When the leaders of NATO's 32 member states arrived at Türkiye's Presidential Complex, the Külliye, on Tuesday evening, President Erdoğan and his wife met them to the crash of the Mehter, the Ottoman military band whose drums once thundered day and night beneath the walls of Vienna.
The welcome opened the 36th NATO Summit, the second Türkiye has hosted after İstanbul in 2004. US President Donald Trump, plainly taken with the band, turned to it and gave a thumbs-up as it played.
He was not the first European visitor to be won over by that sound. But it took Europe a while.
Music as a weapon
The Mehterân was the marching band of the Janissary corps, the Ottoman Empire's elite standing infantry, among the first professional standing armies in Europe and early masters of gunpowder warfare. Founded in the late 14th century and recruited for much of their history through the devşirme levy, the Janissaries were the shock troops of Ottoman expansion for nearly 500 years.
The Mehter marched with them, and it was not there for entertainment. With massive kös kettledrums (some so large they were carried on camels), shrieking zurnas, cymbals, and bells, the band played through assaults and bombardments: a wall of sound designed to steady the Janissaries and unnerve everyone on the other side of the ramparts. The Mehter was psychological warfare set to music, and it is widely regarded as the oldest military band tradition in the world.
Nowhere was that clearer than at Vienna. For two months in the summer of 1683, the city lived inside a soundscape engineered to break it. Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha's army ringed the walls, and defenders' accounts describe the Ottoman drumming rolling over the city through assaults and into the night, relentless, disorienting, a constant reminder of the army at the gates.
The most desperate front of the siege was fought in silence, by listening. Ottoman sappers tunneled toward the walls to plant mines beneath the bastions, and the Viennese hunted them by sound: dried peas scattered on drumheads, bowls of water set on cellar floors, watched for the faint tremor that meant men were digging underneath the city. Above ground, the drums; below ground, a city straining to hear its own destruction approaching. Vienna listened for its life.
The siege broke on 12 September 1683, when a relief army under Polish King Jan III Sobieski swept down from the Kahlenberg heights, its winged hussars delivering what is often called the largest cavalry charge in history, and the long Ottoman retreat from Central Europe began.
Vienna then claimed the last word in the war of sounds. The Pummerin, the great bell of St. Stephen's Cathedral, was cast, by tradition, from melted-down Ottoman cannon abandoned at the siege. The drums that had tormented the city were answered, ever after, by a bell made from the guns that accompanied them. Its successor still rings in the Austrian New Year.
Then something unexpected happened: Vienna fell in love with the soundtrack.
The conquest that worked
Within a century of the second siege, "Turkish music" had become a craze in the very city the Mehter had failed to intimidate into surrender. European courts hired Janissary-style bands. Composers wrote in the alla turca style, imitating the Mehter's driving rhythms and percussion.
Mozart, working in Vienna, wrote the Rondo alla Turca, arguably the most famous piano showpiece ever composed, and built an entire opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, around Janissary-flavored music. Beethoven wrote a "Turkish March" for The Ruins of Athens and, more consequentially, put a full Turkish-march episode into the finale of his Ninth Symphony, scored with the Mehter's signature battery: bass drum, cymbals, and triangle.
Those three instruments entered the Western symphony orchestra through the Ottoman military band. The fashion ran so deep that pianos of the era were sometimes built with a "Janissary stop," a pedal that added drum and bell effects so amateurs could storm Vienna from their parlors.
The Janissaries themselves did not survive the era that made their music famous. The corps, by then a political force that made and unmade sultans, was violently abolished by Mahmud II in 1826 in the Vaka-i Hayriye, and the Mehter was disbanded with it. The tradition was revived in the 20th century, and today's Mehter is a ceremonial unit, the one that played in Ankara on Tuesday.
A message in the music?
That the Mehter has lost none of its edge showed at that same welcome. The band played for each leader as they arrived, and as Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his wife, Mareva Grabowski-Mitsotakis, walked in, it struck up "Ceddin Deden."
For readers unfamiliar with the repertoire: "Ceddin Deden" ("Your Ancestor, Your Grandfather") is the most famous Mehter march of them all, a rolling salute to Ottoman forebears whose refrain hails the "ever-heroic Turkish nation." It is, roughly speaking, the last song a Greek prime minister would pick from the jukebox.
Was it a deliberate wink? Impossible to say. Every leader got a march, "Ceddin Deden" is the corps' greatest hit, and someone had to draw it. It is entirely possible Greece simply came up in the rotation. But the selection was, as the diplomats say, noted. Mitsotakis, for his part, walked in without missing a step, which after six centuries of Greek-Ottoman history may be the most diplomatically fluent response available.
If nothing else, the moment proved the original point: 343 years after Vienna, the Mehter can still get inside a European capital's head.
The anthem in the room
Which brings the story to its final turn. The melody Beethoven set in that same Ninth Symphony finale, the Ode to Joy, is today the official anthem of the European Union.
So when Europe's heads of state and government stood at the Presidential Complex listening to the Mehter, they were, in a sense, hearing the ancestor of their own anthem's percussion section. The band that played day and night outside Vienna's walls in 1683 played a welcome in Ankara in 2026, and Europe's music has been answering it for more than two centuries.
What passed through the leaders' minds as the kös drums struck up is not on the record. Most, in all likelihood, heard pageantry: color, brass, a host nation's flourish. But that is precisely the measure of what three and a half centuries have done. A Viennese defender in 1683 heard that sound and understood it as a promise of destruction; a chancellor or prime minister in Ankara hears it and reaches for a phone to film it. Somewhere between those two reactions lies the entire history of Türkiye and Europe: from enemies at the walls to allies at the summit table, with the same drums keeping time throughout.
The Janissaries never took Vienna. Their drums, it turns out, took everything else.
Editor's note: The popular claims that the croissant and Viennese coffeehouse culture originated with the 1683 siege are folklore with weak documentary support and are omitted here.