depth interviews and informal conversations with approximately one hundred individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds across urban and smaller town settings (Skopje, as well as Gostivar, Tetovo, Ohrid, Bitola, and Strumica in North Macedonia, and Prizren and Pristina in Kosovo).

Participants included Albanian, Turkish, Torbeshi, Pomak/Gorani, and Bosniak Muslims, alongside Orthodox and Catholic residents (including post-war Bosniak migrants and Turkish nationals living in the region). Torbeshis/Pomaks/Goranis represent Slavic-speaking Muslim communities indigenous to the Balkans, known by different names across national contexts.

Fieldwork included participant observation in religious, civic, and political settings, including TIKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency)-renovated mosques and election gatherings (Figure 1-3). Document analysis focused on Turkish state media representations, promotional materials for Turkish investments, decades of archives from Birlik and other Turkish-language publications, including Yeni Balkan, newspapers published by Turkish minorities in North Macedonia, and local newspapers’ coverage of Turkish presence in the region. I prioritize tracking individual narratives that illustrate how political imaginaries are internalized and contested, rather than making broad claims about “Muslim perspectives” as a unified category. Following Law (2004) and Tsing (2015), I treat indeterminacy and imaginative encounter as methodological resources rather than deviations from clarity (ie. Soytemel and Saglam, 2025).

Manifesting the interconnectivities in Muslimhood: Beyond the global Islam

The imaginative encounters operating across post-Ottoman geographies cannot be fully understood without examining their intellectual and political genealogies within Turkey itself. Contemporary Turkey’s neo-Ottomanist projects and revivalist imperial dreams are not merely strategic foreign policy instruments but are deeply rooted in the Islamic revivalist movement that began transforming Turkish political imagination from the 1970s onward. Crucially, the current ruling regime’s approach to transnational Muslim interconnectivities emerges directly from this revivalist intelligentsia, whose ideological foundations continue to shape how Turkey imagines its role in post-Ottoman spaces. The contemporary forerunners of the AKP’s strategic networks of media and corporations trace their origins to the yeşil sermaye (green capital, referring to the color of Islamic shrines) of the 1990s—the upper middle-class religious families who supported the Refah Party and who now constitute the material foundation of Turkey’s neo-Ottomanist ambitions. To understand how these imaginative encounters function in practice, we must first trace the formation of these Islamic elite networks, from their emergence as green capital supporters of Refah to their current position as the driving force behind Turkey’s contemporary imperial imagination.

The new Islamic elites of the early 2000s were those who had been referred to as the new Anatolian/rural/green capitals of the 1980s. These families are characterized by their readiness to contribute to the advancement of Erdoğan’s agenda and that of his party. They were often the religious families who had achieved middle-class status during the 1990s and established strong connections based on shared political perspectives, aspirations for national and ümmet’ (ummah/Muslim nation’s) prosperity, and unwavering support for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current President of Turkey and founder of the AKP (Justice and Development Party). While contemporary Islamic elites enabled and empowered by Turkey’s ruling AKP have become a topic in vogue (Babacan 2021a; Babacan 2021b; Başkan 2010; Dikici Bilgin 2022; Somer 2011; Waldman and Caliskan 2017; Öztürk 2015), the intellectual and ideological continuities within the AKP as a product of Turkey’s Islamic revivalism are somewhat underexplored (Sehlikoglu 2024). This includes the AKP’s complex relationship with the Gülen Movement, a transnational Islamic network that was initially allied with Erdoğan after 2005, became his primary rival after 2013, and was ultimately accused of orchestrating the 2016 coup attempt before being declared an enemy of the state (Sehlikoglu 2024; Shively and Tee 2024; Tee 2025; Vicini 2024).

A particular self-image heavily drives Turkey’s contemporary local and international politics, Güçlü Lider Türkiye (Turkey the Powerful Leader), that obtains Turkey a strong support within and beyond its borders. Although this self-image has surfaced only recently and is now widely known, its principal founding reference point emerged in the early period of Turkish Islamic Revivalism between 1970s and the 1990s. The Westernization of the early republican period was seen as an obstacle for Turkey to reach its real potential, that is, not the sickly follower of the West but the leader of the East. This message could be traced in the public lectures and writings of the Islamic elite and intelligentsia of that period and in the writings of the authors whom they religiously read, followed, and cited, such as Cemil Meriç, Nihal Atsız, Nureddin Topcu, and Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. In this section, however, I trace the ways in which resurrection as a theme has been established and translated into contemporary Turkey’s self-identifying discourse. The theme of resurrection, as I also argue here, has been interwoven with Muslim suffering as an affective struggle shared by Muslims from different parts of the world.

To demonstrate the interconnectivity between reviving the spiritual self and turning this into a political power at the national and international level, I would like to select one significant example from the writings of that period. In the writings of Ömer Okçu (pen name Hekimoğlu İsmail), a prominent Islamic intellectual of the period, whose works reached both educated elites and ordinary readers across Turkish society, the key to Turkey’s success is for its youth and public to revive religious values in their lives and find strength against Western oppression. His novel Minyeli Abdullah (Abdullah of Minya), published in 1967 (currently in its 97^th edition, making it one of the most enduring works of Turkish Islamic literature), depicts the spiritual resistance of Abdullah (God’s abd/عبد/servant) against the secular Westernized tyrants of Egypt.

Abdullah is also a generic name Okçu used to avoid using actual names or when someone cannot be identified (i.e., John Doe). Naming his protagonist Abdullah, Okçu also turns him into anyone, into a nameless and relatable Muslim. In fact, he has, on several occasions, explained how Abdullah was portrayed as an Egyptian and not Turkish simply to avoid the secular Turkish state’s surveillance and bans. Yet, despite his efforts, his book was banned in 1986 and he was imprisoned under the infamous “163^rd code,” which punished any religious formation against the secular regime by the now-abolished State Security Court. The repeated police raids on his home and multiple interrogations demonstrated the state’s recognition of his influence, yet he continued writing despite this pressure. The book was later adapted into a movie (1989) that became a blockbuster, achieving notable financial success during Turkish cinema’s declining period. The marketing blurb of both the book and the movie highlighted that it is the shared struggle of all abdullahs in “Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Turkey, and everywhere in the world,” thus extending and spreading Turkish Islamic revivalism to a broader public.

The book begins with Abdullah’s discomfort over the loss of local and Islamic values, prompting him to start reading and discussing various religious books with his friends at his house. His spiritual revival amongst like-minded friends is immediately discovered by the colonial officers in Egypt and is interpreted as an organized resistance against colonial rule. This moment then marks his life with a series of suffering, including incarceration, divorce, murder of his son, and displacement.

One of the main messages of the book in Abdullah’s narrative is the strong argument on how any Muslim context is bound to become slaves if they drift away from their own Islamic values and practices. In the context of the late 1900s, the revivalist movement invested in pious revivalism as the strongest resistance against colonization and dependency on Western powers. The way to undo this was by reviving the forgotten cultural values and religious practices. In this argument lies another, that Muslims’ devotion to Islam will inevitably be perceived as a threat by the colonial regimes. The spiritual revivalism, thus, will inexorably result in those Muslims’ suffering at the hands of colonial powers.

The AKP’s Islamist discourse strategically appropriated these existing intellectual registers of suffering and resurrection but deployed them to serve populist and neoliberal frameworks rather than the spiritual revival that figures like Okçu had envisioned. Unlike movements that emphasized individual spiritual development and state obedience, the AKP emerged from Milli Görüş traditions that prioritized the ümmet (Islamic nation) and viewed political activism as necessary to restore Muslim dignity. The party’s transformation of the mazlum (oppressed) narrative—wherein religious Sunni Turks felt marginalized despite their demographic majority—into a claim for state power required an ideological synthesis that could justify their rise from opposition to rule, and to their cultivation of the aforementioned Güçlü Lider Türkiye propaganda.

This core idea, which we have studied in the anthropology and sociology of Islam as Islamic revivalism, took a very particular theme in the context of Turkey: resurrection. Resurrecting the spirituality and resurrecting the imperial past symbolically overlapped. Given how the early republican period’s (1923-1950s) oppression of Islamic practices was perceived and presented as another form of Western colonial tyranny, the resurrection theme obtained followership from a wide range of the public.

Dreaming resurrection

Understanding how corruption allegations are reinterpreted through imaginative frameworks, including of yearning and nightmares, reveals a crucial dynamic. Since 2010, Turkey’s Islamist counter-elite has transformed corruption accusations into attacks on the nation’s dreams. Rather than addressing charges directly, these elites reimagine them as conspiracies against Turkey’s awakening (uyanmak), imperial resurgence (şahlanmak), and resurrection (diriliş). This imaginative reframing—drawing on neo-Ottomanist visions and fantasies of cunning enemies—creates an impenetrable narrative shield where factual allegations become reimagined as threats to collective aspirations (Sehlikoglu 2024). Elite-owned media channels amplify this imaginative transformation, showing how political imagination operates not just to inspire, but to deflect and delegitimize critique.

Focusing on popular media and specifically on Diriliş Ertugrul, the majority of the existing articles examined the show as a so-called “soft power” of Turkey (Kalyoncuoğlu 2020; Türker and Kırık 2019; Yalçın 2016; S. Aydın 2019; Ökmen and Göksu 2019; Çevik 2019; Çetinkaya 2020). While mentioning the show as a beneficial tool in public diplomacy (Çevik 2020; Ökmen and Göksu 2019), scholars argue that people living in different parts of the world who cannot identify with Western-centered drama series and movie content can find familiarity with the characters and cultural elements in Turkish productions (Kraidy and Al-Ghazzi 2013; Salamandra 2012; Yörük and Vatikiotis 2013). I thus instead join the scholarship (Kraidy and Al-Ghazzi 2013; Salamandra 2012), that emphasize recognition, moral and cultural intimacies, and non-Western aspirational public.

There is a considerable number of news about how foreign politicians are impressed by the period drama series of Diriliş Ertuğrul (Middle East Eye 2020; Milliyet 2018) and promoted it in their country (Sözcü 2019). Some of them organized events and invited the series’s cast to their countries (Sputnik 2019; see also Aydın 2024b and Kalia 2026). There is also some news that mentions how people are affected by the series, especially by the kind of Islam that the show represents, and how they changed their religion (Oktay 2021) or lifestyle (Karacaoğlu and Karaahmet 2021) accordingly. Of course, the reception of the series varies from country to country, and it is not welcomed in all countries. For instance, the Egyptian government banned the series for propagating Erdogan’s ideology (Cumhuriyet 2020).

Unsurprisingly, Diriliş Ertuğrul’s claim to reflect the historical truth has been strongly questioned. The main source of critique is that it is impossible to access detailed documentation about the historical period in which Ertugrul himself lived. It is even more ludicrous to have personalities, characteristics, and other biographical details. The lack of documentation provides more room for creative writing but simultaneously makes the series immune to historical criticism.

The Balkans: Pride and the messiness of imaginative topographies

Turkey’s systematic investment in the resurrection as a political dream within and beyond the country’s borders can be traced in, as of today, a vast literature. I would like to unsettle the power balance in the political dreams and imaginaries that are mapped here. The over-focus on Turkey’s imperial dreams neglects the processes through which those dreams were received, navigated through, and outmaneuvered by local populations. Before proceeding with this analysis, it is essential to address the complex ethno-religious dynamics in the region.

Diverse Muslim communities living in Kosovo and North Macedonia involve Balkan Turks (whose ancestors were forcibly relocated from Anatolia to the Balkans during Ottoman expansion to the West), Muslim Albanians, and Torbeshis. The latter group belongs to a broader category of Slavic-speaking Muslims across the Balkans, who are known by different names depending on location: Pomaks in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece; Gorani or Goranski in parts of Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary; and Torbesh or Torbeshis in Macedonia. While they all speak Slavic languages (typically Bulgarian for Pomaks, Serbian for Gorani, and Macedonian for Torbeshis), they cannot be categorized as a single ethnic group due to their distinct historical and political contexts. What unites them is their status as indigenous converts to Islam—they are ethnically native to their geography and did not arrive through Muslim military operations but rather converted collectively over time.

The origins of these ethnoreligious labels are contested, with some terms (i.e., Torbeshi) originally used pejoratively. However, I observed that younger generations have reclaimed these designations, embracing them as markers of their ethno-religious identities. I also interviewed Turkish migrants living in North Macedonia for various reasons including work, education, and displacement, providing an additional perspective on these dynamics.

Across this ethnographic landscape, I encountered what I call Balkan Pride: a cross-ethnic affective disposition that asserts the region as a cradle of Islamic talent, leadership, and civilizational contribution. Interlocutors routinely claimed celebrated figures—from contemporary celebrities to Ottoman grand viziers—as “Balkan.” One participant even proudly linked Nikola Tesla to Balkan Muslim ingenuity. Such claims operate as cultural capital and as imaginative counter-claims vis-à-vis Turkish neo-Ottoman narratives. They also draw on dense transnational kinship ties—roughly 70 percent of my Muslim interlocutors had relatives in Turkey, primarily in Istanbul’s Bayrampaşa-Zeytinburnu corridor—which sustain reciprocal flows of aspiration, memory, and political affect.

Turkish actors have long recognized this symbolic terrain: Gülenist schools named after Skopje-born poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, for instance, signal competing attempts to anchor Ottoman heritage in Balkan soil. Yet, as I show, such initiatives are navigated through local pride rather than absorbed passively. This single reference operates at multiple levels, fitting well within the takhayyul’s trialist lens: as a sensible marker in the physical landscape, as an imaginative connection to a shared Ottoman past, and as an intelligible claim about the contribution of Balkan Muslims to Islamic intellectual traditions.

Similarly, AKP-supporting Albanians in North Macedonia often referenced Fettah Efendi (1910-1963), an Albanian religious scholar who translated the works of Kurdish Islamic thinker Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. The charity established under Fettah Efendi’s name organized regular meetings discussing works by contemporary Turkish Islamic intellectuals such as İbrahim Kalın, the presidential spokesperson and senior advisor to President Erdoğan. During my time there, the meetings were focusing on Kalın’s book Me, Other, and Beyond (Ben, Öteki, ve Ötesi), as explained by my interlocutors. These discussions were not approached critically but as learning opportunities from Kalın’s insights, similar to how the group read writings of the spiritual leaders such like that of Nursi’s.

The intellectual engagement with Turkish Islamic thought exists alongside a strong sense of local historical agency, creating what appears at first glance to be contradictory positions. Many Albanian Muslims emphasized their historical ability to (out)maneuver external control, maintaining their ethnic identity through centuries of Ottoman rule while simultaneously claiming important roles within it. The frequently cited Skanderbeg (Iskender Beg) embodies this complex positioning—a historical figure who managed to operate both within and against Ottoman power structures (analyzed in detail below).

The messiness of these imaginative encounters surfaced clearly during my conversations with secular ethnic Turks in North Macedonia, who articulated pride in Ottoman-era figures through distinctly local frames of reference. According to many people I interviewed, the Ottoman past and the formation of the Turkish Republic are a source of pride due to the presence of their very own nation and ethnicity in it. The secularist ethnic Turks frequently emphasized how major figures with progressive and modern views were always those “born on this side of the river” (Meriç/Maritza River), citing specific examples: “Ataturk’s father, Ali Rıza Efendi, is from here, from Kocacık köyü” and “He himself was educated in Manastır.” For these interlocutors, the founder of modern Turkey represented not a rejection of their Ottoman past but a connection to it that simultaneously affirmed their local importance in both Ottoman and Republican Turkish histories.

What we observe here does not fit into competing binary narratives where neo-Ottoman Turkish imaginaries encounter local resistance narratives. Instead, these multiple imaginaries co-exist, interpenetrate, and transform one another. The Albanian pride in “infiltrating” Ottoman structures while “remaining Albanian, pure and untainted” as Bayram, a thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur, brilliantly put it during a conversation, operates simultaneously as a historical claim, a political position, and an ethical stance. It allows individuals to engage productively with Turkish neo-Ottomanist projects while maintaining distinctive identity narratives that neither fully embrace nor reject Turkish influence.

Rather than treating such positions as contradictions, I follow John Law’s (2004) and Anna Tsing’s (2015) invitation to treat indeterminacy as analytically generative. What might look like inconsistency becomes, instead, a method of living and imagining across layered histories and political horizons. Such “messiness” reveals rather than obscures political imagination in post-Ottoman contexts, where examining intangible elements—such as desires, aspirations, imaginaries, ² and sovereignties co-exist without settling into stable form. When my Albanian interlocutors simultaneously criticized excessive Turkish influence while participating in Turkish cultural events, they were not being inconsistent. Instead, they were navigating a complex imaginative landscape where sensible political realities, imaginable historical connections, and intelligible ethical commitments all shaped their responses to Turkish neo-Ottomanism.

TIKA projects: Imaginative landscapes and engineering takhayyul

While Balkan Muslims navigate complex imaginative topographies through narratives and claims to historical figures, Turkey’s investment in tangible heritage through TIKA projects represents a material intervention into these same imaginative landscapes. These projects—renovating Ottoman-era buildings, constructing new mosques, and developing infrastructure—constitute attempts to reshape the imaginative landscape of Islam in the Balkans.

By the time the famous Guardian article “Turkey’s Gift of a Mosque Sparks Fears of ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ in Kosovo” was published in 2019, I had already been conducting fieldwork in Kosovo and North Macedonia for two years. The article, focusing on a new mosque project in Pristina designed to emulate the imperial Ottoman-mosque Selimiye, was published coincidentally on the day I arrived in Prizren for my third fieldwork visit. This piece exemplified a broader Western media preoccupation with Turkish presence in the Balkans, framing it primarily through concerns about neo-Ottomanism. The article was specifically focusing on a new mosque project that is planned to emulate the main imperial mosque projects of the Ottoman Empire, such as Selimiye.

My Kosovan friends and interlocutors were upset about this coverage and had already discussed their discomfort across their Facebook and WhatsApp groups. Their critique was not directed at the Turkish influence but at how their country was portrayed in Western media. They all expressed, in different ways, how upsetting it was that Kosovo was not presented with its own agency, but merely as an object of Turkey’s agenda. Some of the conversations I found myself in were inevitably reflecting on how they have been fighting for independence for decades and blaming the Western “world” for their mission to be incomplete. Further, the West was still reducing their country to a passive recipient, a shadow of another nation. Their sentiment reflects precisely the problem with the soft power approach that frames Balkan Muslims as non-agentive subjects rather than active participants in these imaginative encounters.

The national pride and defensiveness against such portrayals became palpable in these moments. Emin, an Albanian who had studied in Turkey and who had previously complained to me about excessive Turkish influence in Kosovo’s internal affairs, exemplified this apparently contradictory position. Comparing the mosque controversy to the opening of a Catholic Church in Pristina the year before, ³ he noted: “There wasn’t such a fuss around it, despite the fact that only 2 percent of Kosovans are Catholic.” ⁴

Emin and I talked many times about the Turkish banks, TV series, job opportunities in Turkish companies, and Turkey’s political influence in Kosovo. He prefers to work in a German construction company, not because he is critical to those who work at Turkish ones, but because Turkish companies bring their own company workers from Turkey to work here, I was told. I, therefore, pushed Emin on his comment and question him whether he has any inconsistency: “I thought you were against the Turkish influence, so I would expect you to be critical of the new mosque too.” His response revealed the complexity of his self-imagination and positioning: He first responds half-jokingly, “I am more against the European interventions.” He then feels a need to provide me with a more tailored answer: “Sertaç Hanım, we are a young country. So many countries in the world do not even recognize us as a country. We need every support we can. It is important to make compromises. Albanians have survived for thousands of years. Buildings won’t make us lose our identity.”

This stance reflects the same Albanian pride I had encountered throughout my fieldwork; so I wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with it. The chief mufti Naim Tërnava’s response to The Guardian reflected this same pragmatic approach, noting that with “no villages without a church in Europe” but “dozens of villages without mosques in Kosovo,” building another mosque was simply a practical necessity “for the worship of God, and nothing else.” Here again, the material intervention (the mosque) is reframed through local imaginaries rather than accepted on Turkey’s terms.

The expectation of finding clear “anti-Islamic” Albanian voices in response to Turkish mosque construction reveals precisely the analytical trap that this article seeks to avoid. When my interlocutors expressed concerns about Turkish influence, they rarely framed these in terms of opposition to “Islam” as a monolithic category. Instead, their critiques centered on specific forms of Islamic practice and institutional authority that they viewed as foreign to their local traditions. For instance, even the non-practicing Muslim Albanian interlocutors distinguished between what they called “our Islam” and “Turkish Islam,” not on doctrinal grounds but on the basis of historical experience and cultural practice. As Bilal, a forty-five-year-old businessman from Tetovo, explained: “We have been Muslim for 500 years, but we were never Turkish. Our Islam survived because we made it ours, not because we followed the Turkish or Arabic way.” This sentiment reflects not anti-Islamic resentment but rather a more particular understanding of how religious practice intersects with ethnic identity and historical memory. The complexity deepens when we consider that Albania’s recent (in 2024) proposal to establish a sovereign state of the Bektashi Order—a Sufi order with historical significance in Albanian Muslim identity—represents neither secular rejection of Islam nor acceptance of Turkish neo-Ottomanism, but rather an assertion of distinctly Albanian Islamic authority on the world stage.

What we observe in these responses is not a simple acceptance or rejection of Turkish neo-Ottomanism, but a sophisticated navigation of multiple imaginative topographies. The TIKA projects represent Turkey’s attempt to materialize its neo-Ottoman imaginaries in Balkan landscapes (see Figure 1). However, local communities engage with these material interventions through their own historical narratives and contemporary needs, transforming their meanings in the process. The mosque becomes simultaneously a symbol of Turkish influence, a practical religious necessity, and an opportunity for a young nation seeking international recognition and support.

Figure 1.

Sinan Pasha mosque, Prizren, Kosovo, January 2019. Photo Credit: Sertaç Sehlikoglu.

This messiness of imaginative encounters challenges both the Turkish neo-Ottomanist narrative and Western media framings that position Balkan Muslims as passive recipients of Turkish influence (Sehlikoglu and Shabani, 2026). Yet, it is crucial to understand the complex dynamic in the imaginative encounters: material interventions like TIKA projects become sites where multiple historical temporalities and political aspirations coexist in productive tension. Local actors don’t simply accept or reject these interventions but rather repurpose them within their own historical narratives, creating new hybrid meanings that neither Turkey nor Western observers fully control or comprehend. The mosque, therefore, exists simultaneously in multiple imaginative registers—as Turkey’s projection of neo-Ottoman power, as a practical religious necessity for local Muslims, and as a strategic resource for Kosovo’s nation-building project. This multiplicity reveals how the “soft power” framework, focused on unidirectional influence, inevitably fails to capture the agentive processes involved, where the supposedly “influenced” actively transform the very meanings of the material interventions intended to influence them.

Figure 2.

A Turkish citizen wearing Erdogan's portrait, June 2018. Photo Credit: Sertaç Sehlikoglu.

Figure 3.

The flags are being swapped, June 2018. Photo Credit: Sertaç Sehlikoglu.

Kosovo: Selective narratives in the imaginative encounters

Prizren occupies a foundational place in Albanian national history. It was here that the League of Prizren formed, and where the first Albanian government was established in 1881—a legacy that remains central to Albanian collective memory and political identity. When Kosovo declared independence in 2008, Turkey became the first state to recognize it, a fact my interlocutors frequently cited as proof of Turkish support for Kosovan sovereignty. Despite its still “disputed” international standing, Kosovo’s linguistic regime—where Turkish remains one of five official languages alongside Albanian, Bosnian, Romani, and Serbian—reflects both Ottoman legacies and ongoing political entanglements. This symbolic and bureaucratic presence of the Turkish language in everyday governance becomes a quiet but powerful reminder that the region’s political imagination cannot be understood solely through narratives of rupture or nationalist distancing. Turkish tourist visitors to the city and its Albanian residents offer an interesting, and to me, a beautiful example to the messiness of imaginaries.

Kosovo has become a popular destination for Turkish tourists, particularly those tracing their own family histories in the Balkans. And their purpose is somewhat heritage-seeking; it represents attempts to reconnect with imagined histories and ancestral geographies.

For many, as one visitor put it, being able to communicate in Turkish (rather than struggle in English) offers a form of pride that “no Eurovision contest prize can match.” This sensorial recognition—the “feel” of the place—forms an imaginative geography in which Ottoman continuity is experienced bodily and nostalgically. It is sustained by intimate cues: dark-red “rabbit’s-blood” tea in narrow-waisted glasses, Ottoman-era mosques, small-town architectural echoes of Eskişehir or Kastamonu, shopkeepers switching easily into Turkish, and the surrounding natural beauty. These sensations create a seeming continuity while quietly obscuring ruptures.

What typical Turkish tourists perceive as familiar in Prizren operates primarily through sensorial and affective registers: the “feel” of the place, its resemblance to a preserved, humble Anatolian village, residents’ ability to switch effortlessly to Turkish, familiar architectural aesthetics, and the surrounding natural beauty. This sensorial familiarity creates an imaginative geography that selectively highlights Ottoman continuities while obscuring ruptures.

This affect of return obscures other histories. Alongside preserved Ottoman quarters and new mosques, Turkish companies build highways, bridges, and commercial infrastructure — interventions often read as signs of Ankara’s expanding influence. Many of these firms were founded by families with Balkan origins, ⁵ blurring any simple distinction between “Turkish” investment and diasporic return. For instance, the ENKA corporation responsible for a major infrastructure project I observed being constructed between 2017 and 2019—a highway that would later stand as a public symbol of Turkish investment in Kosovo’s development—was itself established by a Balkan family. The supposedly distinct Turkish and Albanian imaginaries are already deeply intertwined in messiness, through historical population movements and cultural exchanges.

Yet tourist itineraries seldom mention Prizren as the capital of an Albanian national movement, nor acknowledge the still-fresh memories of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (UÇK: Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës) struggle for independence from the 1980s until 1999, nor the figures whose portraits mark the cityscape — Ismail Qemali, Isa Boletini, Adem Jashari — whose struggles signal rupture from Ottoman and Yugoslav sovereignties alike. Albanian residents move through the same spaces with a different imaginative map, where Ottoman traces sit alongside memories of war, resistance, and national becoming. The city thus hosts overlapping imaginative geographies: a Turkish narrative of civilizational familiarity and continuity, and an Albanian narrative of indigenous political birth and sacrifice. These are not oppositional but entangled—shaped by transnational kinship, shared histories of migration, and contemporary economic interdependence—evincing how Ottoman afterlives unfold not through clear lines of influence but in layered atmospheres of pride, longing, and selective remembrance.

Kosovo offers an excellent vantage from which to observe how imaginative topographies operate through selective memory and strategic forgetting. Turkish tourists and Albanian residents traverse the same streets but inhabit different temporal constellations: one oriented toward Ottoman inheritance and affective return, the other toward nation-building, loss, and survival. These horizons brush against each other daily, neither merging nor cancelling, but coexisting in productive friction—where belonging, origin, and sovereignty are imagined, felt, and claimed beyond neat binaries of influence and resistance.

Albanian pride beyond Turkey’s soft power in the Balkans

As argued, while Turkish neo-Ottomanism projects a particular populist vision of the past onto the Balkans, Albanian Muslim communities actively construct their own historical narratives that simultaneously engage with Islamic identity and Albanian nationalism. These narratives reveal how imagination operates as political currency beyond the framework of Turkish “soft power,” with local communities developing complex historical claims that serve their own identity projects.

A striking example emerges in the widely circulated origin story of Albanian conversion to Islam. According to an Islamic narrative I encountered repeatedly among Muslim Albanians in both Kosovo and North Macedonia, Albanians were the first ethnic group to embrace Islam in the Balkans. This claim is a significant source of pride, positioning Albanians at the vanguard of Islamic history in Europe. Interestingly, when I collected this narrative from different interlocutors, certain details fluctuated—in some versions, the first Muslim Albanians resided in Debren (a village in Bulgaria), while in others, they lived in Debrecen (a city in present-day Hungary). Despite these variations in geographical specificity, the central message remained consistent: Albanians were “the First Nation to believe in the last religion across Eastern Europe,” effectively adapting nationalist Albanian pride to Islamic religious identity.

The malleability of this narrative reveals its function in the imaginative landscape. What matters is not its historical precision but its utility in positioning Albanian identity within both Islamic and European frameworks. Even more revealing is how this same narrative is appropriated and transformed by Turkish Macedonians to support an entirely different claim to pride—that of Ottoman legacy. In their version, these early Muslim Albanians in Debrecen suffered persecution under non-Muslim rulers until the Ottomans arrived as saviors and protectors. One narrative thus serves multiple imaginative projects simultaneously.

The question of historical truth in these accounts may be debatable, but their social function is undeniable. Following Charles Stewart’s (2017, 82) Levi-Straussian understanding of historicity as “a spur to recognize the plethora of possible cultural interpretations of past events.” we can appreciate how these narratives operate beyond simple categories of truth or falsehood. In Stewart’s reading of Levi-Strauss, societies are not simply “hot” or “cold” in their relationship to history; rather, “the relationship of a society to its past could be any temperature” (82). These variables' “temperatures” of historical consciousness allow for creative adaptations of the past to serve present needs.

While the connection between Islamic revivalism and neo-Ottomanism appears straightforward, ethnographic attention to how diverse Muslim communities actually engage with Turkish projects reveals significant complications. The assumption that Islamic identity provides a natural basis for affinity with Turkish neo-Ottomanism risks reproducing homogenizing tendencies deployed by Islamist movements themselves when claiming canonical authority over “authentic” Islam (Mandaville 2020; Sehlikoglu and Kurt 2024; Sehlikoglu, 2025). It is also due to that complexity that a “messiness” of imaginaries arises more tangibly across the Balkans, a geography where diverse forms of Islam emerge. ⁶

This flexibility coexists with more documented historical narratives that are equally important to Albanian identity. Historically, Albanian Muslims are renowned for their resistance to Ottoman rule, most famously exemplified by Skander Beg (Iskender/Alexandre Beg), whose rebellion against the Ottoman Empire persisted for twenty-five years and constituted the most successful resistance movement of the fifteenth century. Born as George to an Orthodox Christian Albanian ruling family, he was sent to the Ottoman Sultan’s court at age eighteen—notably older than typical devshirmes (children recruited into Ottoman service). Upon converting to Islam, his name was changed to Iskender, a Turkified and Arabized version of Alexandre/Skander, and he eventually attained the title Bey/Beg reflecting his high rank. After more than a decade of loyalty to the Sultan, he staged a revolt with substantial Albanian support, recruiting followers from within the Ottoman Army’s janissary (yeniçeri) corps.

This historical account has become one of the most frequently invoked references to Albanian national pride. The Macedonian government even erected a statue of Skander Beg in the northern part of Skopje, materializing this narrative in the urban landscape. The significance of Skander Beg lies in how he embodies simultaneous engagement with and resistance to Ottoman power—initially working within the imperial system before ultimately challenging it.

Returning to takhayyul theory, Skanderbeg’s enduring significance demonstrates how this framework operates across multiple registers simultaneously. As a sensible historical fact, Skanderbeg represents documented resistance to Ottoman rule that lasted twenty-five years. As an imaginative narrative, his story provides a template for Albanian pride that celebrates both Islamic conversion and resistance to Islamic empire. As an intelligible moral lesson, Skanderbeg offers a model of ethical behavior that shows how communities can engage with imperial structures while maintaining their autonomy and dignity. This trialist operation of takhayyul reveals why Skanderbeg’s legacy cannot be reduced to simple categories of collaboration or resistance; he embodies the complex maneuvering that characterizes Albanian approaches to external power, from the Ottoman period to contemporary engagements with Turkish neo-Ottomanism.

This complex historical relationship informs contemporary attitudes toward Turkey and its neo-Ottomanist projects. While a small minority of Albanians in North Macedonia strongly support Erdoğan as a political and religious leader, the majority population expresses significant resistance. A recurring critique I heard centered on the assertion that Albanians would not be assimilated into Turkey or Turkish culture. As Husein Amca explained to me: “There are fifteen million Albanians in Turkey right now. We are not assimilated in Turkey, we won’t be assimilated in Macedonia, nor in Kosovo.” His words articulates a foundational element of Albanian self-perception—a confidence in their historical resilience that has enabled them to maintain distinct ethnic identity through centuries of imperial rule, from Hungarian kingdoms to Ottoman governance to Yugoslav socialism (Backer 1982; Draper 1997; Maliqi 1993; Reineck 1993; Zenelaga and Goga 2021; Zhelyazkova 2000). This reflects what Albanians consistently described to me as their proven capacity to “navigate through external control,” engaging strategically with foreign powers while preserving their autonomy and cultural distinctiveness.”

Yet it would be analytically reductive to frame these dynamics solely through the lens of resistance or resentment in the conventional sense. What operates among Albanian Muslims is, however, a different affective register. “Rather than the ressentiment that Scheler (1912/2024) describes as emerging from suppressed negative emotions and value inversion, Albanian pride manifests as what we might call “pre-sentiment”—an anticipatory confidence rooted in historical precedent rather than historical grievance. Where ressentiment involves the systematic repression of revenge fantasies, pre-sentiment channels collective memory of successful navigation (like Skanderbeg’s strategic positioning within Ottoman structures) into contemporary confidence about managing Turkish influence. This distinction is crucial because it reveals how communities with complex imperial histories develop sophisticated emotional and political strategies that exceed simple binaries of acceptance and rejection.

What emerges from these narratives is an Albanian imaginative landscape that is no less nationalist than Turkish neo-Ottomanism but operates through different historical references and claims. Albanian Muslims construct a complex historical consciousness that allows them to simultaneously claim primacy in Islamic history while celebrating resistance to Ottoman rule. This imaginative flexibility enables them to engage with Turkish neo-Ottomanist projects strategically—accepting certain benefits and connections while maintaining narrative distance and asserting their own historical agency.

This imaginative flexibility coexisted with internal critiques of Albanian nationalism. Ferida, an educated Albanian woman, was explicitly critical of Albanian nationalism, arguing that “nationalism hurts Albanians in the long run.” She saw certain nationalist discourses as too divisive, insisting Albanian identity needed to soften to survive. “Survive what?” I asked. And she responded with extended examples of wars, forced migrations, genocide (including the Cham Albanians’ expulsion from Chameria/Tsamouria in Greece during the 1940s), and other historical struggles. Her anti-nationalism was simultaneously informed by Sunni religiosity—providing an alternative framework for belonging that transcended ethnicity. Significantly, her Islam-centered critique was also rooted in Albanian pride: she viewed nationalism as beneath a legacy of sophisticated strategic endurance. Her position shows how even rejection of nationalist frameworks can operate through alternative imaginaries rooted in ethnic pride.

Unlike contexts such as Northern Cyprus, where Turkish neo-Ottoman projects have sharply polarized domestic public opinion along secular-religious lines (Akdeniz and Dayıoğlu 2025; Bahceci 2024; Bahçeci 2025), the Balkan Muslim communities demonstrate more fluid and pragmatic approaches to Turko-Islamic influence. This difference also reflects the particular historical experience of Balkan Muslims (Bakić-Hayden 1995; Ibrahimpasic 2012; Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017; Luke 2013; Maessen 2014; Merdjanova 2016; Montgomery 2019; Panos 2015; Petrović and Reljić 2011; Schad 2015), who have cultivated authentic and divergent selves, vocabularies, and cosmologies with cultural autonomy within imperial frameworks over centuries. Rather than producing clear pro-Turkish versus anti-Turkish camps, Turkish neo-Ottomanist projects encounter what might be termed “strategic ambivalence”—a sophisticated form of engagement that allows communities to benefit from Turkish resources while maintaining critical distance from Turkish political authority.

Understanding Albanian narratives through this lens of cosmological cultivation makes it crucial to recognize the complex vocabularies, cosmologies, and histories that Turkish neo-Ottomanism attempts to engage, or as Kalia (2025) writes “encroach” upon—and not simply the shadows of Turkish soft power. Returning to takhayyul theory, the way imaginaries operate—as in Albanian selfhood—demonstrates why it is essential to move beyond dualities imposed by conventional theories of imagination. Historical narratives function not simply as true or false accounts, but as imaginative resources deployed to navigate complex present realities where religious identities, national affiliations, and geopolitical considerations intersect.

Imagining the Balkans and fantasies of the self

International relations literature on Turkish neo-Ottomanism has largely failed to engage with how imagination operates as political currency within the Balkans, despite the significance of imaginaries in the region pioneered by Todorova (1997) and subsequent scholars (Asavei 2018; Aydoğan 2020; Boyer 2010; Hetemi 2019; Neofotistos 2008, 2010). As Maria Todorova argues in her seminal work Imagining the Balkans (1997), the Balkans have long existed as much in imagination as in geographical reality—functioning as Europe’s internal “Other” and a screen onto which Western powers have projected their own fantasies and fears. Todorova demonstrates how the Balkans became “a symbol of something else, a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the ‘European’ and the ‘West’ has been constructed” (1997, 188). While Todorova focuses primarily on Western imaginings of the Balkans, her framework helps us understand how imagination operates as a political currency within the region itself, as different nations construct their own imaginative geographies.

This process is vividly materialized in North Macedonia, where the EU-funded Skopje 2014 project transformed the city’s visual landscape through an imaginative nation-building. A walk along the Vardar River reveals statues of Macedonian and Hellenistic figures, colonnaded palace façades, and dramatic symbolism choreographing a particular vision of antiquity-rooted national continuity.

The twin statues of Alexander the Great flanking the Ottoman-era Stone Bridge exemplify this imaginative layering. Their enormous scale produces a visual hierarchy in which pre-Ottoman identity literally overshadows Ottoman history. Even the fantastical “pirate ships” fixed in the riverbed contribute to a surreal aesthetic of invented historical grandeur—a dream-architecture inviting visitors to inhabit a state-crafted fantasy of Macedonian selfhood.

Here, the Stone Bridge becomes a stage where competing historical claims confront one another. Macedonian monumentalism asserts its origin in classical antiquity, even as Ottoman infrastructure persists beneath. Turkish neo-Ottoman gestures elsewhere in the city attempt to reinscribe imperial belonging, while Albanian national histories circulate in parallel. The result is an ethnographic illustration of how imaginative projects materialize in built form, recalibrating space and hierarchy.

This material dimension of imagination complements with Todorova’s (1997) insights, showing that the Balkans is not only imagined by external powers but are actively reimagining themselves. Through urban planning and monumental architecture, states construct particular relationships to the past. Just as Turkish neo-Ottomanism seeks to reinscribe Ottoman belonging, and Albanian narratives claim both Islamic primacy and resistance to Ottoman sovereignty, the Macedonian state turns to grandiose classicist forms to anchor its narrative in pre-Ottoman antiquity. Skopje 2014 thus becomes another layer in the region’s overlapping imaginative topographies, demonstrating that imagination is not merely discursive but material — producing concrete spatial hierarchies and architectural assertions of historical authority.

Through takhayyul’s trialist lens, we can understand these architectural interventions as simultaneously sensible (physically present in the landscape), imaginable (evoking connections to ancient Macedonia), and intelligible (making moral claims about national identity and historical continuity).

This proliferation of competing imaginaries—Ottoman, Albanian, Macedonian—in the same physical spaces demonstrates why analytical frameworks that focus solely on Turkish “soft power” or neo-Ottomanism are insufficient for understanding the complex dynamics at work in the region. Each of these imaginative projects contains its own internal logic and political currency, they materialize in concrete interventions in shared spaces, and they constantly interact with and respond to one another in ways that transform their meanings and implications.

Why, then, do analyses of neo-Ottomanism so often center Turkey? Partly because scholars and travelers routinely encounter everyday enthusiasm—shopkeepers praising Erdoğan as “the greatest Muslim leader,” or celebrating Diriliş Ertuğrul, the story of a very masculine heroic figure from early Ottoman period, a series shaping Ottoman memory through affect rather than archival fidelity. Yet, as argued, Turkey’s “resurrection” imaginary need not—and does not—determine how Balkan publics imagine themselves. Imaginative life exceeds state intention and often escapes containment (Benjamin 1986; Pandolfo 2018). What I have observed during the parliamentary elections was amongst the one of the most telling of such moments. The parliamentary elections I observed were among the clearest moments when these divergent imaginative registers surfaced in unpredictable ways.

Narratives around Turkish elections in the Balkans

“You should have seen the crowd here during the elections in Turkey,” several interlocutors told me. Their comments prompted me to be in Skopje during Turkey’s parliamentary elections in 2018. On June 24th, as results were about to be announced, I positioned myself in the Old Bazaar (Čaršija) by the Mustapha Pasha mosque and its fountains to witness a revealing moment of imaginative encounter.

Amongst those who gathered were the Turkish immigrants in the city, including the workers of Turkish construction companies ⁷ that operate in Skopje and Turkish students attending both local and Turkish-founded universities. While accents distinguish local Turkish speakers from those from Turkey, it is harder to tell who is a long-term resident and who a temporary worker. Turkish refugees, however, were absent; they would avoid a space where AKP supporters gathered to celebrate an anticipated victory.

The crowd reflected Skopje’s Muslim diversity—Albanians, Turks, Torbeshis, Bosniaks, and others—many drawn by curiosity or family ties to Turkey. Some had travelled from Kosovo or nearby North Macedonian towns such as Gostivar and Tetovo, while others were residents of Čayır, Skopje’s historically Muslim neighborhood. This heterogeneous assembly gathered to watch the results unfold, revealing how Turkish politics resonated across local communal lines.

Turkish media presence dominated the scene. TRT’s crew arrived early, installing cameras and loudspeakers that filled the square with Ottoman military anthems and Erdoğan campaign songs. Turkish and AKP flags covered shopfronts and lampposts, transforming the Old Bazaar into a temporary projection of Ankara’s political spectacle. As an ethnographer, I found it revealing that these same people and their associates posed throughout the day with Turkish flags and banners featuring Erdoğan’s image (Figure 2). The square (Meydan) was visually demarcated by numerous Turkish and AKP flags, while Albanian flags with double-headed eagles were also prominently displayed—a visual contestation that would soon take on greater significance.

By evening, Turkish sonic presence was overwhelming. The lyrics of an Ottoman anthem commemorating the Siege of Plevna became imprinted in my mind:

My sword I hit / The stone was split / O Great Osman Pasha / With the soldiers live long.

As Turkish channels were filming the intensified celebrations, an AKP flag suddenly appeared on the Mustapha Pasha Mosque’s minaret. After only a few minutes, my Bosniak friend Lajla directed my attention back to the minaret, where the AKP flag had vanished, replaced by an Albanian flag (Figure 3). The swap happened quietly, unnoticed by most cameras, but those nearby immediately read it as a pointed gesture—an assertion that this space was not simply part of Turkey’s political stage. I couldn’t determine whether news cameras had captured the AKP flag before its removal, and none of the coverage I reviewed the following day reflected the tensions I had witnessed.

This fleeting act captured the broader dynamics of imaginative contestation in the Balkans. TRT’s framing of the event as evidence of Erdoğan’s transnational popularity echoed the state’s neo-Ottoman self-image. Yet the discreet replacement of the AKP flag with an Albanian one re-inscribed local agency into the scene, transforming a moment of soft-power performance into a negotiation of symbolic ownership. The minaret—an Ottoman architectural remnant—became the stage on which competing imaginaries of belonging were literally raised and lowered.

Conclusion

It is tempting to search for clear “intentions” behind political and economic investments in soft power, yet my field data does not support such certainty. Rather, aspirations, emotive references, imagination, narratives, and fantasies gain currency in contemporary politics. Moments observed in the field—the replacement of an AKP flag with an Albanian one on the Mustapha Pasha mosque, Albanian narratives that claim both Islamic primacy and resistance to Ottoman rule, and selective memory among both Turkish tourists and local publics—illustrate how imagination operates as political currency in post-Ottoman spaces. These encounters cannot be reduced to a unidirectional model of Turkish influence.

What appears in international relations scholarship as Turkish “soft power” is better understood as historically grounded imaginative projects with genealogies in Turkey’s Islamic revivalist movement. The resurrection theme I traced from 1970s-1990s Islamic intellectual circles (e.g., Ömer Okçu/Hekimoğlu İsmail) to contemporary AKP discourse reveals how spiritual revivalism and imperial nostalgia became entwined. Neo-Ottomanist ambitions—materialized through media productions like Diriliş Ertuğrul, TİKA heritage renovations, and corporate investment—represent a contemporary articulation of revivalist imaginaries cultivated over decades.

However, these projects meet equally sophisticated imaginative landscapes in the Balkans. In Turkey, dreams and imagination draw on long-standing cosmologies—from Prophet Mohammad’s dream-training to Osman Gazi’s visionary empire dream. Contemporary resurrection narratives tap into these references. But as shown here, Balkan Muslim communities also draw on their own vocabularies and historical repertoires—from claims of Islamic primacy in Europe to pride in resistance exemplified by Skanderbeg—to engage, appropriate, and sometimes resist Turkish neo-Ottomanist ambitions.

The complexity embedded in takhayyul theory thus clarifies why conventional soft-power frameworks fall short. Through its trialist lens—sensible, imaginative, intelligible—we do not see unidirectional influence but messy encounters between historically situated imaginative projects. Albanian pride in having “infiltrated” Ottoman structures while remaining “pure and untainted,” Turkish tourists’ selective Ottoman nostalgia, and local actors who accept Turkish resources while retaining critical distance all show imagination circulating dynamically among multiple agents.

The global rise of movements animated by aspirational imaginaries—whether “Make America Great Again,” “Britain First,” or Turkey’s resurrection narrative—signals a broader transformation that existing theories struggle to capture (Sehlikoglu 2021a, Sehlikoglu et al. 2026). Labels like “post-truth” misdiagnose the phenomenon. Takhayyul offers a framework for seeing imagination not as irrational or opposed to reality but constitutive of it.

Analyses centered solely on Turkey risk erasing the agency of Balkan Muslim communities who have long navigated multiple imperial formations—Hungarian, Ottoman, Yugoslav, and neoliberal. Any top-down projection of political imaginaries onto communities with their own cosmologies and historical consciousness misses how political imagination functions in practice. These communities’ capacity to adapt, maneuver, and rework narrative worlds demands analytic recognition. The Balkans is not merely a stage for Turkish neo-Ottomanism but a site of active imagination where multiple historical possibilities remain open.

By attending to these messy imaginative encounters rather than focusing exclusively on Turkish soft power, this article contributes to understanding political imagination in post-imperial spaces, where shared pasts generate productive tensions between competing claims to history, identity, and belonging.