Çağdaş Türkiye Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

The Ottoman Empire, which has been struggling for existence in the direction of the Balkans since the first years of its establishment, essentially established itself as a Balkan country and dominated these lands for approximately five centuries. However, the Ottomans, whose dominance in the Balkans began to decline in the last two centuries, tried to consolidate many problems such as the uprisings dominated by the French Revolution, the interventions of the great powers and the economic crises since the beginning of the 19th century. The 1875 rebellion that broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the most west-oriented regions of the Balkan peninsula in southeastern Europe, was almost a harbinger of what would happen in these lands. With the Berlin Treaty signed after the 93 war, these lands came under the rule of Austria-Hungary, which turned to the Balkans in the southeast for years and made the capture of Bosnia-Herzegovina a traditional state policy and occupied it immediately after the 1908 revolution, and showed once again to the other communities of the peninsula how weak the Ottomans were and became the basis for the events that would take place from now on. A group of young people of civil-military origin who witnessed all these events in the mentioned period, based on the point of how to save an empire that was slipping out of their hands, dedicated their external branches and secret cell-type organizational schemes of the Committee of Union and Progress to put an end to the despotic regime, which they saw as responsible for everything and to re-establish the constitutional constitutional parliamentary system. Undoubtedly, these young people, who acted with the mottos of liberte, equality and fratermite, could not foresee that after carrying out the revolution, they would suffer great territorial losses, especially in the Balkans, in this longest century of the Ottoman Empire. This generation, which had a traumatic loss of lands in the archeology of their minds, division, disintegration and sick man phobia, vacillated between the lessons of a past they knew and the anxiety of a future they did not know. This article presents the connections between the loss of Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the most fertile lands of the peninsula by the Ottoman Empire, which was born as a Balkan country and the Second Constitutional Monarchy revolution that accompanied this process. This article emerged as a product of the effort to evaluate the news reflected in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian press about the Committee of Union and Progress and its members, the Young Turks, who left their mark on late Ottoman history. Undoubtedly, the findings and conclusions obtained are open to rewriting with new sources.