Like many of Asia’s antique cities, Istanbul is a palimpsest, continuously inscribed by new movements of people and ideas, even as older writings on its parchment remain faintly visible.
Few Istanbul neighborhoods manifest a multilayered identity as much as Kuzguncuk, which lies on the Asian shore of the Bosporus. Legend has it that Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century first settled here. Their neighbors were Greeks, Armenians and other Christians, part of the Ottoman Empire’s extraordinarily cosmopolitan mix of merchant and trading communities.
The local population is almost entirely Muslim now. Strolling through the neighborhood’s dappled streets one afternoon last week, I came across a synagogue and an Armenian Orthodox church. Both seemed permanently shut. The man who opened the door to the Greek Orthodox church only to wave us away had the sullenness of a minority under perpetual siege.
My companion remarked that the few remaining Greeks in Istanbul have little reason to be bon vivants. She is right. It has been nearly half a century since Istanbul lost the last of its non-Muslim minorities, driven out by a vengeful (and secular) Turkish nationalism. Rural migrants from the Black Sea region moved into the houses vacated by the Jews, Greeks and Armenians.
A Trendy Enclave
Ethnically cleansed Istanbul is now one of the port cities — Shanghai and Kochi, India are among the others — to be self- consciously, and profitably, recovering their multicultural past. Kuzguncuk, too, is being gentrified, helped by Istanbul’s creative class of architects, artists, journalists and designers, as well as visitors like myself, looking for a glimpse of old Istanbul in the neighborhood’s renovated Ottoman houses with overhanging wooden balconies.
Even as it frantically re-establishes its links with “old” Europe, Istanbul demonstrates how a city’s exotic past can be enlisted into a high-end consumption of culture — without any sustained national reckoning with a painful history of pogroms and expulsions. Kuzguncuk itself reveals how Turkish identity today is being revised through careful negotiations and compromises with the past and present.
For all its gentrification by latte-sipping liberals, this old working-class neighborhood is still dominated by socially conservative middle-class Muslims, constituting a solid vote bank for the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which just won a third consecutive national election by a landslide.
via Rising Turkey Is No Neo-Ottoman Threat to West: Pankaj Mishra – Bloomberg.
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