Rosetta and Halley — Tayfun Er

How the Rosetta spacecraft got its name from Ottoman Egypt, and the doomsday panic Halley’s Comet caused in Istanbul in 1910.

The world is watching with fascination as Rosetta, the spacecraft the European Space Agency sent to the comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko, reports back. But did you know that the name Rosetta has a connection with Ottoman-era Egypt? Let us start there.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt he brought with him not only soldiers but a great many art historians, archaeologists and engineers. During the occupation Egypt’s untouched ancient civilisation was plundered, as France sought to fill the Louvre in rivalry with the British Museum, opened by the British in 1753. Near Alexandria, in a town called Reşit (Rashid) because it had been founded by Harun al-Rashid, a military engineer named Pierre-François Bouchard, working on construction, found a black basalt stone 114 cm long and 72 cm wide, covered in writing. He could not read it, but he understood it was precious. Until then almost nothing was known about ancient Egyptian civilisation, because its script had never been deciphered. The French meant to take the stone to Paris, but after France’s defeat it went to London instead. The stone carried the same text in Demotic (the language of ordinary Egyptians), in hieroglyphs and in Ancient Greek. Having one text in three scripts made comparison possible, and since Ancient Greek was known, the celebrated Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion worked for 22 years to decipher it — and the silent language of Egypt, mute for thousands of years, spoke again. Because France had renamed the town of Reşit “Rosetta” during the occupation, the spacecraft now travelling through deep space to tell us what we never knew about the universe was named Rosetta.

The Ottomans met a comet in 1910 — and what a meeting it was…

From the window of the little room above the garden, Bedriye Hanım was pounding her fist on the neighbour’s wooden siding in great excitement, shouting:

“Emine, my dear, where are you?.. Come to the window, listen to what I have to tell you…”

Getting no answer, she muttered to herself:

“Heavens, what a sluggard that woman is — the world could end and she wouldn’t leave that dark little room of hers…”

Pounding harder:

“Emine Hanım, come to the window for a moment… Just look what’s about to happen… A star is going to hit the Earth… I’m so worked up I can’t keep still… Oh! She won’t even answer. Are you dead, woman?... Stir yourself a little...”

Emine Hanım slowly opened her window and put her head out:

— I’ve only just got the boy to sleep. Don’t bang like that. The house is shaking to its foundations...

“Oh, the idea!... As if my fist could shake a house!”

— Oh, can’t it just? Dust is pattering down through the cracks in the ceiling. The child has been poorly for a couple of days, terribly fretful — I went through hell getting him to sleep.

“Haven’t you heard?”

— Heard what? Has Sıtkı divorced his wife again?...

“To blazes with Sıtkı and his wife... This isn’t some little matter of divorce... Things are bad...”

— What’s happened, dear?

“The whole place is in uproar... Even the deaf sultan in Bursa has heard, and you still know nothing... Oh, what a catastrophe!...”

— Oh, don’t frighten me like that... When I get anxious something catches in my throat and I come over faint. I can’t bear grief the way I used to... If it’s something terribly sad, please don’t tell me.

“The saddest of the sad... May it never come to our homes... Far be it from our friends.”

— Don’t... Bedriye, don’t... Now my heart has started pounding... Has your Hacı father had a stroke? Tell me, I’m going to faint...

“A comet is going to hit the Earth...”

Emine Hanım spat “tu! tu!” into her collar a few times to ward off her palpitations, then said:

— Oh, and I thought it was something to be afraid of. What a fuss you make, sister... Let it hit, then... So what? I’ll shut my door and sit in my little house, I’ll not go anywhere; the women will go off in droves to see “how it’s going to hit”... Oh no, not me, I’ve no time to be trampled among the rabble...

Bedriye Hanım gave a nervous laugh:

“Emine, sister, how silly you’ve become... Do you think if that great fringed brute crashes into the world your house will still be standing, so you can shut the door and sit inside?”

— My dear, nothing will happen to my house. It was built with honest money. When the Kazasker Efendi’s mansion in Çarşamba was pulled down, it was built from its timber. If you’d seen the oil-mill posts they used inside, you’d be amazed. This world may fall down, but our house will still stand. In the great earthquake, stone buildings collapsed, yet not a splinter of our house moved... The ship of resignation never sinks — don’t you worry...

So begins Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s novel “A Marriage Under the Comet”. It portrays how the news that a comet (Halley’s) would strike the Earth in 1910 — and that doomsday would follow — echoed through a poor neighbourhood. The mood of those days and the panic they caused were also staged in “Pera-Halley Retour”, a musical put on in Beyoğlu by Catacloum, Istanbul’s first permanent cabaret theatre. Both Hüseyin Rahmi and the musical treated that fear with irony and humour.

The expectation of the apocalypse in 1910 made some people repent; some even gave away their property. Halley, which approaches the Earth every 76 years, has on each visit been taken as a sign of great events, if not the end of the world. In 1445, for instance, a new crusade was launched against the Ottoman advance in the Balkans. In 1456, however, the Ottomans laid siege to Belgrade, and in June the Pope called on all of Christendom to pray against the Turks. After the siege was lifted on 9 August, Halley’s disappearance was interpreted in various ways. In 1910, too, Bulgarian armies advanced as far as Çatalca. Seen that way, Halley might be counted an ill omen for the Ottomans; seen the other way — since the armies never reached Istanbul — it might just as well be read as a good one.