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urkic archers on horseback gallop as they unleash their arrows, Ottoman infantry rush to repel an attack in World War I, and modern Turkey’s army shows off its prowess. “To the Red Apple!” declaims President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a voiceover.

The aim of this striking video merging different eras is clear — to claim continuity throughout 1,000 years of Turkish history, from the exploits of the Turkic tribes who began to win control of Anatolia a millennium ago, to the young Ottoman troops who resisted an Allied invasion in 1915 at the Battle of Gallipoli, to the exploits of modern Turkey under the rule of Erdoğan himself.

But why the reference to a single piece of colored fruit?

Over the last five years, Erdoğan and his allies have repeatedly used the image of the Red Apple (Kızıl Elma) as a symbol of their present and future ambitions for a fast-developing, economically independent Yeni Türkiye (new Turkey).

Above all, the Red Apple is a symbol of a vision and quest for modern Turkey — to wield influence and hegemony well beyond its borders into Muslim-majority lands formerly ruled by the Ottomans in the Balkans, Middle East, and the Caucasus.

“When asked where they were going, they said they were ‘going to the Red Apple,’” Erdoğan said of Turkish troops who in early 2018 took part in one of three major operations Ankara has launched inside Syria in the last few years. “This is the thing. Yes, we have our Red Apple.”

To outsiders it may seem bizarre to produce the bucolic image of a fruit to project military and political ambition and power. But the Red Apple is a symbol with roots extending long before Erdoğan that equates with Turkey’s centuries-old pursuit of global power.

But what is extraordinary about this symbol that has become central to the ideology of modern Turkey is that both its origins and meaning are mysterious, even to those who use it so emphatically to promote their beliefs. As in all quest myths, such as the Holy Grail, the pursuit is as important as the end goal.

The usual explanation is that the Red Apple was a term for a globe held by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in a giant statue that once stood outside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, symbolizing a desire for world domination. The symbol was then taken up by the Ottomans, Turkish nationalists, and now by Erdoğan himself as he seeks to draw inspiration from the imperial era.

For Turkish nationalists, the country’s cultural borders extend well beyond the limits of the political frontiers accepted by the country’s founder, Kemal Atatürk, when modern Turkey was created in 1923 in the wake of the Ottoman defeat in World War I and the Turkish victory in the War of Independence against Greece.

Erdoğan stated this credo plainly in a speech in November 2016: “Turkey is bigger than Turkey. We know this. We can’t fit into 780,000 square kilometers. The borders of our heart are quite different from our physical borders.”

In the last five years, Erdoğan has increasingly taken on the mantle of nationalism, and a political alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party strengthened his grip on power and helped him win the 2018 presidential election.

These same nationalists have long dreamed of far-fetched concepts like a Turan Army, a force that would include all the Turkic peoples stretching out to Central Asia to project Turkic power across the world.

The nationalist poet Ziya Gökalp, a writer oft quoted by Edoǧan in his speeches, wrote a poem in the early 20th century titled “The Red Apple” in which he declared: “Our last desire in this mortal world / We are Turkish, we will arrive to the Red Apple.”

Those images mixing the arrow-firing Turkic horsemen and the young Mehmetçikler (an affectionate term that refers to soldiers) in World War I are from a video published in August 2020 on Erdoğan’s social media channels to mark the 949th anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert.

In that battle, Seljuk Turks inflicted their first significant victory over the Byzantines in Anatolia, famously even taking the Byzantine Emperor Diogenes prisoner.

The mixing of images of different epochs in the videos — all accompanied by the frenzied strains of the Mehter Band, the Ottoman military orchestra — make clear Erdoğan’s emphasis on a consistent thread running through Turkish history that links together the millennium leading up to his own rule. These feats are united by the constant pursuit of the Red Apple.

In speeches, Erdoğan has repeatedly described Turkish history as a continual march forward, marked by heroic deeds on the way. The thread begins with Manzikert, followed by the 1453 conquest of Constantinople, the 1915 resistance of the Allied invasion at Gallipoli, and the War of Independence led by Atatürk, to name just some of the key dates.