When the Turks made the fateful decision of embracing Islam as their religion, they became a marked people in the eyes of the Christian World, which saw that religion as a great danger to its very existence. The Turks failure, or refusal, to accept Christianity, despite the efforts of Pope Pius II, did not endear them to the Christians of the West; nor did their contribution to the Muslim cause during the great politico-religious upheaval of the Crusades. These religious wars created bitterness, hatred and hostility between Islam and Christianity, which were to last for centuries. Christendom saw Islam as a deviance, a bogey, which, it believed, aimed at eradicating the Christian heritage; and therefore the Ottoman Turks, who had espoused the cause of Islam by taking over the Caliphate, became the object of that Christian hatred and hostility.

In the beginning of the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean witnessed the course of events which greatly effected the economies of the Mediterranean as well as the Ottoman and Arab countries. The Portuguese reached the Western India at the end of the fifteenth century and established themselves at various strategic points around the Indian Ocean, seeking to dominate and shift the flow of trade which had been running through the Red Sea and the Gulf to the Mediterranean world for many centuries. On the other hand, the Ottomans became a sea power as well as the land after the conquest of Constantinople; and conquered Egypt in 1517 taking control of the Red Sea. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, in the time of Suleyman the Magnificent, they took Baghdad and made a direct contact with the Gulf, thus establishing themselves at various important points around the Arabian Peninsula. So became the two empires, Catolic Portuguese and Sunni Ottoman, vis-a-vis, in the waters of the Indian Ocean, drawing themselves far from their capitals.

In an essay written in about 1837, the Ottoman statesman Sadık Rıfat Pasha uses the phrase düvel-i Avrupa hukûmetleri, in a context where these words clearly mean "the governments of the states of Europe". The words devlet and hukûmet were already in common use at that time, but the formulation in this phrase, with the implied distinction between the state (devlet) as an abstract and permanent embodiment of authority, and the government (hukûmet) as the human and impermanent body of persons exercising that authority, is new in Ottoman and therefore in Islamic usage. The normal word for government in modem Turkish and Arabic is hukûmet, hukûma. Used in much the same sense as English "government" or French "gouvernement", it is standard and common throughout the Arabicspeaking lands and in Turkey at the present time-so common indeed that in word-counts which have been made of modern Arabic prose, hukûma ranks among the words of most frequent occurrence, ahead of several quite ordinary prepositions. The word is old, and is attested in Arabic from the earliest of times; its use in the sense of "government" however dates only from the 19th century. In classical Arabic usage it was a verbal noun meaning the act or office of adjudication, of dispensing justice. It could be used in this sense irrespective of whether the person so acting was a sovereign, a judge, or merely an arbitrator. The frequently quoted hadîth that "an hour of justice in hukûma is better than 60 years of worship" refers clearly to the administration of justice and not -as in some modern interpretations- to the conduct of government.

The Ottoman okka is a little known and often misidentified object. In this paper I would like to bring to general attention the historical significance and artistic beauty of these weights. Public negligence of these okkas, and of Ottoman metalwork in general, has caused a tragic loss to Turkey's artistic heritage. Very few okkas remain today; the vast majority have been sold by weight to be melted down and remade into new items of copper and brass. If I can prevent a further loss of these lovely pieces, then my research work will have served its purpose. The Ottomans inherited their weights system from the Seljuks of Rum. The Seljuk forerunners, called dirhems (after the officiol currency of Iconium), were weights in copper or bronze which have surfaced in Konya, Kayseri and other Seljuk commercial centers in Eastern Anatolia. They were cast, circular and with a hole in the center. Their decorative motifs, predominantly bifurcated and trilobed leaves in floral arabesques, were very clear and distinguished compared to contemporary metalwork in Mesopotamia and Persia

The five centuries, in which the Bulgarian lands were included within the frontiers of the Ottoman empire, left deep traces behind, some of which are stili visible today. Among these is the architectural heritage which has been tremendously rich. The vicessitudes of the extremely agitated history of the past hundred years caused the majority of the Ottoman monuments to disappear, but the number of those preserved is still considerable, and among them are works of the greatest quality which shed ample light on some important phases of the development of this architecture. Our knowledge of the Ottoman Turkish monuments of architecture in the Bulgarian lands is far from complete, partly due to the relatively late date in which Bulgarian science began to realise their value, partly of the difficulty to Western and Turkish scholars to travel the land extensively. A general work covering al! existing Ottoman-Turkish monuments in Bulgaria does not exist as yet and will take much pain-staking labour to produce. In this modest contribution we do not endeavour to give a full list of existing buildings nor wish to mentional all literature in Bulgarian, in Turkish or in other languages concerning these monuments but merely pick out a few important works of Early-Ottoman art which have remained largely unknown and unstudied until now.

In the weekly magazine History of the First World War, of September, 1970, published in London, an article appeared under the sensational title of Genocide in Turkey by Dr. A. O. Sarkissian, an Armenian, who claims that approximately 500,000 Armenians were killed by the Turks in the last months of 1915, and that the majority of the remainder was deported to desert areas where they died of starvation or disease, at the lowest estimate 1,500,000 having died as a "direct result of a carefully-laid plan". The writer then audaciously suggests that Adolf Hitler took the treatment accorded to the Armenians as an example in ordering, on 22nd August, 1939, "the extermination of the Polish-speaking race". Dr. Sarkissian, who apparently prefers sensationalism to scholarly research, and who, being a party to the case undoubtedly has an axe to grind, has giyen an absolutely biassed account of Armenian deportations and massacres. He has failed to carry out further research connected with the subject and to consult some of the most recent publications, based on British, French, Russian, Turkish and even Armenian sources, and on the inexhaustible documents in the British Foreign Office Archives in London which throw more light on the subject. Re has preferred to write a propaganda account, rather than to produce a scholarly work, based on facts and figures, which would have been more appreciated. But then he seems to be one of the typical vociferous Armenian propagandists, some of whom, recent documents prove beyond any doubt, were themselves directly responsible for the misfortunes of the Armenian people.