Ismet Hezer lay on a narrow bed in the back of his apartment, a tube running to a colostomy bag by his side. When I’d first met him two years earlier, back in 2014, he had been a forbidding old man with a skullcap, beard and the kind of granite visage that time had not so much aged as polished to its essential hardness. Now his scalp was bare, his chin messily stubbled, his skin hugging the sunken orbs of his eyes; he looked like a day-old chick blown from its nest in a storm. He and his wife Mahinur were vague about the nature of his illness but they hinted that it was a result of complications caused by a suicide attempt.
I had first met Ismet after reading a news report about his attempted suicide. He lived in Tokludede, a tiny, tight-knit cluster of balconied timber houses with gardens of fruit trees and chickens, nestled against Istanbul’s old Byzantine land walls, close to the Golden Horn. The neighborhood took its name from Toklu Ibrahim Dede, a soldier in the army of Sultan Mehmet II who had settled in the area following his capture of the city in 1453.
After his conquest of Istanbul from the Byzantines, Mehmet ordered prominent soldiers and members of his court to restore and beautify different parts of his new capital, and this was probably how Toklu Ibrahim Dede gave his name to the area. The neighborhood’s chief pride was a collection of graves that lay through a nearby gate in the walls, known as the Blachernai Gate, after the Byzantine palace that had stood nearby. They were said to belong to Muslim saints martyred during the first Arab siege of Constantinople in 674, among them companions of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Lying in a bulge in the fortifications, which seemed to curl around it like a cupped stone hand, Tokludede had felt like a place apart. The outside world entered through a single road that doubled back on itself in a loop, as if realizing it wasn’t needed there.
But the outside world arrived anyway. When I visited, Tokludede was in the process of being scraped away, its wooden buildings demolished and its gardens erased, with new homes replacing them, along with a large hotel. These “urban renewal” projects were happening all over Turkey. Usually justified on the grounds of earthquake preparedness, their animating principle was more often the profit margin of the stakeholders involved in them.
Over the course of several years, I visited Tokludede and witnessed its transformation from a historic neighborhood with a deep-rooted social and urban fabric into an ersatz version of itself, with its original community scattered to the winds. The story of its transformation is that of the erosion of traditional community bonds occurring across Turkey as a byproduct of the nation’s embrace of a relentless neoliberal development model. A national program of urban transformation has served the ruling government’s aims of generating economic growth, but has come at the cost of both the character and amenity of historic neighborhoods, as well as social cohesion.
Residents of Tokludede were enticed or coerced into leaving, their homes taken from them in exchange for a sum far below market value. Often, they were shepherded into tower blocks on the fringes of the city, supposedly more valuable than their old homes, and burdened with hefty loans. Tokludede’s historical connections made it desirable real estate and were almost certainly among the reasons why it was targeted for urban renewal. Even before the neighborhood had emptied out, the municipality started digging up roads and cutting off water, electricity, streetlights and finally sewage, until the place was all but dead and only the desperate or uniquely obstinate remained. Among those were Ismet and Mahinur Hezer.
I had read that Ismet, finally overcome by the pressure, had tried to kill himself by drinking a bottle of agricultural pesticide. He had penned a suicide note addressed to a prosecutor, in which he blamed his death on everyone from the project developer to the district mayor, the Istanbul metropolitan mayor and the man who was then prime minister: Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
When I had first visited him, he seemed to have recovered from his suicide attempt. Tokludede was screened off with high metal sheeting and patrolled by security guards. He met me at the small gap he used to get in and out. The home where he and Mahinur had lived for more than 40 years was the last of the old houses remaining. Around it rose the concrete shells of their replacements.
As we drank tea in an orchard that survived amid the construction work, Ismet showed me the suicide note, scrawled in a spidery hand on a small page of lined paper, as well as his hospital report and the latest threatening letter from the municipality. His fighting spirit had apparently revived.
“It was real poison I drank,” he told me with peculiar eagerness. “You can’t even stand its smell, but I swallowed it all without water or anything. … I wanted to die. It would have helped my family, because after I’d gone people would have woken up and seen what was happening. They wouldn’t touch my house anymore and they would give everyone their rights.”
“Ha!” his wife gently scoffed. “That would never have happened.”
When I saw Ismet again, about three years later, then on his sickbed, I assumed he had lost his battle. He was living in a dingy 1970s apartment block across the road from Tokludede, which was still hidden by metal sheeting. Yet he was in a triumphant mood. The developers had compromised. Their home had been demolished, but he and Mahinur could build its replacement themselves and retain ownership of it.
“It’s a victory,” Ismet croaked. “They bought everyone else’s house, but they couldn’t buy mine. I’ve become like an eagle here.”
He would be a lonely eagle, though: Almost all his old friends and neighbors had moved away. He told me about life in the neighborhood. He had arrived there as a boy back in the 1960s, coming on the post train from the distant province of Bayburt to join his older brother. At that time, the Golden Horn and its docklands were the pumping heart of industry in Istanbul, and the whole area was full of factories and workshops. Ayvansaray, the larger district of which Tokludede was a part, was ideal for rural migrants to settle in, and Ismet got a job at Tekel, the state alcohol company, first working in their factory and later driving delivery trucks, a job he remained in for the rest of his working life.
When I asked him how Tokludede had changed in the time since he’d first lived there, he recalled the city’s now largely vanished non-Muslim minorities. In 1955, a devastating pogrom was launched against Istanbul’s Greeks, with more than 3,000 shops, churches and homes attacked and over a dozen people killed. Over the following years, thousands emigrated.
“I wish they would come back,” he said. “We were neighbors with Armenians and Greeks. They were beautiful people. The people who came here loved them. If they poured a glass of tea for themselves, they would pour one for a neighbor too. … People scared them away to get their hands on their property.”
After a while, Ismet grew tired and suggested that I go to another Tokludede local called “Redhead” Salih. “He’s a good kid,” he told me. “You’ll find him at the teahouse.”
Ismet’s lament was one I heard repeatedly during my visits to the walls: Their communities were dying, their neighbors were strangers, the support and closeness they had once known was withering away.
In Turkish, the word for neighborhood — “mahalle” — carries greater heft than its English counterpart. For several centuries, the mahalle was the basic administrative and social unit of Ottoman society. Neighborhoods were largely self-sufficient, taking care of their own security, street cleaning, firefighting and education, which would take place at the “medrese” of the neighborhood mosque or other place of worship. The neighborhood was represented to the state by its local imam, rabbi or priest, and later by its “muhtar” or elected headman.
The mahalle was, in many ways, a refuge from the more impersonal structures of the modern state then being introduced to Turkey. It was therefore predictable that it would be a target for the project of nation-building and societal reform that followed the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The mahalle formed the very weave of the antiquated social fabric that Turkey’s modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, hoped to tear apart to allow his new country to join what he thought of as the family of “advanced nations.”
Pulling people out of the neighborhood and the conservative social norms it represented and into the bosom of the new nation was an implicit aim of many of Ataturk’s social reforms. It was a goal furthered by the closure of the medreses, or religious schools, the emancipation of women, the reordering and centralization of education, and bold urban planning projects in Istanbul and other major cities, including the construction of parks and promenades allowing for free and mixed social gathering of a kind impossible in the neighborhood.
The ideal of the modern city was encapsulated in the new capital Ankara, elevated from a small town and built on a Western model. Turkey’s leaders began to view Istanbul’s entire urban fabric as deficient. One Istanbul mayor opined that everything in the city apart from its monuments should be demolished and rebuilt.
The mahalle lost its all-encompassing nature but something of its spirit survived. It would receive fresh infusions in the form of rural migrants like Ismet and Mahinur, who tended to come with relations and neighbors from the same villages, preserving in the city something of the closeness that had survived in rural communities.
Even at the start of the 21st century, to be part of a neighborhood was to be enmeshed in a network of support and obligation that was familial in its closeness. To some, it signified the safety net of community and the upholding of moral values; to others, it was an oppressive, coercive force breathing down your neck, watching your every move, enforcing conformity.
The Ayvansaray Sports Club, where Ismet had sent me to look for “Redhead” Salih, looked much like any other of Turkey’s thousands of teahouses: a place where the men of a neighborhood would gather to gossip and argue; a node of community life. On the walls inside — along with the “No smoking” signs, portraits of Ataturk and verses from the Quran — were photographs of the long-defunct soccer team from which the cafe took its name.
The former soccer players were now old men seated in groups near the door playing “okey” — a popular game using numbered tiles. In winter, the place smelled of tea, rain and sweat, and echoed with the clack of okey tiles. The glass frontage looked onto a meager park, beyond which the wind whipped the gray waters of the Golden Horn. Once this waterfront was thronged with factories, docks and workshops, but that time was long gone. Now Tokludede too was gone, and most of the old men who sauntered in each morning had traveled an hour or more across the city to be there.
I found “Redhead” Salih sitting among a group of younger men toward the back. He was middle-aged, his hair a short sweep of copper, like brushed wire, with a lean, chiseled face and light blue eyes. He was an electrician. He looked like a gunslinger in a Western: the man the bad guys haven’t factored in, gazing calmly from his porch as they ride into town.
Like Ismet, he fought hard against the developers but, instead of trying to retain ownership of his family’s house, he took them to court to get as much money as possible. Things had gone well. The offer at the outset had been 165,000 Turkish lira, but after various rulings had been upped to nearly 10 times that. He still thought it was a bad deal and was appealing again. “I’ll make them regret what they’ve done,” he said.
Tokludede’s end had largely been a quiet one, however. Similar projects had met far greater resistance in places like Sulukule, an old Roma neighborhood further along the walls, or Tarlabasi across the Golden Horn, where a community of Kurds, Roma, immigrants and transgender sex workers were cleared out to make way for a lucrative development. Rights organizations suspected that these places were targeted because they contained marginalized groups, either out of a desire to push them further to the fringes or because they were seen as easy victims. On the other hand, their plight attracted international attention.
But Tokludede’s residents were not part of any ethnic, political or religious minority. In fact, they represented a section of Turkish society that was as mainstream as you could get: the urban Sunni Muslim lower middle class. The teahouse itself felt like a bellwether, the kind of place foreign reporters sweep into ahead of elections to take the pulse of the nation, and I too was tempted to draw sweeping insights from its most trivial features.
President Erdogan himself had grown up in the area. He’d lived across the Golden Horn in Kasimpasa, another industrial migrant neighborhood, and attended a religious high school just up the hill from Ayvansaray. His family had moved to the city from the Black Sea region in the 1930s, and his father had been a boat captain on one of the skiffs that plied the Golden Horn. As a teenager and young man, Erdogan played semiprofessional soccer for a string of local clubs, and many of the old men sitting at the okey tables had known him before his political days, either as an opponent or a teammate on the pitch. Among the collage of soccer photos was one of him posing with a group of the club members back when he was mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s.
In the Ayvansaray Sports Club, some were pious and others not. Most were fervent supporters of Erdogan. Initially, I assumed this was why staunch holdouts like Ismet Hezer were rare, but there was more to it than that.
In the conversations I had with the teahouse regulars — even those who were outraged at the development — there was a sense of resignation, as if the demolition of Tokludede was the final act in a longer story of decline that had been years or decades in the making. Ismet had linked it to the driving out of the non-Muslims. Others mentioned the loss of the Golden Horn industries or the closure of the local soccer club. For many of them, the development project was not so much the death of Tokludede as the sweeping away of its corpse.
For Salih, Tokludede died with the “kulhanbeys,” a somewhat old-fashioned term for young men more widely known as “kabadayi” — neighborhood youths who trod the line between vigilantes and racketeers. He told me about them while regaling me with stories of the neighborhood’s past as we spent a day wandering the environs of Tokludede. The neighborhood itself was still sealed off and guarded by private security.
“That could never happen if the kulhanbeys were here,” Salih fumed. “It was our neighborhood and we could go in whenever we wanted.” The youths’ heyday had been in the 19th century, when they’d been Robin Hood figures whose exploits had become part of the city’s folklore. These days, the term generally refers to street thugs, but in Salih’s telling the kulhanbeys of his youth were vigilantes and champions of natural justice like their 19th-century forebears.
“We were like one big family, as if everyone was related to everyone else,” Salih recalled. “In that culture, the kulhanbey is like the defender of the neighborhood. For example, if a man who was an outsider passed through the neighborhood two times, on the third time he’d be stopped.”
After the tumultuous 1970s in Turkey, culminating in the coup d’etat of 1980 in which the country was brutally brought to order, the Turkish state made a decision to embrace the neoliberal politics then on the rise in the West. After the military stepped back following elections in 1983, the new prime minister, Turgut Ozal, enacted a raft of radical free-market reforms, with the military’s tacit backing. The decades-old command economy was abandoned, many state monopolies were broken up and sold off to private enterprise, and protectionist measures were scrapped, opening the way for the emergence of a new class of business owners from the cities of Anatolia. The reforms generated wealth and innovation but also drove up inequality and, in particular, urban poverty.
Tokludede would be profoundly affected. The success of Ozal’s center-right Motherland Party in 1983 was replicated in municipal elections the following year, which brought a new administration to Istanbul led by a former electrical engineer with no previous political experience named Bedrettin Dalan. Urban redevelopment and infrastructure projects had long been a yardstick for political ambition and success going back to the urban and social reengineering plans of Ataturk. In Istanbul, such projects had usually foundered due to a political environment too unstable to push them through, ideological divisions, corruption and cronyism, or the sprawling complexity of the city itself.
However, Ozal’s government had passed a series of laws expanding municipal powers, and so Dalan set about putting his stamp on Istanbul. He set his sights on the Golden Horn and the industries around it. This booming industrial zone had brought ecological ruin to the historic harbor, whose polluted waters had become a fetid, lifeless soup, a mark of shame evident to the thousands of tourists and residents who daily flocked across the Galata Bridge that spanned it.
Dalan vowed to make the waters of the Golden Horn the same color as his famously blue eyes. He reimagined it lined not with factories and docks but promenades, cafes and beaches. He shut down the industries and moved them to more remote regions, such as Tuzla, and across the Sea of Marmara to the Gulf of Izmit, where they would continue to grow — and pollute — out of sight but on a far greater scale. Although the Golden Horn’s water was restored, places like Ayvansaray sank into poverty. Skilled workers left and homeowners moved away and rented out their properties. The second part of Dalan’s plan, in which the Golden Horn would become a hub of tourism and leisure, would take decades to materialize.
The kulhanbey culture also came to an end, even though, according to Salih, they had stayed aloof from the political violence preceding the coup. Perhaps, like their 19th-century forebears, the kulhanbeys had thrived due to the unstable conditions of the time, when the state appeared to be losing its grip on the country and communities looked within themselves for forces of authority.
About two years later, I returned to Tokludede to see how the development had progressed. I’d phoned Mahinur to ask after Ismet but she’d said he was too sick to receive visitors. I walked around the new neighborhood, which was still empty. The houses were more or less finished now and the hotel was due to open soon. I was struck again by the absurdity of the whole thing: a real old neighborhood knocked down to make way for a fake one for people who wanted to live somewhere steeped in history. Ismet’s house was in the final stages of completion and it looked largely like the original I had first seen several years earlier: a link to the past forged by his own tenacity.
Later, I met Salih. It was a fine day and we went out on the Golden Horn with a friend of his who kept a small boat. We got talking about Ismet.
“He didn’t really try to commit suicide, you know,” Salih told me. “He was mixing weed killer in his basement — the fumes overcame him and he passed out. His son took him to hospital. He wrote the suicide note later because he thought it might help draw attention to his case.”
Something had always seemed off, I told myself: Drinking pesticide was an odd way to kill yourself and he’d never struck me as broken or defeated. Then there was the theatricality of the suicide note. I remembered his triumphant words comparing himself to an eagle and marveled at his apparent audacity.
“He was a smart man,” said Salih.
Salih’s friend took the boat over to the opposite shore, where we bought beers and sat drinking in the shadow of the Golden Horn Bridge. We talked more about neighborhood culture and its decline, and I asked Salih what he thought it meant for the next generation.
“I don’t want my children to be like me, I never wanted that,” he said. “When I talk about all this … I’m describing a period long buried in our imagination. … My elder son plays the violin. The younger one plays the guitar. They both have great English, they both swim well, the younger one does skating. I wanted to raise them differently from how I was raised. … I didn’t want them to be geographically insular, to learn the ways of Ayvansaray and say, ‘We’re Ayvansaray kids.’ I want them to say, ‘We’re children of the world,’ because we — the older generation — experienced the torment of not being that.”
When he was young, Salih continued, he’d been approached by Vakko, one of Turkey’s biggest clothing brands, and offered a job as a model. “I would have done it, but then I would have come to the neighborhood and all my friends would have said, ‘We saw you on TV last night shaking your ass.’ So it was impossible. The man says to me, ‘Boy, are you crazy? Your salary is 12,000 liras. You could earn 36,000 liras and you wouldn’t even have to work full-time.’ But I had to refuse. Can you imagine it? I don’t want my children to go through that.”
This disavowal of the macho neighborhood culture of old Tokludede was almost more of a surprise to me than Salih’s revelation about Ismet’s supposedly staged suicide attempt. Having spent many conversations with me mourning the death of the old world of his childhood, he nonetheless believed that the succeeding generation could build a new, better one: more confident, more outward-looking, less insular — and, on that sunny afternoon on the Golden Horn, his optimism was infectious.
Those changes in Tokludede are only a small part of a broader transformation taking place across once-insular cities and towns across Turkey, which are now being pried open by the forces of globalization and development. The old neighborhood institutions with their familiar codes have already become a casualty of this process, drowned under a tidal wave of capital and foreign cultural influence.
In the midst of that loss, a new generation of Turks are coming of age, thrust into a different world than their forefathers, for better or worse.
Before we parted, Salih showed me a video of his younger son, then 11, standing on a podium at a town hall in England, delivering a speech in faultless English in front of a room full of war veterans. It was part of an exchange his school had done, which Salih had traveled to England to attend. “We are a generation who are the future’s global citizens,” the boy declared, “and we are a generation who know the future we dream of can only be shaped by peace.” It was, he said, one of the proudest moments of his life.
This essay is adapted from the author’s new book, “To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul.”
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