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Ayverdi states that the center of
gravity of the sixteenth- and sevententh-century Istanbul population was situated around the large and central Bayazit complex and that the density of
settlement decreased as one moved westwards.
In the Muslim mahalles of pre-nineteenth-century Istanbul, the central figure
of the neighborhood community was the religious leader of the local mosque,
the imam. He was indeed an influential man and, at times, a local potentate
of sorts. Certainly not because of the meager powers given him within the
administrative setup of towns in the central Ottoman lands but rather, as we
shall see in greater detail in the case of the Kasap İlyas mahalle, simply
because he was often relatively well-off—if not outright wealthy. Besides, his
legal position as trustee of a number of pious foundations put him in command of a nonnegligible amount of local economic resources.
Unlike the mahalle, the semts never were legal administrative units. The
mahalle, however, was always both a basic urban administrative unit and a
social and economic entity. However, these two meanings never completely
overlapped. The centrally determined administrative network of Ottoman
Istanbul and the web of local identities did not necessarily coincide. This was
so in the inceptive fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as in the “modernizing” nineteenth. The perception of the urban population regarding their
environment and their self-definition in relation to their immediate surrounding
was always more important than the religious/administrative matrix imposed
upon the cityscape for purposes of control or tax collection.
The traditional mahalles of Istanbul were generally very mixed in terms
of wealth, social class, and status. Residential patterns usually ran along lines of ethnicity and religion. However, ethnically and/or religiously mixed mahalles
were not infrequent either. Recent studies have tended to show that even in
the early periods of Ottoman rule, ethnic and religious identities did not
necessarily exhaust the definition of a mahalle. The notion of the absolute
homogeneity of the Islamic or Middle Eastern town quarter regarding its
social composition and the idea that these neighborhoods were exclusively
defined by religious, ethnic, class, or occupational affiliation have also seriously been challenged by recent studies on Ottoman cities, especially in the
empire’s Arab provinces.
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Local legend tells us that Kasap ƒlyas was the chief butcher/meat provider to the Ottoman army that conquered Constantinople in 1453 and that
in recognition of his services, the sultan bestowed upon him a large plot of
land. On this plot of land he first built a small mosque bearing his name
and endowed it. Around this local mosque, goes the legend, a whole neighborhood bearing his name then took shape. The elderly inhabitants of
Kasap ƒlyas still recount the many foundation myths concerning Kasap İlyas
and his arrival to the neighborhood, as well as his many exploits, religious
and otherwise. Kasap ƒlyas has grown into a sort of mythical figure and he
has been surrounded by an aura of sanctity by the locals for quite a long
time. His deed of trust (vakfiye) was set down in 149417 and his small shrine
standing in the small graveyard beside his mosque bears the date of 1495
as the date of his passing away. The present-day Kasap İlyas mosque was
almost totally rebuilt after the 1894 earthquake. Of the original structure,
nothing much remains
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Avrupalıların elit aileleri varsa bizimde elit imamlarımız var
The flexibility of the process of appointment sometimes created real
dynasties of imams officiating in the same local mosque and sons often succeeded fathers as leaders of small Istanbulite local communities. Although the
appointment procedure for imams in republican Turkey has greatly changed—the imams are nowadays no more than ordinary government officials and
their appointment procedure obeys the rules that apply to all civil servants—
even in the present-day Kasap İlyas mahalle, a father and his son have been
the officiating imams of the mosque since 1970. Local dynasties of imams
may therefore have survived to a certain extent.
The mahalles were well entrenched as basic communities at the local level
and played key roles in shaping local identities and solidarities. This solidarity
entailed a particular modus vivendi, plus some sort of collective defense, as
well as various mechanisms of mutual control and surveillance, many of them
designed for regulating and monitoring public morality. In many mahalles
collective social life was real, durable, and strong. In many of them, for
instance, self-appointed bands of youths would act as militias to defend the
mahalle’s “honor” from outside “agressions.” In others, there were, in the
nineteenth century, self-organized amateur “fire-brigades” who took charge
of the extinction of real and of the prevention of potential fires. These young
mens’ brotherhood type of groups (tulumbacı) also took upon themselves the
task of defending the honor and reputation of the locals.
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