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Second Empire of Trabzon
Timeline: 1983: Doomsday

OTL equivalent: Republic of Turkey
Flag of
Flag of the Second Empire of Trabzon
Location of
Location of
Motto
"Sadık İmparator ve Autokrator Bütün Doğu, İberler ve Perateia"
Capital Trabzon
Largest city Trabzon
Other cities Ordu, Giresun, Artvin, Ardahan, Rize
Language Turkish
Religion
  main
 
Islam
  others Orthodox Christianity
Ethnic Groups
  main
 
Turkish
  others Hemshin, Abkhaz, Laz, Kurds, Azeris, Adjarians
Government Military dictatorship
Emperor Sahin, Altan
Population 2,400,000 (2023 est.) 
Established November 3, 1983
Independence from Republic of Turkey
  declared March 4, 1987
Currency İperpiron

The Second Empire of Trabzon, also known simply as the Empire of Trabzon, is a state in the Eastern Turkish Wasteland. It was established by mutinous Turkish military personnel as a result of the Soviet-Turkish border war which erupted in the Caucasus following the 1983 Doomsday catastrophe. Trabzon's de jure head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces is General Altan Sahin, who declared himself emperor (imparator) of the region in 1987.

As Sahin's health has declined, de facto executive authority has increasingly rested with a military administrative council. The military controls many aspects of life in Trabzon, including public education, public broadcasting, utilities, and healthcare. The economy is a peculiar combination of a command-and-distribution model controlled directly by the armed forces with elements of a free market economy controlled by Trabzonian entrepreneurs, many of them former or currently serving military officers.

Sahin's regime claims to be the spiritual and ideological successor to the former Empire of Trebizond, a medieval Byzantine polity, although Trabzon remains - for the most part - a culturally Turkish state, albeit influenced heavily by the Caucausus. It has been supported by a number of other regional actors, namely Georgia and Armenia as a buffer against the rapid military and political expansion of the post-Doomsday Turkish Sultanate.

History[]

Pre-Doomsday[]

Trabzon, historically known as Trapezus and Trebizond, formed the basis of several states after being founded by Milesian Greek settlers in the ninth century BCE. It was a part of at least one ancient Mossynoeci confederation before being annexed by the Mithridatic Kingdom of Pontus. The Roman Empire conquered Trapezus following the Mithridatic Wars, and under Roman rule the city became one of the most strategically important naval and trade centers on the Black Sea. It declined greatly after being sacked during a Gothic invasion in 258, but regained prominence after being inherited by the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in 395. During the Fourth Crusade, the Byzantine Empire was dismembered and independent Greek rump states emerged at Trebizond, Nicaea, and Epirus. Alexios I Megas Komnenos declared himself emperor of the region in April 1204 with backing from his brother David and their relative Queen Tamar of Georgia, an act to which historians attribute the founding of the so-called "Empire of Trebizond". Geographically the first Empire of Trebizond never included anything more than the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. Its demographic heritage, however, endured for several centuries after being permanently annexed by the Ottoman Turks in 1461, and a substantial number of Orthodox and Greek-speaking people remained there until the early twentieth century.

From 1859 to 1920, hundreds of thousands of Abkhaz, Lazi, Abazin, Ubykh, Nogay, and other migrants from the Caucasus fled the conquest of their homelands by imperial Russia and migrated to Trabzon by sea, with hundreds of thousands more arriving by land. The Caucasian migrants - known as mahajirs - were driven into the Ottoman Empire both by deliberate Russian ethnic cleansing policies and by internal calls for hira, a voluntary exile of Muslim communities unwilling to live under non-Muslim rule. While many of the Caucasian peoples resettled elsewhere in Anatolia or made their way to the Levant, a large number settled permanently along the southern coast of the Black Sea in and around Trabzon.

During the 1910s and 1920s, Trabzon became the focal point for an abortive Greek secessionist campaign, prompting the Turkish government to deport most Orthodox Greeks to the Balkans or Russia. The independence of Trabzon was first proposed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as a Greek state known as the Republic of Pontus. As a result of Turkish purges, however, the demographics of the region shifted and Muslims, predominantly Turks, but also smaller numbers of Greek-speaking converts and Circassians, quickly formed a new majority.

According to ethnologists, an interesting trend which characterized the (post-Doomsday) Turkish population of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been a romanticized emphasis on the achievements of the Empire of Trebizond and ancient Trapezus as part of a fledgling Trabzon nationalism, their Greek character and previous significance to local Greek nationalists notwithstanding.

Trabzon briefly became a flashpoint for Cold War tensions in 1958, when a United States Air Force (USAF) C-130 Hercules aircraft based there was shot down after straying into Soviet airspace. The USAF maintained a reconnaissance outpost at Trabzon until 1970, after which it was transferred to the Turkish Air Force.

Doomsday[]

As with many other countries and regions around the world, Doomsday came suddenly for Trabzon. While the city itself was spared the immediate fallout from a nuclear strike, Trabzon experienced an unprecedented deluge of refugees fleeing from the south, where Erzurum and much of the surrounding countryside had been annihilated. In the wake of the resulting nuclear barrage, NATO and Turkish Air Force aircraft were scrambled from Trabzon to intercept further incursions and strike Soviet airfields in the Transcaucasian Military District.

Turkish M47 Patton tanks1

A unit of the Third Army's 11th Corps returns to Trabzon, November 1983.

Turkey's Third Army was largely paralyzed by Doomsday, as its commanding officer, then in Izmir, had been killed during the nuclear exchange. Additionally, its 9th Corps had ceased to exist after the strike on Erzurum. The Third Army Headquarters at Erzincan made a concerted effort to mobilize its 11th Corps, which was based in Trabzon and had thus survived relatively intact, for an anticipated Soviet ground invasion. The 11th Corps took part in a series of pitched battles near the Georgian and Armenian borders with motorized troops from the Soviet 31st Army Corps, and was initially successfully in several joint NATO and Turkish maneuvers which ended the Soviet initiative. The fighting quickly devolved into a war of attrition, with the 11th Corps, already under-equipped at Doomsday, suffered heavy casualties due to a breakdown in logistics. At one point, only one of its divisions had enough ammunition for another engagement. Desertion reached critical levels, and mutinies at the command level were also not uncommon. Perhaps the most well-known example was that of a brigadier general later identified only as Altan Sahin. Deeming the tactical situation untenable, and protesting his abrupt redeployment to an irradiated zone near Batumi, General Sahin achieved notoriety for placing a number of his superiors under arrest; according to some historians, this effectively nullified the 11th Corps as a cohesive formation.

It remains clear, however, that the collapse of the corps and the Third Army as a whole was influenced by a number of factors, namely crippling desertion and the logistical difficulties which made carrying out many directives impossible, and Sahin was not the only senior officer who unilaterally seized command. However, he and a cabal of others succeeded in taking control of the 11th Corps' surviving manpower. They cut off all contact with Erzincan and abandoned the counter-offensive against the Soviets, first brokering an unofficial truce then withdrawing towards Artvin. General Sahin and his men reached their former bases in Trabzon on November 3, 1983. The city had formerly descended into chaos as a result of the refugee crisis and inadequate supplies or housing to accommodate the new arrivals; the returning troops assisted the gendarmerie in forcibly restoring order. Nevertheless, the Turkish Air Force units stationed in Trabzon refused to accept his illegal authority and stood to arms. The standoff ended when Trabzon Air Base was surrendered to Sahin, who had threatened to fire on returning military fighters unless he was allowed to take control of the airfield.

Post-Doomsday[]

Establishment of the Second Empire[]

With Sahin presiding as Trabzon's unofficial commissioner, a rigorous degree of martial law was applied to the city and all of its surrounding districts. Like most ranking members of Turkey's preexisting military establishment, Sahin was well aware of the threat posed by political violence in the country and feared that the widespread anarchy would provide a catalyst for extremist right-wing parties such as the Nationalist Movement (MHP), radical Islamist groups who believed that Doomsday was the final judgment of Allah, and Kurdish separatists to make their own bids for power. Sahin worked to undermine these elements by disarming civilians en masse. He declared Trabzon "pacified" in early 1984, although heavy-handed initiatives by his soldiers to check perceived internal threats ran their course well into 1985. Troops launched repeated month-long sweeps of the Trabzon, Akçaabat, Sürmene, and Yomra districts. Residents were frequently interrogated, asked to produce proof of identity, and declare weapons. In some cases, civilians were assaulted, and dozens were executed for failing to comply. Known sympathizers of the MHP and Kurdish refugees were Sahin's primary targets. Many were segregated from the general populace and marched into makeshift internment camps. Notably, there was little opposition to these measures; by and by the population of Trabzon accepted the imposition of martial law without protest. Historians have since compared their attitudes at the time to those during Turkey's 1980 coup d'état, which many in Trabzon had likewise welcomed as the only alternative to anarchy. Indeed, the purges Sahin ordered and general crackdown on subversive elements was carried out in an eerily similar fashion to those which had followed the coup four years earlier, including the specific attacks on right-wing extremists and abolition of all political activity. Local offices belonging to all three major legal political parties in Turkey at the time, the Motherland Party, Populist Party, and National Democratic Party, were closed and their members ordered to keep a low profile. In response to criticism from local officials General Sahin made rather vague statements about his intention to play a caretaker's role until the entire country had recovered sufficiently for civilian rule.

Sahin1

Altan Sahin, rare public photograph, 1986

Communication between Trabzon and the remnants of Turkish military and civilian administrative structures was also severed throughout 1984. It was evident that Sahin and the officers who now controlled the region understood they were regarded as traitors and deserters, and they could expect little leniency from any surviving central government. Attempts by municipal officials to re-establish contact with provisional authorities in Konya were halted, and emergency broadcasts such as the Toplama Order subject to jamming. Civil servants with ties to the former government were also dismissed. This inevitably led to a deterioration of local government, especially at the policy level. Sahin set up an advisory administrative council composed of military commanders, placed military tribunals above the system of civil law, and appointed soldiers to fill all posts in local government and parastatal agencies. Trabzon was, in effect, governed directly from military installations under Sahin's control across the region, where commanders on the battalion level functioned as petty administrators. While controversial in hindsight, the remnants of Turkey's armed forces were the only force capable of filling the vacuum after the civilian government in Ankara had been destroyed, and as far as Sahin was concerned he had created the precisely the state of order he desired. Next to Konya, Patnos, and other key Turkish urban centers, Trabzon was a comparatively tranquil model of post-Doomsday stability.

According to General Sahin's critics, the period of 1984-85 foreshadowed events to come, as his rule became increasingly authoritarian and despotic, culminating in his self-coronation as İmparator (Emperor) of Trabzon. Most modern Turkish sources claim that Sahin in 1987 titled his emerging proto-state Trabzon İmparatorluğu (Empire of Trabzon) and officially renamed himself the following year Emperor Altan I. Some have cited this as demonstrative of Sahin's eccentricity, as well as a ludicrous and overly flamboyant nature. However, absolute monarchs holding executive powers and formerly obsolete titles were hardly an uncommon fixture in post-Doomsday geopolitics. Sahin's supporters have defended his decision as the spark which created modern Trabzon nationalism. They have typically cited his belief that a strong unitary state with a central government united under an absolute ruler would reduce expenses considerably and allow more resources to be directed towards the advancement of the entire country.

In December 1986, Altan Sahin gave his first personal address to Trabzon's residents at Hagia Sophia, a former Byzantine church and Ottoman mosque revered as a symbol of the city's once-proud imperial legacy. He extended martial law indefinitely and gave vent to his doubts about the survival of the Turkish republic. This was the last occasion on which the Turkish flag was hoisted in Trabzon, as on March 4, 1987 Sahin announced that after some deliberation he would take the title of emperor. Simultaneously, the administrative council decreed that it was adopting a resolution to transform the republic—or at least, the portion of the republic encompassing Trabzon—into an "empire".

1988 coup d'état attempt[]

Always an underdeveloped region, Trabzon was in relatively poor economic shape following Doomsday. Many rural households found themselves overtaxed attempting to support the countless refugees which crowded the countryside. Military bureaucrats who handled administrative tasks and maintained the civil infrastructure were mostly occupying ransacked offices with few chairs, desks, typewriters, or paper. They had no way of enforcing the prices General Sahin and the advisory council fixed for common goods. Due to a decline in the circulation of preexisting Turkish currency, black markets thrived and inflation skyrocketed. Meanwhile, Sahin reveled in unparalleled extravagance. The cost of his new palace complex, built atop the ruins of Trebizond Citadel, coupled with his absurd coronation, devastated Trabzon's fragile finances. Some of Sahin's subordinates believed the resources expended on these projects greatly accounted for the further impoverishment of the citizens.

Trabzon Coup

Civilians and soldiers jostle in the streets of Trabzon during the 1988 coup attempt.

In May 1988 Colonel Bahri Yalçın, a member of the administrative council, called for a coup d'état. Yalçın had denounced Sahin as attempting to build a cult of personality, and of betraying his people by his unilateral decision to abolish the republic. He ridiculed the adoption of a new imperial flag modeled after the arms of Greek Trebizond, and insisted this showed disrespect for the Turkish nation. More importantly, Yalçın warned, he regarded these acts as an open renunciation of Kemalism and a direct challenge to the soldiers who had helped Sahin take power. Indeed, these sentiments were echoed by many in the ranks of the armed forces, which still included an avowedly Kemalist component.

Reports as to how the coup progressed are contradictory. For example, the government of Trabzon maintains that there was no coup in 1988, and released a bulletin on the anniversary of the incident in 2008 to that effect. A journalist who later defected to Konya, Fatma Karademir, wrote at length about the 1988 coup attempt in a pamphlet criticizing Sahin's regime, and it is from her account that most information concerning the event is derived. Karademir notes that Yalçın called for the seizure of Trabzon Airport and the closure of the roads. Neither happened. She claimed that "thousands" of angry civilians then marched on Trebizond Castle, accompanied by soldiers and an M48 Patton tank. Loyal soldiers fired at the crowd. Protestors broke into a police station and released detainees there. However, the remaining members of the administrative council disavowed Yalçın and addressed the public from a radio station, insisting they would not support a coup. Apparently the remaining troops continued to follow their orders. The following day the streets were deserted, Sahin's loyalists set up roadblocks, and Yalçın went into hiding in Ordu, then controlled by another military officer Karademir described as a "provincial warlord". Sahin demanded that Yalçın be returned to Trabzon. When the city's residents refused, his troops attacked and plundered Ordu. The raid on Ordu, Karademir claimed, touched off a ripple of violence and low-intensity warfare between Trabzon and other Turkish successor states in what had become known as the Eastern Turkish Wasteland.

Despite outward appearances, the attempted coup d'état revealed serious internal divisions within the armed forces under Sahin's command. There were several bloody purges in 1988 and 1989, when various battalion or even brigade commanders were viewed as potential usurpers or became real political threats in their own right. Each purge provided new opportunities for others to advance in the ranks. For example, the commander of air defense, Osman Bahçekapılı, had been an ambulance driver in the 11th Corps; Murat Başer, chief of the armored brigade, was formerly a cook seconded to Sahin's staff during the Caucasus border war. The officers who sat on the administrative council ruled with no explicit policy except the natural goal of self-preservation. They barely exerted control over some army units in outlying areas, which functioned as semi-independent garrisons of occupation.

Sahin also established several powerful internal security forces, such as the core of handpicked soldiers known as the "Imperial Guard" and the Directorate of Counter-Intelligence, made up of the former military and gendarme intelligence agencies as well as local elements of Turkey's defunct National Intelligence Organization. Like its pre-Doomsday predecessor, the Directorate of Counter-Intelligence in theory had no police powers and depended on the Imperial Guard troops for enforcement. In fact, both freely terrorized the populace during their hunt for communists, right-wingers, Islamic radicals, and Kurdish or Armenian separatists.

Rural producers of tea and hazelnut quickly turned to smuggling, especially to the Caucasus and other Turkish communities to the west. The smuggling problem turned into a fixation with Sahin and the advisory council; in late 1989 they ordered the Imperial Guard to refocus on eliminating all smugglers. The troops shot hundreds of suspected smugglers between 1989 and 1995, but were equally interested in plundering the possessions of those they'd killed and often failed to discriminate between criminals and innocent peasant cultivators.

Pacification campaign in New Erzurum[]

Occupation1

Trabzonian troops in a forward staging area prior to invading New Erzurum, 1990.

A large swath of territory to Trabzon's immediate south remained underpopulated and generally in chaos for nearly a decade after Doomsday as a result of the Soviet nuclear strike on Erzurum, which had obliterated the city itself and triggered eastern Turkey's largest internal refugee crisis. The destruction of Erzurum crippled local infrastructure and brought all economic activity, apart from subsistence agriculture, herding, and internal trade, to a halt. Survivor communities which remained in Erzurum formed a patchwork of loosely affiliated kadiluks or kazas, vilayets, and sanjaks. There are a number of conflicting reports as to the stability of the region between 1983 and 1990; Trabzon's government claimed that competing warlords and militia groups emerged which fought for control over the larger towns and cities. Proponents of this position insisted that these disparate marauders preyed on the common people and carved up the land into personal fiefdoms. The death and destruction wrought by the fighting opened the way for a "pacification" campaign launched by General Sahin and his advisory council. Trabzon offered hope to the Turks living in the war-torn province of Erzurum, along with a reprieve from the excesses of the warlords. Sahin himself mentioned in a public address in May 1990 that he believed he was the only one capable of ridding the troubled "southern provinces" of warlords who had turned their weapons on their own people.

However, in most contemporary academic literature, Sahin's claims of disorder and internecine factional warfare south of Trabzon have been dismissed as a propaganda exercise. Turkish historians observed that Trabzon carried out trade with the independent communities in Erzurum, although during the late 1980s relations were strained, primarily because of continuing clashes along their common border. Most of these skirmishes seem to have been provoked by isolated groups of soldiers or herders, but Sahin seized on them as an opportunity to expand his political influence further southwards. He ordered his troops to invade the patchwork of autonomous vilayets—known collectively as New Erzurum—hoping to divert attention from his own internal troubles and rally the people of Trabzon against an external adversary.

Surprisingly, most of the vilayets mobilized, united, and counterattacked, joined by disgruntled exiles from Trabzon. Sahin's troops, who had expended most of their energy by looting along the way, were driven back. The unexpectedly ferocious resistance waged by New Erzurum has been credited to a number of factors, namely the fiercely independent nature of survivor communities in that region. In sharp contrast to the Trabzonians, the vilayets did not welcome the prospect of military rule. For almost eight years Erzurum's remaining population had been left to their own devices, and many of the vilayets had formed as a direct response to the threat posed by deserters from Turkey's Third Army, who had resorted to armed banditry. They possessed little faith in Sahin, who was perceived as another marauder, especially after his 1988 sacking of Ordu. Public opinion of Trabzon also declined greatly as a result of the brutal anti-smuggling operations, which had forced some farmers to flee south.

The forces General Sahin ordered into New Erzurum represented a small number of 11th Corps veterans structured and trained for full-scale conventional warfare, and thousands of recent Trabzonian recruits hastily enrolled with minimal training and little sense of discipline. These inexperienced and undisciplined units heartily plundered and murdered their way through the countryside. Civilian homesteads were looted, with doors, roofs, and even door frames being stolen by the soldiers. From the time they marched into New Erzurum around mid 1990, however, the Trabzonians were able to exert only very limited control over various parts of the region, namely the major north-south road through Erzurum Province to the city of Hopa.

Trabzon Expansion1

Trabzon's expansion into New Erzurum. The territorial extent of vilayets occupied by Trabzon are indicated in red.

New Erzurum confirmed what many observers already suspected about Trabzon's miniature defense forces—they relied more on concentrated troop formations and overwhelming firepower than on tactical flexibility and maneuver warfare. Nothing had been done to change the preexisting doctrine, training, and organization of units that were adopted for a conventional war against the Soviet Union. Certainly, the invaders were well-equipped: while all of the regime's valuable tanks and most of its heavy weapons were retained in Trabzon to reduce the potential for another attempted coup d'état, troops in New Erzurum possessed twenty-seven trucks, some towed mortars, and significant fuel and ammunition reserves. Much of this irreplaceable equipment and resources fell into the hands of the local militants as Sahin's forces began their disorderly retreat. Undeterred, Sahin embarked on a renewed conscription campaign, the first implemented anywhere in Turkey since 1983, and mobilized his more reliable Imperial Guard. Trabzon made a second attempt to invade New Erzurum between 1992 and 1996, and this time the occupation was more successful. The vilayets were for the most part subdued or destroyed over the course of the bitter four year campaign, prompting their residents to resort to guerrilla warfare. Nevertheless, they suffered severe casualties as Trabzon maintained total artillery superiority and the Imperial Guard shelled settlements without discrimination.

Trabzon did not aim to vanquish the guerrillas so much as intimidate and terrorize the local populace into abandoning areas of intense resistance and either voluntarily disarm or withdraw their support from the partisans who were still fighting. Like many post-Doomsday civil conflicts this unfortunately resorted in the deliberate destruction of villages, a scorched earth policy, and the heavy mining of the countryside and the perimeters of major urban centers. The Imperial Guard not only hit back hard against guerrilla targets but also attacked what remained of New Erzurum's priceless economic infrastructure by sabotaging utilities and burning fields. New Erzurum's resistance fighters countered this strategy of calculated annihilation with a prolonged war of attrition. The availability of vast quantities of arms in the region left over from earlier Turkish and Soviet forces, captured from Trabzon, gained on gray and black markets, or simply obtained through the illicit cross-border trade with the Caucasus, as well as the compulsory military service the pre-Doomsday Ankara government required all male citizens to undergo, facilitated an effective insurgent bloc.

On November 11, 1997, Altan Sahin declared New Erzurum "pacified". It was a hopelessly optimistic sentiment. Since Trabzon's invasion the insurgents had made the roads so impassible for supply convoys that many outposts had to be resupplied exclusively by air, a costly endeavor which exposed aircraft to risk and consumed large quantities of fuel. The majority of Trabzon's troops were concentrated in isolated bases and along their lines of communication, and the rest were overstretched and dispersed over the vast countryside, hunting guerrillas. The ill-advised pacification campaign had achieved little more than a high body count, the displacement of nearly a third of New Erzurum's inhabitants, and an utter proliferation of land mines. During the subsequent months Trabzon would even abandon the territory it held in southern New Erzurum, due to its logistics woes and the cost of maintaining a military presence there.

War with Greater Patnos[]

See main article: Patnosi-Trabzon War

The occupation of New Erzurum was a limited one because in time Trabzon preferred to fight for limited aims: keeping its supply lines open, controlling the largest settlements and strategic bases, and holding guerrillas at bay, while the militant vilayets fought an unlimited war in which they perceived only two options: death, or the expulsion of the invaders. Due to the continued concerns over insurrection on the home front, Trabzon intentionally limited the scope of its operations and the amount of forces it committed. On the other hand, to the population of New Erzurum it was a total war for their very survival. Trabzon was not defeated militarily, but it did fail to achieve its objectives. Moreover, the war left its fledgling army exhausted, both physically and psychologically.

For all General Sahin's successes in overcoming the various armed statelets in Erzurum's north, the flames of resistance had not been extinguished in the south. The southern plains and central mountains were still held by an alliance of vilayets, and their continued existence infuriated the self-styled emperor, an affront to his claims to have pacified the region. Sahin came to consider stamping out this coalition as his chief objective. Occupying the south had already been attempted and was deemed unfeasible for several reasons, namely the difficulty in resupplying outposts, poor maps, the mountainous terrain into which the insurgents could swiftly disappear after mounting raids, and the risk of further overextending Trabzon's limited manpower. The southern vilayets had staved off Trabzonian conquest for three long years, and during that period thousands of corpses were sent back to grieving families along the Black Sea coast. Military analysts believed at this point their skilled leadership and determination would enable the south to resist Sahin indefinitely.

Even more worrying to members of Sahin's advisory council was that the war had intensified rivalries in the armed forces. Kemalist sentiments remained strong, and longstanding veterans as well as new fighters who had made their careers under Sahin since 1983 sought to weaken each other's influence, ushering in an era of violent disputes and mutinies. To defuse these tensions, and with the ultimate aim of outflanking and isolating the insurgency in southern Erzurum, Sahin sent the most problematic units to annex a 300 square-kilometer length of territory between Refahiye and Bingöl town, known as the Erzincan Strip. This marked the culmination of tensions with the neighboring Republic of Greater Patnos. With Sahin's establishment of the Second Empire of Trabzon in 1987, the traditional Kemalist antipathy for imperial monarchs reemerged and was especially pronounced in Greater Patnos; indeed, rumors abounded that Kemalist elements forced to flee Trabzon after the failed 1988 coup d'état fled south and found their way into the armed forces and civil government of the latter. When Sahin decided to mount a multi-brigade punitive expedition to capture the Erzincan Strip, the Patnosi regime viewed itself as threatened, its territory violated by Trabzon. Although the troop movements were justified as part of a greater counter-insurgency effort against New Erzurum, the new conflict between Sahin and the staunchly republican Turkish military remnants in Patnos assumed the form of a conventional war in which armor, mechanized infantry, and air power played decisive roles.

With the bulk of its troops and equipment set against Kurdistan in the east, Greater Patnos proved surprisingly vulnerable to the Trabzonian onslaught, and Erzincan itself fell to Sahin's commanders in January 1999. Trabzon's forces encountered severe logistical difficulties but survived by seizing Patnosi trucks and ammunition depots. Their rather centralized logistics system regulated supplies at the battalion level directly from Trabzon and Rize, a rather awkward arrangement given the limited transportation and communications network. The most striking feature of the Patnosi armed forces was its large mechanized and armored units, which it had inherited from various Turkish units expelled from Kurdish territory by the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK). This gave the republic a tank force several times the size of Trabzon's embryonic armored corps. The Patnosi tanks were stationed further southeast near the Kurdish border, however, and it took valuable time to transport them north towards the Erzincan Strip. While Sahin repeatedly claimed that he possessed more aircraft than the Patnosi air force, most of these were based out of airfields at Trabzon itself. Due to an ongoing fuel shortage, Trabzon's distance from the Erzincan Strip severely affected the pilots' ability to time and execute their missions. Sahin may have hoped he could utilize the runway at Erzincan Airport for this purpose, but that site was found to be in ruins, choked with debris, and well within range of Patnosi artillery.

Trabzon Patnos War1

Trabzonian troops redeploy to the Erzincan Strip, mid 1999. Photo courtesy the Georgian press.

During February and March of 1999, Trabzon achieved several victories at Erzincan, Yayladere, and Kemah but also suffered significant defeats at Hozat and Tunceli. Despite their success in capturing Erzincan and several smaller settlements, several factors prevented a Trabzonian victory. Tank losses had been severe in the battles around Tunceli. Greater Patnos had also mobilized its own air force, establishing air superiority and harassing the overextended Trabzonian supply lines with impunity. Unusual flooding also hampered reinforcements and supply convoys on the roads. Although it fought its way into the Munzur Valley and Tunceli was virtually destroyed by shelling, Trabzon lacked the manpower or supplies to capture the city. General Sahin and his staff devoted their attention towards repairing the airfield at Erzincan and regrouping for the anticipated counteroffensive.

In early April, Greater Patnos retook the initiative and launched a three-pronged counterattack aimed at dislodging Trabzon from the Erzincan Strip. The campaign proceeded at a dizzying pace as fresh Patnosi units, including crack special forces diverted from the Kurdish border, bolstered by tanks and heliborne infantry, overwhelmed the invaders in just two days of fighting which left over a thousand Trabzonians dead, wounded, or taken captive. Within a week, Greater Patnos had recaptured all of the major towns and villages lost during the incursion. On April 7, 1999, Altan Sahin recalled Trabzonian units from the Erzincan Strip.

It took Trabzon almost a decade to recover from its catastrophic defeat in the 1999 war. The battles to capture, and subsequently defend, the Erzincan Strip cost the armed forces many veteran troops and much of its equipment. Skilled manpower, especially soldiers with technical skills unlikely to be possessed by conscripts drawn from various undeveloped regions, was difficult to replace. Shortages of hardware, inadequate maintenance, and lack of spare parts for what remained of Trabzon's ageing Turkish military equipment also limited the effectiveness of all units. For the next eight or nine years, Trabzon would seek to improve its defense capabilities by diversifying into a variety of foreign sources, including Iraqi arms dealers and the Federation of Georgia. Yet this aid was insufficient to restore the armed forces to their prewar effectiveness. For all Altan Sahin's continued espousal of jingoistic territorial ambitions and implacable hatred of Kemalism, he never again considered a southward military expansion and resigned himself to consolidating control of northern Erzurum.

The Looming Sultanate[]

Unrest in Trabzon arising out of economic deterioration and the stifling of all political activity contributed to a security crisis in the Sultanate of Turkey, which occupied the Paphlagonian region following the so-called Union Accords. Trabzonian refugees fleeing west towards Samsun were said to number in the tens of thousands, seeking refuge from marauding soldiers and armed raiders. Relations between Trabzon and the Sultanate were almost immediately poisoned due to General Sahin's virulent anti-Konya rhetoric—he denounced Ertuğrul II as a "puppet of illegal securocrats"—and his irredentist claims to Samsun and Sinop Province. Since 2001, over 20,000 refugees, both civilian and military, have crossed the border into Samsun. These refugees have included more than fifty former army officers who pleaded with Konya for asylum. Since General Sahin had announced his intention to try these personnel on treason charges, their flight to Samsun provoked a political row with the Sultanate. By early 2006, it was estimated that at least 13,000 of the Trabzonians were being sheltered in makeshift refugee camps along the Terme River. Some Trabzonian refugees, particularly the highly educated, found jobs with the Turkish civil administration.

TurkeyExpansion4

Current Turkish geopolitical situation. The Second Empire of Trabzon is denoted in a maturing yellowish green.

Ali Kızgın, prominent Trabzonian exile and chairman of a Samsun-based organization which researches and compiles trade statistics of the Eastern Turkish Wasteland, issued a detailed report in 2009 claiming that opportunistic businesses in the Sultanate were taking advantage of goods shortages in Trabzon. According to Kızgın, these individuals smuggle consumer goods into Trabzon which either originated from industrialized parts of the Sultanate or were transshipped from Konya's trading partners elsewhere. They are frequently paid in Trabzonian hazelnuts, which are trucked back to Samsun and sold to the local government. This brisk flow of illicit exports was temporarily disrupted in 2011 when a Trabzonian patrol clashed near Ordu with unidentified soldiers and killed four of them. Trabzon insisted that this was the latest in a variety of acts of "terrorism" and "sabotage" sponsored by Konya, and the soldiers were Turkish special forces. The border was temporarily closed, while both governments issued threatening statements.

On March 6, 2013 Sahin announced he was unilaterally reopening the border. The extent of the Sultanate having overt security implications for Trabzon could not be ascertained, but many international observers believe that its intelligence community was at least in contact with Sahin's political opponents.

De-Kemalization and the Kızgın affair[]

In July 2016, the government declared it would be undertaking a symbolic purge of all remaining "reactionary, Kemalist, and republican sentiments" from Trabzon. Local authorities were given one year to remove all symbols representing Atatürkçülük from the public space. A decree adopted by the administrative council prohibited the propagation of Kemalism or any other republican philosophy through the names of public sites, structures, or facilities, and banned the public display of names associated with Kemalism, including individuals, organizations, events or dates symbolizing the "regressive and non-sovereign republic of 1923-1983". This was seen as Trabzon's final severance of its past ties to the old Republic of Turkey.

By 2017, dozens of public sites associated with the Kemalist movement had been destroyed, defaced, or renamed. For example, Trabzon's Atatürk Alani (also known as Atatürk Square) was renamed Sahin Alani. A statue of Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic, was removed from the site. A large house previously owned by Atatürk in Trabzon was also demolished by the Imperial Guard. Possession of portraits of Atatürk, previously a staple of republican Turkey, was made punishable by hefty fines and a minimum of ten days' probation work (community service).

De-Kemalization1

Statue of Atatürk being removed in Rize, 2017.

On October 13, 2017, Ali Kızgın published a series of reports from Samsun alleging that the de-Kemalization campaign had resulted in a fresh wave of human rights abuses in Trabzon. Kızgın claimed the victims pf the program were elderly pensioners, many of whom missed the government's decree due to the country's poor communications infrastructure, and had no idea possession of Atatürk portraits or Kemalist paraphernalia was a crime. He documented a few cases where security forces assaulted individuals for being in possession of old flags or papers bearing the symbols of the Turkish republic. Kızgın distributed his reports throughout Greater Patnos as well as the Sultanate of Turkey, hoping to draw public attention to the internal situation in Trabzon. On November 21, he was found shot to death in his Samsun home. The perpetrators were never located, although Kızgın's daughters maintained their father was assassinated by agents of Sahin's regime.

In memory of the slain activist, the organization he headed was renamed the Kızgın Society. Since 2017, it has largely abandoned its former practice of documenting economic activity and has refocused on human rights in the Eastern Turkish Wasteland, namely in Trabzon but also in New Erzurum and Greater Patnos. Over the next two years, it grew to be the mouthpiece of Trabzonian exiles all over the region, and the Turkish-speaking world's greatest source of information about developments in Trabzon. On December 30, 2021, the Kızgın Society released its first newsletter in English, with the goal of raising awareness of the Wasteland's issues in the larger international community.

The succession question[]

By the end of 2022, Altan Sahin had administered Trabzon as its absolute ruler for forty years. Due to his advancing years and increasing frailty, the emperor had increasingly delegated more of his executive powers to the country's administrative council, staffed by hardline defenders of the military regime. The council was originally composed of junior officers who had joined Sahin in his Doomsday mutiny, and many had taken on the role of bureaucrats applying rules and laws to leverage their own income, prestige, and power. Sahin's public appearances became more sporadic beginning in 2021, leading to widespread speculation about the ageing monarch's health; the Kızgın Society and other critics in exile claimed that he had resorted to use of body doubles at his few public outings to hide serious health problems. As Sahin excused himself more and more from his scheduled appearances throughout 2022, rumors continued to grow that he had become too ill to perform official duties. External critics described the government as being in a state of inertia, encumbered with an absolute monarch who had grown old yet remained resistant to organizing his succession.

Despite this, most observers believed that Sahin's authority remained intact. Having consolidated his regime over the four decades since Doomsday, Sahin remained Trabzon's most authoritative figure, and the administrative council - at least in theory - still had to wait on many of his decisions, even if there was growing uneasiness about the topic of future succession.

The two main contenders for succession on the ruling council were General Ali Ulutaş, chairman of the administrative council and Minister of National Defense, and General Cengiz Akyüz, Minister of Interior and Public Security, who was also commander of the ostensibly elite Imperial Guard. Both were veterans of Sahin's 1983 mutiny and subsequent seizure of power in Trabzon, and benefited immensely from the latter's dependence on a small circle of trusted military personnel to fill key administrative positions. Ulutaş managed a property development bureau organized as part of the Ministry of National Defense which seized control of all Turkish state-owned enterprises, including government factories, processing plants, and fisheries, in the wake of Doomsday. Akyüz had formed a private paramilitary contractor, Scimitar, with extensive connections all over the Turkic world, particularly in former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Scimitar recruited heavily from the large numbers of unemployed former Soviet and Turkish military personnel in the wake of Doomsday, and its services were a valuable source of hard currency for Sahin's regime.

2023 coup d'état attempt[]

On March 11, 2023, Ulutaş sent shockwaves through Trabzon by announcing that Sahin was abolishing the administrative council by decree. He ordered all members to resign their positions and establish a new, temporary commission of "national salvation" made up of soldiers and civilians to rule until further notice. Sahin, who had not issued a personal decree since 2020 and had not made any public appearances since the new year, remained conspicuously absent. Early on the morning of March 12, a column of tanks and other armored vehicles under the command of Ulutaş rolled into the capital and took up positions around the palace complex, the Imperial Guard barracks, the interior ministry, city airport, radio station, and the central police station.

Akyüz, along with most of the military hardliners on the council, refused to resign and immediately accused Ulutaş of attempting a soft coup. No sooner had news of his dismissal reached him than he began marshaling his forces to usurp power from Ulutaş. A few hours after the appearance of the tanks, Akyüz and the other sacked members of the administrative council released a joint statement pronouncing Ulutaş's actions illegal, declaring a state of emergency, and releasing the Imperial Guard into the capital to deal with disloyal army units. Akyüz sent aides who rushed from one army unit to another, trying to prod the rank and file into action. In the absence of any clear sense of authority, many of the conscripts on duty simply ignored the conflicting orders from both factions and refused to mobilize, or went home. The civilian populace in Trabzon, likewise, remained largely apathetic to the ongoing developments, with life in the capital going on much as usual: people queued for buses, taxis and cars weaved in between the parked tanks, and traffic police motioned to military vehicles to pull over to the curb.

At noon, the music of the capital's radio broadcaster ceased for an announcement read by General Ulutaş, who introduced himself as leader of the "Military Revolutionary Commission for the Government of National Salvation". Ulutaş claimed that power had passed into the hands of the new commission, headed by himself, charged with drafting a new constitution for Trabzon within six months. Furthermore, he reiterated that Sahin had asked to be relieved from his executive duties and state posts on health grounds, and had chosen Ulutaş as his interim successor. As a final measure, the Imperial Guard and Ministry of Interior were to be dismantled, pending "reorganization". In a barefaced appeal to the opponents of Sahin's autocratic rule, Ulutaş proclaimed that the government's actions would henceforth be guided by the will of the masses, implying that a democratic spring was about to occur in Trabzon.

For the next forty-eight hours, some of the most diverse groups in the country began taking advantage of the crisis to issue clarion calls for change. Civil service employees sympathetic to the coup made attempts to unionize and called for a general strike, the first in Trabzonian history, and although it did not attract widespread support several hundred manual and office workers walked off the job. The clandestine circulation of anti-regime publications by Trabzonian exiles soon became quite open; the Kızgın Society's newsletters flooded the streets of the capital. A demonstration by hundreds of women demanded equality. Another demonstration by Muslim clerics demanded an end to the repression of religious organizations and a greater role in the governance of the state. The police and gendarmerie were too busy barricading themselves into their stations and worrying about the soldiers outside to suppress the civilian movements.

Coup Trabzon1

Rebel tank knocked out by Scimitar contractors during the coup attempt, March 2023.

Ulutaş hoped to resolve the coup without bloodshed. He did not order his troops to fire upon the police station, interior ministry, or the Imperial Guard barracks, instead appealing to their occupants to surrender, always accompanied by the reassurance that his actions were being done in the name of the emperor. The coup plotters apparently believed that the personnel, both civilian and military, would passively resign themselves to the transition of power once they realized it was too far gone to be stopped. This would prove to be a fatal error. Since the telephone lines had not been cut, Akyüz was able to continue making calls from his office at the interior ministry, including multiple to the garrison at the airport, instructing them to hold the airstrip at any cost and deny the coup plotters entry. At dawn on March 13, the tower controllers gave the green light to arriving helicopters carrying what Akyüz later described as "loyal reinforcements". The reinforcements were wearing nondescript uniforms and carried Soviet weapons. It later emerged these were several companies of paramilitary Scimitar operators mobilized from the organization's headquarters in Giresun. Uncertain of the loyalties of the capital troops, Akyüz had called in his private army to crush the coup.

Directed via phone and radio from the interior ministry, the Scimitar forces soon broke the blockade of the airport and retook the capital. Armed with rocket-propelled grenades and old wire-guided anti-tank missiles, they disabled or destroyed the tanks blocking the access roads to the Imperial Guard barracks and the police station. Caught completely by surprise, and not equipped with enough ammunition for a prolonged firefight, most of the coup plotters surrendered in two hours. Scattered firefights took place throughout the city until the evening, when Scimitar and the Imperial Guard finally stormed the radio station and gunned Ulutaş down. The coup attempt was over.

Akyüz takes power[]

In the aftermath of the failed coup, a curfew was imposed on the capital and the airport closed. The Imperial Guard set up checkpoints and patrols on the streets of Trabzon: the officers of the administrative council feared that the civilians might rise up in a show of support for the coup plotters, but no such incidents occurred. Although the command and control centers of power were now firmly in their grasp and it was clear Sahin was no longer in control of the country, the council was still shy of announcing the abolition of the monarchy. For the first time the council, which had operated for so long in Sahin's shadow, now acquired a public face: Akyüz. In a radio address to the nation on March 16, Akyüz affirmed the absolute authority of the council, announcing that he was succeeding Ulutaş as well as Minister of National Defense. He denied that Ulutaş had acted with the knowledge of the ailing monarch, but carefully stated that the emperor's judgment had in any case become vulnerable due to an unspecified "serious illness", from which he had apparently been suffering from some time. Akyüz stated that the emperor would remain head of state, but would have no future influence on the governance of the nation or on political affairs until he made a full recovery.

Nobody believed that Sahin would actually return to his previous state of authority, least of all the members of the council. The unexpected ease with which Ulutaş had attempted to usurp power had proved that. Nevertheless, in a surprising parallel with Ulutaş, Akyüz was careful to let it be known that all his actions were being made in the name of the emperor. Although prior to the coup, the council members had been mostly resolute in their loyalty to Sahin, the emperor's growing isolation, withdrawal from public affairs, and apparent poor health led to the assumption first by the coup plotters, and subsequently by the loyalists, that the head of state was a lame duck, whose power depended solely on their benevolence.

The emperor's true state, both mental and physical, remained a mystery to the vast majority of the nation, although external critics believed there was a possibility he was already dead: either killed in the coup, or expired immediately prior to those events, encouraging Ulutaş to make such a brazen bid for power.

Government and Politics[]

Structure[]

TD1F

Imperial standard, used by Trabzon's Administrative Council and the armed forces.

The Second Empire of Trabzon has been described as both an absolute monarchy and an uncomplicated military dictatorship. Since proclaiming himself emperor, General Altan Sahin remains unconstrained by a written constitution, a legislative body, or elections. The declaration of an empire in 1987 formally abolished most forms of local and regional autonomy and centered authority in the national government. To emphasize their dependent status, for example, provinces (il) were renamed regions (bölge). All were headed by military commissioners appointed by the armed forces general staff.

For decades, the self-styled emperor remained at the top of the government hierarchy. Sahin decided who served where and in what capacity. He nominated and had the power to dismiss military commissioners, ambassadors, directors of state and parastatal bodies, officers of the army and the gendarmerie, and judges. He was head of state, commander in chief of the armed forces, and until 2004, the sole de facto commissioner for national defense. Sahin controlled foreign policy and judiciary. He ruled by decree, and his word was law. From 1983 to 1990, helping him deal with all these problems was his personal staff, mostly fellow veterans of the 11th Corps who had supported Sahin in his original mutiny. These military officers were the only ones allowed to comment on questions put to the emperor, including proposals made by civilians.

Beginning in 1990, most administrative policies were proposed and implemented by a military consultative body known as the Administrative Council, whose members held state portfolios. This was made up of Sahin's general staff and patterned loosely after the disestablished National Security Council which ruled Turkey from 1980 to 1983. In theory, the council was only empowered to advise the emperor on governmental affairs, with all executive and legislative authority vested in Sahin. A spokesperson for the government quoted by a Kuitasi newspaper stated that the council had no actual legislative powers but was limited to an advisory body concerned with making recommendations.

However, by the late 1990s the emperor had eventually delegated most of his executive policymaking to the council's general secretary, a position which rotated biannually. For example, during its October 1999 session, Sahin authorized the council secretary to name ambassadors and create the post of a foreign relations secretary to receive the credentials of foreign diplomats. This coincided with the formal establishment of relations with the Federation of Georgia and subsequently, Armenia. In 2004, Sahin created the portfolio of Minister of National Defense and awarded this position to then-secretary General Ali Ulutaş, effectively surrendering his absolute oversight on defense-related matters.

The number of council members, as well as the names and functions of their portfolios, changed over the years. Originally made up of twenty officers, the number was raised to thirty in 1991 and reduced sharply to nineteen by 2001. By 2023, this had fallen to thirteen. The members included three generals who held official positions as ministers of state without portfolio, and the heads of eight other ministries. The state ministries included agriculture and rural affairs; communications and transport; trade and industry; national defense; finance; forestry; public works and housing; and interior and public security. Each ministry had its own budget and operated with considerable independence. All of them were appointed by the emperor until 1999, when a decree was passed providing for the accession of new members by nomination from any existing councilors.

Following the failed coup d'état in early 2023, General Cengiz Akyüz unilaterally seized the role of the council secretary, backed by other military hardliners who had resisted Ulutaş's bid for power. His first act as secretary was issue an ordinance on the "provisional organization of public authority", which suspended in part Sahin's broad executive authority and proclaimed the Administrative Council as the highest institution of the land. Thus, the council secretary succeeded the emperor as the highest decision-making figure with legislative and adjudicative power, and became the new de facto head of state. Under the new ordinance, the secretary is responsible for the appointment and removal of the council members at the advice of no less than two-thirds of the members, and may himself be removed by a unanimous decision of the other members.

Administration and public service[]

By the time Sahin had consolidated his power in Trabzon in 1984, the centralized administrative structure of the old Republic of Turkey had imploded. There was no communication between the provinces and whatever remained of the central government, which was no longer able to direct such services as public works, customs, and finances. Sahin ordered a purge of the civil service between 1984 and 1985, effectively demolishing all forms of local civilian governance, and making it impossible to enforce administrative policies except through the armed forces. Trabzon currently has no civil service which exercises formal jurisdiction over the employees of ministries, government organizations, and state parastatals, all of which are staffed almost exclusively with military personnel. Furthermore, there is no separate supervisory board charged with regulating the grade classification, pay rates, recruitment and personnel needs, or personal evaluation of these bodies - since they were integrated with the armed forces, their needs and resources were dictated by the general staff.

The empire is divided into eleven administrative regions, each corresponding roughly to a pre-Doomsday Turkish province. These regions are Trabzon, Ordu, Giresun, Gümüşhane, Bayburt, Rize, Artvin, Ardahan, and Kars. Trabzon does not control the entirety of the former Kars province, merely the northern section of it; the remainder is controlled by Greater Patnos. Furthermore, the occupied sections of New Erzurum are not administered as part of their own region but a designated "anti-terrorist zone" under perpetual military occupation.

Regions were headed by military commissioners who executed the laws, regulations, and decisions made by the Administrative Council. Their duties also included collecting taxes, issuing identity documents, census taking, and implementing economic and social development plans. The almost total lack of economic social planning was such that this theoretical role was rarely realized. The military commissioner was also in charge of social services, although in all regions these were so severely neglected that most Trabzonians tended to rely on the social services provided by private employers and religious organizations wherever available. Another one of the commissioner's responsibilities was to manage the regional budget; similar to pre-Doomsday provincial budgets, this was financed through income from rents, payments for state services, fines, and a 1% share of national tax revenue.

At the lowest level, some civilian authority prevailed in the form of traditional leaders who functioned as unpaid parts of the administrative apparatus. The smallest unit of local government in Trabzon was the village (köy derneğ), or rural locality with a population under 2,000. Following custom in Turkish communities, the village head (muhtar) is chosen by an assembly of the village adults. This informal assembly makes decisions pertaining to local affairs and elects a council of elders (ihtiyar meclisi) which includes the local imam. The muhtar supervises communal projects, collects taxes, and presides at civil ceremonies. The council of elders supervises finances, and decides on the contributions in labor and money to be made by villagers for road maintenance and other community improvements. It also arbitrates disputes between villagers and can impose fines. The preeminence of local authorities such as these, especially in rural areas, exploded after the collapse of the Turkish government during Doomsday and due to its own limited manpower and resources, the much more impoverished Trabzonian successor state was unable to fully re-impose centralized forms of governance on them. Many rural communities in Trabzon's interior and far eastern sections collaborate with the military and gendarmerie where necessary, but otherwise are not subject to any form of oversight, or assistance, from the regional military commissioner.

National identity[]

See main article: Nationalism in Trabzon

From its inception, the Second Empire of Trabzon has co-opted symbols and iconography from various pre-republican and pre-Ottoman regimes in the Pontic space (namely the first Empire of Trebizond which existed from 1204 to 1461) in an attempt to provide a unifying cultural framework for the post-Doomsday society and population. As the new state began to solidify, its military leadership recognized that the invention of new national traditions and symbols of national existence and continuity were necessary for the regime's political survival.

During the mid 2000s, the use of medieval Trapezuntine and even ancient Pontic symbolism and appeals to the region's mythical historic greatness under these historical empires, coupled with undertones of a new Pontic nationalism, emerged as a response to the revived Turkish nationalism sweeping the Sultanate of Turkey. Sahin made increasing use of these themes in his attempts to promote the state's spiritual inheritance from the Empire of Trebizond, and inculcate the Trabzonian population with a sense of new cultural superiority to the rest of the Turkish-speaking world.

While ethnocentric elements of Turkish culture provided the cornerstone of both pre-Doomsday and post-Doomsday strains of Turkish nationalism, Trabzonian nationalism differs from its use of the state, and appeals to a fictitious Pontic nationhood, as its main guiding principles. Prior to Doomsday, ethnic and religious minorities in northeastern Turkey were either isolated and oppressed, or their very existence was not acknowledged as they were considered to be a fifth column within Turkish nationalism, which had striven to achieve and convince itself of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. One result of Trabzonian nationalism emphasizing the state as opposed to an ethnocentric dominant culture has been a revival in the cultures and languages of ethnic minorities in the Pontic space, which the state has in turn encouraged to ensure their loyalty.

Geography and External Boundaries[]

Trabzon is surrounded by five distinct nations and one major body of water—the Black Sea. Hemmed by sea to the north and high mountains along the eastern and southeastern frontiers, Trabzon generally has well-defined natural borders. Since 1983 the boundary with the former Soviet Union, which was defined by mutual agreement between the Soviet and Turkish governments in 1921, has formed Trabzon's borders with the post-Doomsday countries of Georgia and Armenia. Trabzon's boundaries with the Sultanate of Turkey and the Republic of Greater Patnos have never been formally delineated and remain the topic of some dispute. Although fighting has gradually ceased in New Erzurum, that territory remains one of western Asia's frozen conflict zones. All of New Erzurum is claimed by Trabzon, and the surviving vilayets in the south have harbored a lingering resentment over the loss of their northern lands and principal settlements.

The country is prone to earthquakes, as it incorporates a significant amount of territory once included in Turkey's most active seismic region, which extends to the region north of Lake Van on the Georgian and Armenian borders. Broadly speaking, the Second Empire of Trabzon can be delineated into two distinct geographical regions: the densely populated coastal strip along the Black Sea, and the interior, where the land surface is rough, broken, and mountainous. Flat or even gently sloping land is rare, especially in the southeast, which has a median elevation of about 1,500 meters.

The Black Sea coastal strip consists of a steep, rocky coastline with a few rivers that cascade through gorges further inland. Access to the interior from the coastal strip is limited to a few narrow valleys due to the presence of the Pontic Mountain Range, which varies from 1,500 to 4,000 meters in elevation and runs parallel to the Black Sea. Because of these natural conditions, the reach of the Trabzonian government and security forces is largely confined to the coast, and much of the interior outside major settlements or military installations remains isolated. The coastal strip occasionally widens into fertile deltas where cultivation is intense; Trabzon remains dependent on these areas for the production of its primary cash crops: hazelnuts and tea. The mild, damp climate is also conducive to commercial agriculture, and due to the country's severe shortage of foreign exchange no amount of coastal land is wasted; even the mountain slopes where possible have been farmed or utilized for grazing livestock. The southern slopes of the Pontic range are usually barren, but the northern slopes facing the Black Sea are much more conducive for vegetation. Timber is cut on these slopes from ancient deciduous and evergreen forests. Rainfall averages 1,500 millimeters annually and may occur during any season.

Trabzon's interior is sparsely populated and is home to a much more extreme climate and a number of recently extinct volcanoes. Some streams and rivers which empty into the Black Sea originate in the south. Much of the region is characterized by hot, dry summers and severe winters with heavy snowfalls. Smaller settlements are often isolated for protracted periods during winter storms. There are valleys at the foot of the mountains near river corridors which support diverse agriculture, although primarily for local subsistence.

Demographics[]

Chepni folk Trabzon

Chepni girls in traditional dresses dance to Kemençe music.

Overall population density remains low; however, the Black Sea coastal strip is densely populated. Although the coast accounts for less than a quarter of Trabzon's landmass, about half the population was residing there in 2014. The Trabzonian government classifies 45% of the population as rural, meaning people who live outside a settlement or in a settlement with fewer than 800 residents. While the rural population has declined since Doomsday, there has also been a notable "reverse exodus" of some urban dwellers to the countryside. The reasons for this movement are open to various hypotheses, including a desire to escape the growing complexities of administration and various abuses committed by the security forces. There is no formal system of rural governance and many smaller communities are still administered by a local muhtar (traditional village head).

Trabzon has a relatively high population growth rate (estimated at 3%) which is unusual compared to that of the region prior to 1983. For the first 14 years after Doomsday nothing was done to challenge the pre-existing Turkish legislation, which decriminalized abortion for a broad range of medical causes. In 1997, however, the administrative council issued a new decree making abortion and the distribution of information about contraceptives illegal. This was seen as a reflection of the traditionally conservative social attitudes in Trabzon, which was often at odds with the liberalizing trend in the western parts of Turkey. Pressure from some religious leaders to extend the ban to include the practice of any form of birth control, including sterilization, was rejected. The number of illegal abortions was also said to be increasing as a result, and currently accounts for around 5% of maternal deaths.

Chart 2023 Trabzon Demographics

Racial and ethnic groups in Trabzon (2023 census).

Unlike the pre-Doomsday Turkish state, which attempted to assimilate or purge ethnic minorities, as part of a system which classified all Sunni Muslims as Turks and non-Sunni Muslims as aliens, the Trabzonian state tags individuals with citizenship and ethnic nationality - for example, Trabzonian and Laz or Trabzonian and Turkish - encouraging an identity and experience in common among peoples who lived in vastly different cultural traditions. The post-Doomsday state has essentially institutionalized multi-nationality in minorities through the codification of nationhood and ethnic nationality as social categories separate and distinct from statehood and citizenship. As a result, pre-Doomsday identities and expressions of minority groups have reemerged after a long period of suppression, and data is now freely available to be collected on their numbers. There are eight recognized ethnic nationalities in Trabzon: Turks, Kurds, Romeika, Georgians, Hemşinili (Hemshin), Lazi, Circassians, and Abkhazians.

Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims compose 75.5% of Trabzon's total population in 2023. Turkish speakers in Trabzon include several distinct subgroups, which differ from each other with slight variations in dialect and custom. Historically speaking, the northeastern Black Sea coast was one of the last areas in Anatolia to be settled by Turks due to the survival of the (first) Empire of Trebizond there. The region was colonized by Chepni Turks, an Oghuz tribe, in the fifteenth century around the time of Trebizond's annexation to the Ottoman Empire. The Chepni gradually migrated eastward into Trabzon by following the coast from Samsun, where they established several independent principalities and probably subsumed the local Christian Anatolian tribe, the Chan (Tzane). During the 1480s Trabzon became the center of a settlement and development project that include the mass relocation of Anatolian Turks there by the Ottoman government. The Ottomans also granted significant amounts of land to sipahi notables from Albania. There was another wave of Turkish immigration to Trabzon in the mid 1500s from eastern Anatolia due to tribal uprisings which had destabilized that area. Thousands of Circassian Muslim immigrants from the Russian Empire gradually settled in Trabzon beginning in the late eighteenth century, and their descendants continue to make up a notable percentage of the country's farm workforce; they are usually bilingual in both Turkish and Circassian but are classified as a separate ethnic nationality for census purposes.

Due to the historical prevalence of the Greek language in Trabzon, local Turkish dialects adopted some aspects of Greek phonology and syntax. The Greek influence is especially notable in vowel harmony, pronominal syntax, the use of the -mIş suffix, and word order.

Some ethnic minorities in Trabzon largely disappeared as a result of voluntary migration and population exchanges throughout history. For example, the region was once home to a significant Pontic Greek and Urum population, which gradually declined due to migration to Georgia, Greece, and Russia, especially during the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish War. Most of the remaining Pontic Greeks were expelled by the Turkish government as part of a population exchange with Greece during the early twentieth century. Today only an estimated 5,000 remain, many of them Muslim converts. For census purposes, the Trabzonian state has classified these individuals as their own ethnic nationality, but references them only according to the name of their dialect: "Romeika". Trabzon's small Armenian population was mostly exterminated during the Armenian Genocide.

Laz girl1

Laz girl in Rize, 2015.

In the post-Doomsday era, Trabzon's largest minorities are the Georgians and Laz, Abkhaz, Hemshin, and Kurds. The Laz, who speak a Caucasian language known as Lazi, are primarily occupied with fishing and concentrated in villages near the coastal city of Rize. Abkhazians and smaller numbers of Georgians live just east of the Çoruh River and on the Trabzonian-Georgian border, where they are employed as farmers or herdsmen. The Hemshin people are closely related to the Armenians but converted to Islam in the seventeenth century. Georgian and Lazi speakers have been publicly recognized as model minorities by the Trabzonian government. Nevertheless, in some areas traditional prejudices still run deep. Although legislation prohibiting the public use of specific languages did not exist, Laz continued to face individual acts of discrimination for speaking Lazi in public as late as the early 2000s. During the mid 2000s, the Trabzonian regime recognized both Georgian and Lazi as official minority languages in Trabzon, likely due to its increasingly close ties with neighboring Georgia. Georgian political support for Trabzon, as well as the ongoing active recruitment of Georgian and Lazi speakers into the armed forces, have notably softened public attitudes towards Caucasian minorities.

The size of the Kurdish minority has increased as a result of the immediate post-Doomsday refugee crisis, triggered by the Soviet nuclear strikes and the outbreak of conventional warfare between the remnants of the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in southeastern Turkey. Kurds form an outright majority around the southern part of the Ardahan region, especially near the city of Göle. Anti-Kurdish sentiments, although not as pronounced in Trabzon as in Greater Patnos, remain common among the Turkish populace. However, the PKK's continued military resistance to Greater Patnos and the eastwards expansion of the Sultanate of Turkey have also attracted grudging admiration from Trabzonian nationalists.

Beginning in 2016, the Ministry of Interior and Public Security announced it would be initiating a program to encourage the voluntary migration of Kurds to Kurdistan, including financial incentives for low income earners. The program is rumored to be part of a deliberate resettlement scheme negotiated with the PKK, although the Ministry has denied this. Since 2016, at least a third and possibly up to half the country's Kurdish population has emigrated to Kurdistan.

Health[]

Trabzon inherited a centralized national health service from the Republic of Turkey, which was previously consolidated under the Turkish Ministry of Health. Prior to Doomsday, the availability of healthcare was poor, and medical facilities were concentrated in the city of Trabzon and other provincial capitals, leaving most rural areas without access to medical care. Public health providers emphasized curative medicine for the urban population, although as employees of the state they were expected to provide free health care to the entire population, the great bulk of whom lived in rural areas.

Trabzonhospital1

Physician and nurse examining a patient at the Artvin state hospital.

After Doomsday, the Armed Forces of Trabzon provided the bulk of medical care and preventative health services, trained health personnel, supervised the operation of hospitals and other health care centers, regulated the price of pharmaceuticals, and controlled drug production and all pharmacies. In addition, the armed forces also paid the salaries of all medical and healthcare staff in the former public health sector, although they showed little interest in regulating private health facilities. Many experienced physicians departed the public sector to pursue the private practice of medicine during this time, forcing Trabzon to rely increasingly on foreign physicians from a number of countries in central Asia and the Caucasus, who arrived directly under contract to the government. In 1995, the civilian health service and the armed forces' medical command were both subordinated to a General Directorate of Health Services (Trabzon Sağlik Hi̇zmetleri̇ Genel Müdürlüğü, or SHGM) staffed by military officials, which assumed most of the responsibilities previously fulfilled by the Turkish Ministry of Health.

The ongoing shortage of medical staff, drugs, facilities, and resources - coupled to the largely rural nature of the local population - compelled the Trabzonian state to devote most of its resources to a program of preventative medicine emphasizing hygiene and nutrition rather than a traditionally oriented curative program. Due to the aforementioned shortages, the regime turned to the notion of using informal health workers chosen by their own villages to acquire basic preventative and therapeutic techniques at military bases, and to return to villages as practitioners. These "village nurses" were not physicians but often expected to fulfill this role, and were provided with food, uniforms, and modest stipends by the local military district.

After Doomsday, the decline in healthcare standards and facilities resulted in a resurgence of various debilitating and crippling diseases, as well as some major infectious diseases. Although no health data outside the capital seems to have been collected until the 2000s, informal surveys by the individual military districts suggested that the incidence of measles, pertussis, typhoid fever, and diphtheria were all on the rise. The regime had done little to maintain or expand the existing water infrastructure from the pre-Doomsday era, and as a result there was an alarming prevalence in water-borne illnesses, especially of diarrhea among children and infants. In 2023, the infant mortality rate was 120 per 1,000 live births.

Education[]

Education in Trabzon has been secularized and largely under state control since 1924. Literacy rates plummeted after Doomsday due to the collapse of the Turkish public educational system, and the Trabzonian military regime's disinterest in maintaining the existing schools or paying the salaries of the existing teaching staff. Nevertheless, many of Trabzon's ruling class, including Altan Sahin, were the product of a modernized military education, and in 1996 the emperor decreed that the portfolio of a Minister of Education would be created. The Trabzonian Ministry of Education was modeled loosely after the pre-Doomsday Turkish Ministry of Education, albeit firmly under military control and dependent on subsidies from the military budget. The newly created Ministry's emphasis was on primary education and the mandatory enrollment of students, particularly in urban areas. Nevertheless, with its limited resources and the poor state of development in much of Trabzon, it has proven impossible for the regime to supply the whole country with educational necessities. In rural areas, there remains a severe lack of school buildings and teachers, and it was estimated in 2020 that only 70% of the primary age children had schools to attend in their district. Additionally, most rural schools relied on a single teacher to handle several classes on different subjects and at different levels. The shortage of teachers has been aggravated by the decline in status of the teaching profession, and low government salaries which combine to deter prospective teachers. Additionally, most teachers with an urban background are unwilling to work in rural schools.

Urban dwellers and residents of the capital in particular have been able to witness the effects of education firsthand, and are likelier to ensure their children receive the best education. Many rural dwellers also appreciate the benefits of education, and there have been cases in which entire families relocate to the capital or another coastal city so their children may be educated there. However, the vast majority of Trabzon's rural population who are focused on agriculture and live in villages scattered throughout the interior do not have a high opinion of the state-controlled secular public education. Many rural dwellers are reluctant to enroll their daughters in school at all, and withdraw their sons at regular intervals for planting and harvesting. They much prefer to send their children to religious schools, which were banned in the Republic of Turkey but reemerged unopposed and in force to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the state educational sector after Doomsday.

In January 2024, the adult literacy rate in Trabzon stood at 52%. The literacy rate is highest among young men in coastal cities and lowest among elderly women in the interior. Older rural women have the least exposure to education, although rural men are more literate due to primary school attendance or literacy courses taken during military service. The armed forces serve as a major vehicle for improving literacy among adult men, particularly rural dwellers. In 2024, an average of 61% of military recruits were illiterate when they entered service, but 40% of these were successful in military-sponsored literacy courses. At the same time, there were 300,000 Trabzonian students officially enrolled in primary education. The official numbers do not necessarily reflect the number of students who will graduate successfully, as attrition is high in the early years and many students are removed from their classes to assist with agriculture so often they cannot pass their courses.

Only 12% of Trabzonian primary students are able to attain a secondary level education, and nearly all these reside in the capital. Secondary schools do not exist in rural areas and even many towns, and it is prohibitively expensive for rural families to send their children to a coastal city for secondary education. Trabzonian secondary education is divided into academic secondary schools, technical schools, and trade and commercial schools controlled by the state. These schools follow the pre-Doomsday Turkish model and are divided into two three-year sections corresponding to academic divisions. Courses are apportioned into general, professional, and practical (or workshop) subjects. General subjects include the Turkish language, a foreign or minority language of choice (applicable to students from ethnic minorities), history, geography, and science. Academic secondary education schools are the rarest of all, and designed to train students for higher education. Students have a choice of following various scientific branches and concentrating on those courses.

Adult education classes are sponsored by the military, oriented towards rural areas, and consist of literacy and vocational courses. These courses are hosted on military bases and open to civilians during the off-season for agriculture; the vocational courses include introductions to blacksmithing, carpentry, and basic metallurgical and electrical work.

KTU Trabzon1

Kardeniz Technical University in Trabzon.

The Karadeniz Technical University (KTU) in Trabzon is the country's sole functioning institute of higher education, with an average of 400 students enrolled annually. It trains the skilled technicians and engineers employed by the defense sector and major civil industries, such as timber production as well as maritime trade and commercial fisheries. The medical school at Karadeniz also trains most of the country's licensed physicians and nurses. In recognition of this vital status, KTU enjoys theoretical academic and administrative autonomy from the state, and is permitted to elect its own rectors and officials. However, the state retains the option to restrict the university's authority over its budget as it deems fit, and occasionally retire instructors, who are considered civil servants, with over 25 years of service. These measures are designed to ensure that KTU and its tenured staff remain broadly loyal to the ideology and ideals of the military regime. Since the late 1990s, several instructors at Karadeniz have been dismissed or suspended for their criticism of various state policies.

Economy[]

Like the other states of the Eastern Turkish Wasteland, Trabzon was largely undeveloped prior to Doomsday. Modernization and industrialization are the long-term economic objectives of the government, with the primary emphasis on agriculture and light manufactured goods. Although since 2016 industrial production has expanded much more rapidly than agriculture, the difference remains relative. Industrialization, by twentieth and twenty-first century standards, has only just begun, and agriculture contributes the most to the national product.

The Trabzonian state inherited a tradition of a strong public sector and centrally planned economy from its Turkish predecessor, which had itself inherited these characteristics from the Ottoman Empire. Since the Ottoman era, Turkey had been governed by a succession of republican governments which argued that the state had an intrinsic duty to intervene in the economy, not only to strengthen the nation against foreign powers but ultimately to advance the livelihood of the people. This attitude was shared by many of those in the armed forces, including the junta which governed the country until 1983. It was thus little surprise that at his coronation address, Sahin argued that only under the discipline of a centralized state authority like the military could Trabzon make strides in the modernization of the economy.

While all of the other post-Doomsday Turkish successor states (with the exception of New Erzurum) inherited large populations, considerable agricultural potential, or well-established industrial bases, Trabzon possessed few of these advantages in 1983. At the time of the nuclear exchange, the region had only just started to benefit from the effects of rapid industrialization in Turkey. Turkish industrialization of the 1970s and early 1980s had produced distortions in the labor market and had concentrated wealth largely in the west of the country. Trabzon experienced a recent population boom during the late 1970s, which contributed to unemployment as the size of the labor force exceeded the demand for local employment. The mechanization of commercial agriculture had also rendered the small farms upon which most rural Trabzonians depended nonviable, compelling them to migrate to cities in droves. However, urban unemployment was high as the majority of rural newcomers lacked the technical skills to compete in modern industries and could find employment only as unskilled labor. The province's woes were compounded by the worst economic crisis to hit Turkey since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with inflation reaching triple digit levels by 1979.

Beginning in 1980, the Turkish government instituted an economic reform program which reduced the number of parastatals, devalued the lira, imposed new monetary policies, slashed subsidies and price controls, and encouraged direct foreign investment in the private sector. There were signs that this liberalizing trend would reduce Turkey's external deficits and generate economic growth; however, its progress was interrupted by Doomsday.

Pontic Tea1

Tea plantations in the Pontic Mountains.

Trabzon's agricultural sector, including crop and livestock production, forest products, and fisheries, employs four-fifths of the workforce and occupies an estimated 85% of the country's total arable land. Historically, the fishing subsector has been by far the most significant, providing the livelihood of the large coastal population and supplementing the incomes of those engaged in sedentary farming. Climatic factors have led the government to refocus mostly on the separate development of crop production, namely in tobacco, tea, and hazelnuts; settled cultivation of both has been centered in the coastal belt where higher rainfall occurs. During the 1980s and much of the 1990s, however, crop production still was largely a subsistence practice. The large rural community carried out cultivation under rainfed conditions and to a limited extent, made use of irrigation. Its adherents participated only along the pheriphery of the monetized economy, and incentives for farmers to produce surplus for sale were nonexistent. Most did not make any investments in their farms aside from seeds and labor, and limited market conditions in the post-Doomsday era did nothing to encourage extra production.

A comparatively small but important segment of the coastal farming population had produced principally for market sales. These cultivators had been responsible for a substantial degree of crop intensification prior to Doomsday, resulting from more efficient use of commercial fertilizers, fuel, and pesticides. Turkish agricultural scientists had previously recognized Trabzon's coastal commercial farms for their utilization of irrigation and high-yield seeds. However, the farms' dependence on imported fertilizers, chemicals, equipment, and fuel became a major disadvantage due to the shortage of these resources and the disruption of trade after 1983. A few of the commercial farmers survived by smuggling their goods across the country's porous borders, which in turn triggered brutal military purges aimed at disrupting the smugglers' activities.

One of Sahin's first actions as emperor was to impose a military purchasing monopoly on agricultural products. Cultivators of cereal crops were the first affected, being ordered to sell 50% of their grain production to the military. After 1985 Sahin gradually extended this measure to include hazelnut, cotton, silk, wool, and tobacco. He also evoked preexisting Turkish legislation which held that the state could be only the legal buyer of tea and tobacco. The decree was enforced where possible, but a majority of peasant and commercial cultivators simply ignored it. Sahin's growing displeasure at the increased amount of smuggling despite his attempts to regulate the trade in agricultural exports led to the execution of almost 900 farmers between 1989 and 1995, accompanied by the displacement of another 3,000.

The armed forces became directly involved in the economy through the seizure of former state-owned enterprises and abandoned commercial farms, which were ostensibly repurposed to provide work for unemployed youth. In reality, they operated as a forced labor program for political dissidents as well as Trabzonian youths under military age, who could be conscripted as needed. The armed forces has justified this program as part of an initiative to instill a sense of "national consciousness and work ethic" in the country's youth. The goal was for the military farms to become self-sufficient, but productivity has remained low and they operate on subsidies from the defense budget. In contrast, the largest and most well-known state enterprise involved in the labor program is the old Tekel factory near the abandoned Gulbahar Hatun Mosque in the capital. The factory produces cigarettes under the Tekel brand, which held a monopoly on cigarettes in Turkey prior to Doomsday, as well as counterfeits of foreign brands for export, and is a vital source of foreign exchange for the regime.

TekelFactory1

The Tekel factory in Trabzon.

Soil reclamation and cultivation of less arable lands have helped raise agricultural production, but initiatives to expand the amount of arable land remain limited by topography. The military's purchasing monopoly, brutal anti-smuggling campaigns, and other attempts to regulate internal trade have resulted in a rural peasant population that is predominantly hostile towards state policies.

Trabzon's Black Sea coastline has considerable potential for fisheries. The tonnage of the fishing fleet has increased, but in the early 2000s it was still dependent on traditional boats, most of which lacked motors. The fish are also caught using rudimentary means such as double or triple-walled trammel nets (known as molozma). Although the government does not release economic statistics, potential annual catches of anchovies and other open sea fish are estimated at anywhere from 73,000 tons to 125,000 tons. The fisheries exist to meet local demand, although dolphin oil is prioritized as an export by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. At least one dolphin fishery was operating at Sürmene in early 2022.

By 2024 it was clear that the rigid controls on planning by the military leadership, the weight of the military bureaucracy, and the restrictions placed on free inquiry in the educational system, including scientific and technical research on economic theory, had also burdened all sectors. Military oversight hindered the economy's efficiency and productivity, as well as the capacity of parastatals and private enterprises to adapt themselves to technological advances made since 1983.

Prominent Trabzonian business leaders have clamored for the diffusion of decision-making power to the lower levels of the economic structure, and for the diversification of foreign trade. However, the military regime remained intent on keeping the region's socially conservative and pious business elite under its thumb, and showed little interest in relinquishing control of economic affairs. Local businesspeople in northeastern Anatolia had long been downcast and marginalized by traditional state elites, and since Doomsday this pattern has continued in the form of the rivalry between the business class and the new hierarchy of securocrats.

In early 2024, the government reaffirmed the military's monopoly on foreign trade, purchasing monopoly on agricultural products, and its role in setting prices for industrial and agricultural goods. The Armed Forces of Trabzon directly control an estimated 30% of the country's gross national product.

Currency[]

Trabzon has issued its own paper currency, the İperpiron (Hyperpyron) since 1988, when it was introduced at equal value to the Turkish Lira. Due to paper shortages, the Trabzonian government initially used pre-Doomsday Lira notes modified with adhesive stamps bearing the image of Altan Sahin. These stamped notes replaced unstamped Lira notes at par. During the 1990s, the stamped Lira notes were gradually removed from circulation and replaced with new İperpiron notes printed in the capital as paper supplies became available.

İperpiron cannot be spent outside the country, meaning external financial transactions of any size must be made at Georgian, Armenian, or Turkish banks - all of which have branch offices in Trabzon. Pragmatically, the İperpiron is an inconvenience, requiring resources to print and circulate, making wireless payments impossible, and making business more difficult; yet, it signals a desire for isolation from external economic influence and a strong claim to autonomy that the Trabzonian regime values.

The regime has tolerated the unofficial use of more stable foreign currencies like the Lira and Georgian Lari due to issues with the İperpiron, namely several bungled revaluations which triggered hyperinflation and public unrest. The widespread black market trade in Liras has helped ease inflation and stabilize exchange rates, even as they undermine the regime's control over money supply and monetary policies.

A substantial portion of hazelnuts, cigarettes, and marine products each year continue to be smuggled out of Trabzon through unofficial and semi-official channels to fetch higher prices in foreign currency.

Communications and mass media[]

See main article: Mass media in Trabzon

The Trabzonian state has a monopoly over all broadcasting. A very high frequency (VHF) transmitter in the capital and two mediumwave transmitters in Giresun and Rize broadcast Turkish-language programs to an estimated domestic audience of up to 500,000 listeners. The national radio program consists of local folk and classical music interrupted hourly by newsreels and official communiques; occasionally there are also scheduled lectures and discussion panels. Religious programming and commercial advertisements are not supported. Radio is currently the dominant medium of entertainment in Trabzon, and reached a larger segment of the population than the domestic press. However, the import of new radio receivers is prohibited, in effect limiting the population to old shortwave or FM receivers acquired prior to Doomsday, and their possession is taxed via annual licensing fees.

Trabzon is one of the few countries in the post-Doomsday era to have banned television altogether, as the regime was concerned over the politically subversive nature of Turkish-language TV broadcasts originating in unfriendly states such as the Sultanate of Turkey or Greater Patnos.

Foreign Relations[]

The Second Empire of Trabzon shares common borders with New Erzurum, the Sultanate of Turkey, the Republic of Greater Patnos, and the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Armenia. Its vision of regional affairs has been dominated by the dedication of the empire's political leadership to the pacification of the Eastern Turkish Wasteland. During the early years of Trabzonian independence until 2000, Trabzon was involved in almost perpetual warfare with neighboring states, leading them to regard its irredentism as the paramount cause of instability in the region.

New Erzurum[]

In 1992, Trabzon occupied and subsequently annexed a 500-square kilometer area of northern Erzurum adjacent to the southern Trabzonian border. Depending on the historian, Sahin's invasion has been characterized as the product of personal and territorial ambitions, a preoccupation with restoring order to a chaotic area, or an attempt to subdue Erzurum's independent vilayets in retaliation for cross-border violence. While factional rivalries may have existed between the various communities in New Erzurum, the arrival of marauding Trabzonian troops led to their effective unification against a common enemy. By the end of 1997 New Erzurum was in effect a partitioned country. With Greater Patnosi assistance, the Coalition Sendika and its legislature controlled the southern part of New Erzurum. The area north of Pasinler district, however, was controlled by Trabzon and its local allies. Sahin had declared on several occasions his intention to withdraw his forces from New Erzurum once the region was "pacified". After 1997 however, Trabzon decided to keep its troops there, and skirmishes and fighting continued intermittently.

The stalemate in New Erzurum was impacted by the 1999-2000 war over the Erzincan Strip, when Greater Patnos inflicted a series of devastating military defeats on Trabzon. Sahin's ability to stage incursions on the south of the country was compromised by these developments, and the long term fighting against the vilayets aroused discontent in his armed forces and domestic populace as well.

Trabzon does not recognize the independence of New Erzurum or the legitimacy of the Coalition Sendika. While political tensions have remained high, New Erzurum continues to be a major conduit for Trabzonian smugglers, and a brisk informal trade is believed to be carried out on both sides of the border.

Republic of Greater Patnos[]

Even prior to 1999 Trabzonian relations with Greater Patnos were, on the whole, unfriendly. Although both states had been formed from remnants of the Turkish Armed Forces after Doomsday, a wide ideological gulf separated monarchist, authoritarian Trabzon from the republican, pro-Kemalist regime in Greater Patnos. Patnosi foreign policy goals have also usually been at odds with those of Trabzon. From 1985 to 1999 a well-maintained balance of power had limited the potential for conflict between the two. But the result of Trabzon's increasingly aggressive counter-insurgency campaign in New Erzurum was the complete breakdown of the regional power balance that had restrained prior tension. Sahin believed he could cut off the insurgents in New Erzurum by occupying the Erzincan Strip, which was ostensibly Patnosi territory; he also used the pretext of further military adventures as an outlet for unreliable and discontented units. The Patnosi armed forces (AFGP) were more than four times the size of Trabzon's roughly 12,000-man expeditionary forces; because of the greater potential of conflict with Kurdistan, though, none of the troops on the northern frontier were very well-equipped. By the winter of 1999, Trabzonian armored forces and motorized infantry, supported by aircraft, had thrust into the Erzincan Strip, overrunning most of the disputed territory within several weeks. The AFGP reacted by redeploying most armored and elite units north, a decision which turned the tide of the war decisively in its favor by early 2000. Trabzon lost over 1,000 men, as well as a third of its armor and a quarter of its air corps. In February 2000 Sahin announced the withdrawal of Trabzonian military personnel from the Erzincan Strip.

Since the 1999-2000 war Greater Patnos moved steadily into a position of military strength in the Eastern Turkish Wasteland. Backed by the Sultanate of Turkey and its allies in the Mediterranean Defense League, and assisted by a growing military establishment of up to 100,000 regulars, the AFGP has been able to discourage further Trabzonian incursions. Despite Sahin's insistence that a Patnosi military buildup constituted a direct threat to Trabzon itself, most international observers did not believe the AFGP would use its superior forces to subjugate Trabzon, though indeed it did nothing to assuage Trabzonian fears that it had the ability to do so.

Sultanate of Turkey[]

In the 2000s, Sahin came to regard the Sultanate of Turkey as the leader of pan-Turkic imperialism and a threat to Trabzonian independence. He vigorously condemned several of the Sultanate's policies - including military and economies ties to Greater Patnos and support for the autonomy of New Erzurum; resistance to the consolidation of the Eastern Turkish Wasteland under Trabzon; and blatant dismissal of Trabzonian claims to parts of Samsun and Sinop provinces, where the borders have never been formally demarcated. Turkish-Trabzonian relations have been limited to relatively modest, informal commercial and trade arrangements.

Tensions between the two states skyrocketed after a Trabzonian patrol clashed with a party of unidentified gunmen near Ordu in 2011. The attackers killed eight members of the Trabzonian security forces before withdrawing in haste, leaving three of their dead behind. Trabzon subsequently released a propaganda film on the incident simply entitled, Ordu 2011, which depicted alleged Turkish insignia and markings on the uniforms and weapons of the gunmen. According to Trabzonian sources Turkish special forces were carrying out frequent reconnaissance operations in Trabzon, taking advantage of lax security measures on the border and the underdeveloped state of the country. The Trabzonian government perceived these raids as a concerted attempt to undermine its authority by demonstrating its impotence to oppose Turkish military endeavors. Some officials also believed that the Sultanate was gathering intelligence on Trabzon for a future invasion. Sahin apparently dismissed those rumors the following year when he pointed out that an invasion by Turkish forces would be costly in military, economic, and diplomatic terms, and if successful, would yield few resources and a hostile populace. Instead, he focused on the Sultanate's support for Greater Patnos, which he claimed could be used as a proxy against Trabzon without the same political repercussions.

Konya neither acknowledged nor denied its involvement in the skirmish. The border between the two countries was closed from September 2011 to March 2013, when it was reopened.

Former Soviet states[]

After World War II, relations between Turkey and the Soviet Union quickly soured, and fear of Soviet expansionism was instrumental in persuading the Turkish government to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952. Turkey's pro-West alignment characterized its relationship with the Soviet Union until the 1960s, when the two countries experienced an important warming of relations due to bilateral economic cooperation agreements. Tensions were heightened again when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, highlighting Turkish fears of Moscow's ability to project its influence further abroad. Participation in NATO made Turkey a belligerent on the side of the West in the Doomsday Crisis, leading to the subsequent Transcaucasian border war.

For both countries the practical consequence of their post-Doomsday fragmentation was the replacement of two relatively large and generally predictable neighbors with six smaller near neighbors facing economic collapse, domestic instability, and a serious refugee problem. There are two former Soviet republics in the region which share land borders with Trabzon, Georgia and Armenia; thus, the Trabzonian regime views them as natural partners for trade and development projects.

Public opinion in Trabzon is divided on Armenia, probably due to the historical animosity which has existed in northeastern Turkey between Armenians and ethnic Turks. Nevertheless, the revival of Ottoman-era bitterness between the two communities seemed remote as long as Trabzon continued to pursue a strictly pragmatic foreign policy towards Abovyan. The outbreak of the Nagorno-Karabakh War between 1992 and 1994 passed almost unnoticed in Trabzon, which was then embroiled with its own bloody conflict in New Erzurum. Sahin did issue a decree adopting an officially neutral position on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, and Trabzonian soldiers turned back Azeri refugees attempting to enter the country at gunpoint. Trabzon also kept the transborder roads to Armenia open, allowing goods to flow into that landlocked country. Enver Çelik, a Trabzonian exile and Turkish contemporary historian, wrote at length on the topic of Trabzonian-Armenian relations during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in a series of essays published in Konya in 2015. Çelik argued that Trabzon withheld recognition of Nakhchivan and carried out routine trade with Armenia despite public sympathy with the Azeri cause in exchange for arms, which Sahin badly needed for his campaign in New Erzurum. Çelik's theory is generally accepted in international circles; however, local Trabzonian sources have disputed this claim on the basis that Armenia, being preoccupied with its own campaigns, was in no position to become a major supplier of arms to Trabzon at the time. Çelik has since conceded that this may not have constituted an official arrangement between the two governments, proposing that black market traders and corrupt army officers in Armenia may have supplied the arms of their own accord, which were sold at inflated prices to Trabzon. Trabzon's current military arsenal includes a disproportionate number of weapons of Soviet origin, although it is unclear whether these were acquired as early as the 1990s or have been supplied by Armenia, Georgia, and the Transcaucasian black market since that time.

Relations between Trabzon and the Turkic republics of Central Asia - namely Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, have been badly strained due to the latter's political alignment with the Republic of Greater Patnos and by extension, the Sultanate of Turkey. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of the Sultanate and a decisive Patnosi victory in the Erzincan Strip presented the Trancaucasian states with the dilemma that Trabzon's ill-advised belligerency had left it defenseless against a possible Turkish or Patnosi invasion. Lacking an indigenous arms industry, Trabzon had to rely on foreign sources for replacing the equipment lost during the war with Greater Patnos. Because of domestic economic insufficiencies, however, Sahin's government was unable to pay for significant military purchases; the erratic acquisition of arms on the regional black market at nearly unpalatable rates was pursued with little enthusiasm. This forced him into the position of having to depend on donors whose aid was linked to perceived national interest.

Diplomatic contact with Georgia was established in 1998, beginning in earnest in 2001 Sahin looked to that country as a major supplier of military materiel. At length both Georgia and Armenia agreed to furnish older or second-line arms for the Trabzonian armed forces, which they supported as a counterbalance to the expanding Sultanate of Turkey. Trabzon's demise as a buffer zone meant, in effect, a more powerful Sultanate on Georgian and Armenian borders, with the potential to lend direct support to Azerbaijan. Konya was in an alliance with Greater Patnos, which backed Nakhchivan, and had always been much more overtly sympathetic than Trabzon to the Azeri cause. From this perspective, Trabzon was by virtue of its very existence restraining the Sultanate from providing direct military assistance to Azerbaijan.

Military aid from Georgia and Armenia has assumed considerable symbolic importance to Trabzon because it was regarded as a political commitment to that country's safety and territorial integrity.

National Security and Defense[]

Trabzon BTRpatrol1

Trabzonian conscript on patrol in New Erzurum, 2007.

Trabzonian national security concerns are dominated by neighboring New Erzurum and by the Sultanate of Turkey with its Greater Patnosi allies, whom Sahin has accused of supplying training, military equipment, and advisers to bolster the independence of the surviving vilayets. Sahin and the administrative council maintain that Konya sponsors the insurgency against their forces in New Erzurum and has conducted air and commando raids into Trabzon.

Trabzon's military decline since the 1999-2000 conflict, universal hostility towards other Turkish regimes, and international isolation have resulted from the wanton aggression against its neighbors that has shaped its foreign policy since the early 1990s. Sahin does not recognize political boundaries drawn by Turkish successor states other than his own, and has pursued irredentist claims to Sinop Province, New Erzurum, and the Erzincan Strip.

Law and order, the control of suspected or overt opposition to the imperial regime, and the detection and control of crime were the responsibilities of the Jandarma (gendarmerie) and the Trabzon National Police. With a few exceptions, the gendarmerie has developed a solid record of early detection and elimination of political dissidence. The army and air corps, which were small but apparently well-trained and effective, were responsible for territorial defense, border control, and for support of the police and gendarmerie during internal security crises.

Civil defense[]

Trabzon Bunker1

Bunker beneath residential apartments in Trabzon

The lessons of Doomsday, including the rapidity with which the old Turkish government collapsed, were not lost on Sahin and the securocrats who controlled the Trabzonian state. Beginning in the late 1990s, Sahin began establishing protocols to ensure the survival of the military high command and administration and providing for its continuity during and after a major conventional war. These included the construction of a network of blast-resistant bunkers located in the capital's industrial areas and many of Trabzon's residential neighborhoods as well. The bunkers are hardened structures ranging in size from single-occupancy pillboxes and casemates to reasonably large underground complexes. In the case of the latter, a highly redundant communications system, consisting of remote as well as on-site elements, is believed to link the various subterranean bunkers and allow those inside to receive instructions from the authorities as needed. Up to 400 bunkers of various sizes were gradually built beneath industrial sites, government buildings, military installations, and residential structures in the cities of Trabzon, Giresun, Ordu, Rize, and Artvin between 1998 and 2024.

The command staff in each of Trabzon's military districts are also believed to have been provided with their own subterranean bunkers, located well away from urban centers, from which they will continue to direct military actions during wartime. Per standard civil defense procedures, all industrial and other major economic facilities are equipped with blast shelters for the workforce, and detailed procedures have been developed for the relocation and safe storage of industrial equipment which will almost certainly be targeted by Trabzon's enemies. The regime has also hoarded vast reserves of military hardware, vehicles, medical supplies, and ancillary kit in caves, mine shafts, and other natural and man-made subterranean spaces repurposed for long-term storage. These stockpiles would be used to facilitate civil defense measures and partisan resistance in the event of an invasion. There are hundreds of such sites tunneled into the sides of mountains in the Pontic range.

Armed Forces[]

See main article: Armed Forces of Trabzon

The Armed Forces of Trabzon were established by imperial decree in 1987. The armed forces were formed from the remnants of the Turkish Third Army's 11th Corps, as well as any Turkish military bases and equipment left on Trabzonian soil after the events of 1983. It is the central institution of modern Trabzonian society, and the country's single largest employer.

The armed forces have two branches: the Trabzonian Army and the Trabzonian Air and Air Defence Corps. The country has no navy; coastal defense and maritime security are vested in the army. Associated forces include the Trabzonian Imperial Guard, which is considered part of the army for official purposes but answers directly to the emperor and the administrative council, subverting the military's chain of command.

Law enforcement[]

The Trabzon National Police, which numbered 1,852 personnel in 2014, served as the first line of defense and was officially the government's chief organ for maintaining order and internal security in urban areas. Its influence and usefulness has in fact declined since the 1980s, and the law enforcement role of the police was largely duplicated by the armed forces and the gendarmerie. Civilian law enforcement agencies were not popular with Sahin when he took power, and in 1986 he disbanded the Coast Guard and reorganized the National Police as a part of the armed forces. The police were made directly responsible to the emperor, who was also commander in chief of the military. It was not considered a branch of the Trabzonian army, however, and did not operate as part of the military command structure.

Broadly speaking Trabzonian police fulfill either administrative and judicial functions. "Administrative" police enforce traffic laws, fingerprint and photograph suspects, inspect motor vehicles, issue licenses, and conduct surveillance of foreigners. Film and literature censorship is another responsibility of policemen assigned to the traditional administrative role. "Judicial" police investigate crimes, issue warrants, and work closely with courts on the local level. Two other categories of police also exist in Trabzon itself: political squads, which investigate acts of subversion and political dissidence, and community watchmen. The watchmen are usually elderly, unskilled auxiliaries who are not armed and prevent local theft and sound the alarm in case of a larger emergency. Police ranks are constable, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and several grades of superintendent and police chief. The national police is divided into district commands headed by superintendents, who answer to a commissioner in the capital. Commissioners followed instructions received directly from the emperor or the administrative council. Due to the declining importance of the police in favor of the armed forces and the gendarmerie, however, local authorities have been permitted to retain de facto control over district police commands.

A police air wing, equipped with Augusta-Bell 204 helicopters, was established after Doomsday. The unit was able to provide mobility between remote police outposts and provide assistance through the airlift of supplies and transport of personnel. It is unclear what equipment, if any, the air wing was operating in 2017. Existing fire brigades, which previously existed under the authority of municipal administrations, were abolished in 1992 and superseded by a centralized fire brigade under the control of the Trabzon National Police. It operated almost exclusively in Trabzon itself, but a three-year plan was underway in 2016 to expand the brigade's services into several other cities.

The police have a policy of recruiting entrants who had at least completed junior high school, though the trend was increasingly toward making officers of policemen who earned their high school education while serving as police. All police personnel undergo a training course of six months' duration at a national police school in Trabzon originally established by the Turkish police in the pre-Doomsday era.

Individual police commands have been accused of such human rights abuses as the operation of illegal checkpoints, torture during interrogations, incommunicado detention, politically motivated disappearances, excessive use of force, and summary executions. The policemen who committed abuses enjoyed impunity due to the virtual absence of prison and military tribunals. Because up to four-fiths of all police personnel were stationed along the coast due to logistics and equipment constraints, towns further inland were the responsibility of the armed forces and gendarmerie. Frequent delays in salary payment has led to growing frustration, prompting a rise in corruption and human rights abuses. Public image of the police is decidedly poorer among Trabzonians than that of other security forces.

Overcrowded Trabzon Jail

Overcrowding in Trabzon's central prison.

The Trabzonian gendarmerie, known as the Jandarma, was a large paramilitary force with strong political connections responsible for law enforcement outside the municipal boundaries of the major coastal settlements and guards the land borders against illegal entry and smuggling. It has jurisdiction over 90% of Trabzon's geographic area and the entire rural population. Most of the gendarmerie's recruits are conscripts, and its officers and noncommissioned officers are transferred from the army. The gendarmes possess staff sections for personnel, intelligence, operations, and logistics and are organized into mobile reaction forces, supplemented by commando units equipped with Cadillac Gage and Panhard armored cars. In 2012 Trabzon announced the purchase of nine wheeled armored personnel carriers, presumably from Georgia, to assist in gendarmerie operations in New Erzurum. Gendarmerie units distinguished themselves in New Erzurum and along the Patnosi frontier during the 1990s. Many of the gendarmerie's law enforcement responsibilities paralleled those of regular police. For example, it had the authority to check contacts between Trabzonians and foreigners, collect taxes, enforce hunting and fishing restrictions, fight forest fires, and exercise powers of arrest independent of the police. It also had the added duty of enforcing conscription laws and could press any able-bodied man into military service as it deemed fit. Gendarmes were much more highly visible in public life than the regular police, keeping both government officials as well as ordinary members of the public under scrutiny.

In contrast to the armed forces, the gendarmerie always possessed a somewhat mixed reputation in Turkish society. Since its founding in the mid-nineteenth century, Turkish gendarmes had cultivated a reputation for the judicious exercise of brute force, and their image among Trabzonians had further declined during the post-Doomsday era since most of the public's interactions with them were related to taxes and conscription. The conscripts are largely drawn from the ranks of the rural unemployed and poorly trained.

The incidence of crime is considered high in comparison to rates in other Turkish-speaking countries. Statistics on criminal activity are difficult to compile due to the fact that Trabzon does not make its penal registries public and much of the acts formally considered police matters are addressed by local communities without being brought to the attention of the police or the gendarmerie. Trabzon's extensive use of imprisonment to punish urban criminals and political subversives has strained the resources of a penal system that was already inadequate. The three major prisons that existed in the region before 1983 had been established by the old Turkish government. By the 2000s these facilities had deteriorated and were inadequately staffed. In 2014 the system included three facilities, the best equipped of which was the central prison in Trabzon. All three suffer from extreme overcrowding, as a result military and police facilities and even hospitals have been repurposed as makeshift jails. The size of the country's prison population has never been disclosed but is estimated to number several thousand. The dramatic increase in Trabzon's prison population after Doomsday has been accredited by some human rights activists to the rapid rise in the number of persons convicted of smuggling, domestic terrorism, and illegal political activity.


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