Istanbul: Capital of the World

In the last twenty years or so the city has attracted people from the former Soviet Union. Poorer people flock to the cheaper hotels of Aksaray, and services are advertised in Russian; the wealthier migrate to the Taksim area and luxury clothes shops in Nişantaş advertise their wares in Russian. More recently Aksaray has housed thousands of refugees from civil war-torn Syria; here services are advertised in Arabic.

Its most famous monument, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Haghia Sophia, Ayasofya, built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was converted into a mosque by Sultan Mehmet after the Turkish conquest of the city in 1453. It became a “museum” in 1935. Islamists want to turn it back into a mosque as they have done with the Ayasofya in Trabzon, Trebizond. It is the prototype for almost all subsequent mosques in the Ottoman Empire and beyond, to such an extent that a dome is still commonly regarded as an integral feature of a mosque.

Everybody has his or her own Istanbul, and anyone can feel at home there. The quarters, the cemeteries, the alleyways, the docks are all like a palimpsest of universal history. Napoleon is said to have claimed that if the world had to have a capital it should be Istanbul.

The twentieth century saw great changes to the city. The century started with bursts of architectural activity. The many different communities were being challenged by a new nationalism that transformed the city during the First World War. The implosion of the Ottoman Empire led to a Turcification of Istanbul, and other communities were expelled, decimated or chose to leave. A monoculture was imposed. But the dawn of the twenty-first century has seen a revival of the city’s globalism. It has become a regional financial capital, a cultural metropolis, with some exciting new architecture. Constantly expanding, its transport systems have remarkably kept up with a tenfold increase in population in the last fifty years. This means that nine out of ten of the inhabitants of the city are not from Istanbul. Mostly the newcomers are from Anatolian villages.

From 1453 to 1923 it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire. When Mehmet Fatih, the Conqueror, took over a ravaged and shrunken city, he encouraged whole populations to come to his new capital. His immediate successors welcomed the Muslim Arabs and the Jews expelled from Spain after the Christian Reconquest; their skills were valued and needed. The Ottoman Empire was dominated by Sunni Muslims but was a diverse, multicultural, multilingual, multi-ethnic society. There was certainly a hierarchy of communities, but the Empire had a far greater tolerance of diversity than was the case in contemporary Renaissance Europe. It is misleading to call the Armenians, Greeks, Jews and other communities  “minorities”; that effectively delegitimises them. Insofar as there was a political philosophy the varying communities were seen as elements – anāsīr – of the body politic. Each community had a contribution to make to the whole, comparable to different parts of the body. An arm was as integral as an eye. Of course things went wrong; there were breakdowns of community relations, persecutions and even massacres. But usually the Empire was sufficiently resilient for a balance to be restored that allowed the Empire to survive. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that ideas of exclusive nationalism undermined the Ottoman system. And the geography and demography of the capital reflected that inclusiveness. Istanbul was not rigorously cantonised. Districts were not exclusively Muslim or Christian or Jewish.  Social divisions were as much horizontal as vertical. The poor shared the same space, had the same dilemmas, constraints and opportunities; as did the rich.

The nineteenth century saw outside powers anticipating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and coveting juicy provinces. The observation attributed to a Russian Tsar, that Turkey was the “sick man of Europe” was often repeated, anticipating this collapse. Yet we must remember that the Russian Empire actually predeceased the Ottoman, albeit by six years. The Ottoman Empire also outlived the Habsburg and Hohenzollern Empires. For most of Europe the First World War lasted from 1914 to 1918. But the Ottoman Empire was continually at war from 1911 to 1923. Insofar as strength is seen in military terms the Ottoman forces did not do too badly during that war. They had to fight on four fronts.  They repelled an international invasion – from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand – of the Gallipoli Peninsular; they captured an Anglo-Indian Army (including its British General) in Mesopotamia; they extended territory in southern Arabia; they did not surrender Medina until the end of the war; and, in spite of early reverses, they regained territory in eastern Anatolia lost in the war with Russia in 1878.   

From the 1920s there were over twenty succession states to the Empire. The national narrative of each was based on rejection of or revolt against the Ottomans. These states included not only the non-Turkish states of the Balkans, Middle East and North Africa but also the Turkish heartlands themselves. The Republican Turkey that emerged from the ashes of the Empire was based on a repudiation of the multinational Ottoman state. In the generation after the First World War loss of Empire made Istanbul a sad place: like Vienna, it was built to be the centre of a great Empire.

Modern Turkey stressed its Turkishness; in spite of its secularism, the identity of a Turk overlapped with being a Muslim. In the early 1920s, with the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, the country was purged of its Greek Christians, most of whom had Turkish as their first language. They left to become second class citizens in the Kingdom of Greece. A few thousand Greeks stayed behind in Istanbul, some of whom insisted that they were Turks, not Greek. These Turkish Orthodox Christians kept their church at Panaghia in Tophane.

The historical narrative of all the succession states painted the Ottoman Empire in the most unfavourable light – coinciding with the Turcophobia of elements of western war propaganda. It has only been from the end of the twentieth century that a revised version of the past has had some support. Ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and then the troubled chain of events in the Middle East have led people to think that the Empire must have had a more successful formula. Liberals have reinterpreted the Ottoman Empire as a valid experiment in multiculturalism. Islamists have looked back on the Empire as a successful Islamic political institution.

he boundaries of the Ottoman Empire were very similar to those of the Empire it succeeded – the Byzantine Empire, which always saw itself as the continuation of the Roman Empire. (It was only in the sixteenth century that western historians started using the term Byzantine.) Administering an Empire from the same city meant that, in spite of religious differences, the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires – sub specie aeternitatis – had much in common. For most of the people in the Eastern Mediterranean world in the fifteenth century the Fall of Constantinople/Conquest of Istanbul was a regime change. Inevitably, the managers of each successive Empire were constrained, to some extent, by geographical determinism and by the same opportunities and constraints. There was never any question, in each case, that the city was the focus and capital of the Empire. One successor considered shifting the capital to Mecca to emphasise the Islamic nature of the Empire, but that would not have made any strategic, political or economic sense. Both Empires saw themselves as universal entities with a unique divinely ordained mission. In practical terms, there was a similar degree of delegation to the provinces, with gradations of autonomy defined by pragmatism. There was even the implicit idea that Istanbul’s sovereignty over its co-religionists extended beyond the bounds of the Empire.

Mehmet Fatih (1432-1481) saw himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and indeed, with his patronage of the arts, could be seen as a Renaissance Prince. But there were other Byzantine legacies. Architecture for both was a symbol of power. Until the 1960s most people coming to Istanbul approached the city by the sea and Ayasofya, first as church and then as mosque, dominated the landscape as the outsider approached. In the early nineteenth century the Selimiye barracks on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, when it was built, was the largest garrison in the world, and was another display of military power, designed to overawe the visitor. Although the first Sultans left most churches in the hands of Christians, successive Sultans built enormous mosques that dominated different quarters of the city. Byzantine Emperors and Ottoman Sultans both ensured that the city had adequate fresh water supplies with viaducts and fountains. Ottoman taxation was based on Byzantine precedents. The Byzantines had built up a customs mechanism based on duties on incoming ships that were moored on the Golden Horn. Kommerkion was the word used for a customs payment due, from which, through Latin we get the word commerce. The word was also borrowed by the Ottomans and evolved into the word, gumruk, a word familiar to every visitor to Turkey and the Arab world. The common Turkish word efendi is also derived from the Byzantine Greek word for “gentleman”.

One faith gave each sovereign its legitimacy but other religions were permitted. The quarter of Eyub, with the tomb of one of the Companions of the Prophet was always a site of pilgrimage. In the Byzantine city there were other destinations of pilgrims. Holy wells abounded and the city became famous for its unrivalled collection of holy relics. With the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when the city was plundered by western Christians under the leadership of Venice, these relics were looted and dispersed all over Europe. But the Ottomans continued with the policy of collecting holy relics. This was particularly the case after Sultan Selim attached Egypt to the Empire in 1517. From Cairo he brought relics to the imperial palace, Topkapı, most notably a mantle believed to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad.      

Out of the chaos of the collapse of the Empire and the twelve years of warfare which had brought dislocation and loss to almost every family in Anatolia and Istanbul, Mustafa Kemal (Atatȗrk after the introduction of surnames in 1934) brought the country together on his own terms. Imperial nostalgia was banished, a new regime and a fresh new politics, albeit rooted in the later Ottoman reforms, was launched. The windy Anatolian hill town of Ankara became the new Republic’s capital and seat of government. It was cold in the winter, hot and dry in the summer, a contrast to the moderate Mediterranean climate of Istanbul. Few of the new elite actually came from Ankara or central Anatolia. Public servants and those who sought to be close to men of power reluctantly shifted their bases to Ankara, but hastened back to the Bosphorus for the summer months. 

Mustafa Kemal’s own feelings about the city were ambivalent. He came from Salonica and was one of a succession of men from the Balkans who have had a profound impact on the city. (The Byzantine Emperor Justinian and the sixteenth century all-powerful statesman Sokullu Mehmet are two others who spring to mind). Mustafa Kemal first came to the city as a seventeen year old cadet at the War College (now the military museum in Harbiye). He enjoyed the glamour and pleasures the city provided, and in some ways he became the quintessential late Ottoman Pasha, speaking French, moving in the best circles, familiar with the imperial palaces, staying at the Pera Palas, taking rooms in Beşiktaş, self-consciously concerned about his dapper appearance. He was not alone in absorbing ideas and political programmes from France or Britain. But he grew to abhor the cosmopolitanism of the city, its Levantinism. He looked for an authentic Turkishness and, although his personal relations with the non-Turkish Muslim elements were often excellent, Istanbul represented for him all that was distasteful and an obstacle to the new Turkey of which he dreamed. 

After he had raised the standard of revolt against the Sultan’s authority in 1919, he avoided the city for eight years. In 1926 he authorised a statue of himself to be raised on the headland, Sarayburnu; the promontory that separates the Sea of Marmara from the entry to the Golden Horn. This was a defiant statement against an Islamic objection to statuary, but he only came to the city for the first time, full of apprehension, the following year. He had already travelled all over Anatolia where he was greeted with adulation. In the summer of 1927 he arrived by yacht. City and President greeted each other graciously. The President stayed at the Dolmabahçe Palace, architectural symbol of Sultanic authority. He received delegations of support and the streets were crowded with well-wishers. Security was tight, for several leaders from the war years had been assassinated. But the ice was broken, and Mustafa Kemal came thereafter every year to Istanbul. He established his own villa at Florya to the west of the city. He had strong ideas on architecture, as on most things, and hated domes, eaves, pitched roofs and everything that made up quaint orientalism. He insisted that his villa, now a museum, be made up of straight lines. It is a straightforward structure of brutalist simplicity, an eloquent testimony of the man’s own simplicity and single-mindedness.   

Atatȗrk became a regular visitor to Istanbul and enjoyed the dancing and parties at the Park Hotel near Taksim. He fell ill in 1938, and after a visit to Ankara in May stayed in Istanbul for the remaining six months of his life. Too ill to move back to Ankara, he spent a lot of time on a yacht, bought for his personal use by the government. There he received visitors but from July he was terminally ill. He stayed at his modest Florya villa but in the summer he moved to the less modest Dolmabahçe Palace. He went into a coma on 16 October, came to from time to time but sunk into final unconsciousness two days before he died on 10 November. His body lay in state for seven days in the lavishly ornamental Throne Room at Dolmabahçe Palace – a room that he must have loathed – and people thronged to pay their respects. Two days after he died the crowds were so out of control that several people were trampled to death.    

In the last half century the city has emerged again from the eclipse into which it had been plunged by Republican policies. The city represents the history of the land that is Turkey and has bounced back to vigorous life. Ankara may be the political capital but in every other respect Istanbul is dominant. As well as being the largest city in population, it has become the financial and artistic capital. Most of the newer inhabitants from Anatolian towns and villages have brought their own perspectives, way of life and culture. Older Istanbullus are anxious that their city has been taken over by the peasants of the interior. The newcomers have provided the main support for the AKP and the Islamist policies of President Recep Tayib Erdoğan, to the dismay of the liberal internationally-minded elites who easily relate to the outlooks of their counterparts in Paris, Milan, London and New York. There is a social gulf between the sophisticated quarters of Istiklal Caddesi in Beyoğlu or Bağdat Caddesi on the Asian side on the one hand and the suburb of Sultanbeyli and the area around the Fatih Mosque on the other.

The different classes come together in their enthusiasm for different football teams. The three main Istanbul teams – Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe – have their supporters all over the country. The fourth team of the country is not based in Ankara but is from Trabzon (which has also seen a remarkable transformation in recent years). However, the traditional base of support for each of the Istanbul teams reflect the social history of the city. Beşiktaş is the oldest team with a stadium that occupies the site of the imperial stables attached to the Dolmabahçe Palace. It is seen as the team of the working class. Galatsaray is named after the old elite school in the centre of Beyoğlu and represents the older elite of the city. The Kurdish leader, Abdulla Ocalan, in an interview once expressed his support for Galatasaray and many Kurds now support the team as a result. And Fenerbahçe with its stadium on the Asian side of the Bosphorus – a location that does not prevent the team from participating in the European World Cup – is the team of the new meritocracy. The Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk, typically, is a supporter.

Soccer is followed intensely and bitter are the rivalries. As they enter the stadiums supporters are frisked for weapons and opposing fans directed to terraces behind high wire netting. The whole country follows key matches, especially between two of the three teams, and crowds pour onto the streets to celebrate or bemoan the result.

I could write a book about the different quarters of Istanbul (indeed I have). Nearly every part has its stories; a modern mosque, a monument, a cemetery, a piece of Byzantine wall, an Art Nouveau shop front. Let us pause in Balat, an old Jewish quarter; Istiklal Caddesi, the spine of Belle Epoque Istanbul and Yildiz Palace, home of the last powerful Sultan, Abdűlhamid II.

Balat is a suburb on the west side of the Golden Horn about four kilometres from the Bosphorus. It lies below the old Byzantine Palace of Blachernae. The word Balat is derived from the Greek Palation, meaning simply Palace. Originally Balat was a suburb allocated to Christians. There had been a small Jewish community in Byzantine Istanbul but it was augmented in the sixteenth century when the Sultan encouraged migration to the new Ottoman capital. Initially the Jews came from the Balkans but after the final fall of Andalusia, Jews (and Arabs) were specifically invited to Ottoman lands. They came in large numbers and settled in Balat.

From the early seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth century people Balat was the predominant Jewish quarter of Istanbul. The Andalusian Jews brought their own Spanish dialect, Ladino, with them and a distinctive Judaeo-Spanish culture prevailed. There were already synagogues in the area, named after Balkan locations – Plovdiv and Ohrid for example. It was predominantly – but not exclusively – Jewish, for Turkish Muslims, Armenians and Greeks also lived there alongside them, generally in harmony.

Large changes affected the area from the nineteenth century. The Jewish community was conservative and observant. The main divisions in the nineteenth century came from a secular education which challenged the authority of the religious leaders. Istanbul also admitted Jews from Italy and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. Prosperity also led to migration from Balat outwards to the other side of the Golden Horn around Galata. The 1940s and onwards further diminished Jewish Balat. Imposition of a property tax in the Second World War targeted non-Muslims and many chose to emigrate, the wealthier to France and Canada, the poorer to the new State of Israel.

Istanbul was noted for its urban conflagrations. One happier, though unexpected, outcome of these fires was that from the 1860s there was a coherence in the urban planning and architecture of the area known before the Republican period as Pera, and since as Beyoğlu. It was the home of the wealthy, the elite (of all religions) and the foreigner. 

In the nineteenth century Istiklal Caddesi was the spine of non-Muslim Istanbul. Even in Byzantine times this suburb, situated across the Golden Horn from the main city with its great mosques and the Sultan’s palace of Topkapı, was  separate. It was pera, beyond the city and was the base for the Genoese, who were uncertain allies of the Byzantines. From the Galata Tower two town walls descended to the Golden Horn. Some parts of these Genoese walls can still be seen, including a gate with the Genoese symbol above the doorway.

A walk along Istiklal Caddesi, previously known as Grande Rue de Pera – and, happily, it is largely pedestrianised – is an encounter with the social, cultural and architectural history of the last century and a half. In the last twenty years there has been a tension between commercial interests in smashing and rebuilding on the one hand, and preserving and celebrating this heritage on the other. There have been victories on both sides. Some buildings have a distinctively Istanbul architecture. Many of the architects were French and Italian, though the owners of the land were often Ottoman Muslims. The Balians, the Armenian family who designed palaces, mosques and barracks are represented by the entrance to Galatasaray school. Several shopping malls, pasaj, on the pattern of those in Naples and Brussels, have been restored in recent years. 

It is worth looking at all the buildings, for some gems may be overlooked. For example, the small Asnavur Pasajı has a narrow entrance, but above it and on the upper balconies are fine examples of Art Nouveau ironwork, as well as mosaics on the floor. On the eastern side is another gem, at number 201. It houses an old fashioned shop selling clocks and antiques. On the iron grille doorway is an Art Nouveau giant beetle. The walls and windows could have been designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Like many smaller buildings, the name of the architects is on the wall. In this case the architects were called Yenidunia and Kyriakides, a Turkish-Greek partnership. 

On the other side of the road is a larger building, the Elhamra Pasajı, built in 1920. The architect was Turkish – Ekrem Hakki Ayverdi, and it is in an extraordinarily bold eclectic style. Gothic arches frame the windows. Slender classical columns between the windows rise to a neo-Islamic muqarnas blind archway. It is worth pausing to contemplate this example of multiculturalism frozen in stone. Purists would condemn the mixture of styles, but it is in many ways a reflection of the universal quality of the city, which was, even as it was being built, vanishing. The building occupied the site of a French theatre to which, in 1861, a ballroom called the Crystal Palace was added. A feature of the street was its commitment to pleasure. Cinema in Turkey began here. Betwen Yeşilcam Sokak and Sakizağaçı Cadesi was one of the great Istanbul cinemas and theatres, originally called the Gaumont (or Gomon) and then the Glorya. Louis Armstrong once played there.  It was lost in the first decade of the twenty-first century, although today several cinemas still remain along the road.  

Music was a feature of Ottoman Istanbul. Along the street at the corner of Nuru Ziya Sokak the Commendiger family used to have a shop selling classical musical instruments. The Ottoman ruling family were among their most loyal customers. In 1847 the Commendigers hosted the Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt. He played to the imperial family and gave lessons to some of its members. Sultan Abdűlaziz was no great reformer but he did love music. He, and other members of the family, composed music. His son, Abdűlmecid, was a lover of music and also a painter.

The cousin of Abdűlmecid, the Sultan Abdűlhamid II, has had a bad press. He is generally portrayed as paranoic, suspicious and reactionary. He had built for himself in his palace at Yıldız, then on the edge of the city, a couple of miles up the Bosphorus. He was, like the rest of his family a lover of western classical music, in his case opera. He had a small theatre built at Yıldız where an Italian company would put on operas by Offenbach and Verdi. But he did not like unhappy endings and in La Traviata he directed that Violetta should not die a consumptive death but be restored to vigour in the final act. The theatre survives.

Abdűlhamid was also a patron of architecture. Unlike members of the family of the previous generation he did not go for the outrageous extravagance and splendours of the palaces of Dolmabahçe or Beylerbey, but a relatively modest extended villa at Yıldız. This palace had extensive grounds that stretched down to the Bosphorus, with one or two independent buildings as guest houses. The whole enclosure was surrounded by walls about five metres high. He was suspicious and had every reason to be. His uncle, Sultan Abdűlaziz, had been either driven to suicide or murdered; his immediate predecessor and brother, Murad, was deposed; he himself survived an assassination attempt. He concentrated power in the hands of himself and a few trusted servants, but he also had a reforming vision that owed more to Metternich than to John Stuart Mill. During his reign there was a huge expansion in education. His palace, now a museum, reveals his personality. As well as his theatre, he also had a carpenter’s workshop where he liked to make furniture, some examples of which are in the museum. He was also a builder. His favourite architect was an Italian, Raimondo D’Aronco, who built much of the palace. Abdűlhamid also commissioned the Yıldız mosque just below the palace. This was designed by the last of the Armenian Balian family of architects. It has Gothic windows and to this mosque the Sultan would drive the hundred yards from the Palace each Friday.

Sultan Abdűlhamid also built up his own personality cult, strange for a reclusive. He saw the importance of visible symbols of monarchy. In his youth he had accompanied his uncle, Sultan Abdűlaziz to London; he even went to Balmoral as the guest of Queen Victoria. He read of the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees, and celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession with much ceremony. His personal arms and portrait appeared on school textbooks.

His reign, 1876-1909, saw a weakening of the Empire and the loss of Christian provinces in Europe. At the same time Muslim refugees arrived from Central Asia and the Caucasus, fleeing from advancing Russian imperialism. The ideology of the Empire became more explicitly Muslim. The idea of the caliphate, khilafa, took on fresh life under Abdűlhamid. He reached out to Muslims beyond the Empire, especially to India. He was particularly committed to retaining the allegiance of the Syrian provinces. Some of his closest advisers were Syrians. There still survive throughout the Empire – in Jaffa and Aleppo for example – clock-towers he had built. These were symbols to bind the Empire. Of course in the end he failed.

In his person the Sultanate and the Caliphate were united, an identity both secular and religious, a revival of the Caesaropapism of the Byzantine Emperors. In 1923 Mustafa Kemal abolished the Sultanate, but for a year retained the Caliphate in the person of the music-loving painter Abdűlmecid, nephew of Abdűlhamid. But he was sent packing in 1924, in spite of protests from India. During the 1920s and 1930s there were several possible contenders for the role of Caliph, including King Farouk of Egypt. The notion of caliphate went into eclipse until revived in this century.

 Istanbul carries its inheritance lightly. It is a modern city but a palimpsest of two millennia of artistic and cultural endeavour. Fifty years ago there was a touch of provincialism about the city. The main political and economic decisions were made in Ankara. But today it is the dominant city of the country – New York to Ankara’s Washington or Sydney to Australia’s Canberra. 

Not only has it asserted itself as Tukey’s major city once again, it has also resumed an international role. The internationalism is less visible than in the late nineteenth century, but it is possible to see public signs in Istanbul today in more than half a dozen languages. Visitors, residents and tourists arrive from all over the world. 

The political and social changes since 1960 – three military coups, democratic elections, mass immigration into the city from rural areas, extensive developments in architecture and transport – have not undermined the essential personality of Istanbul. You are never far from the waters of the Golden Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara. If there are unsightly tower blocks in one direction, there are the age-old monuments of faith and power in another – Sűleimaniye mosque, Ayasofia, the Selimye barracks.

Istanbul is eternal. It still has something for everyone. It is the most exciting city in the world.

Citations

For background on Istanbul, see Andrew Dalby, Tastes of Byzantium (I B Tauris, London and New York, 2010); Erik J Zȗrcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building (I B Tauris, London and New York, 2010); Jonathan Harris, editor, Byzantine History (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2005), and my own book Istanbul: A Cultural History (Signal Books, Oxford, 2010).