‘In but not fully of Europe’: Situating the Ottoman legacy in the heritage initiatives of the European Union and the Council of Europe

The European Union (EU) and Council of Europe (CoE) are in a continuous struggle to identify the internal ‘Europeanness’ of their narratives, borders, boundaries, and regions. Since the 1980s, they introduced numerous cultural policies and heritage initiatives to identify and promote what their policy rhetoric calls ‘European identity’, a concept always used in the singular. These policies and heritage initiatives validate only certain aspects of the past while excluding others. In this article, we analyse how the Ottoman legacy within Europe is integrated into official heritage initiatives. We offer a synthesised qualitative content and discourse analysis of data from three heritage initiatives – European Heritage Label, Cultural Trails of Europe, and European Heritage Days – to demonstrate how the deeply embedded Ottoman legacy is either significantly absent or presented in inconsistent and ambivalent terms in these heritage initiatives. We go on to argue that this depends upon crucial aspects of Europe’s civilisational anxiety where its Ottoman-Islamic past is concerned.