Re-Inventing Reis: History and the Discursive Evolution of Erdoğan’s Popular Title

In recent years, the title Reis has emerged as a popular nickname for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, both within Turkey and beyond. While majority of studies consider this title merely as a superficial element of the authoritarian rule of Erdoğan, this paper argues that Reis is a significant political symbol in modern Turkey, transcending Erdoğan’s individual political identity or cult of personality. Utilizing the concept of ‘invented traditions’, this study suggests that Reis constitutes a deliberately designated political symbol. Being constructed by various state actors, ruling elite and mass population, it serves to legitimize not only Erdoğan’s personal authority, but also to disseminate authorities’ dominant ideological discourses and narratives, thereby providing popular mobilization around them. The paper shows the history of construction of the symbol of reis and the evolution of Reis’s discursive meanings starting from a sacred image of national leader to a symbol of ideological fusion of Turkish nationalism and Turkish Islamism, as well as Ottoman nostalgia.