Aslı Yanbul
@asliyanbul
Şu anda okuduğu kitaplar
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.
Bazı hikâyeler tam tahmin ettiğin gibi ilerler. Bazılarıysa son sayfada tüm bildiklerini sorgulatır. 🤯
Ters köşeleri seviyorsan, seni sonuna kadar merakta bırakacak 3 kitap önerisini keşfetmeye hazır ol!
The case of a “new” mahalle, just next to Kasap İlyas is a good example
of an attempted but aborted neighborhood. Its existence is documented as far
back as the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and it seems to have then
occupied an area around the Davud Paœa gate. It was at that time called a
“new mahalle, adjacent to Kasap İlyas,” probably because it did not yet have
a mosque of its own from which to derive a name. In the 1630s, however,
Bekir Paœa, one of the defterdars28 to Sultan Murad IV, built a two-story
wooden mosque on the seaside just outside the ramparts, endowed it, and
appointed an imam and a muezzin to officiate in it. With a number of people
already living in the area, and a newly established and endowed mosque, the
new neighborhood was thus set to acquire its independence from Kasap İlyas.
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
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.