Syria as a Turkish TV drama

Adam Gopnik once observed that the defeated American South, though crushed in the Civil War, went on to win the battle of memory – at least until the premiere of Gone with the Wind. History, in that sense, is not written by the victors but by the romantics. The film’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, dispossessed of wealth, family and love, fights with ferocious resolve to survive in a world that has turned against her. Yet what the film ultimately offered was something else: a persuasive ending. As she returns to her devastated home and vows to start again — “tomorrow is another day” — the story reframes defeat as endurance, even as it closes the chapter on the old world.

It convinced Americans, perhaps for the first time, that the old world which had structured their national imagination was definitively over.

The Turkish series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, first broadcast in 2014, presents itself as a historical action drama about the founding of the Ottoman state. But it is also a vast romantic canopy cast over politics. The show became a formidable instrument of Turkish soft power, amplifying not only a heroic past but also the ideological vocabulary of the present. Broadcast in 71 countries, dubbed into 25 languages, and watched by billions, it turned into a cultural landmark with touristic – and political – magnetism. Its music has been repurposed as a Palestinian anthem, played at Lebanese protests, and even performed at Bahrain’s Royal Opera House. Nicolás Maduro once visited the set, posing with actors while brandishing the hero’s sword and wearing his cap.

The idea that romantics write history becomes clearer when one considers the feedback loop between such dramas and Turkish political life. The narrative arcs of Ertuğrul that fuse religious and national identity, the sense of encirclement by enemies, the spectre of internal betrayal, the persistence of deep-state conspiracies, mirror, almost too neatly, the themes that have animated the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Years ago, invited by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, I crossed the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge with a group of Arab and foreign intellectuals. The Israeli authorities delayed us for nearly an hour. My Israeli interrogator, an Arabic-speaking officer, struck up a casual conversation and, to my surprise, asked about the latest developments in Bab al-Hara, the wildly popular Syrian drama. It seemed he, too, was following it.

The memory returned while I was watching the Turkish series Uzak Şehir (The Distant City), first aired in 2024 and set in the border city of Mardin. Its first season borrows heavily from the plot and characters of the Syrian-Lebanese series Al Hayba. 

The Turkish series adopts the sweeping melody of Concierto de Aranjuez, familiar in the Arab world through Fairuz’s ‘Li Beirut’. But its lyrics, sung by Sezen Aksu, mark a notable gendered departure: a lament for the women of Mardin, their thick hair ‘stained with blood’, rising like phoenixes from the ashes. ‘I have the right to speak of their silence,’ she sings. ‘I have the right to bear witness.’ By contrast, the theme of Al Hayba, performed by Nassif Zeytoun, remains anchored in a masculine fatalism: the brooding hero, shaped by circumstance, compelled to hardness. ‘It’s not in my hands; the conditions made me this way’.

I never watched Al Hayba at the height of its popularity. The refusal was instinctive, almost visceral. The violence it dramatised felt too close to the machinery of brutality that engulfed Syria after the uprising against Bashar al-Assad. The smugglers and contraband networks depicted on screen echoed a reality in which such activities fell under the direct control of the Assad family and its security apparatus, extending into militia networks. Drug production and trafficking had, by the regime’s final years, become central to its political economy.

Mardin itself, where The Distant City is set, belongs culturally and historically to the broader Levant. Its urban fabric, social life and linguistic plurality – Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic and Aramaic – retain a distinctly Syrian flavour. Through family ties on my wife’s side, I have some connection to that region, whose population is divided roughly between Arabs and Kurds.

The use of Turkish in the series provides a curious relief. It creates a distance from Al Hayba’s emotional register, sparing the viewer a direct confrontation with Syrian trauma, while still allowing a triangulation between Turkish drama, Levantine narrative and Syrian reality. At the centre of this triangulation lies a fundamental question: how geography shapes human beings.

In the series, Mardin’s border economy is dependent on the smuggling of goods, weapons and people. It imprints itself on social norms and personal behaviour. Violence and tenderness coexist uneasily; the environment itself becomes an agent of coercion, estrangement and moral distortion. Place is not merely backdrop but destiny.

Contemporary Syria, hemmed in geographically, historically and socially by competing regional powers, increasingly resembles this dramatic landscape. Its people, like the show’s protagonists, appear trapped within the tragic (and occasionally absurd) dictates of their environment. Communities seem compelled towards harshness; internal fractures deepen; factional loyalties turn lethal. All unfolds within an atmosphere of overwhelming emotional intensity.

In this sense, The Distant City offers a compressed image of Syrian reality. What it does not offer, however, is what Gone with the Wind once provided its audience: a convincing ending. There is, as yet, no narrative capable of persuading Syrians that an old world has truly passed – or that a shared story might still be possible.