The word of the week is şatafat, and Ankara supplied the visual aid.
At the NATO summit, Turkey received its guests with the full vocabulary of Erdoğan-era grandeur: mehter music, ceremonial guards, a turquoise carpet that seemed designed less for walking than for being recorded, and the Erdoğan couple standing before the vast Presidential Complex, its doors polished to a shine usually reserved for furniture showrooms.
There was also the choreography.
Visiting dignitaries greeted the hosts, smiled for the cameras, and were gently moved along by protocol. One official appeared to tap guests into motion, the diplomatic equivalent of saying: your moment with the leader is over, would you now kindly proceed indoors? A few guests were spared the interruption. Zelenskyy, Macron and Trump enjoyed longer exchanges. With Trump, Erdoğan even walked inside, confirming once again that protocol, like justice, occasionally develops preferences.
Şatafat is often translated as pomp, splendor or ostentation. None is quite enough. Görkem is grandeur, with its chin held high. İhtişam is magnificence, preferably imperial. Şatafat, a chewy, chatty word, arrives with a raised eyebrow and a half-disguised sneer. It is splendor that knows it is being watched and can be found kitschy, but does not mind.
Its ancestry is almost too convenient. Lexicographer Sevan Nişanyan traces şatafat to an Arabic-rooted word associated with the insignia of Mamluk rulers in Egypt, as well as ornament and flattery. So the word already comes to Turkish carrying three useful things: the ruler, the decoration, and the compliment paid in the ruler’s direction.
ERDOGAN’S ŞATAFAT
This is why the word suits Erdoğan so well. His politics has always understood architecture, lighting and scale. The Presidential Complex is not merely an office; it is a statement with columns. Even its preferred name, külliye, draws on Ottoman-Islamic vocabulary, lending a modern seat of executive power the aura of civilizational continuity. Grandeur becomes heritage, and evil tongues that call it kitsch are left to hiss outside the gate.
The Ottoman world knew the display intimately. Processions, robes, banners, reception halls and carefully graded proximity to the sovereign were not extras; they were part of rule. Go to Topkapı Palace and you will see the grammar of power arranged in courtyards. Who stood where mattered. Who waited mattered. Who approached mattered most. Power had to be seen, and preferably seen from below. Erdoğan did not invent this instinct. He revived it for the age of high-definition video.
There is also Turkish hospitality. The guest must be honored, fed, photographed and sent away convinced that no one hosts quite like the Turks. If reports of engraved pistols as summit gifts are true, the hospitality came with a trigger guard. Some of the wiser European leaders left the gift in Ankara.
WASTE NOT
Yet şatafat is never politically innocent. Erdoğan’s critics call it waste. His supporters prefer itibar, prestige. That difference is everything. One person sees extravagance; another sees national dignity. In Erdoğan’s political vocabulary, Turkey must be seen as strong, sovereign and impossible to patronize. If that requires a few more guards, carpets, lights and doors, then austerity can wait outside with the press pool.
But şatafat always looks different from the checkout line. In a country where citizens argue with supermarket prices and calculate rent in whispers, grandeur becomes combustible.
NATO came to Ankara to discuss hard power. Erdoğan received it with soft furnishings, hard choreography and a nod to the times when the Ottoman Empire stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Red Sea, from the Balkans to North Africa. That is şatafat: not simply splendor, but splendor determined to make a point.
