Pamuk, Istanbul and Migrants

Posted on : August 26, 2019
Author : AGA Admin

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Istanbul is a city of migrants. Orhan Pamuk, in his description of a regular childhood walk along Osmanbey (an Istanbul neighbourhood near his childhood home), recounts the memory of

 

an old Greek lady who darned socks and sold belts and buttons; she also sold eggs from the village which she would take out of a varnished chest one by one like jewels…….There was a coffee shop called the ‘Arab shop’ (just as Arabs in Latin America were often known as ‘Turks’, the handful of blacks in Istanbul were known as Arabs) with its enormous belted coffee grinder…

 

While Pamuk took delight in this demographic diversity partly because of his own heritage (his paternal grandmother was a Circassian) not all representations of this diversity were positive. In Istanbul , Memories of a City  Pamuk recounts a newspaper report written in 1949 where the presence of migrants is already represented as less than favourable

 

first the rents and taxes went up, and then, thanks to the immigrants the city was flooded with razor sellers, simit sellers, stuffed mussel sellers, tissue sellers, slipper sellers, knife and fork sellers, sundries sellers, toy sellers, water sellers and soft drink sellers and as if that was not enough, the pudding sellers, sweet sellers and doner sellers have now invaded our ferries’

 

Every city responds to and adapts to immigrants differently. Istanbul, a transcontinental city with thirty-nine districts saw rapid urbanization from the 1980’s and an increase in population from four to more than fourteen million. Istanbul has over the years been transformed by waves of immigrants not just from other parts of the country with transformative effects on its urban space but has been recipient of migrants from neighbouring conflict areas affecting not just culture-space interactions and urban planning but also the image of the city. Over the years its most stringent challenge was most often how to provide basic services like healthcare and education to growing numbers yet also tailor them to the needs of an increasingly diverse population.

 

Istanbul is estimated to host a population of around 1 million migrants with various nationalities and legal status. The number of registered Syrians in Istanbul represents about 3.75 percent of the total population of the city. Besides the Syrians under temporary protection legal status, there are “short-term resident permit holders” (including refugees who prefer the residence permit over temporary or international protection in order to access increased freedoms, such as living in Istanbul), university students, as well as asylum-seekers (“international protection applicants”, among whom only a tiny number of “people with special needs” are allowed to live in Istanbul; others are obliged to live in a “satellite city” until they may be resettled to a third country; those who are registered in the surrounding areas of Istanbul live and work in Istanbul yet keep travelling back and forth for the signature duty, and some eventually become irregular), and irregular migrants (composed of rejected asylum-seekers, those who overstayed their visas, or those who arrived to Turkey irregularly). The main employment sectors are textile, small manufacturing or factory works, construction, street vending, domestic work, sex work, and recycling material collection, among others.

 

A study by Kristen Sarah Biehl (“Migration, Urban Space and Diversity: A Case from Istanbul”, Insight Turkey, 16 (4) 2014) shows how certain Istanbul neighbourhoods like Kumkapi emerged as the main hub for the migrant groups. Kumkapi had traditionally been one of the residential quarters for Greek and Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire and later the Turkish Republic. In the 1950’s discriminatory state policies led to the emigration of original inhabitants abroad or to other districts.  Pamuk describes what this meant for Istanbul when he described “a row of houses abandoned by Greeks, Armenians and Jews as a nationalist state bore down on minorities”.  Their place was taken by growing numbers of internal migrants who began to arrive from other parts of Turkey attracted by its centrality, availability of housing and proximity to jobs. While neighbouring districts of Laleli, Gedikpasha and Beyazit emerged as manufacturing counterparts with workshops that offered informal job opportunities, Kumkapi emerged as the residential counterpart with high density and rapid turnover of residents. On the other hand the native citizens, who themselves were a heterogeneous group of Greek, Armenian, Assyrian Christian minorities and ethnic Turkish residents primarily from the Black Sea and Central Anatolian regions, started moving elsewhere as the ‘archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew everyone else’, became too diverse. On the other hand, it is this diversity that attracted migrants as they shared the comfort of anonymity.

 

This intersection between migration, urban space and diversity and the contestation within urban space and the new modes of pluralistic living is likely to shape cities like Istanbul in the years to come. For Pamuk this was also the secret of Istanbul — “that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, its poor hide the city’s soul inside a fragile web”.

 

(All citations are from Orhan Pamuk Istanbul, Memories of a City )

 

 

Anita

25 August 2019