Kentel, MESA 2013

Galata and Pera across the Historical Peninsula: Late 19th Century Istanbul and Construction, Contestation and Imagination of Urban Dualities

I would suspect there may be a degree of disappointment in the audience when it shortly finds out that among the presenters of this session, there are three people who work on the politics of space in Turkey but none of their presentations are on Gezi protests from this summer, i.e. one of the most significant manifestations of politics of space in the modern history of Turkey. In order to partially meet this assumed expectation, let me start with a few words on this event that would also enable me to situate my own work better in a historical as well as theoretical context. Gezi Protests started as an urban resistance movement against the demolishing of a park at the heart of the city for the construction of a shopping mall. As in many other movements of resistance, it quickly encompassed many different agendas and turned into a massive movement against the government. Even though its initial moments were also brutally repressed by police forces, the government came to embrace those initial moments when the issue was only about protecting the green space. The production (and, as in this case, destruction) of space, however, is never a simple process and never be reduced to a simple choice between trees and shops. Spatial arrangements always create contested meanings; it is not specific to today. This links us back to my own research focusing on an urban project conducted in the 19th century Istanbul, in a location very close to Gezi Park, where, in this case, not the destruction but the construction of a park becomes the symbol of urban capitalism and loss of the common spaces of the Istanbulites. Such 19th century spaces, I would further argue, helped to create an image of a timeless duality within the city, to which I will return at the end of my presentation. Just to familiarize those who are not familiar with Istanbuls topography, here is Galata and Pera, across the historical peninsula.

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Kentel, MESA 2013

Galata and Pera across the Historical Peninsula: Late 19th Century Istanbul and Construction, Contestation and Imagination of Urban Dualities

The story starts with the construction of Tnel, or what was then called Metropolitan Railway of Constantinople, the second subway ever built in the world after the London Underground which connected the commercial area of Galata to the residential and upper class neighborhood Pera, in 1875. The project gave way to another construction: for the municipality of the district decided to use the excavation mass created by the Tnel to fill an important portion of a Muslim cemetery (Kk Kabristan or Petit-Champs des Morts) that lied next to Pera, and on that very ground, above the graves, construct citys first European style garden (Jardin du Petit-Champs or Tepeba Bahesi). In the opening ceremony of the subway, the president of the company that undertook the construction, Baron Foelckershamb proposed to the health of the Sultan and of all other Sovereigns who had their representatives in the presence. He said:All have a common interest in the universal mission of civilization and progress. Even though the distance in which the Tnel operated was quite a short one, the project was clearly seen as a sign of the achievement of the universal mission of civilization and progress in this European quarter of an oriental capital. The great cultural critic Walter Benjamin once saidCultural treasures owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.i This paper follows the assertion of Benjamin and traces the anonymous toil of the contemporaries, and how documents of civilization, in the late-nineteenth-century stanbul, were also documents of barbarism. An exploration of these projects of modern urbanism, the construction of the Tnel and opening of the citys first European-style modern park, reveals that

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Kentel, MESA 2013

Galata and Pera across the Historical Peninsula: Late 19th Century Istanbul and Construction, Contestation and Imagination of Urban Dualities

modern Galata and Pera, as well as their image within the larger cultural geography of Istanbul, were built upon a barbaric appropriation and subsequent transformation of various spaces, most notably and interestingly, spaces of the dead. In order to illustrate this point, let me go back into the 19th century and read some quotations from the European visitors who visited the cemetery before a significant portion of it was turned into a park. In 1852, John Berwick Harwood, an English writer, described it in such words: Certain images to be noted: Greeks who drink coffee and wine, Turkish and Armenian women flirting with men, and animals: kites and vultures. Some twenty years later, famous Italian author Edmondo de Amicis also accounted his visit: Other images: Turks who smoke pipe, playing kids, grazing cows. What is present in these accounts is a different kind of Muslim cemetery, where people of different religions, different genders, and different ages socialize with each other, with animals, and with, naturally, the dead. A certainly diverse, and even a cosmopolitan, if you will, picture. The urban memory of this diversity, however, is virtually inexistent both in the popular and scholarly literature, and it was rather replaced by another account of diversity; an account of Cosmopolitanism with capital letters; an account of the district that is thought to possess a different, modern, European identity which embraced upper-class diversity always-already; which, in fact, necessitated the destruction of the aforementioned spaces for lower class Turks, Greeks, Armenians, dogs, birds, and the dead. The construction of the Jardin du Petit-Champs, which included a restaurant, two theaters, a view terrace and which could only be entered with an entrance fee, in the place of the cemetery, was one of the several urban projects that strengthened the upper-class identity of Pera, along with hotels, arcades, opera halls and of course, the Tnel.

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Kentel, MESA 2013

Galata and Pera across the Historical Peninsula: Late 19th Century Istanbul and Construction, Contestation and Imagination of Urban Dualities

The new urban space created by such projects were populated by the representatives of European capitalists, local elites, wealthy Levantines, a naturally multilingual/multicultural/multi-religious group of people; a community which was more or less destroyed by the nation-state project of the Young Turks and Kemalists in the following century. The loss of such diversity is rightfully lamented both in the academic and in the popular circles, but the fact that the space for such diversity had been built upon the destruction of other spaces of diversity is largely neglected. This neglect can be clearly seen in the narratives on the district, which treat its history in a continuous, linear fashion, as one which was always radically different than the rest of Istanbul. The fact that the district was a Genoese colony in the Byzantine times and some autonomy was granted to its already established trade communities in the Ottoman era has provided a basis for this continuous narrative of difference, diversity, non-Muslim and European identity, that was put in a dichotomy with the other side of the Golden Horn, which was seen as an Islamic capital par excellence. Four centuries of Ottoman rule, however, had naturally left its mark on Galata (one part of this mark was the Muslim cemeteries around Pera), and by the early 19th century, Galatas character was an intelligible one within an early-modern empire. Thus, it was not an alien space. This is not what the general scholarly consensus on Galata suggests, however. Nur Akn, for example, one of the prominent Turkish architectural historians, states that: Galata and Pera, from the very early years, were like a mosaic. It was hard to find any social or physical commonality between Galata, which had an atmosphere very similar to an Italian city; and Sleymaniye or Fatih. Galata and its extension, Pera, were like parts of a European city. Everything Western was first implemented there.ii

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Kentel, MESA 2013

Galata and Pera across the Historical Peninsula: Late 19th Century Istanbul and Construction, Contestation and Imagination of Urban Dualities

It is hard to argue that being like a mosaic is a very striking feature for an early-modern port city, and as I have suggested earlier, the complex social scene presented by the accounts on the cemetery shows that, that mosaic actually included low class elements that do not find a place in the nostalgic accounts about the district. What I argue is that a low class diversity that was an intelligible part of the capital of an early modern empire was replaced by an upper-class diversity, through projects of modernity, civilization, green spaces, etc., which helped to change the meaning of the difference between two sides of the Golden Horn, granting one side the progress of the West and the other side the backwardness of East and the name old city or historical peninsula, thus creating a colonial duality in the absence of a strict colonial regime a duality that still looms large within the literature. Again to quote Akn, Golden Horn did not only separate two very close neighborhoods of the same city, but also two worlds. Galata and Pera was the West in the East.iii Such a dichotomous, orientalist view of the urban space, I argue, was not possible without the realization of the modern urban projects that instituted, for example, a view terrace in the Jardin du Petit-Champs in order for the upper-class visitors to enjoy the Oriental vista with minarets, presented by the other side of the Golden Horn, a feature very much abundant in colonial cities. Through this colonial working mentality of the late 19th century capitalism, heterogeneous public spaces and conflicting images they possessed were tamed: dangerous diversity of men, women, animals and the dead were replaced by a safe, upper-class diversity, and this drastic intervention to the public space of Galata was put to oblivion by the help of a continuous historical narrative that took this late 19th century situation as an always-already condition of difference, against the other side of the Golden Horn. The complexities of the 19th century urban space of stanbul was first tried to be eliminated through spatial violence; and they were later
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Kentel, MESA 2013

Galata and Pera across the Historical Peninsula: Late 19th Century Istanbul and Construction, Contestation and Imagination of Urban Dualities

tried to be enframed through epistemic violence of creating discursive hierarchies and binary oppositions. The debris of this destructive creation is to be found in the spaces of buried as the transcendental subject of historical consciousness. Just to turn back to the Gezi anecdote I began with, I just want to underline the fact that urban struggles, right to the city and right to remember are much complex and deeper than protecting the environment, or green, for I have tried to show that green itself may be a symbol of the loss of common spaces and memories of different heterogeneities, of documents of civilization which are also documents of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 256. ii Ibid., 171. iii Ibid., 39.

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