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THE PLACE OF LOCALITY FOR IDENTITY IN THE NATION: MINORITY NARRATIVES OF COSMOPOLITAN ISTANBUL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

Amy Mills
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Extract

These words of an elderly Jewish man in Istanbul relate his memory of neighborhood life with Greeks, Armenians, and Muslims in the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk. In this place, there were no arguments between people of different religious backgrounds; Muslims shared “his” language, and he, as a Jew, knew Greek. As I examine his narrative for what it emphasizes and for the silences in between, I read Kuzguncuk as exceptional: describing an absence of argument in the past suggests that tension exists today; sharing multiple ethnic languages is understood now to be an old-fashioned rarity. His statement “Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much” suggests that in Kuzguncuk, he and his Muslim neighbors shared a common tie to place, a unique identity as Kuzguncuklu (of Kuzguncuk) that superseded any difference based on religion or ethnicity. As he describes a culture that remained from Ottoman times, his story illuminates indirectly the current Turkish national context that conditions the telling of his narrative.

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Articles
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , August 2008 , pp. 383 - 401
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

NOTES

Author's Note: This research was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the Institute of Turkish Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, a Women in Under-Represented Areas Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Kentucky, and the Walker Institute for International Studies Faculty Research Grant at the University of South Carolina. I am extremely grateful to these institutions, to the many people who assisted my work in Istanbul and Tel Aviv, and to my anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. Any errors or faults of the article are entirely my own.

1 My translation of a recorded interview.

2 Muslim and Christian residents of Cairo similarly remember past harmonious interethnic relations and remark on the contemporary absence of mutual respect. van Doorn-Harder, Pieternella, “Copts: Fully Egyptian, But for a Tattoo?” in Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies, ed. Shatzmiller, Maya (Quebec City: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2005): 22–57Google Scholar.

3 The suffix -lu or -li, when attached to a place name, means “of” or “from” there. Someone of Istanbul is an Istanbullu, and someone of Kuzguncuk is a Kuzguncuklu. This suffix illustrates the importance of place for identity in Turkey.

4 Azınlık is the term for non-Muslim minorities that also describes the political status they acquired with the Treaty of Lausanne.

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8 Rashid Khalidi similarly observes that Palestinians have “several overlapping senses of identity” related not only to religion but also to homeland and city or region. Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 19Google Scholar. Bosnians also have heterogeneous sources of identity, including the relationship to environment; Bringa, Tone, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 30–33Google Scholar.

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11 Other geographic studies of the role of place and landscape in constructing the nation include Till, Karen, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar and Johnson, Nuala, Ireland, the Great War, and the Geography of Remembrance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the political nature of place, see Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar. The politics of national memory is examined in Hodgkin, Katharine and Radstone, Susannah, eds., Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pennebaker, James et al. , eds., Collective Memory of Political Events (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1997)Google Scholar; Fentress, James and Wickham, Chris, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (New York: Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar. The geographic nature of collective memory is discussed in Halbwachs, Maurice, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980)Google Scholar and Nora, Pierre, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 7 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), volume 1Google Scholar.

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13 I use the words “Turkish” and “Turk” to refer to ethnically Turkish and Muslim residents because this is how Muslims and non-Muslims used the words with me. The term implies an ethnic and religious identification for the Turkish nation and is challenged by some who have proposed “Türkiyeli” to better represent the plural identities of Turkish citizens. Istanbul's diverse ethnic and religious groups include a small number of Jews and Christians as well as Kurds, Alevis, Roma, and international immigrants.

14 Eissenstat, Howard, “Metaphors of Race and Discourse of Nation: Racial Theory and State Nationalism in the First Decades of the Turkish Republic,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Spickard, Paul (New York: Routledge, 2005), 239–56Google Scholar. This process transformed Istanbul's demography; Shaw, Stanford, “The Population of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979): 265–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 Leyla Neyzi has gathered extensive oral histories of individuals who agreed to speak openly. See Neyzi, Leyla, “Remembering to Forget: Sabbateanism, National Identity, and Subjectivity in Turkey,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 137–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Fragmented in Space: The Oral History Narrative of an Arab Christian from Antioch, Turkey,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 4 (2004): 285–97. I changed the names of interviewees to protect their identities. For Rıfat Bali, the positive narrative of Jewish history is grounded in the desire to improve Turkey's international image, the important relationship with Israel, the role of the 500 Centennial Foundation, and the idea that talking about past negative events could damage the current situation. Bali, Rıfat, Bir Türkleştirme Serüveni 1923–1945 (An Adventure in Turkification: 1923–1945) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1999), 20–28Google Scholar. Many Jews did not agree to be interviewed. It was even more difficult to interview Greeks, who were sometimes hostile toward my research, such as when the Greek patriarchate library denied my access to a pamphlet about Kuzguncuk. Kuzguncuklu Armenians seem to have emigrated earliest, and few remember Armenian history in Kuzguncuk. My interviews with non-Armenians suggest that Armenians were relatively more spatially and socially isolated from each other and from Muslims than Jews and Greeks.

17 Furthermore, grouping people in minority categories betrays the diversity within groups. Religion, language, and ethnicity as political and experienced categories of belonging have not always cohered. Clogg, Richard, “A Millet within a Millet: The Karamanlides,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gondicas, Dimitri and Issawi, Charles (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1999), 115–42Google Scholar.

18 Eber, Dena and Neal, Arthur, Memory and Representation: Constructed Truths and Competing Realities (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 2001), 5Google Scholar.

19 Closed access to property deeds and other records prohibits historical research on Kuzguncuk.

20 Although Homi Bhabha describes the ambivalence embedded in national narratives authored to construct national identity, he examines the narrative as it is produced at the scale of the state, not as imagined by the individual; Bhabha, Homi, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

21 Mahtani, Minelle, “Racial ReMappings: The Potential of Paradoxical Space,” Gender, Place and Culture 8 (2001): 299–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Göçek, Fatma Müge, ed., Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Bozdoğan, Sibel and Kasaba, Reşat, eds., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

23 Cinar, Alev, Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Yavuz, M. Hakan, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; White, Jenny, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Several studies examine modernity and identity through the study of gender. See, for example, Göçek, Fatma Müge and Balaghi, Shiva, eds., Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity and Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Deniz Kandiyoti, “Gendering the Modern: On Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity,” in Rethinking Modernity, 113–32; Tekeli, Şirin, ed., Women in Modern Turkish Society (London: Zed Books, 1991)Google Scholar.

24 Bozdoğan, Sibel, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Kezer, Zeynep, “Contesting Urban Space in Early Republican Ankara,” Journal of Architectural Education 52 (1998): 11–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Özyürek, Esra, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Secor, “Between Longing and Despair”; Kandiyoti, Deniz and Saktanber, Ayşe, Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002)Google Scholar.

26 Özyürek, Esra, The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Neyzi, “Remembering.”

27 Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity.

28 See, for example, Akar, Rıdvan, Aşkale Yolcuları Varlık Vergisi ve Çalışma Kampları (Internees in Aşkale: Wealth Tax and Work Camps) (Istanbul: Belge Yayınları, 2000)Google Scholar; Aktar, Ayhan, Varlık Vergisi ve Türkleştirme Politikaları (Wealth Tax and Turkification Politics) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2000)Google Scholar; Alexandris, Alexis, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek–Turkish Relations of 1918–1974 (Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies, 1983)Google Scholar; Bali, Türkleştirme; Demir, Hülya and Akar, Rıdvan, İstanbul'un Son Sürgünleri (Istanbul's Last Exiles) (Istanbul: Belge Yayınları, 1999)Google Scholar; Vryonis, Speros Jr., The Mechanism of Catastrophe: the Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul (New York: Greekworks.com, 2005)Google Scholar.

29 Göçek, Fatma Müge, “Furor against the West: Nationalism as the Dangerous Underbelly of the Modern Turkish Republic,” in Nationalism and European Integration: The Need for New Theoretical and Empirical Insights, ed. Karolewski, Ireneusz P. and Suszycki, Andrzej M. (New York: Continuum, 2007), 167–79Google Scholar; Akçam, Taner, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (New York: Zed Books, 2004)Google Scholar.

30 Göçek, “Furor against the West.”

31 Özyürek, Politics of Public Memory; Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State. See also Sargın, Güven Arif, “Displaced Memories, or the Architecture of Forgetting and Remembrance,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 659–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Mills, Amy, “Reading Narratives in City Landscapes: Cultural Identity in Istanbul,” Geographical Review 95 (2006): 441–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rıdvan Akar argues that the interest in minority-urban history is confined primarily to a nonpolitical appreciation of architectural, aesthetic, and culinary cultures; Akar, Aşkale, 8.

33 Smith, Anthony, National Identity (Reno, Nev.: University of Nevada Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

34 A wide literature on this topic exists. See Bierman, Irene et al. , eds., The Ottoman City and its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1991)Google Scholar; Mardin, Şerif, “Religion and Secularism in Turkey,” in The Modern Middle East, ed. Hourani, Albert et al. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993), 368Google Scholar.

35 Behar, Cem, A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul: Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap Ilyas Mahalle (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Rosen, Mina, A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453–1566 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002)Google Scholar.

36 Some of these works are memoirs—for example, Büyükfırat, Zakire, Kuzguncuk: Bella Vista Hoşçakal (Kuzguncuk: Goodbye Bella Vista) (Istanbul: Sone Yayınları, 2005)Google Scholar. Others are semiautobiographical/scholarly works—for example, Bektaş, Cengiz, Hoşgörünün Öteki Adı: Kuzguncuk (The Other Name for Tolerance: Kuzguncuk) (Istanbul: Tasarım Yayın Grubu, 1996)Google Scholar, and Ebcim, Nedret, Üç Dinin ve Ünlülerin Buluştuğu Semt: Kuzguncuk (The Neighborhood Where Three Religions and Their Famous People Came Together: Kuzguncuk) (Istanbul: İleri Yayınları, 2005)Google Scholar. Kuzguncuk is frequently represented in newspapers and magazines. See for example Çakil, D. and Duğen, M., “Istanbulʾda Küçük Bir Paris” (A Little Paris at Istanbul), Akademist 1 (2002): 24–29Google Scholar.

37 For example, see Bektaş, Hoşgörünün, 34.

38 Mills, Amy, “Boundaries of the Nation in the Space of the Urban: Landscape and Social Memory in Istanbul,” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 367–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some argue this is not gentrification because Kuzguncuk has a long-term population that values the neighborhood's history (e.g., Morgül, Tan, “Kuzguncuk Üzerine Kafası Karışık Bir Deneme” (A Confusing Test on Kuzguncuk), Mimar.ist 6, no. 21 (2006): 64–68Google Scholar), although renovation has caused socioeconomic change. Uzun, C. Nil, “The Impact of Urban Renewal and Gentrification on Urban Fabric: Three Cases in Turkey,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 94, no. 3 (2003): 363–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Stanford Shaw, “The Population of Istanbul,” 265–77, 268.

40 Bali, Türkleştirme, 196.

41 Çelik, Zeynep, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993 [1986]), 82–87Google Scholar.

42 Akin, Nur, Dünden Bügüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (Encyclopedia of Istanbul from Yesterday to Today) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1994), 145–46Google Scholar.

43 Rozen, Minna, “Boatmen's and Fishermen's Guilds in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” Mediterranean Historical Review 15 (2000): 72–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Bektaş, Hoşgörünün.

45 Kastoryano, Riva, “From Millet to Community: The Jews of Istanbul,” in Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership, ed. Rodrigue, Aron (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), 256Google Scholar. According to Stanford Shaw, Kuzguncuk did not become important to Jewish life until the 19th century; Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (London: Macmillan, 1991), 50. In the early 20th century, a foreign traveler includes Kuzguncuk in his description of the “main Jewish centers” of Istanbul; Bornes-Varol, Marie-Christine, “The Balat Quarter and its Image: A Study of a Jewish Neighborhood in Istanbul,” in The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Levy, Avigdor (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1994), 634Google Scholar.

46 Banoğlu, Niyazi Ahmet, Tarih ve Efsaneleri İle İstanbul (Istanbul with its History and Legends) (Istanbul: Ak Kitabevi, 1966)Google Scholar.

47 This point was made by several residents, including a young man born to Sivasli parents in that area who took me on a tour and explained the gecekondu's history.

48 Tuğlacı, Pars, İstanbul Ermeni Kiliseleri (Istanbul's Armenian Churches) (Istanbul: Pars Yayın Ticaret, 1991), 169Google Scholar.

49 Başbakanlık Arşivi Cevdet Adliye (Prime Minister's Archives) #2000 16 M 1284 (1868). Thanks to Christine Philliou for identifying and translating this document in the course of other research.

50 Thanks again to Christine Philliou for reading and translating the Greek inscriptions.

51 Banoğlu, Tarih ve Efsaneleri, 81.

52 Kastoryano “Millet,” 257. One interviewee in Tel Aviv recalled his mother's story of being a child in Dağ Hamamı and helping a neighbor move things out of the house during a big fire and hearing from a neighbor that her house was burning too. The fire damaged many houses; several who lost their homes moved to Kuzguncuk.

53 Ibid., 258. However, one Tel Aviv interviewee's family moved from Kuzguncuk to Kuledibi to feel safe in a neighborhood with more Jews. Her family was very active in Zionist political activity, and her father manufactured documents to facilitate illegal emigration to Palestine.

54 Bali, Türkleştirme.

55 Toktaş, Şule, “Turkey's Jews and their Immigration to Israel,” Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2006): 505–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bali, Rıfat, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında, Türkiye Yahudileri. Aliya: Bir Toplu Göçun Öyküsü, 1945–1949 (Turkish Jews in the Republic Years. Aliyah: The Saga of a Mass Migration 1945–1949) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayinları, 2003)Google Scholar.

56 Several older residents, including the former muhtar, indicated that immigration began in the late 1930s/early 1940s.

57 Aktar, Varlık Vergisi.

58 Bali, Türkleştirme, 450–55. Over 97 percent of the properties sold to pay the tax were sold by Jews, and these properties were appropriated and effectively transferred to the state or to private Turks; Aktar, Varlık Vergisi, 229. Those who couldn't pay were sent to work camps in Aşkale, Erzurum, and other places; Bali, Türkleştirme, 458, and Aktar, Varlık Vergisi.

59 Bali, Türkleştirme, 408–22.

60 Speros Vryonis describes problems recording damages and the complex situation that resulted in the compensation paid to owners but only for a very small proportion of total damages. Vryonis, Mechanism of Catastrophe, 266–87.

61 Bahcheli, Tozun, Greek–Turkish Relations since 1955 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 174Google Scholar.

62 Demir and Akar, Sürgünleri, 190.

63 Nicole, and Pope, Hugh, Turkey Unveiled: Ataturk and After (London: John Murray, 1997), 116Google Scholar.

64 Demir and Akar, Sürgünleri.

65 For example, Çeçener, Besim, İstanbul'un Kültür ve İmar Sorunları (The Problems of Culture and Urban Development in Istanbul) (Istanbul: TMMOB Mimarlar Odası, 1995)Google Scholar, and Şengül, H. Tarik, “On the Trajectory of Urbanisation in Turkey,” International Development Planning Review 25 (2003): 153–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Two papers in Istanbul Between the Global and the Local briefly refer to minority emigration in other discussions: Ayfer Bartu, “Who Owns the Old Quarters? Rewriting Histories in a Global Era,” and Keyder, Çağlar, “The Housing Market from Informal to Global,” in Istanbul Between the Global and the Local, ed. Keyder, Çağlar (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 31–46 and 173–86Google Scholar.

66 I formally interviewed seven Kuzguncuklu Greeks, one Kuzguncuklu, several non-Kuzguncuklu Armenians, and twelve Kuzguncuklu Jews. I spoke with many other Jews after synagogue services in Kuzguncuk. The Turkish Jewish community maintains good public relations, although individuals may privately distance themselves from Muslims and perceive historic discrimination. Anonymous, “Jewish Life in Turkey Today,” in Jewish Women from Muslim Societies Speak: A Program Guide, ed. Susan M. Kahm, Nancy F. Vineberg, and Sarah Silberstein Swartz (Waltham, Mass.: American Sephardi Federation and Hadassah International Research Institution on Women at Brandeis University, 2003), 32–34.

67 Approximately fifty people attended. Thanks to David Angel and the Türkiyeliler Birliği (Association of Turkish Jews).

68 Young Muslim Kuzguncuklus who heard about this time describe Kuzguncuk's historic cosmopolitan tolerance with the word hoşgörün, as do new residents who moved to Kuzguncuk because of its mahalle culture and historic buildings.

69 I conducted interviews in Turkish, with the exception of one interview in Tel Aviv with a woman who replied in Ladino, which David Angel translated into English. Several interviewees in Istanbul declined to be recorded. When I could not record, I took detailed notes during the interview and completed text to the best of my ability after the interview. This interviewee declined to be recorded; this excerpt is from field notes I wrote immediately after our interview, based on notes I took while he spoke.

70 This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

71 I was to interview two women together at the church in Kuzguncuk but, upon my arrival, discovered that our interview would be observed by the priest and other male church members. Approximately a dozen people surrounded us and occasionally interjected. I felt the interview was thus heavily monitored for propriety. This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

72 This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

73 This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

74 Toktaş, “Turkey's Jews and Their Immigration,” 508.

75 This widespread rumor, although untrue, caused many to fear Nazi occupation of Turkey. Bali, Rıfat, “Talat Paşa'nın Kemiklerini Mi Nazi Fırınları Mı?” (Talat Paşa's Bones or Nazi Ovens?), Toplumsal Tarih 150 (2006): 42–47, 45Google Scholar.

76 The relationship to place of origin is important for identity construction in transnational contexts. Neyzi, “Fragmented.”