Had history been other than it was, Ertugrul Osman was destined to become one of the most powerful men on earth.
Had the Ottoman Empire not met its death in 1923, when Ertugrul Osman was only 11 years old, then things would have been very different. Instead of being the one known as the last Ottoman, arriving just too late to stir the embers of the expiring dynasty, his hereditary luck would have immediately granted him a place in history - and not in the way he's currently remembered, if indeed he's remembered at all.
For Ertugrul Osman was fourth in-line to the great throne at the Sublime Porte at the point the Treaty of Lausanne, which divvied up the Osmanic carcass, was signed on July 24, 1923. His great future, and the dream of restoring his empire's hold on an area which once spanned vast swathes of three continents, was over before it had even begun.
Who could have blamed Ertugrul Osman if he had gone mad at that point, and spent the rest of his days moving a series of blue-topped drawing pins (representing Ottoman forces) over a map of southern Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia, until they vastly outnumbered the red-topped drawing pins (representing the infidels?) It would have been understandable if his mortal hand - it should have been the unimpeachable, lightning-bringing appendage of a godhead but for a kink of history! - had swept away each and every red drawing pin, beyond the very boundaries of the map and into oblivion.
Who could have blamed Ertugrul Osman if he'd kept cats named after all the old imperial capitals: Sögüt, Bursa, Edirne, Constantinople, and drowned the pure white kitten called Istanbul in a bucket of water?
Somewhere along the line, fate kicked Ertugrul squarely in the face, in a double-image both hilarious and tragic: a roundhouse to the chops performed by the devastating offspring of Chuck Norris and Chun-Li from the Streetfighter video games, that caused Ertugrul to comically rear up into the air, a look of exaggerated astonishment fixed permanently to his face.
Everything that we laugh at is simultaneously deadening; there is a darkness that syncopates it, and makes it ordinary. As we hold our sides at the airborne Ertugrul Osman, our conscience is pricked because we make mirth at the demise of an empire, and its slow disaggregating in front of our streaming (with laughter) eyes.
When we laugh at something like this, we are overjoyed because nothing lasts forever, and because everything carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. It is a rare thing to look our own mortality squarely in the eye, and frighten it away with the roaring which comes from within. The tragedy of Ertugrul Osman is the tragedy of the human condition - the only difference being that, for us, it can never be other than it is.
