Of Kuzguncuk, which we visited for the second time yesterday, Pat Hale remarks: "The fact that the suburb retains churches, mosques and synagogues has ensured that it is often talked about in terms of multicultural tolerance. In reality, of course, the churches and synagogue have only tiny congregations today."

This is a duality that you encounter quite often.

Our home suburb, for example: "While much of Istanbul has changed beyond recognition in the last 100 years, Balat has retained a link between Turkey’s cosmopolitan Ottoman past and the present. Hidden among their multicoloured ruins and riches is the legacy of the city’s old Christian and Jewish communities..."

Yet these days, as this same article acknowledges, the easy inter-cultural, inter-religious sharing that older residents still recall from their early childhood belongs as much to the realm of memory as the practice of intermarriage. As one of them testifies: "A culture like this doesn't exist anymore."


Why? Well, it's complicated.

For most of the 1800s, things were going well: "Byzantine Jews lived peacefully with migrated Spanish Jews, and were friendly neighbours with the Greeks and the Armenians, who occupied the next-door block of Fener." But the earthquake of 1894 caused a lot of damage: "Most wealthy Jews moved to other parts of Istanbul, and those who stayed could not rebuild dilapidated buildings."

Then came the 20th century, and Turkey's transition from empire to nation-state: "The greatest divisions came about during, and in the aftermath of, the First World War which gave rise to the modern Turkish Republic. Turkey’s religious minorities, viewed by many as having sided with the enemy or as potential conduits for foreign intervention, faced increasing suspicion and resentment. Over the next decades, in times of crisis at home or abroad, these minorities periodically became targets of political and social unrest, or even punitive measures."

Orhan Pamuk, in Istanbul: Memories and the City, testifies to these sad developments: "At the beginning of the twentieth century, only half the city's population was Muslim, and most of the non-Muslim inhabitants were descendants of Byzantine Greeks. When I was a child, the view amongst the city's more vocal nationalists was that anyone who so much as used the word 'Constantinople' was an undesirable alien... It was the nationalists, then, who insisted on the word 'conquest' [to describe the victory of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II over the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire on 29 May 1453] ... Neither President Celal Bayar nor Prime Minister Adnan Menderes attended the 500th anniversary ceremonies in 1953... The Cold War had just begun and Turkey, a member of NATO, did not wish to remind the world about the conquest. It was, however, three years later that the Turkish state deliberately provoked what you might call 'conquest fever' by allowing mobs to rampage through the city, plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities... Both the Turkish and the Greek states have been guilty of treating their respective minorities as hostages to geopolitics, and that is why more Greeks have left Istanbul over the past fifty years than in the fifty years following 1453...

"[After the bomb incident in Salonika] mobs hostile to the city's non-Muslim inhabitants gathered in Taksim Square, and after they had burned, destroyed and plundered all those shops my mother and I had visited in Beyoglu, they spent the rest of the night doing the same in other parts of the city. The bands of rioters were most violent and caused greatest terror in neighbourhoods like Ortakoy, Balikli, Samatya and Fener, where the concentration of Greeks was greatest... It later emerged that the organisers of this riot ... had the state's support and had pillaged the city with its blessing...

"As for the Jews, those who were in a position to loan money to the state during the last centuries of the empire, and the Greeks and Armenians who gained prominence as businessmen and artisans, they shared the bitter memory of the punitive Wealth Tax imposed on them during the Second World War, paving the way for the seizure of their land and factories, and of the riots of 5 and 6 September 1955, during which so many of their shops were pillaged and burned."

(According to this source, when the state of Israel was founded, most of Balat's residents emigrated.)




Pamuk continues: "The cosmopolitan Istanbul I knew as a child had disappeared by the time I reached adulthood. In 1852, [French author Theopile] Gautier, like many other travellers of the day, remarked that in the streets of Istanbul you could hear Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French and English (and more than either of the last two languages, Ladino, the medieval Spanish of the Jews who'd come to Istanbul after the Inquisition)... After the founding of the Republic and the violent rise of Turkification, after the state imposed sanctions on minorities -- measures that some might describe as the final stage of the city's 'conquest' and others as ethnic cleansing -- most of these languages disappeared. I witnessed this cultural cleansing as a child, for whenever anyone spoke Greek or Armenian too loudly in the street (you seldom heard Kurds advertising themselves in public during this period) someone would cry out, 'Citizens, please speak Turkish!' You saw signs everywhere saying the same thing."

In 2003, a bomb exploded near a synagogue in Taksim. The result was 57 dead and 700 injured. This is why you can't just enter a synagogue in Istanbul. You need prior permission, and from what I've read, such permission is not granted all that willingly.

In Balat, according to Marsel Russo, of a total of 18 synagogues that used to exist, only the Ahrida and Yanbol Synagogues currently serve the community on sabbaths and high holidays.





So... is Balat still Jewish, Russo asks. He answers positively: "The roots of Jews there go 600 years back… With its many synagogues that served over centuries, its Jewish institutions, hospital, shops, workshops, one can easily feel this character, even if there is no significant Jewish presence in Balat any longer."

Hmmm... Not sure...

But what Balat isn't is monocultural.

In the 1980s, a series of programmes targeted the renovation of the shorefront and the cleaning up of the Golden Horn. And in the late 1990s, the European Union financed a restoration project in Balat, which encouraged the emergence of cafes, boutiques, and art spaces. But then a new cleavage became visible. Young professionals and creators took up residence in the area, but so did refugees fleeing Syria and other warzones: "While the Syrians and other newcomers, such as Iraqis and Egyptians, have helped revive some of Balat’s lost cosmopolitanism, [community centre director Shahla] Raza said that their situation has become more precarious due to the neighbourhood’s increasing desirability. 'Landlords are asking them to move, obviously because they’re not getting the rent that they want.'"

According to anthropologist Alan Duben, writing in 2011, there is still much diversity in Istanbul's population generally: "When the Greeks left the city, thousands started to arrive from Anatolia. Some even simply moved into the homes previously lived in by Greeks. Armenians and Jews came too. Many also chose to move to the suburbs, and most of them became Muslims. However, if one analyses the ethnicities in this population, one discovers that it is once again filled with differences. There are many Kurds and Alevis and other ethnic groups. Effectively there is now a multiculturalism within Islam itself... During the '30s, the city was far more secularised. Religion was repressed by the single Kemalist party, and there were very few signs of Islam around the city. Things began to change during the '80s, when women started to wear the veil, and religion became far more visible in daily life... The new and unforeseen phenomenon is that a class of young city-born, sophisticated, and educated young people has formed, but they are also religious. This is something the old elite would never have expected. Women cover their hair but wear very beautiful and fashionable clothes. These are not poor and uneducated people, but a new urban religious class, sharing with the secular class consumerism and integration into the capitalist system. This too is a sort of multiculturalism. In Istanbul one can find two amazingly different lifestyles, one is the Islamic and the other is secular. Then there are the more moderate and the more radical Muslims, just as in the secular camp there are some who are extremists and others who are more open. This is yet another special kind of multiculturalism..."

Then there's the curious case of the "Rum Polites", as researched by Ilay Romain Ors: "Once a numerous and established group within Istanbul society, reaching up to a quarter of the urban population, the Rum Polites today are dispersed not only between Istanbul and Athens, but are also spread all over the world. Among them, some have Turkish citizenship, some Greek, some both. There are several subdivisions of the Rum Polites category, or sub-groups linked with it.. While many are fluent in both Greek and Turkish, their mother tongue is mostly demotic Greek, though with a large vocabulary unknown to non-Istanbulites... The Rum Polites trace their origins in Istanbul for several generations, sometimes even as far back as the Byzantine Empire... Some have also intermarried with others, so there is a certain number of Rum-Armenians, Rum-Muslims, Rum-Levantines and so on... Many Polites strongly stress that there is a great difference between Rum and ... Greeks from Greece."

Writing in 2006, Ors puts the population of Orthodox Christians in Istanbul at about 1,800 -- "a mini-minority". But some at least testify to an experience of multiculturalism: "My informant Makis, a middle-aged Politis who moved back to Istanbul after two decades in Athens... [said]: "There is a certain understanding, respect for the other, which has to do with being from Istanbul, being from a big city. It is multiculturalism...; a very very important notion which is less today but still exists here. It is about being Istanbulite, regardless of being Jewish, Muslim, or Rum. Religion is not important in this. What’s important is this multiplicity, a common culture."


I'm aware that I'm only scratching the surface of this fascinating subject. And I'm aware that, as an outsider, I'm picking up pretty much nothing of this complexity just by walking the streets. As with everything else connected with Istanbul, I need to keep reading...