Ottoman Turkey, for instance, banned clocks when they first appeared.
The problem of how to cope with emerging nationalism in the Balkans faced by the multinational empires on all sides (Austria-Hungary, Russia and Ottoman Turkey) was the nub of the problem.
But 94-year-old Samuel Kadorian of Van Nuys, Calif. says he remembers the forced march of his family and thousands of other ethnic Armenians from their home in Ottoman Turkey back in 1915.
Erdogan Toprak, deputy chairman of the opposition Republican People's Party, has said the prime minister "would like to bring the sultan back" - a reference to the old days of the Ottoman Empire before Turkey become a republic.
As the pope learned in Turkey, the Ottoman treatment of minorities was less harsh than that of some Christian regimes.
Such paternalism may have helped to shake Turkey out of its Ottoman torpor, but it goes down badly in liberal-democratic modern Europe.
Since Turkey's new geopolitical assertiveness of Ottoman heritage will be driven by Turkish interests, those interests can best be reconciled with European interests on an arm's length basis.
In 1920, the Treaty of Sevres was signed between Turkey and the Allied powers after World War One, relieving Turkey of much of the land ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
For the past 90 years Turkey has in fact neglected the Arab lands of the former Ottoman empire and focused on the West.
Armenia promises to recognise Turkey's borders and to allow a commission of historians to investigate the fate of the Ottoman Armenians.
After World War I the defeated Ottoman Empire's most successful general, Mustafa Kemal , took over and made the revolutionary decision that Turkey's future lay in tying itself firmly to the West.
In today's secular Turkey, people can still be heard murmuring a prayer as they pass the lavish tombs which the early Ottoman sultans liked to build.
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