A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul
Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap Ilyas Mahalle
A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul
SUNY series in the
Social and Economic History of the Middle East
Donald Quataert, editor
A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul
Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap ƒlyas Mahalle
Cem Behar
State University of New York Press
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2003 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Behar, Cem, 1946–
A neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul : fruit vendors and civil servants in the Kasap Ilyas Mahalle / Cem Behar.
ISBN 0-7914-5681-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5682-X (alk. paper)
DR738.5.K37 B44 2003 949.61'8—dc21
For Candan, my first reader
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Contents
Prefaceix
Introduction: The City, the SEMT, and the MAHALLE1
The Mahalle and the Semt3
The “Islamic City”7
The Kasap ƒlyas Mahalle11
Fluidity and Imprecision13
Sources and Issues18
Local Identity: The Formative Sixteenth Century31
Mahalle Topography: Boundaries and Landmarks35
Houses and Gardens40
Streets and Dead Ends44
The Population and Inhabitants of a Peripheral Mahalle49
Kasap ƒlyas’ High Street: “Butchers’ Road”53
Fire and Brimstone58
Kasap ƒlyas: Tanzimat and After65
The Imam and His Congregation67
The Benefits of Local Power: The Case of Aziz Mahmud Efendi 72
A Case of Peaceful Transition: Imam and Muhtar in Kasap ƒlyas 78
The Administered Body: Early Nineteenth-Century Perspectives 83
the Arapkƒr Connection 95
The Formation of a Migrant Shelter in Kasap ƒlyas:
Ispanakçı Viranesi and the Arapkirlis 97
Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants: Provincials and
Arapkirlis in 1885106
Legal Residence: Regionalism and Nepotism120
Chapter 4: “End of Empire”: Portrait of a Neighborhood
Community in the Late Nineteenth Century131
Families and Households136
Streets, Houses, Warehouses, and Shops: Residential and
Commercial Areas in Kasap ƒlyas146
The Muhtar and his Mahalle: Ruler, Representative, Middleman160
Epilogue173
Notes185
Bibliography209
Index217
Volumes in SUNY Series in the Social and Economic History
of the Middle East225
Preface
As frequently happens, this research came about by chance. It was in 1988, while working on marriage, family, and fertility in late Ottoman Istanbul, that I first came across the name of the Kasap ƒlyas neighborhood. This encounter materialized in the form of notebooks and loose folios. These documents had probably been waiting for some time on the stall of a secondhand book dealer in Istanbul. The book dealer, Turan Türkmeno™lu, managed to convince me that these disparate sheets full of an already pale scribble were somehow connected with my research on family and fertility patterns. A quick glance at some of the notes on marriage contracts that one of the notebooks contained, made me think that this might be true after all.
Upon closer scrutiny, it became clear that these manuscripts constituted an exceptional set of archival documents pertaining to the life and administration of a single Istanbul mahalle: Kasap ƒlyas. Some of the documents were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and they had been carefully preserved by the successive imams and by local headmen (muhtars) of Kasap ƒlyas. These individuals had added, in the late nineteenth century, a large number of notes of their own that had apparently been handed down from one muhtar to another. The novelty and originality of the data was striking. The equivalent of these sources exist, to the best of our knowledge, for no other urban neighborhood of Istanbul or, perhaps, of any other Ottoman city. A small portion of these sources and documents have been used as partial and local illustrations in our book on Istanbul Households.1 However, it did not then occur to me that these documents, highly interesting but nevertheless patchy and disparate, could be used as a basis for an historical study of this single mahalle.
The two articles on the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle that I have published so far (one in 1997 and another in early 1999) have been the object of fruitful criticisms coming from two colleagues: Ferhunde Özbay and Ayhan Aktar. It is due to their encouragement and enthusiasm that I began to consider writing an historical study focusing not on one Ottoman or Middle Eastern city but on a single neighborhood community (a mahalle) within an Ottoman
city. The idea that these prima facie highly partial and chronologically patchy local sources of information on the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle deserved to be transformed into a—hopefully—consistent book is due to their moral support.
These exceptional local sources had to be supplemented with information relating to Kasap ƒlyas obtained from the Ottoman Religious Courts’ Archives and with quantitative data from the 1885 and 1907 Ottoman population censuses (Tahrir-i nüfus). Thanks are due to Nurettin Çivi and Aysel Istanbullu, directors of the Istanbul Registry Office (Istanbul Vilâyeti Nüfus Müdürlü™ü), for allowing me to transcribe in their entirety the original Ottoman census documents for the neighborhood. The help of Dr. Abdülâziz Bayındır, director of the Istanbul Religious Courts’ Archives (Istanbul Müftülü™ü ¥er’iye Sicilleri Arœivi) is also gratefully acknowledged. My heartfelt thanks go to Aysel Danacı, Emre Erdo™an, Tülây Gençtürk, Meriç Mekik, and Araks ¥ahiner for their assistance in transcribing the Ottoman Sharia’ Court records for the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, as well as the 1885 and 1907 late Ottoman census documents, and for cross-tabulating some of the results.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the elderly inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas whom I interviewed and who have provided me with a perspective on what life and human relationships in Kasap ƒlyas had been, a perspective that I could not have obtained otherwise. Hasan ¥arkalkan, muhtar of the neighborhood since 1994, made all of the interviews possible, and what is more, made me feel like a bona fide member of the highly extended familial network that the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle must have been in former times.
It gives me great pleasure to be able to thank those scholars and institutions that have helped me during the preparation of this book. Thanks are due to a grant from the Population Council, a grant which (MEAwards Grant MEA 323) made possible, in 1994 and 1995, part of the research and data collection on which this book is based. The contribution of the Eurasian Project on Population and Family History (International Research Center for Japanese Studies-Kyoto) is also gratefully acknowledged.
Edhem Eldem’s lengthy article on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Istanbul2 has been an excellent source of inspiration. Nedret ƒœli and ƒbrahim Yılmaz (“Simürg” ƒbrahim) have been of great help in locating some rare publications on Istanbul neighborhoods. In the writing process, Mine Eder unfailingly supplied sharp lexicological advice. Two friends and colleagues, Selim Deringil of the Department of History, Bo™aziçi University, and ¥evket Pamuk, of the Ataturk Institute of Bo™aziçi University, gave generously of their time, read the entire manuscript, and provided many discerning comments and suggestions.
In the end, I alone am responsible for the errors and deficiencies that remain.
Introduction
The City, The Semt and the Mahalle
The image of Istanbul as the city, or as “a world in itself” was often used to depict the size, the bustle, and the diversity of the Ottoman capital.1 As the center of economic and political power of an empire stretching over three continents, Istanbul drew people from all Ottoman lands and even from beyond. Its population was no doubt one of the most disparate in the world, and the city itself was very large. The walled city itself, a triangular peninsula surrounded by water on two sides, was, at least until the industrial revolution, larger in area than most European cities.2 Its three boroughs (Eyüp, Galata, and Üsküdar) were set outside the walls and, for two of them, across the water. The official Ottoman denomination of greater Istanbul, Dersaadet ve bilâd-ı selâse (the Abode of Felicity and the three boroughs), does reflect the feeling of size and distance, as experienced by its inhabitants in their daily lives. Many Istanbulites were leading a localized life, especially before the nineteenth century, and were only partially familiar with the city at large, especially those parts of it that were “across the water.” Well into the nineteenth century, traveling from one part of the city to another was still something of an adventure, and daily “commuting” was unthinkable. Local identities and solidarities at the neighborhood and district level developed within Istanbul long before an overall urban conscience could impose its stamp on the inhabitants.
The population of Ottoman Istanbul, though it certainly had a number of ups and downs, always seemed to be tremendous.3 Among Ottoman cities, only Cairo could ever have stood the comparison. Though the hard data are lacking, Istanbul—and not London or Paris—might well have been the most populated capital-city of Europe between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. At the time of the Ottoman conquest, the population of the Byzantine capital had fallen to just tens of thousands of people. The policy of Mehmed II (the Conqueror) was one of bringing settlers to Istanbul, a policy of forced migration (sürgün) in an attempt to revive the city in the decades immediately following the conquest. About a century later, under the reign of Süleyman “the Magnificent” (1520–1566), the Istanbul population
Figure 1 Istanbul (Map of the Walled City)
probably reached the quarter-million mark. It was then almost twice as large as that of Paris or London.
Throughout the centuries, the Porte was always worried about the uncontrollable crowding of Istanbul and tried to limit migration to the city and to push away all undesirable elements, if necessary manu militari. These efforts, however, were mostly to no avail. Except for some wild guesses made by a few European travelers, there are practically no data for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century population of Istanbul. The earliest estimates for the first half of the nineteenth century point to slightly less than half a million inhabitants. Growth was slow but regular throughout the nineteenth century. The first citywide reliable count is that of 1885. The one-million mark will be crossed—for the first time, and only tempo-rarily—just before the First World War, due to the sudden inflow of refugees fleeing the Balkan wars.
Not surprisingly, the historiographical heritage of Istanbul has tended to view this enormous conurbation not as an integrated whole, but rather as a patchwork, a colorful collage. There is a wealth of studies on the trade and commerce of Istanbul, its politics and government, its art and architecture, its religious/ethnic communities, and so forth. There have been very few efforts to examine Istanbul as a unified whole. The very problematic nature and— as often as not—the simple absence of historical documentation on the social life of the city and of its inhabitants, is a forbidding obstacle facing local and social historians of the Ottoman capital. Specific in-depth local studies as well as studies emphasizing the modes of articulation of the diverse sections of the city to each other are sorely lacking. Istanbul’s topographical mosaic of well-defined individual cells did consist, on one side, of city quarters or residential neighborhoods (mahalles), delineated on ethnic/religious grounds and, on the other side, of ethnically more mixed commercial/economic areas. There is, however, a very basic difficulty in finding references to individual mahalles in pre- nineteenth-century Ottoman archival sources. The only Ottoman historical sources for Istanbul that are classified on a topographical basis and in which various mahalles can be spotted are the Archives of the Religious Courts (¥er’iye Sicilleri/Kadı sicilleri); and even in these archives, homogenous, long, and uninterrupted time series are difficult to come by.
The MAHALLE and the SEMT
Ever since the early sixteenth century, the urban fabric of the residential areas of intramural Istanbul has consisted of a juxtaposition of mahalles. Some of them retained their name and topographical location for centuries. These mahalles were usually not very populous, nor did they cover a wide area. On
the eve of the First World War, for instance, the Istanbul mahalles had an average population of around fifteen hundred people.4
Ten or fifteen streets at most, grouped around a thoroughfare or perhaps around a small square, and one or two small mosques (or a church or a synagogue, depending on the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood) defined most of the residential Istanbul mahalles. The neighborhood also usually contained a public fountain or two and a few shops catering to basic necessities or services. There might also be some some public utility buildings (a public bath, or perhaps, a dervish convent or a primary school). Less basic goods and services were available either in the more central commercial areas, like the covered big bazaar (çarœû-yı kebir), or in the many weekly markets serving larger slices of the urban population. Many of these Ottoman mahalles of Istanbul bore the name of the benefactor of the local mosque, the public bath or fountain, that of a mythical figure, that of a Byzantine monument, or even, in a few cases, the name of the geographic origin of its first Muslim inhabitants.
Although the borders and areas of each of the Istanbul mahalles were never very strictly drawn, and they certainly did fluctuate in time, these urban neighborhood units were at all times perceived as an important protective and cohesive unit immediately surrounding the family and the household. They fostered a durable sense of local identity and cohesion. At least ever since the middle of the sixteenth century, and in the absence of accepted family surnames, many of the artisans and the ordinary folk of Istanbul were known or nicknamed as “from such and such a district (semt) or mahalle.” Various types of rivalries or cooperative actions between adjacent neighborhoods and districts are well-known and have survived well into the twentieth century.
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. Twentieth-century Kasap ƒlyas bears many reminiscences of these groups. The districts (semts) and mahalles of pre-twentieth-century Istanbul had their—real or imagined— honor and reputation to uphold.
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.5 In intramural Istanbul, large mansions of pashas and beys neighboring the shanty lodgings of beggars (se’ele) or of streetporters (hamals and küfecis) were quite a common occurrence. These different groups were not usually clustered in separate parts of the neighborhood either. Indeed, there were some mahalles where, on the whole, the inhabitants fared better than those of other neighborhoods. However, really “exclusive” areas, or particularly well-off neighborhoods, or particularly destitute ones were quite exceptional.
Within intramural Istanbul, the distinction between the semt 6 (district) and the mahalle was of primary importance in the perception of urban space and in situating local identities. The semt is a nondescript area, a district, usually much larger than an average mahalle, indicative of a rather large section of the city. Most of the semts took their name from a precise point, such as a city gate, a large market, or a building that was functional for the city as a whole (Edirnekapı, Fatih, Sultanahmet, Karagümrük, Unkapanı, ¥ehremini, Fener, etc.) and were therefore used as basic geographic markers. Sometimes, the toponymy of the semts might indicate the city or region of the empire from which an initial population had migrated (Aksaray, Karaman, Çarœamba, etc.). Many people referred to their personal addresess by indicating both the semt and perhaps the name of a local landmark (a well-known mosque, a city gate, a wharf, a monument, etc.). These semts and landmarks were no doubt better known by the inhabitants of Istanbul at large than the names of the numerous small traditional mahalles. The mahalles, notwithstanding some remarkable exceptions, were of vital importance only to their own denizens and their names might not be known to inhabitants of distant semts.
A cadastral land survey of the city and a regular name for each street of intramural Istanbul (with a number for each house or gate) were to come only in the 1860s. Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even official documents—deeds of sale of real estate, for instance—in which a precise definition mattered, routinely used only very approximate addresses in which the semt and/or a well-known local landmark were mentioned. For instance, in the religious court rulings in which a resident of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle was involved, that person was always identified as “such and such, from the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle near [the] Davudpaœa [wharf/gate].” The Davudpaœa semt
and/or the Davudpaœa wharf clearly localized the small Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. For all practical purposes, this was deemed to be a sufficient “address.” Once in the neighborhood, people were pretty sure of finding their way to a precise destination or of reaching the desired person simply by asking around.
The mahalle was an economic and social entity which, as far as the daily lives of its inhabitants is concerned, delineated their primary cultural milieu (family life, religious community, neighborhood, etc.). This is especially true of the period preceding the early nineteenth century, since local public coffeehouses began spreading in Istanbul only then.7 Before that period, these public coffeehouses were concentrated in a few central or commercial areas of the city. The mescit and, perhaps, the hamam were the only public meeting places at the mahalle level. Therefore, the local mescit, which was of definitional importance to the neighborhood, was also the main available public space.
Local consciousness at mahalle level necessarily meant close and frequent contacts. As to the semt, its extent implied that routine face-to-face meetings were much less important. In Istanbul the semt was almost always related to the functionality of the area within the overall urban organization (trade, commerce, religion, politics, education, etc.). The sense of belonging to a mahalle was part of daily life, but that of being part of a semt certainly involved a somewhat higher degree of abstraction, a sort of open topographical self-positioning and status-seeking with respect to the rest of the city. A residential semt could be more or less prestigious than another and there could be a—real or imagined—hierarchy of semts, but not of mahalles.
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.
In the residential quarters of the Ottoman city, the imam of the local mosque was considered, up until the Tanzimat reforms of the middle of the nineteenth century, as a local headman of sorts. As a mediator of the authority of the kadı, he had both administrative and religious powers and duties. His most important duty was to apportion and to collect the lump-sum taxes imposed by the Ottoman state. He also acted as a guarantor for every local inhabitant. Any newcomer who wanted to set up house in the mahalle had to have the imam’s approval, provide a guarantor, and also produce proof of his solvency. After the 1830s laymen (muhtars) were appointed/co-opted as
local headmen. The process of transfer of authority was generally smooth and a good example of this transfer can be followed in Kasap ƒlyas.
The “Islamic City”
Social and urban historians of Istanbul have often stressed the idea that these mahalles, however diverse they may have been, defined on the whole a static configuration, typical of most precapitalist urban populations.8 The mahalle is implicitly taken to be not only a basic level of social integration but also a community characterized by a high amount of autarky and an almost built-in inability to move. This static picture of the human topography of Istanbul intra muros is usually taken to mean, first, that the numbers, areas, and composition of the residential mahalles were well-defined and relatively stable, and, second, that the restricted mobility of the population implied some rigidity in the ethnic/religious makeup of each of the neighborhoods.
The absoluteness of the ethnic, religious, and functional divisions embedded in the topographical makeup of the city, its cellular structure, and the absence of interpenetration between the ethnic and religious constituents were also used for claiming the existence of a specific and typical Islamic urban model, an archetypal Islamic City. The functional articulation of various parts of the city, the use of public space, and its overall architectural and urbanistic consequences (the functional triangle consisting of the mosque, the market, and the public bath) were also taken to have an unequivocal and unique connection to this model. Often even the sheer physical shape of the Islamic city was taken to be an unequivocal expression of its social structure, just an external sign of a system of law, social ethics, and social institutions. The presence of ruling elites that distantiate themselves from the population at large, the general lack of urban political autonomy and of oppositional political initiatives coming from the cities in Islamic lands—as opposed to “Western”/European cities—that were attributed to this structure were taken to be an a posteriori demonstration of the thesis.9 Some proponents of the thesis went as far as denying the existence of any sort of permanent formal institutions within the Islamic city and of any sort of corporate personality within which there might grow up an exclusive solidarity that could take precedence over the community of “believers at large,” the umma.10
The thesis on the existence of an essentially “Islamic city” was, for a long time, surrounded by the prestige and aura of its first proponent, none less than Max Weber himself. Weber had, in fact, adduced no historical evidence worthy of that name to support his thesis. His idea, however, was taken up by, and integrated into, other worldviews such as “Orientalism” or the “world-economy/world-system” paradigm. These two were obviously in dire need of
defining (albeit sketchily, and notwithstanding the teleological vision involved), some overarching urban similarities that would account for the decline or “peripheralization” of Ottoman, “Islamic,” and Middle Eastern cities in the nineteenth century. A classical Islamic scholar, Gustav von Grunebaum, came to the rescue in the 1950s, filled up Weber’s historical lacunae with religious and philological scholarship and, for all practical purposes, codified the concept of the Islamic city for the coming decades, and it became part of a more general typology of urban forms.11 The same codification had also been applied in the 1930s and 1940s to North African Muslim towns by the French Islamists William and Georges Marçais.12
The Eurocentric Weberian framework on urban development in Islamic lands received a more nuanced interpretation in the hands of such scholars as Ira Lapidus and Albert Hourani.13 While sharing with Weber and von Grunebaum the basic view of a disaggregated and vertically segmented typical Islamic urban structure that lacked the elements of a true civil society, these historians had a more nuanced view of the politics and governance of these cities. They admitted the historical existence of a group of denizens who could, under certain circumstances and by common consent, come to represent an (almost European) civic community spirit, a strictly local ‘asabiyya. For a number of reasons, most of them concerning the available historical sources, scholars have so far considered the (North African as well as Middle Eastern) Arab case as the normative type of “Islamic city,” although Anatolian and other Ottoman towns, and even Istanbul, have also been envisaged within the same paradigm.
More recent studies, however, while seeking neither to question nor to support the long-standing paradigm of the Islamic city have, first and foremost, tried to diversify their historical perspective by using a larger variety of local sources. Recent historical work tends to focus on the diversity of situations and on the singularity of urban societies in Islamic lands and in the eastern Mediterranean. Efforts are made to situate and represent a greater diversity of ethnic, religious, local, and professional identities. Scholars now rightfully insist not only on the singularity of each Ottoman city, but also on that of each of their constituent parts. As Lapidus candidly wrote in an article published in 1973: “When we speak of Muslim cities, we do not speak of a special type of city society, but we refer to the predominant religious and cultural identifications of their inhabitants and the institutions built around these identifications.”14
In the residential quarters of Istanbul, settlement patterns did traditionally follow religious and ethnic lines. Socioeconomic determinants of housing patterns were, for centuries, of only secondary importance. The class- or income-based differentiation of the urban fabric did not take hold of Istanbul before well into the twentieth century. But from this observation to the idea
that these residential patterns were, before the twentieth century, either frozen or at least largely predictable, there is a huge step that the proponents of this thesis would not hesitate to take. The reality is, as we shall see in the case of Kasap ƒlyas, that even in times of relative demographic stability, even before the “long” nineteenth century, both the population of Istanbul and of the traditional residential neighborhoods were in considerable flux. The demarcation lines between mahalles were never so strict and the horizontal mobility of the residents was much higher than is usually admitted. At the local level, mobility and change seem to have been the rule, not the exception.
It is also usually understood, in the context of the same paradigm, that the guilds in Islamic cities did not essentially function as organizations defending the interests of craftsmen. Given the general weakness of urban organizations in Islamic lands, the guilds would be functioning basically as a means of supervising and taxing craftsmen, who would otherwise have totally escaped governmental control.15 This centrally controlled rigid guild structure would then obviously have impeded the appearance of a class of “free” laborers, the social basis for industrialization and for capital accumulation. The administrative rigidity of the guilds’ organization, another pillar of the “Islamic City” paradigm, will be clearly seen, in the case of Kasap ƒlyas, to be more an illusion than a reality. The fluidity and permeability of guild and nonguild activities will be illustrated by the fruit and vegetable peddlers who had been living for centuries in Kasap ƒlyas.
The haras or mahallas of some Arab or Middle Eastern cities, such as those of Cairo or Aleppo, were often barred by gates that had to be shut at night, a fact taken as a handy physical demonstration of the segmentation of Islamic urban structures. As to the borders of the various city quarters of Istanbul, or those of any other Turkish Anatolian city for that matter, let alone being physically barred, they were never even strictly drawn or well defined.16 Over the centuries, there were orders issued by the kadı of Istanbul, especially in times of political trouble, demanding that the population construct gates to protect their mahalles from outside aggressions. But these rulings were never fully implemented, or only haphazardly. As exemplified by the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle and by its adjacent neighbors, the areas of the traditional Istanbul neighborhoods have always been somewhat imprecise and fluid. The mahalle was essentially a basic urban community defined by a dense web of relationships, before being a “ward,” a local administrative unit.
As to the continuum in local consciousness in Ottoman Istanbul, it may well be due not to any pre-set internal homogeneity, but to the very peculiar functional and topographical constraints which, from the very beginning, besieged almost all quarters of the Ottoman capital-city. The fact that the continuity in the topographic and administrative makeup of the capital-city
of the Ottoman Empire implied a rigidity neither in the number nor in the human and social composition or the economic and social function of each of its cells is perhaps a further challenge to the essentialist notion of a clearly defined, archetypal, and immutable “Islamic city.”
The resilience and the physical and social flexibility of our particular city quarter needs explanation, when viewed over a number of centuries. That the small Kasap ƒlyas neighborhood had the capacity and contained a multisecular mechanism designed to absorb rural migrants and integrate newcomers is striking enough. The fact that, in the last four centuries, it has more or less successfully survived a number of devastating fires, earthquakes, political instability, changes in the economic fortunes of Istanbul, and nineteenth-century throes of modernization must be a sign of its power of adaptation. Ottoman/ Turkish cities were not amorphous conglomerates of homogenous, rigid, and isolated town quarters or guilds. The apparent lack of formal urban institutions before the nineteenth century signifies neither that townsmen had no means of articulating their specific interests, nor that particular public cultures, of the sort that the legacy of the “Islamic city” typology has contributed to obscure, did not exist.
True, no Muslim Istanbul neighborhood could exist or survive without a minimal level of autarkic organization centered around a mosque (and with a public fountain, a few shops, perhaps a school or a public bath, etc.). From that trivial fact to the notion of a city made up of homogenous and uniform cellular units, there is, however, a huge step which, if taken, will wear away much of the historical variety that characterized Ottoman cities and neighborhoods. We would suggest that any attempt at devising a normative “Ottoman neighborhood” or producing a programmatic “Istanbul mahalle” is bound to lose much factual wealth and historical variety. In organizing research into local history around such clichés as “integration,” “local autarky,” “staticness,” or “topographical fragmentation” we would elude many issues. Much information would be put away by the a priori submission to such bulky concepts.
This book does not pretend to provide a paradigm to rival the idea of the Islamic city, and to replace one norm or one archetype by another. If anything, we would argue, in the context of Islamic/Ottoman/Middle Eastern cities, against any essentialist reductionism and in favor of the irreducible historical singularity not only of each city, but of each of its bits and pieces. The contribution of such a microstudy to the debate would be to show, perhaps, that not only the cities of Arab, Islamic, and Ottoman lands themselves, but also their topographical or functional or social constituent parts (i.e., the neighborhoods, haras, or mahalles) too, cannot be made to fit into a set of fundamentally unique and ghettoizing characteristics.
The Kasap ƒlyas MAHALLE
Kasap ƒlyas (“Butcher ƒlyas”) mahalle is a smallish neighborhood in southcentral intramural Istanbul, bordering on the sea of Marmara and immediately to the west of the large Langa vegetable gardens. Set on one of the southern hillsides of Istanbul, on land gently sloping toward the sea, the neighborhood also includes part of the city ramparts bordering on the sea of Marmara, with a gate (Davud Paœa Kapısı) opening to an empty plot of land on the seaside. From this plot of land jutted out a small wooden wharf known as the Davud Paœa Wharf (Davud Paœa ƒskelesi). Both the gate and the wharf served as geographic markers to localize the neighborhood (see map).
Situated near the area known as Xerolophus or Hagios Emilianos in Byzantine Constantinople, the identity of this Ottoman mahalle is documented from the end of the fifteenth century on. With a couple of adjacent neighborhoods, it formed a semt of Istanbul known as Davud Paœa. The fifteenthcentury mosque bearing the name of its founder, the grand vizier Davud Paœa (d. 1498) is located further up the hill, in another mahalle. Together with the wharf, the gate on the ramparts, and a building of public utility located within the mahalle (the public bath, Davud Paœa Hamamı), this mosque gave its name to the whole area. The Davud Paœa semt is surrounded by other well-known districts: Cerrahpaœa, Samatya, Langa, and Etyemez. As to the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, it still exists as a small administrative unit, presently within the bounds of the Fatih District of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.
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 ƒlyas 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 ƒlyas mosque was almost totally rebuilt after the 1894 earthquake. Of the original structure, nothing much remains.
The available waqf (philanthropic/pious foundation) registers for the neighborhood bear evidence to the existence of a durable sense of local identity. So do many elements of local folklore and ethnographic material.
Significant intracommunity links can be documented for a period extending back to the late fifteenth century. For instance, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the average number of pious foundations per mahalle in Istanbul was around 11. Kasap ƒlyas, however, had one of the highest number of foundations (26, to be precise) among all the 219 listed neighborhoods in traditional intramural Istanbul.18 Less than fifty years after the Ottoman conquest, this is a sure indicator of a relatively high degree of social cohesion.
The first population census of our neighborhood was done in 1885. The neighborhood contained then about a hundred fifty houses, most of them wooden, one- or two-story traditional structures, set in a total of thirteen streets and blind alleys. Kasap ƒlyas also had a mosque, two dervish convents, three public fountains, a school for girls, a police station, and about thirty shops as well as a number of warehouses for the storage of bulk goods (coal, wood, timber, sand, gravel, etc.). It also contained a large double hamam for men and women, surrounded by a number of shops. The presence of a large public bath in such a small neighborhood is something quite exceptional for Istanbul, for most of the public baths were located in or around the central commercial areas of the city. This large fifteenth-century hamam certainly attracted customers from other mahalles as well.
The irregular and dense maze of streets and houses in the mahalle acquired a topographical stability only toward the middle of the nineteenth century, after a number of devastating fires which, together with large areas of the city, also ravaged our neighborhood. According to a rough calculation based on a map of Istanbul dating from around 1875, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle covered an area of approximately six hectares.19 Quite a large portion of the mahalle was occupied by gardens and vegetable gardens (bostans), sometimes called the “Davudpaœa gardens.” These were extensions of the neighboring Langa Gardens (see map). Kasap ƒlyas, though relatively large in area, has never been very densely populated. Well into the twentieth century parts of it still had a clearly semirural character.
From about the sixteenth century on, Kasap ƒlyas was a predominantly Muslim city quarter with always, as far as we know, only a minority of Greek orthodox inhabitants. Armenians and Greeks were a sizable majority in the neighboring Langa and Samatya semts. The last Ottoman census of 1907 tells us that Kasap ƒlyas contained about eleven hundred people.20 Its sixteenth-and seventeenth-century population must have been about half that figure, or even smaller.
Kasap ƒlyas is not topographically central to the walled city, nor is it situated anywhere near the political heart (the Palace) or near the traditional business or shopping areas of the walled city. The central commercial areas were situated either along the southern shores of the Golden Horn or in and around the large covered bazaar. As was the case with all mahalles located
near the city walls and city gates, Kasap ƒlyas was, throughout the centuries, considered to be peripheral (in all senses of the term) and it was inhabited by relatively poor people. Notwithstanding the presence of a number of mansions (konaks) belonging to the high-ranking military and bureaucrats, Kasap ƒlyas was always a much less prestigious residential area than some of its immediate neighbors.
Kasap ƒlyas housed, in the late nineteenth century, a large number of street peddlers, itinerant vendors of fruits and vegetables, some beggars, a group of—mostly female—manumitted black slaves, and a considerable number of families of quite modest means. Many of these were immigrants from the eastern Anatolian town of Arapkir. Nevertheless, all of the elderly inhabitants we interviewed, while recognizing that Kasap ƒlyas or the Davudpaœa District had never been very wealthy or particularly prestigious, still took great pride in its allegedly “aristocratic” (read: “old Istanbul”) character.
Kasap ƒlyas’ economic and social articulation to the rest of the capitalcity of the Ottoman Empire took shape through two of its main topographical assets: the wharf and the vegetable gardens. From the sixteenth century on, the neighborhood appears in official documents as “the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle near the Davudpaœa wharf,” thus signaling the fact that the wharf preexisted the mahalle and/or that it had a topographical and commercial importance that superseded that of the neighborhood as such. The Davudpaœa wharf was indeed an important geographic marker on the Marmara shores of the walled city and, as we shall see, a was nonnegligible disembarkation point for a number of goods. As for the large Langa orchards, and their extensions right to the middle of the neighborhood, they played an important role in local fruit and vegetable production and distribution and provided employment to many of the less-favored inhabitants of the mahalle.
Fluidity and Imprecision
At no period in the history of Istanbul can the number of mahalles within the walled city be taken as a datum. Their number in the early and formative decades of the Ottoman city after the 1453 conquest is not clear.21 The estimates for the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries range between 60 and 130 mahalles. New mahalles were still being formed more than half a century after the Ottoman conquest. Whether the increase in the number of mahalles that occurred in the first half of the sixteenth century is due to population growth by immigration, that is, in many cases, by forced settlements (sürgüns) of provincial groups, or simply to local population spillover is highly uncertain. The total number of Istanbul mahalles was put at no less than 219 in a listing of pious foundations done in 1546.22
About two centuries later, however, a trustworthy and often cited source of the late eighteenth century puts the total number of neighborhood communities in intramural Istanbul at only 181.23 In the post-Tanzimat era there was a tremendous change in the number of these basic urban entities. A listing of Istanbul mahalles drawn in 1876 for electoral purposes contains 251 items. The 1907 population census contains population data from 147 intramural mahalles. Another administrative list dated from 1913 contains no less than 346 names of neighborhoods. Only ten years later their number has fallen to 282, according to another official listing published in 1922.24 The 1927–1928 Republican municipal reorganization finally reduced the number of Istanbul mahalles situated within the walled city to 114. It also redefined and stabilized their borders. In many cases, these newly defined and redrawn, “rational” and republican mahalle borders were not in conformity with previous usage, nor were they necessarily in agreement with traditional perceptions of local urban space. The number and area of these intramural Istanbul mahalles is, however, still the same today.
The number, the borders, the areas, and the modes of transformation of the quarters of Istanbul, as well as the social, demographic, and economic reasons behind their fluctuation, is still a moot question. Population growth— whether because of immigration or simply as a result of an excess of births over deaths—might have resulted either in a multiplication of neighborhoods or in an overcrowding of existing ones. Demographic growth certainly caused an increase in the number of mahalles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but not necessarily in the nineteenth, when overcrowding was the result in many cases.
Besides, many local or large-scale fires frequently devastated Ottoman Istanbul, in whose residential areas houses were, especially after the sixteenth century, built more and more frequently of wood. As a result of the large-scale fires, many neighborhoods were frequently burned down.25 In the reconstruction process, however, some neighborhoods were reconstructed and survived almost intact (e.g., Kasap ƒlyas) but some less fortunate mahalles did not. They disappeared and/or were absorbed by one or more surrounding mahalles.
A well-documented example is that of the Servi Mescidi mahalle, situated in central Istanbul. In 1826 a local fire completely destroyed the neighborhood. The mahalle contained at the time of the fire a total of forty-four houses, its namesake mescit and a han.26 After the fire, new houses and shops were rebuilt on the vacant lots, but these were somehow attributed to the two neighboring and larger mahalles of Mahmud Paœa and Cezerî Kasım Paœa. The unfortunate Servi Mescidi neighborhood then disappeared from the official records. It does not appear in the 1876 listing. The efforts at revival and restoration by the trustees of the local pious foundation (vakıf) and by the imam of the local mosque—who had lost his sources of revenue in the fire—
were of no avail. As late as 1902, the trustees of the foundation related to the small mosque filed an application to the Council of State (¥ûra-yı Devlet) to make their point. The Council of State issued a ruling stating that the Servi Mescidi pious foundation was still valid, that the charred remains of the mosque were still standing, and that, therefore, the destroyed neighborhood had not lost its legal right to exist. But the court ruling could never be implemented, and the local mosque, and the Servi Mescidi mahalle were never rebuilt.27 In the municipal reform of the 1920s its area was included within Mahmud Paœa.
What is it that made such a difference possible between the “stable” Kasap ƒlyas, which survived all the fires, and the unfortunate Servi Mescidi neighborhood that succumbed to the first large-scale fire and could not be restored? The answer is not clear. Whatever it may be, the lesson is that the physical, mental, and social boundaries of the Istanbul neighborhood communities were basically imprecise. The topographically amorphous nature of many of these urban cells could make them extraordinarily resilient as well as prone to sudden and accidental change. There is even a relative instability in the very names of many mahalles, when considered over a long period of time.
The case of a “new” mahalle, just next to Kasap ƒlyas 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 ƒlyas,” 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 ƒlyas.
It appears, however, that a bona fide “Bekir Paœa mahalle” could never be launched. This “new” neighborhood does not appear in a late seventeenthcentury Istanbul avârız list of neighborhoods29 composed just a few decades after the building of the Bekir Paœa mosque. About a century and a half after the foundation of the mosque, an exhaustive and authoritative listing of Istanbul mosques does contain the Bekir Paœa mescit, but does not omit to mention that this small mosque “has no mahalle attached to it.”30 Similarly, a “Bekir Paœa neighborhood” appears in none of the post-Tanzimat nineteenth-century official mahalle listings. Yet another source calls the small mosque not by the name of its founder but as “the mescit next to the Davudpaœa wharf.”31 In the second half of the nineteenth century the mosque must have fallen totally in disuse, for during the Ottoman 1885 census it was already abandoned and in ruins. In the last Ottoman census of 1907, it had completely disappeared.
The Bekir Paœa mescit, as a building, had stood the test of time for about two and a half centuries. However, at no point in time had it succeeded in giving its name to a neighborhood independent from the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle from which it was supposed to have emerged. Was the congregation of the small seaside mosque too small or too poor and/or was the initial endowment and incomes of the waqf insufficient for the upkeep of an imam? Why didn’t the “new” neighborhood expand beyond its initial area? Why didn’t it annex new groups of streets and people?
There was no Muslim neighborhood in Istanbul that did not have at least one proper mescit. But there were plenty of mosques that had no attached mahalle of their own.32 At least three other such small mosques without a mahalle of their own were situated not too far from our Kasap ƒlyas neighborhood. One was the ¥ah ü Geda mosque, situated to the west of our neighborhood and part of the Kürkçübaœı mahalle. The second was the ¥ah Sultan mosque in the neighboring Etyemez District. The third was the Çavuœzade mosque situated at the northern border of Kasap ƒlyas. All of these mosques were sixteenth-century constructions and the Çavuœzade mosque is even said to have been built by the master architect Sinan. None of these small mosques ever had their own mahalle. We shall probably never fully understand the social and economic dynamics that lay behind Bekir Paœa’s unsuccessful attempt at pioneering the establishment of a new neighborhood “independent” of Kasap ƒlyas.
The city quarter, as a location, was always both socially and physically flexible. This was perhaps even more so in topographically very large and— at least until the second half of the nineteenth century—relatively sparsely populated Istanbul, than in other Ottoman cities of a more normal extent. Suraiya Faroqhi, for instance, points to a relative stability in the numbers but to a very frequent change in the names of the mahalles in the central Anatolian towns of Ankara and Kayseri in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.33 In Istanbul, both borders and areas could vary even over a relatively short period of time. “Mergers and acquisitions” of mahalles were probably as frequent as new formations and split-ups.
An example is again provided by our—still relatively stable—Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. As detailed in the 1885 census documents, the inhabitants of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle lived within a total of 14 streets and culs-de sacs. Only twenty-two years later, the official rosters of the last Ottoman census of 1907 show us that the population of the same mahalle had spilled over an adjacent street and that the neighborhood—as defined jointly by census officials assisted by the local headman (muhtar) during the census operations—now included 15 streets instead of 14.34 The Kasap ƒlyas mahalle had, in the meantime, spilled eastward and encroached on a street that had formerly “belonged” to the Bayezid-i Cedid mahalle. This neighborhood, whose exist-
ence is documented from the sixteenth century on, appears, however, in none of the nineteenth-century official mahalle listings and must, in the meantime, have merged with another neighborhood, probably with the one called “Sancaktar Hayreddin” situated just to the west of Kasap ƒlyas. A mahalle at one point in time is a still photograph of a complex process of building and destroying, and of organizing and reorganizing.
The flexibility of the notion of the mahalle is also shown by the many cases of “a neighborhood within a neighborhood.” These are instances where part of a mahalle is called by a different name. The aborted “Bekir Paœa mahalle” is a case in point, albeit unsuccessful in the long run. But some of these smaller entities might have found their way into some historical sources and have appeared as a distinct city quarter in some listings, and not in others.35 At some point in time, an Istanbul mahalle could have, embedded in it, a subgroup of streets or even of a few building blocks that bore a special name.
For instance, Çavuœzade Street has always been part of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. Nevertheless, it was considered by many of its twentieth-century inhabitants as forming a separate entity having distinct characteristics. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century inhabitants of Ispanakçı Viranesi, another small area within Kasap ƒlyas, also formed a subgroup. People living in these two submahalle entities were distinguished due to their—real or imagined— social, ethnic, professional, or religious backgrounds. Ispanakçı Viranesi housed new rural migrants to Kasap ƒlyas, especially in the nineteenth century, and Çavuœzade Street was inhabited mostly by Istanbulites. But there never officially existed a separate Ispanakçı Viranesi mahalle, nor was there ever one named Çavuœzade. These two names never found their way into official mahalle listings. It remains that a subset of a given mahalle could sometimes, or just for a certain period of time, be considered a totally separate neighborhood. This adds a further element of imprecision to the already fluid local perception. In a sense, a mahalle was always a process in the making and only a fleeting picture is provided by the few available cross-sectional snapshots.
Gradual changes in the makeup of Istanbul mahalles were also induced by the simple horizontal mobility of the inhabitants. The ethnic/religious composition of neighborhoods could not have been totally static either. This mobility is impossible to document for periods preceding the second half of the nineteenth century. The few reliable figures that exist for the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle in the Hamidian period, however, strongly suggest that even in earlier periods urban mobility must have been far from negligible.
The turnover rate of the population in our small neighborhood was very high in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1885 and 1895 the yearly entry and exit rates to and from the mahalle totaled around 3 percent. That is, for a population of around 1,000 to 1,100 inhabitants, the muhtar’s notebooks reveal that there there were about 30 people moving in
or out of the neighborhood every single year. This is a very high rate of circulation. We should add to this figure of 3 percent the yearly births and deaths that occurred among the population of the mahalle. This would mean that the demographic and social composition of the neighborhood could be completely transformed within a generation or so. Indeed, over the last quarter of the nineteenth century the population of Kasap ƒlyas changed almost to a degree of unrecognizability. Practically none of the families and households present in the mahalle during the 1885 census are to be found twenty-two years later, in the last Ottoman census of 1907.
Sources and Issues
What is known of the demographic structures and the social relationships within the capital-city of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly concerns either the Palace itself and its web of political relationships or the more “Westernized” suburbs of Galata and Pera, whose inhabitants were mostly the Levantine or the non-Muslim. In any case, the available information concerns mostly middle- or upper-middle-class strata. The stock of published sources and materials (novels, memoirs, biographies, travelogues, etc.) also concern, for obvious reasons, more or less the same groups. Besides, they are, for the most part, concentrated in the post-Tanzimat period.
As exemplified by the history of Kasap ƒlyas however, grassroots Istanbul, much less “visible” both to contemporaries and to historians, was certainly quite different. The majority of the Istanbulites, especially those living in the intramural city, shared more modest households and neighborhoods, and it is they and their movements that ultimately put their stamp on Ottoman Istanbul. However, not much of significance has been written either on the daily lives of ordinary citizens, on the structure and the web of relationships of average neighborhoods or, for that matter, on the human fabric of Ottoman cities at large.
As far as the Anatolian towns are concerned, the picture is not all that different. In the heyday of their discovery and frenetic exploitation as a new source, it was hoped that the early Ottoman tax cum land cadastral surveys of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tapu-tahrir registers (the Defters), could be used to reconstruct quarter by quarter their demographic and economic structure. These documents, however, have proven to be too schematic, too isolated, and too incomplete to provide anything more than a simple indication of relative population densities and, in some cases, of global population trends36 in these cities. Besides, consistent long-run series are almost impossible to obtain for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
As to the Ottoman/Turkish tradition of local history, this literature deals quite extensively with the archaeological remains and the architecture, the historical monuments, the urban layout, and so forth, of various cities. Notwithstanding a few notable exceptions, much of this literature, especially that concerning Anatolian cities, is little more than undigested raw historical source material with almost no attempts at detailed comment or synthesis. Besides, this literature is, mainly for lack of historical documentation, largely silent on what is the basic element of any community object of study: the people and their daily lives in the Ottoman period.
There is a small number of brilliant exceptions to this sad state of affairs. Faroqhi on seventeenth-century Ankara and Kayseri, André Raymond on various Arab cities under Ottoman rule, Haim Gerber on seventeenth-century Bursa, Abraham Marcus on eighteenth-century Aleppo, Daniel Goffman on Izmir, and Özer Ergenç on sixteenth-century Ankara deserve special mention. All of these studies use the archives of the local religious court records as one of their main source of documentation.
Local Archives
We know, however, of no equivalent historical study focusing on a single mahalle within an Ottoman or Middle Eastern city. Indeed, one of the reasons why, among all of the neighborhoods in traditional Istanbul, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle has been picked up for such an in-depth, demographic, and historical study is, first and foremost the availability of a really exceptional set of archival sources pertaining to its population. The equivalent of these historical sources exist, to the best of our knowledge, for no other urban neighborhood of Istanbul, or for that of any other Ottoman city, for that matter.
These quite exceptional archival sources consist of three thick notebooks accompanied by a number of loose folios, all handwritten by the successive imams of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque and by the muhtars of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle in the second half of the nineteenth century. These notebooks and folios contain, among other items of information:
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1. a nominative list of 654 marriage contracts registered by the imams of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque in the second half of the nineteenth century;
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2. a complete list and description of waqf property in the neighborhood starting from the 1660s and ending about the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as the uses to which these waqf buildings and land have been put and the revenues that accrued;
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3. a nominative list of population movements in and out of the neighborhood in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as a (very incomplete) list of births and deaths in the mahalle;
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4. a very precise descriptive count of all real estate property, public and private, in the neighborhood conducted in 1885 with names of owners and of tenant(s), if any.
The care with which the successive imams and muhtars of the the nineteenthcentury Kasap ƒlyas mahalle took note of the demographic events that occurred in their neighborhood is truly surprising. Prior to the late nineteenthcentury regulations on registration, there was no Ottoman/Muslim tradition of registering or centralizing vital events. A particularly zealous scribe (the local headman, muhtar Osman Efendi, of whom more will be said later) was instrumental in preserving these local documents. We have used these exceptional local records to complement the official census documents, to obtain an insider’s perspective about the social and economic makeup of the neighborhood, and to trace the process of rural migration and integration into the mahalle. The marriage records contain little demographic information, for neither the ages, nor the dates and places of birth of the spouses were noted. These records are, however, a good indicator of the progressive secularization of vital registration. As to the local waqf records kept by the imam, the local trustee, they furnish important glimpses on intramahalle relationships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The movements in and out of the neighborhood have provided a means of analyzing a multisecular migration model from the Anatolian town of Arapkir.
Quantitative Data (Late Ottoman Censuses)
Two other important Ottoman archival sources have been delved into, for the purposes of this book: The archives of the religious court (¥er’iye Sicili Arœivi) for the Davud Paœa District, spanning the period from 1782 to 1924, and the 1885 and 1907 late Ottoman Population Census (Tahrir-i Nüfus) documents. The censuses and registration schemes developed in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century provide a rich source of data for historical studies. The two late Ottoman de jure censuses (tahrir-i nüfus) of 1885 and 1907 and the population registers that were built upon them comprise a rich array of information on many aspects of Ottoman population and society.37
Until recently, these data had been utilized only in a superficial way.38 Census-taking was an age-old Ottoman habit and a census of each newly conquered territory was indeed taken in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
But these early counts were done for the purpose of assessing agricultural output and potential tax returns. Besides, they were discontinued after the first decades of the seventeenth century.
The two censuses of 1885 and 1907 were in fact the first empire-wide censuses designed specifically for purposes other than either taxation, agricultural revenue assessment, or military conscription. They were the first “modern” censuses in which precise demographic and social information was collected for each individual. All census registrations were nominative and they permit, therefore, the reconstruction of family and household structures. The 1885 census was also the first to record information about females. Individuals were recorded as members of residential groups of various types, the most common of which was the house or household (hane). The houses and other premises were all registered together by neighborhood and street address, and these are very helpful in drawing the social topography of the neighborhood.
Registration in the Ottoman capital during these two censuses is known to have been quite thorough, both for males and females. Strict measures were implemented to make sure that the census officials carried out their tasks. Each registered individual was then issued with a sort of population certificate (nüfus tezkeresi), which was a combination of a birth certificate and an identification card. This certificate was later to become an essential document for transacting all official and legal business, buying and selling property, seeking government employment, obtaining travel documents, and so forth. There is reason to suppose that census regulations were most strictly applied in the capital-city. In the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, for instance, both the local headman and the imam of the mosque assisted the census officials in the registration process and signed the local census register upon completion of the operations as a testimony of the exhaustivity of the count. The data from these censuses are the most reliable source for the study of population, households, and families in late Ottoman society.
The basic rosters for the 1885 and 1907 censuses in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle are kept intact in the Population Registry (Nüfus Müdürlü™ü) of the Fatih District of metropolitan Istanbul. These two late Ottoman censuses were designed to also function as permanent population registers, probably under the influence of Quételet’s Belgian population registers, and the census totals were to be regularly updated with the day-to-day registration of all subsequent vital events. All births, deaths, and in- and out- migrants to and from each neighborhood and city were to be recorded on the basic census rosters and these were to be kept in situ. The total failure of the postcensus registration schemes, however, stand in sharp contrast with the thoroughness and the reliability of the initial census registration itself. These rosters, which contain personal and confidential information, are still protected by a privacy
law. They have not yet been turned over to the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry and are not yet, properly speaking, public archival documents. They can be consulted by special permission only.
We have done an exhaustive and systematic transcription of both the 1885 and the 1907 census documents for the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. In the 1885 census, the non-Muslim population of the neighborhood was registered in a separate roster, which is unfortunately lost. As to the 1907 census, there is only one basic roster that contains both the Muslim and the non-Muslim inhabitants of the neighborhood. In 1885, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle had 925 registered Muslim inhabitants and, in 1907, a total of 1,160 inhabitants, 1,039 of which were Muslim.
Other Written Sources
Quantitative data and sources for the pre-nineteenth-century Istanbul population are difficult to come by. The available estimates, most of them by European travelers and Orientalists, are approximations with a usually low degree of reliability. Besides, Istanbul was never taxed in the same manner as the provinces, never had a Tapu Tahrir Defteri, and was never, even immediately after the Ottoman conquest, subjected to a census. There are, for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, only a few sparse cizye defteri (head-tax registers for the non-Muslim population) and some partial household counts for the occasional avârız taxation. As to the urban local level, population figures are non-existent. The first citywide reliable count is that of 1885.
The Archives of the Religious Courts (¥er’iye Sicilleri Arœivi) for Istanbul are classified on a topographical basis, given that many of the courts of justice were also responsible for law and order in specific chunks of the city. The archives for the Davud Paœa District, of which the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle is a part, span the period between 1782 and 1924. The Davudpaœa Court of Justice, always headed by an aide (na’ib) of the kadı of Istanbul, was one of the oldest courts of the city. Its foundation is probably contemporaneous with the namesake mosque and dates therefore from the last decade of the fifteenth century. The court operated at first within the Davudpaœa mosque itself but was moved, in the eighteenth century, to a two-story wooden building just adjacent to it. The devastating fire that ravaged a large part of Istanbul in 1782 destroyed both the Davudpaœa Court Building and its three centuries of accumulated archives.
As to the post-1782 religious court records for Kasap ƒlyas, they contain mostly deeds of sale of property, settlements of debts and of commercial disputes, cases of inheritance with litigation, and cases of divorce. The cases of divorce include declarations of outright repudiation as well as cases with
mutual consent and financial settlement. There are also a number of rulings that amount to an outright rejection of the plaintiff’s case. A 10 percent sample spanning the 1782–1924 period has been drawn from among these court records. A total of 173 detailed court records have thus been transcribed, classified, and analyzed. A first screening was done by previously selecting the court cases where either the plaintiff, the defendant, and/or the object of discord were living or were situated in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle.
Interviews and Personal Narratives
A small number of in-depth interviews have also been conducted with elderly inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas. Nine of them were with Kasap ƒlyas-born men who were still in touch with their mahalle of origin, and one was with the wife of a former muhtar. The interviews were conducted either in their homes or in a coffeehouse in the mahalle where elderly people regularly met on Sundays. We attempted to obtain informants from as wide a range of social strata as possible but the paucity of the numbers involved invalidates any claims of “representativity.”
Not surprisingly, we have had difficulty in obtaining precise chronological information about occurrences in the neighborhood. The temporal construction of each of the biographical narratives hinged on the remembrance of a past and lost “imagined community.” Nevertheless, these interviews have provided very useful general information on daily life in the neighborhood and on its inhabitants in the first half of the twentieth century. We have thereby also obtained important clues on intracommunity relationships, on the self-image of the neighborhood community as a whole as well as, more generally, on twentieth-century local identities in Istanbul. Local myths and legends seem to have played an important role in the definition of the inhabitants of the mahalle.
The interviews also provided us with insights into the values and aspirations of men and women living in the integrated atmosphere of a traditional Istanbul neighborhood before the Second World War. During the interviews, most of the older Kasap ƒlyas inhabitants have spontaneously referred to the “foundation myths” of their mahalle with a mixture of pride and nostalgia, and have all expressed deep regret at the disappearance of the local ‘asabiyya in Istanbul. Many of the interviewees, for instance, took great pride in the “authentic old Istanbul” nature of their mahalle of origin, which they viewed as a proof of aristocracy. They all missed and deeply regretted the former internal solidarity networks.
The Istanbulites, in their public life, often saw their mahalle as a direct extension of their untouchable individual private space, of their inner personal
domain. Their doorstep, their (often dead-end) street, and their mahalle were indeed transitional stages between their private and public spheres of activity. Therefore for many people, to talk about a mahalle implied conducting, in a sense, a first-person narrative discourse.
On the other hand, Ottoman historians have sufficiently stressed the fact that there was no widespread tradition of first-person narrative writing, no “personal” literature, or autobiographical materials worthy of that name in Ottoman times, at least not before well into the second half of the nineteenth century. There are exceptions, of course, but the exaggerated value attached to them is of a kind that tends to confirm the rule. The dearth of Ottoman/Turkish historical sources centered on the singularity of individual lives has been sufficiently underlined. The personal voice, the distantiation of the observer to the observed, the autobiographical touch, and the opinionated observation of daily events is something that is virtually impossible to find before the winds of “Westernization” could seriously affect daily social life in Ottoman cities.
As to the very few available personal narratives, they do not furnish sufficient material for the construction of personalized histories. Nor are they numerous enough, or do they constitute a fruitful perspective leading to a view of society “from the bottom up.”39 This state of affairs, for the time being, erects almost insuperable barriers to the detailed study of Ottoman popular life and culture in past centuries. The building of a meaningful, consistent, and continuous Ottoman/Turkish histoire des mentalités is, by the same token, a formidable enterprise. As things now stand, therefore, an Ottoman/Turkish equivalent of a Montaillou or of a “Merchant of Prato” seems quite impossible to reconstruct.
Take, for instance, our exceptionally conscientious late nineteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas muhtars and imams. These two officials have very carefully noted down hundreds of local events, filled up pages and pages with notes of local occurrences, and kept a personal archive full of various official matters of sometimes minor local importance. Some of the events that happened in the neighborhood didn’t even require the official seal and did not even need to be officially registered.
Nevertheless, these two people, through pages and pages of local records, never give as much as a single clue either about themselves, their families, or their daily lives. Besides, they have never put down in writing a single personal opinion or viewpoint. The tone that prevails in their handwritten documents concerning the mahalle is a totally flat and impersonal one. The events that took place in Kasap ƒlyas were uniformly related in a crisp, dry style, often evocative of shorthand notation. Nowhere does the mental attitude of the muhtar and the imam toward these events, their work in general, their immediate social environment, or themselves transpire in any way. The tone is that of a zealous scribe who does his job well, often does more than what
is required of him, and puts down in writing a maximum of information. But the scribe never distantiates himself from the duty of officially recording events. That these events in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were taking place in a very close environment and that almost all of them involved people who were well-known both to the muhtar and to the imam have made no difference. The selectivity among the types of recorded events is not revealing either. All social and demographic events, whether a birth, a death, the arrival to the mahalle and the registration of a newcomer, or even a simple signature apposed on a sales contract, get exactly the same flat and impersonal treatment.
Besides, these zealous and careful scribes always chose to remain incognito. Not once do they directly sign their books or documents, or mention their own names and identities, which we have had to discover by following the changes in handwriting, by cross-checking with other sources, and by capitalizing on minor textual hints. Official or unofficial local chronicles are a type of historical source that is not to be found in Ottoman Istanbul. Whether all of this constitutes sufficient reason for explaining the absence, especially before the second half of the nineteenth century, of any documentation on life in the Istanbul mahalle, is a matter to reflect upon. Microscale social and economic studies have not yet managed to appear as a promising research area for Ottoman and Middle Eastern historians.
We do not go so far as asserting that the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle was, in any sense of the word, representative of the whole of traditional Istanbul—or even of its more modest portion; nor can we say that it was a “typical” Ottoman/ Turkish urban community neighborhood. Whether such a thing as a “typical” Ottoman city, which would also impose unique characteristics upon their various quarters and their inhabitants, ever existed is doubtful. To situate and describe a precise Ottoman local urban identity and to document its demographic and social evolution is, in itself, a sufficient challenge.
Otherwise, it might well be that Kasap ƒlyas has followed a strictly individual and inimitable path, that it has had an evolution that is totally sui generis. The highly unusual set of historical documents that have survived for this mahalle would, if anything, tend to set our neighborhood apart from the others. The care with which the successive imams and muhtars of nineteenthcentury Kasap ƒlyas took note of the demographic events that occurred in the mahalle is truly surprising. This is even more of a contrast when set against the background of a total absence of any Ottoman/Muslim habit of registering, reporting, or centralizing vital events. The impressive collection of local waqf documents that the local imams carefully preserved is just as unusual. These quite exceptional local headmen might well have been the products of an exceptional mahalle. The lesson, if any, to be drawn from Kasap ƒlyas would be to emphasize the extreme diversity and dissimilarity of urban neighborhoods, as well as their fluidity.
Ironwork above the tomb of the founder of the Mahalle, Kasap ƒlyas (author’s photograph)
1
The Contours of a Local Identity
It was a chilly November day of the year 1494 (Safer 900 a.h.). ƒlyas slowly climbed the steep hill toward the large mosque of the Grand Vizier Davudpaœa. Its lofty dome and tall minaret overlooked the whole district, the large semt to which it had come to give its name. Obviously, the Davudpaœa mosque was much larger and loftier than the small mescit ƒlyas himself had built down the hill. But how could he, a simple butcher, have ever competed with the fortune of a grand vizier? There was no point in being dissatisfied with the comparison. Turning back, ƒlyas looked down the hill toward the Marmara Sea and marveled at all that had been accomplished.
ƒlyas had seen glorious days indeed. He sometimes felt that the whole city of Istanbul was his. True, he was only a simple butcher. But he had been given, in his time, the incomparable honor of feeding and serving the army that conquered this magnificent city. He had been appointed chief butcher of the sultan’s army, and had served his master as best as he could. He did not only feed the Blessed Army; he was also part of it. This meant that he too had waged a Holy War in his own right. That was more than four decades ago. For weeks and months in the spring of the year 1453 (857 a.h.) ƒlyas and his aides had borne the heavy responsibility of slaughtering sheep and providing the besieging army with a sufficient amount of meat. Once Constantinople was taken, who could deny his vital contribution to the victory?
And yes, after the conquest, when the time came for sharing the spoils, he was not forgotten. The glorious Sultan Mehmed the
Conqueror allotted his chief butcher, ƒlyas, a large piece of land within the walled city. The other chief butcher of the conquering army, Demirhan, had also received his share. He had, however, died soon after the conquest. Demirhan’s lot was perhaps better situated, as it overlooked the bustling Golden Horn from the top of a steeper hill near the Byzantine church of Christ Pantocrator and was nearer to the commercial center of the city. But it was much smaller in area and already rather densely populated by Christians. As to his own share, near the city walls and overlooking the sea of Marmara, it was much larger and virtually empty. Luckily, ƒlyas had to face a territory that was practically a tabula rasa. Indeed, after the conquest the quasi-deserted city had to be almost totally repopulated. Settlers had to be brought in, new neighborhoods had to be formed, mosques had to be built, and Byzantium had to be given a new and Muslim stamp. So, in a sense, Kasap ƒlyas’ Holy War was far from having ended with the capture of the city. His personal Holy War was in fact only beginning.
He remembered the very day he had set foot on “his” bit of Istanbul. That was also the first time he had entered the conquered city itself. Approaching his territory on a boat, he had found landing on a small old wharf made of a few creaking planks. The infidels called it the Agios Emilianos wharf. Part of the Muslim army had already used it as a landing place during the two-month long siege of Constantinople. This wharf was the nearest sea access to his portion of the city. ƒlyas had then looked at the area in and around the city walls bordering on the sea of Marmara and he had chosen the best place to build his mosque: not too close to the sea and the city walls, but not too high up the hill either, a plot of land bordering on the small side road that led from the Forum Bovis of the infidels to the city walls near the Seven Towers. Then he had boats bring to the seaside blocks of stone, limestone, and sand to make mortar, wood for construction, and so forth. Workers were hired and building began.
Very soon, however, the building of the mosque had to come to a temporary halt. ƒlyas remembered why. He was sitting on a block of stone watching the workers unloading the boats and carrying the various building materials from the wharf to the construction site of the mosque. The actions of one of these workers struck him. The man took a heavy stone or a sack full of limestone from the boat moored at the wharf, brought it to the building site and, without leaving it there, carried the same sack or stone back to the boat again. The action was repeated quite a few times. ƒlyas was puzzled.
When asked for the reason for his strange behavior, the man answered that “he felt he had to do his share of daily work, and that he had no choice but to work for a living; however, as he was impure, he felt he should not contribute to the building of a holy place of worship while in a state of ritual impurity.” ƒlyas was struck by the man’s honesty and piety. On the spot, he gave the order to stop all work on the building site of the mosque. Then, he gave priority to building a large hamam first, so that the workers could wash and regularly perform their ritual ablutions. A location just across from the mosque was selected for the purpose. The mosque itself was finally completed only after the public bath was built and in operation. With the mosque and the shops built just next to it, the providential public bath would become an essential part of the new mahalle.
Many of those who worked on Kasap ƒlyas’ construction site were also among his former aides in his work as a butcher. They were all used to slaughtering sheep and cattle and all of them enjoyed a good bite of mutton or beef. Save one. This odd man was strangely averse to eating meat and would never even have a taste of it. No wonder he was nicknamed “Etyemez” (meat-averse!). It was very strange, therefore, that this man could take part in a long-term enterprise whose very existence rested on the provision and consumption of animal meat. Naturally, ƒlyas ended up by banishing this misfit. The man was told to go and settle as far away as possible from the mosque and from the center of ƒlyas’s new mahalle. The vegetarian went and settled on a small bit of land at the extreme western tip of the large area put by the Sultan under ƒlyas’s responsibility. The vegetarian’s place of banishment was later to become a separate neighborhood known as Etyemez. Nevertheless, this neighborhood always remained morally part and parcel of Kasap ƒlyas’s dependencies.
But all of this was a long, long time ago. ƒlyas the butcher was now old and felt tired as he climbed up the hill on a narrow dirt road. He knew that the end was not very far, but he was ready to go, and at peace with himself. He had already accomplished the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Haj. Besides, he had just made his will and had given away all of his possessions to endow a holy foundation. The foundation, his perpetual vakıf, was to take care of his mosque, the mosque he had built himself, the visible product of his dedication, of his piety and hard work. This mosque that bore his name, the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, was standing just below him, toward the foot of the hill on land gently sloping toward the sea. He had indeed
richly endowed it. Apart from the yearly revenues accruing from the thirty thousand aspers in cash that had bequeathed to his foundation, there would also be the rental incomes from no less than sixteen shops and six rooms, all adjoining the mosque. These moneys would certainly be more than sufficient for the upkeep. An imam as well as a müezzin would be appointed on a permanent basis and the imam would be the trustee of his foundation. The wages of the Coran reciters, those of the Friday preachers and of the cleaners and caretakers of his mosque, as well as the expenses for the necessary upkeep and repair work would be paid out of his foundation’s revenues.
Besides, with the public bath and the shops all near the city gate leading to the seaside and to the wharf, he was sure that a small center of attraction had already taken shape. Through his efforts, a durable neighborhood community, a real mahalle had been formed. However rich or prestigious the adjacent mahalles might become, he was sure that his mahalle would always have both chronological and spiritual precedence over its surroundings. In time, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle would, no doubt, put its stamp on the whole district. It seemed then that Kasap ƒlyas had waged his personal Holy War with a great deal of success.
As for himself, he had made sure that, when the time came, his body would be laid to rest in the small plot of land just behind the mosque. That would be a perfect location for watching his neighborhood, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, grow and prosper—and forever remain a basic building block of Muslim Istanbul.
It is not totally impossible for these events to have really taken place. This narrative is, as a matter-of-fact, just a combination of various local myths and legends of Kasap ƒlyas with the few elements of truth that can be gathered from sixteenth-century sources.
As to the first serious historical source of detailed information on the mahalle, it dates from 1546, no less than half a century after the putative decease of its mythical founder and almost a century after the conquest of Istanbul.1 In the detailed list of vakıfs established in 1546 and published by Barkan and Ayverdi, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle is listed as one of fourteen neighborhoods that were then part of the Davud Paœa area.2 In this collation of Istanbul pious foundations, the details of no less than 2,490 deeds of trust are enumerated and these are distributed over a total of 219 mahalles of Istanbul intra muros. This shows an average of 11 vakıfs per Istanbul neighborhood, though for most of the mahalles the number of deeds of trust did not exceed four or five. Among the neighborhoods adjacent to Kasap ƒlyas, for instance, only three vakıfs were registered for the Sancaktar Hayreddin
mahalle, two for Abacızâde, eight for Kürkçübaœı, nine for Hubyar, and eighteen for Davud Paœa. With a total of twenty six local pious foundations Kasap ƒlyas was indeed the record holder in and around the Davud Paœa area, and was also among the ten mahalles of Istanbul having the highest number of local vakıfs.
Local Identity: The Formative Sixteenth Century
Less than a century after the conquest, Kasap ƒlyas had already acquired the location that it still occupies within the semt and mahalle topography of Istanbul. Set on the slopes of the last of the “seven hills” of the historical Istanbul peninsula, on land gently sloping toward the sea south of the Davud Paœa Mosque, Kasap ƒlyas was then, as it is today, embedded in the larger Davud Paœa semt.
The high number of endowments for local common benefit established in Kasap ƒlyas is a sure indicator of a strong sense of local identity and of a relatively high degree of social cohesion. The decisions that many of the inhabitants of the mahalle took, in the first half of the sixteenth century, concerning the transmission of their property, shows that they really believed in the perennity of their neighborhood. Those who established a foundation for local common benefit in their neighborhood chose to dispose of their goods in a manner that would establish an eternal link between them and their neighborhood community. A local identity, a sense of local belonging, was evidently already there, for such potent material effects would not have been produced without a strong collective belief in local common goals and benefits. The first deed of trust (vakfiye) established in the neighborhood is, as a matter-of-fact also the earliest within the whole Davud Paœa district and is dated May 1501 (¥evval 906 a.h.). That first local vakıf provides for the repair and maintenance of a local public convenience, a well for public use (bi’r-i mâ-yı müœterek) situated in the neighborhood.3
Was the comparatively large number of local endowments due to the fact that Kasap ƒlyas was particularly populous or particularly well-off in the sixteenth century? On the matter of populousness, just the contrary is true. As we shall see, though large in area, the mahalle was always, in the sixteenth as well as in later centuries, rather sparsely populated. As to riches, the available sources do not allow for that sort of a comparison at a mahalle level in the sixteenth century, but, as we shall see, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century data would, if anything, point in just the opposite direction.
Starting from the very end of the fifteenth century, the inhabitants of that small bit of Istanbul seem to have strongly believed that they could meaningfully bequeath their possessions (in cash or as real estate property) for
a strictly local cause and purpose. Besides believing in the perennity of the mosque and of the mahalle itself, the inhabitants who endowed a foundation for local common benefit must have put a good deal of confidence in the personality of the local religious leaders (i.e., the imam and the müezzin of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque) who would automatically have to function as trustees and would have to manage the trust fund or the real estate property in accordance with the desires of the founder.
Besides, Kasap ƒlyas, through the prestige of its local religious leaders, seems to have acquired a particular urban aura. Indeed, the trusteeship of a number of houses situated in Arap Taceddin and in the adjacent “new” mahalle had also been given to the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque. However, not even a single item of property situated in our neighborhood had been given in trust to a local religious foundation situated elsewhere in the city in the first half of the sixteenth century.
Points of Reference
In the last quarter of the fifteenth century three buildings played a definitional role in the formation of our neighborhood and of its local identity: (1) the Davud Paœa complex (külliye) which gave its name to the whole area and was situated up the hill above Kasap ƒlyas. Built in 1485 by the grand vizier Koca Davud Paœa (d. 1498), it was composed of a large mosque, a shrine (türbe), a small theological school (medrese), and a soup kitchen for the poor (imaret); (2) the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, built probably not long before 1494, which is the date of its deed of trust; and (3) the large Davud Paœa double bath (çifte hamam4) situated right in the middle of our mahalle and built probably at the same time as the Davud Paœa complex itself. As it was nearer to the city walls bordering on the sea of Marmara than to the Davud Paœa complex, the Davud Paœa public bath was often designated as Deniz Hamamı, or Denizciler Hamami (The Seamen’s Hamam).
Together with the Davud Paœa gate on the city walls bordering the sea of Marmara and the small wharf that jutted out from the piece of land just outside the gate, these three buildings were the main formative landmarks of both the Davud Paœa semt and the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. These three buildings put their imprint on the area, became the basic topographical points of reference for a local identity, and contributed to the formation of a durable local consciousness. Indeed, neither the name of the Davud Paœa District nor that of Kasap ƒlyas appear in a previous listing of Istanbul pious foundations dated from 1472.5 The last quarter of the fifteenth century was crucial in that respect.
Were there any traces of any Byzantine building, monument, road, church, and so forth or of any other pre-Ottoman center of attraction that could have served as a point of reference to the newly formed mahalle? Judging from the speed with which local identities were formed in the neighborhood after the Ottoman conquest, the answer seems to be negative. The Byzantine monument nearest to the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle would be the Arcadius column, at the center of a small forum that was situated about a quarter of a mile to the north and was within the bounds of the Cerrahpaœa District, where the basis of the column can still be seen. To the west of Davudpaœa, the neighboring semt of Samatya derives its name from the Greek Psammathia. To the east of Kasap ƒlyas are the large vegetable gardens of Langa, whose Turkish name is a direct descendent of the Byzantine Vlanga. No onomastic or topographical traces have been transmitted to Ottoman Istanbul, however, either of Xerolophus, the Byzantine denomination of the hills of the Davudpaœa District, or of Hagios Emilianos, the name of a church and of a gate in the city ramparts, both in the same district.6 The district was in no way an important Byzantine economic or political center. It did not become a primary urban center under Ottoman rule either. The construction of durable local identities in Ottoman Davudpaœa and in Kasap ƒlyas seem to have owed little to what the district had contained in Byzantine times.
The area was very sparsely populated in the late Byzantine period. Sources show that the whole Marmara coast from the point of the Seraglio to the Castle of the Seven Towers was hardly inhabited.7 Buildings were rare in the first decades of the Turkish conquest as well. Many maps and engravings of the period show vast empty areas all along the coast. The Buondelmonti map of the end of the fifteenth century as well as the Vavassore map dating from the 1520s show, despite the usual inaccuracies of scale and perspective, that the seacoast of the walled city of Istanbul was lined with gardens, vineyards, orchards, and windmills and contained large areas of empty land. In all of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century historic maps and charts, very few houses, churches, and mosques appear along the Marmara coast of intramural Istanbul.8
Deserted though it was in the decades preceding the Turkish conquest, the Davudpaœa area was not given priority when Istanbul had to be repopulated after the Ottoman takeover. Some of the neighboring districts did receive an influx of immigrant population, but not Kasap ƒlyas and Davudpaœa. As part of the policy of repopulating Istanbul, for instance, many Armenian communities were brought from around the Anatolian towns of Tokat and Sivas in the years immediately following the conquest, and they were settled in the neighboring districts of Samatya, Langa, and Sulumanastır.9 For all we know, our district and mahalle were not directly concerned by any of these forced population movements. The neighborhood identities that took shape
in the mahalle and in the district were not connected to any “imported” network of preexisting relationships (a common geographic origin, ethnic or religious groupings, etc.) which would have simply been superimposed upon a new topographical locus. The available evidence seems to indicate that local identities and local solidarities in Kasap ƒlyas were formed on the spot, the two mosques, the hamam (a place for meeting as much as one for taking baths) and the wharf having served as basic mental and geographic landmarks.
The account-books of the large and central Süleymaniye mosque, built between 1550 and 1557, barely a decade after the 1546 list of pious foundations, contain another bit of evidence indicative of this early formation of the Davudpaœa and Kasap ƒlyas local identities.10 In the absence of family surnames, almost all of the workers employed on the construction site of the large sultanic mosque were clearly identified by their place of origin. For those coming from outside the capital, the name of their town of origin was added to their name and for the Istanbulites, that of their district within the city. Next to those coming from the adjoining districts of Langa or Samatya, many workers (stonemasons, carpenters, etc.) on the construction site, from 1550 on, were clearly identified as “such and such from Davudpaœa.”
Endowments, Donations, and Foundation Aims
The specifications of the sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas vakıfs list the broad range of endowments that were set up by the local inhabitants.11 First of all, various amounts of cash, ranging from one thousand to thirty thousand aspers (akçe) were donated. In most of the deeds of trust it was clearly specified that the yearly return of these moneys would be 10 percent. Then there is real estate (a total of sixteen houses and five shops, all situated within the mahalle) which had been endowed. This is quite considerable, given that Kasap ƒlyas could not, in all probability have contained at the time much more than fifty or sixty houses. Besides cash and real estate, some utensils for daily use (a cauldron, a large tray, a copper bucket, a basin, a pickaxe, a spade, etc.) were also bequeathed to the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, as well as, more appropriately, some manuscript copies of the Coran.
Three of the twenty-six vakıfs provided funds for the upkeep of a dervish lodge (tekke) situated elsewhere. The Süleyman Halife tekke belonging to the Halvetî Sufi order was situated in the neighborhood of Sofular, about a kilometer to the east, and three Kasap ƒlyas deeds of trust dating from 1515 and 1521 provided funding for this lodge. This leads us to presume that there existed no such tekkes in or near Kasap ƒlyas in the first half of the sixteenth century.12
The deeds of trust directly and openly state that their object is one of local common benefit. The upkeep and repair of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque is
the most often-cited aim and endowed moneys and their future revenues are clearly earmarked for that specific purpose. The provision of oil for the oillamps of the mosque and the purchase of candles for lighting the mosque on special days is also important. The care and cleaning of the two communal water-wells of the mahalle have also been provided for, as well as the expenses of a small local primary school (muallimhane) which was endowed as early as 1514. In another important chunk of the deeds of trust both the management of, and the revenues that would accrue from, the bequeathed property (houses and shops) are directly left to those who are to officiate as imam and/or as müezzin of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque. These indirect donations to the imam are often conditional upon his regular recitation of Coranic prayers for the rest of the soul of the deceased donor. The existence of officiating local religious leaders must be seen as an object of common benefit from the point of view of the local community.
From a strictly technical and legalist point of view, though, about half of the sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas pious foundations belonged to the type called hereditary (evlâtlık or zürrî) vakıfs. Technically, this means that the initial donor could decide that the donated cash or property forming the initial endowment would at first be entrusted either to one or more of his direct descendants or to another person of his choice. The endowed property would then be managed by these selected “heirs” and would revert to the trusteeship of the imam of the local mosque only after the death of those persons or the complete extinction of their line of descendants. As suggested by Barkan and Ayverdi in their introduction to their modern edition of the 1546 list of Istanbul vakıfs, this mode of constitution of the vakıfs could also have been used as a way of bypassing the very strict Islamic rules (ferâiz or muhallefât) concerning the partition of inheritances.13
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque who was also the local leader of Kasap ƒlyas, was managing the revenues of twenty-six different local pious foundations. From among these, the use of, and/or the revenues accruing from, six houses and three shops had been given to him by the various donors. As we shall see, the imams of the Ottoman Kasap ƒlyas mahalle have always enjoyed fairly comfortable income levels, and the basis for their regular income flow seems to have been already established in the early sixteenth century.
MAHALLE Topography: Boundaries and Landmarks
To determine the precise boundaries of the sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas mahalle is an attempt both vain and impossible. The mahalles—or, rather, those that survived until the twentieth century—were officially assigned precise and artificial boundaries only in 1927.14 For centuries the Kasap ƒlyas
mosque, the Davudpaœa complex, the hamam, the wharf, and the city ramparts bordering on the sea of Marmara were sufficient definitional landmarks. There is nevertheless reason to suppose that the area and borders of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle did not change to a very considerable extent during the last few centuries. To the west and to the east of it, the two neighboring mahalles (Sancaktar Hayrettin alias Bayezid-i Cedid, and Kürkçübaœı) have always been the same. The southernly limits of Kasap ƒlyas were, then as now, naturally set by the city walls and by the sea of Marmara. To the north, there were two neighboring mahalles (Hubyar and Abacızade) in the sixteenth century but these had later disappeared and had been absorbed into other northernly neighborhoods.
To sum up, Kasap ƒlyas extended, then as now, over a rectangular area, with the long sides of the rectangle being oriented approximately in the eastwest direction. Compared with the other intramural Istanbul mahalles, Kasap ƒlyas has never been a small neighborhood. In the nineteenth century, Istanbul neighborhoods usually covered an area ranging from one to five hectares.15 Kasap ƒlyas, toward the end of the nineteenth century, had a total area of no less than six hectares. Only a little more than half that area was effectively inhabited, though, and the Davud Paœa vegetable gardens took up the rest.
The streets of Istanbul received official names only in the 1860s. The people of Istanbul gave names to the more important streets before the nineteenth century, but nothing points to the existence of street names as early as the sixteenth century. There were no house or gate numbers either and the modern construct of an “address” could not apply.
The truth is that none of the real estate property in Kasap ƒlyas set up as a pious foundation in the sixteenth century can now be located with any degree of precision within the mahalle. For in the deeds of trust, these properties were always described with reference to the nearest well-known landmark and to the names of the owners of the neighboring houses or property. The landmarks most often used in the sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were, besides its namesake mosque and the hamam, the city ramparts, the Davud Paœa gate on the same ramparts, and the wharf.
The Wharf
Among these ontological markers of Kasap ƒlyas, the Davud Paœa wharf is of special importance. This wharf, which probably preexisted the mahalle, was far from being essential to the general port activities of a large city like Istanbul. The most important wharfs were always, in Byzantine as in Ottoman times, located along the coast of the Golden Horn, which was a magnificent natural harbor. To these were brought most of the goods im-
ported to the city and the main wharfs used for passenger transportation were also situated along the coast of this harbor. The Davudpaœa wharf was nevertheless one of the very few jetties situated on the Marmara Sea coast of the walled city. Along a one-mile stretch of coastline from Langa to Samatya, among the vegetable gardens and the fishermen’s huts, there were but two small jetties: that of Yenikapı, mostly used for bringing fruits and vegetables from the Asian coast in the nineteenth century, and our Davudpaœa wharf.16 The Davudpaœa wharf served as a basic point of reference for a much wider area than our neighborhood.
This wharf epitomizes the functional articulation of Kasap ƒlyas to the rest of the city. To this small wooden wharf, barges brought such construction materials as wood for burning, timber, coal, straw, sand, and gravel. These were then stored in a number of nearby warehouses within the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, all situated between the Davudpaœa wharf and the main thoroughfare of Kasap ƒlyas that passed between the mosque and the hamam. Records suggest that the presence of warehouses in the area was as ancient as the wharf, or as the neighborhood itself. As early as 1511 a deed of trust mentions the existence of a “seller of wood/timber near the Davudpaœa wharf.”17 Traces of these shops and warehouses are to be found throughout the centuries.
These warehouses obviously did not address themselves to the sole inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas, or even to the larger Davudpaœa area of which Kasap ƒlyas was a part. Most of these goods were commodities of first necessity, whether for fuel (wood and coal), for transportation (straw), or for construction and repair work (sand and gravel). As a matter-of-fact, the general layout of the city of Istanbul commanded that an important part of the import, transportation, and domestic distribution of these bulk goods be done by sea, to avoid the hilly and dense maze of narrow streets in the city center. They had to be stored in warehouses situated not too far away from their port of disembarkment. From there, retail trade and distribution could proceed. The Davudpaœa wharf and the warehouses in our mahalle serviced a large portion of the city, in fact almost the whole of the Marmara seacoast west of Langa. Our neighborhood therefore had an urban commercial function whose importance exceeded the narrow limits of a small and residential mahalle. Wood and timber was brought to the capital-city of the Ottoman Empire from various Black Sea ports and their first points of entry were situated along the southern shore of the Golden Horn (in Cibali and Odun iskelesi, to be more precise).18 The Davudpaœa wharf and the warehouses in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle served as one of the main transiting points for urban retailing and distribution.
The centuries-long presence of the wharf and of the attached warehouses did put a durable imprint on Kasap ƒlyas. The owners of the warehouses used local labor and facilities, and many of the street-porters living within the mahalle were partly or fully employed in the transportation and distribution
of timber, sand, and so forth. The whole area acquired, as we shall see, a certain disrepute due to the presence of the porters and of various warehouse workers, a largely “nonfamilial” and mostly migrant group within an otherwise almost completely residential area. The small wooden Davudpaœa wharf was also sometimes also used for public transportation. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century listings of boats and barges operating in Istanbul show that a few, though not many, of them were permanently attached to the Davudpaœa wharf. These boats and barges must have carried passengers to and from the city center, that is, to and from other wharfs situated on the Golden Horn. This public transportation activity probably continued until the 1860s, when the mahalle was connected to central Istanbul by a tramway line. Although Istanbul is a typical port-city surrounded by water on three sides and where various types of boats were, for centuries, the most important means of public transportation, there are few serious studies on the history of marine transportation within the city.19
The Davudpaœa wharf also had its political heyday in the early sixteenth century, for it was, in a way, involved in the political fight between Selim and Korkut, both sons of Sultan Bayezid the Second (reigned between 1481 and 1512) and potential heirs to the Ottoman throne. When the throne seemed to be up for grabs Korkut, who was then governor of Manisa, secretly moved to Bandyrma, took a boat that crossed the Sea of Marmara, and landed in Istanbul on April 9, 1512. His intention was to rally the various Janissary corps stationed in Istanbul and to convince them to join him in order to overtrow his father. The attempt was not crowned with success and it was Selim, later nicknamed “The Grim,” who finally mounted the Ottoman throne. What pertains to the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle in this adventure is that, to mount his political coup, Prince Korkut had chosen the Davudpaœa wharf when he disembarked upon his arrival at Istanbul.20 That is hardly surprising for, in all military and political logic, he needed a wharf that was both well-known to navigators and was not too centrally situated. It can be surmised that, had Prince Korkut’s political gamble succeeded, the fortunes of the small and secondary Davudpaœa wharf and of the mahalles in its environs might well have received an economic and political boost.
Even in the early sixteenth century, however, the significance of this minor wharf was not limited to the sole Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, within the bounds of which it happened to operate. The Davudpaœa wharf, minor though it was, was used as a basic topographical landmark for a much wider area. In fact, the whole of the Marmara coast all the way from the Langa vegetable gardens to the Greek and Armenian quarters of Samatya were using this wharf as a topographical marker. For instance, in two deeds of trust dated April 1530 and October 1542,21 the small mosque of Bayezid-i Cedid, situ-
ated about half a mile to the west of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, and nearer in fact to the district of Samatya than to Davudpaœa, is described as “the mosque of Sultan Bayezid near the Davudpaœa wharf.” Moreover, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only this or that particular building or plot of land, but whole mahalles were described with reference to the Davudpaœa wharf. In many of the local deeds of trust drawn in the late seventeenth century, the neighborhood where the donated property is situated is described as “...the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle near the Davudpaœa wharf.”22 So is the neighboring mahalle always referred to as “...the Bayezid-i cedid mahalle near the Davudpaœa wharf.”
Later, the inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas even came to be designated, in some nineteenth-century sources, as those from the Davudpaœa wharf (Davudpaœa Iskeleli). This designation was meant to differentiate those who lived in the parts of the Davudpaœa District nearer to the seaside and to the wharf—that is, in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle—from those who resided up the hill, near the grand vizier’s mosque and the religious court contiguous to it. These people were therefore called those from the Davudpaœa Court (Davudpaœa Mahkemeli).23 When local fire brigades were constituted within Istanbul in the middle of the nineteenth century, the volunteers from the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were, almost naturally, incorporated into the Davudpaœa Wharf fire brigade, and those from the upper parts of the district into the Davudpaœa Court brigade.
The Ramparts
The city ramparts bordering on the Sea of Marmara, the natural southern border of our rectangular neighborhood, constituted yet another important definitional landmark for the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. A gate on the walls (Davudpaœa kapısı) opened on a small plot of land from which jutted out our wharf. These walls had lost all defensive function after the capture of Constantinople and had not undergone any substantial repair work.24 Materials were often extracted from them to build houses. Among the sixteen houses donated to a pious foundation in Kasap ƒlyas in the first half of the sixteenth century, no less than nine were set very close to these city walls. As the description in the deeds of trust shows (cidar-ı kal’a ile mahdud), either the houses themselves or their gardens were abutting on the waterside ramparts. Many shops and warehouses were also contiguous to the city walls in the sixteenth century. We know that three of these shops were endowments of pious foundations, in 1511, 1521, and 1529. The last two were shops/ warehouses for timber and wood. Then as now, there were vegetable gardens
as well under the city walls, and one of them, too, had been bequeathed to a foundation in 1515.25
All this leads us to believe that the center of gravity of the sixteenth century population of Kasap ƒlyas had been nearer to the sea. There probably was a relatively greater concentration of houses, shops, and people in the part of the neighborhood between the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, situated more or less in the center of the mahalle, and the southernly ramparts. Compared to this part of the neighborhood, the slopes of the hill toward the Davudpaœa mosque must have been more sparsely settled.
Houses and Gardens
The sixteenth-century deeds of trust contain a number of important clues on houses, land use, and general patterns of settlement in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. The houses and other real estate property donated to a local vakıf are often described in some detail.26
Houses as Dwellings
The usual nomenklatura of houses and dwellings in Ottoman Istanbul comprises four different status markers. These markers are, in ascending order of prestige: süflî (shabby, run-down), tahtanî (level with the ground), fevkânî (elevated), and mükellef (luxurious). These adjectives are the expression of a hierarchy in both size, quality, and social status of the house. The last qualifier was usually reserved for palatial houses and for the larger dwellings of the high-ranking military and bureaucrats.27 The tahtânî houses were on average, single-story houses, and the fevkânî usually had two stories.
Out of the sixteen houses set up as a foundation in Kasap ƒlyas in the first half of the sixteenth century and whose descriptions are given in the deeds of trust, no less than thirteen are qualified as hane-i tahtânî. That is, they all had only a ground floor.28 Two others were qualified as süflî, that is, they also had one single floor but they were smaller and/or shoddier than the others. Only one of the houses in Kasap ƒlyas was qualified as a fevkanî house and therefore had more than one floor, most probably two. In the sixteenth century, just as in later centuries, and notwithstanding the presence of a few large mansions, the houses in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were mostly of an average size and of a quite modest appearance.
From the little that remains of the old mahalles of Istanbul today, one gets the distinct impression that the wooden two-story type of residence was definitely the most common one. But this contemporary impression concerns
mostly the surviving nineteenth-century wooden buildings. Back in the sixteenth century, the most common type of Istanbul dwellings seem to have had only one floor. Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travelers also report that one-story buildings were pervasive in most of Istanbul.29
Moreover, it is probable, as Barkan and Ayverdi also point out,30 that most of these one-story süflî or tahtani houses in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle only contained a single “room,” the main living quarters. The word hane, or “house,” most probably designated the whole construction, while the individual dwelling-units included therein were designated by the word bab, which means “door,” “gate,” or “entrance.” When and if the two did not coincide, it was openly specified in the deed of trust, for instance, a house with two gates (iki bâb hane) was being donated to a vakıf. A patent example of the distinction between house and residential unit is given by a deed of trust established in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle and dated December 1526. According to this deed, “a house with two gates” was being set up as a pious foundation, but the donor had clearly specified that the incomes accruing from the large room (beyt-i kebir) were to be put to a different use than the moneys that were to accrue from the renting of the small room (beyt-i sagir).31
The assumption that most of these houses must have contained a single living space is also supported by the abundance of outhouses and annexes attached to each of them. The roofed single space was functioning both as a living room and as a bedroom, because most of the other domestic chores and functions were banished to these outhouses and extensions. The houses in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle all possessed one or more of these extensions. The kitchen (matbah) and the kiln or oven (furun), for instance, were invariably separated from the house itself, and so, for obvious reasons, were the toilets (kenif). Some houses had a well, others an open veranda (zulle), and still others a cellar or a granary (serdab or anbar). The extensions attached to the same hane were obviously being used in common by all of the households living within the same dwelling-unit. Indeed, a water-well that is donated to a Kasap ƒlyas vakıf is mentioned in the deed of trust as being an extension of a house and is described as a common water-well (bi’r-i ma-yı müœterek).
The Kasap ƒlyas houses, as were most dwellings in sixteenth-century Istanbul, were wooden constructions that had a basic timber structure, and brick, mud or stone filling in between. The outside walls might have been covered with boards or planks. More probably, they were simply plastered.32 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travelers to Istanbul are unanimous in observing that all of the large public buildings (mosques, public baths, hans, medreses, etc.) were solidly built of stone, whereas most private housing was basically built of wood. Wood was a cheaper and more readily available building material than stone, and this was important for the more modest neighborhoods of Istanbul.
The sixteenth-century Istanbulites had been eyewitnesses to the terrible havoc of the 1509 earthquake. This violent earthquake (later nicknamed “the minor doomsday”) had destroyed more than a hundred mosques in intramural Istanbul, as well as the larger part of the ramparts of the city. No stone minaret was left standing.33 After this devastating earthquake, wooden constructions acquired in Istanbul the reputation of being both more resistant to shocks and the cause of less casualties in case of destruction. However, time and time again the public authorities in Istanbul tried to discourage and even to forbid the widespread use of timber as a basic building material. Time and time again official edicts were issued by the kadı of Istanbul to regulate the height of wooden houses, to limit the width of their eaves, to set standards concerning their roofing, to set the minimum distance between these types of houses, and so forth,34 all in order to keep the risk of fires under control.
These efforts were to no avail, though, and the regulations could not be obeyed or upheld, for a very simple reason. First, the population at large could afford but the cheapest of building materials and, second, the number of available craftsmen such as stonemasons, carpenters, and brickmakers was limited. And a large number of these craftsmen were often commandeered for the building of a sultanic mosque, the repair of a fortress, and so forth, and wars often created shortages of masons and builders. Fires, large and small, continued to ravage the city. The havoc wrought in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle by the two large fires that cut through Istanbul in 1660 and again in 1782 is proof that, as far as housing is concerned, wood continued to be the main building material throughout the centuries, at least in our neighborhood.
Only ten years after the fire that ravaged half of Istanbul in 1782, G. A. Olivier, a representative of the French government who traveled through the Ottoman Empire is surprised by the difference in the quality of the public and private buildings in Istanbul. His testimony confirms that nothing had really changed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as far as building techniques were concerned. Olivier writes:
The houses have a skeleton made of oak and this skeleton sits on foundations which are not very deep. The beams are either nailed or fitted with tenons. The empty spaces within the wooden structure are then filled with a sort of mortar made of a mixture of mud, hay and bits of hemp. The walls are covered on the outside with rather irregular painted planks. The roof is covered with long and half-cylindrical tiles similar to those we use in the south of France. In the houses the floors are always wooden. Only public and official buildings such as hans, hamams, bedestens etc. are ever built of solid blocks of stone.”35
We shall return to the subject and to the destructions caused by fires.
As to the sixteenth-century wooden houses of Kasap ƒlyas, they were certainly not in a contiguous row, nor were they attached to each other. Almost all of the houses, even those qualified as süflî, seem to have had a garden, or at least a flower bed (sofa), or a plot of land of some sort. Out of the sixteen houses set up as a foundation in Kasap ƒlyas in the first half of the sixteenth century and whose descriptions are given in the deeds of trust, five had a small garden (cüneyne) and four of them a small vegetable garden (bahçe). Two of these houses were flanked by stables (ahır) and one of them had even a vineyard (kerm). For another house, the deed of trust specifies that it was surrounded by just an empty plot of land (arz-ı hâliye).
The Bostans
There were also many larger vegetable gardens (bostans) in sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas. One of these vegetable gardens, situated right in front of the Davudpaœa gate, was given as an endowment to a local pious foundation by one Kethüda Sinan in February 1515.36 The planting of trees, and the sowing and reaping of fruits, vegetables, and flowers was an important activity in sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas. With the extensions of the large and neighboring Langa vegetable gardens penetrating right into our mahalle, and given that many of the gardens attached to the Kasap ƒlyas houses were also probably used as orchards and vegetable gardens, the area had an agricultural character, an almost semirural atmosphere. In many cases, the resident household units living enclosed in a more or less self-sufficient dwelling coincided with an agricultural unit of production. Many of the houses that had been donated to a local foundation in the early sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas mahalle had a water-well that went with it. These wells were used for watering the vegetable gardens and orchards rather than for drinking. Some of the wells also had, perhaps, a water wheel drawn by a horse, also used for ploughing, and put in adjoining stables, donated with the house.
As communications were slow and relatively scarce, most of the fresh fruit and vegetables consumed within the city of Istanbul came, until well into the twentieth century, from the many local vegetable gardens and orchards. These bostans were located either within the quite sparsely populated walled city itself, or in its immediate surroundings. One of the largest vegetable gardens within the walled city was indeed that of Langa, immediately to the east of Kasap ƒlyas. These large Langa gardens extended right into our neighborhood. Most of the fruit and vegetable sellers in Istanbul were of the itinerant type and they carried and marketed the fresh fruit and vegetables to the areas of Istanbul where there were no nearby bostans.
Just as the wharf, the presence of these vegetable gardens—which gave our “peripheral” neighborhood a quasirural appearance—also put their stamp on
the social and occupational structure of our neighborhood. This was so in the nineteenth century as well as in the sixteenth. Many fruit and vegetable street vendors lived in the vicinity of the large Langa and Davudpaœa vegetable gardens, which were a permanent source of provisioning for their retail trade. As we shall see, this group of street vendors came to be the backbone of the nonwage-earning population of Kasap ƒlyas in the late nineteenth century.
Besides the mosque, the hamam, and a few shops clustered around the mosque, what other public amenities did our neighborhood contain in the sixteenth century? Was there a bakery, for instance? We do not know for certain. Some of the houses donated in the sixteenth century had an oven or kiln (furun). If the baking could have been done at home, what about the wheat and the flour? There were some windmills in Istanbul in the sixteenth century and some of these were situated on the nearby windy hills overlooking the sea of Marmara. We also know that in the late eighteenth century there was a privately owned mill within our neighborhood and that this mill was donated to a foundation.37 This is not sufficient evidence, however, to deduce that the locals used to systematically take their wheat to the mill and then to bake their bread at home.
As for other public amenities, we know that there was at least one public fountain for drinking water in the neighborhood in the first half of the sixteenth century. Drinking water had been brought to the neighborhood through the so-called Kırkçeœme (forty-fountain) water conduit system that was part of Soliman the Magnificent’s foundation that provided waterways for Istanbul. That fountain was situated right in the middle of the mahalle, where the mosque, public bath, and shops were situated.38 There was also another public fountain midway up the hill on the road that climbed from the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle toward the Davudpaœa mosque. It was probabaly connected to the same large system of water conduits. This second public fountain somehow disappeared in later centuries but nevertheless left a durable imprint on the mahalle, for the name of this fountain (Yokuœçeœme, i.e., “sloping fountain” or “fountain on the slope”) was given to the same street. The street still bears the same name.
Streets and Dead Ends
Out of the sixteen houses set up as a foundation in Kasap ƒlyas in the first half of the sixteenth century and whose detailed descriptions are given in the deeds of trust, nine were surrounded by a wall on all sides. These houses, with their gardens, and all sorts of outhouses and extensions included therein, were enclosed, walled (muhavvata). This is a critical detail that allows to visualize more clearly the patterns of land use, the streets, and the general outlook of the mahalle in the sixteenth century.
There was no reason why these one-story houses whose gardens were surrounded by walls should be facing each other. Besides, only those that had a second floor (and these were quite rare, especially in Kasap ƒlyas) could be overlooking the street or the neighboring gardens. The presence of walledin areas, of various gardens also meant that the houses were somewhat at a distance from each other. The gates or facades of these houses did not have to face each other or to run parallel to the street. They did not have to follow any preestablished symmetry, building plan, or pattern either. The plots of land on which these houses were built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were apparently of different sizes and of sometimes quite irregular shapes. The deeds of trust usually situate each house and plot of land by referring to the owners of the neighboring houses or plots. And some of the endowed properties in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle had two neighbors, some three or four, and some even five. Some of the gardens and plots of land are described as being triangular. There was no clear cluster of houses, except perhaps just around the mosque itself and around the Davudpaœa hamam just across it. Houses were sparsely distributed over the neighborhood, and so were the inhabitants. A single house, donated in 1524, was described as being contiguous to another building, and that building was the Kasap ƒlyas mosque itself.
It appears that what is perceived nowadays as the “traditional Istanbul housing pattern” does not date from as far back as the sixteenth century, at least not in or around our mahalle. The almost canonical image of the two-or three-story wooden houses with tiled large eaves, overhangs, and latticed bay windows, all regularly lined up on narrow and badly cobbled winding streets is an image that dates from the late eighteenth century at the earliest. It was certainly not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that wooden houses of two or three stories spread beyond the wealthier areas around the seat of government and the markets. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century streets and housing patterns were very different, especially in a relatively peripheral neighborhood like Kasap ƒlyas.
Ottoman towns were not anarchic or sprawling but they were sketchily planned. When a new center was endowed and founded in Ottoman Istanbul in the inceptive fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the result could be only a new neighborhood made of wandering lanes governed by rigid laws of property. For there was no town planning that could have preexisted the settlements in the conquered city and no time for preestablishing an ideal grid of streets and settlements. When the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle came into being, for instance, the various buildings were certainly not erected according to the fixing of a street map or of any sort of development scheme. Just the opposite happened. For land was plentiful, both in Istanbul and in the whole Davudpaœa District. So, the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, the shops, and the hamam were probably built first. With them, or after them, came the houses with their gardens
and multiplicity of extensions and outhouses, and all of these, as we saw, were enclosed within a wall or a fence. The space that remained became the streets of the mahalle. All of the strictly private spaces were built up, and the public passageways of the neighborhood were then defined by default, so to speak.
It is highly doubtful that the modern concept and image of a “street” could in any way fit the situation in sixteenth-century Istanbul. This is especially true for those “peripheral” parts of the walled city which, like the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, had salient rural characteristics. A low population density as well as an agricultural and horticultural outlook were, as a matter-of-fact, the lot of many other sixteenth-century neighborhoods of Ottoman Istanbul. Many neighborhoods in the area all along the land walls from the sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn and many of those—like Kasap ƒlyas—that were located along the walls bordering the sea, as well as those situated within the alluvial plain of the Bayrampaœa stream (the “Lycus valley” in Byzantine times) shared the same fate.
Public Thoroughfares (Tarîk-i ‘amm)
These Istanbul “streets” that accompanied the formation of various mahalles and that gradually took shape in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had to espouse the city’s quite uneven ground and unusually hilly topography. There were, of course, a few main arteries whose location did not change from early Byzantine times.39 Their configuration was essentially dictated by the crestline of the intramural Istanbul hills and by their relation to the surrounding sea and to the main gates of the city ramparts. The road that was (and is still) considered Kasap ƒlyas’ “high street” was precisely one of those older roads. This Ottoman artery was superimposed upon the Byzantine road that went from the Forum Bovis, situated right in the middle of the city, to one of the main gates on the land walls. But apart from those very few main arteries that remained intact for centuries, it is unlikely that many of the secondary “streets” of old Istanbul could have retained for long the configuration that they had in the sixteenth century.
What did these “streets” of Kasap ƒlyas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look like? First of all, they were unpaved, and therefore dusty in the summer and muddy in the rainy winters of Istanbul. The regular paving of the Istanbul streets began to be considered a normal municipal activity only after the 1850s. Before that, if streets were to be paved the expense had to be paid by the locals,40 and it is improbable that the modest dwellers of Kasap ƒlyas could have afforded that expense. Second, these “streets” did not necessarily have the same width; they could be quite narrow at some points and uselessly wide at others. The attempts at regulating the width of Istanbul
streets were the work of a special municipal committee created only in the 1860s (Islahat-ı Turuk Komisyonu). The sixteenth-century streets had no sidewalks worthy of that name. Third, they had not been leveled and were full of all sorts of bumps and holes. Fourth, these “streets” did not have any official name. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents all of these streets are named the public thoroughfare (tarîk-i ‘amm), and the dead ends simply the private thoroughfare (tarîk-i hass). Besides, as we saw, these streets were surrounded by walls, thus limiting—and protecting—the visibility of the (mostly single-story) enclosed houses on both sides.
People used to circulate in the city either on foot or on horseback, so, for most of the minor streets in traditional Istanbul they just had to be wide enough to allow the passage of a horse-drawn carriage. In the seventeenth century the streets in the Davudpaœa area must have been particularly narrow, for they were, so runs the legend, at the origin of an interesting political crisis. When, in 1647, Sultan Ibrahim (nicknamed the “Mad”) went strolling through Davudpaœa on horseback (and also in disguise), his way happened to be blocked by a horse-drawn carriage. Getting angry, he instantly ordered the Grand Vizier Salih Paœa to forbid all carriages from entering Istanbul. A short while later, the same thing happened again in the same area, but this time the Sultan was furious and had the Grand Vizier removed from office and then executed.41
These events might well be an outright fantasy, produced by a politically minded official Palace historiographer and chronicler, with the intention of demonstrating that Ibrahim was really out of his wits and thereby justifying his overthrow in 1648, and subsequent assassination the same year. As to Grand Vizier Salih Paœa’s removal from office and execution, they were most probably due to more complex political reasons. Whatever the case may be, it remains that, first, a real or imaginary “traffic jam” that occurred in or near our neighborhood was used as a justification for a very important political execution and that, second, the story found its way into standard Turkish history books. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Davudpaœa and Kasap ƒlyas streets must have been, at some points, barely wide enough for a single horseman. The area must also have had at the time quite a bad reputation due to the narrowness of its streets and to the ensuing circulation problems.
The narrow streets of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were seldom straight; they had many bends and curves. They clearly lacked both greenery and perspective. They had to follow the hilly Istanbul terrain, as they followed an itinerary almost randomly determined by the borders of the various houses and by the enclosed gardens and vegetable gardens of the neighborhood.
Thus constituted, these streets were, strictly speaking, just passageways. Their spatial configuration did not allow for any other social function involving
any durable intracommunity relationships. The Kasap ƒlyas mahalle did not contain any public square/piazza or any equivalent that might have the same spatial meaning and social/cultural functions. The “streets” of sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas could obviously in no way function as open public spaces where the locals could come together to trade, communicate, exercise an innocuous pastime, or even simply to chat. Even their functioning as a simple playground for children must have been limited by their physical characteristics. Besides, there was at the time in the mahalle neither a coffeehouse nor a tekke.42 The only two places where the locals could have met and shared common experiences were the Kasap ƒlyas mosque and the Davudpaœa public bath.
Besides, the fact that most houses had only one story and so many walled enclosures meant that it was impossible to sit at one’s window and talk to one’s next-door neighbors or to those across the street, or just to watch the passersby. True, there was nothing of much interest that could happen in the streets of a peripheral mahalle like Kasap ƒlyas. In sum, this type of a house and street configuration in our mahalle entailed a local spatial perception radically different from that connected with the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury houses and neighborhoods. It is this last perception that still survives in Turkish memories and that is sometimes teleologically extended backward to the earlier centuries. However, uses and perceptions of private and public spaces had greatly changed in Ottoman Istanbul in the meantime.43
Blind Alleys (Tarîk-i hass)
Many of the “streets” in sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas were in fact simply blind alleys. Out of a total of sixteen houses donated to a foundation in the first half of the sixteenth century five were on a dead end. The deeds of trust describe them as bordering on a blind alley (tarîk-i hass ile mahdûd, literally, “limited by a private street”). These streets were not considered a public thoroughfare, but were qualified as “private.” These blind alleys were narrower and shorter than the other Kasap ƒlyas streets. The short dead ends were considered a kind of entrance hall to the few houses whose gate opened onto it, not as their property but as their private space, in a way. Not being a public passageway, these alleys also functioned as a protective element, guarding the private life of the households who lived within it. It was obviously seen as a sort of lock, a transitional stage between the public space of the streets and the privacy of the houses.
The inhabitants of the houses whose gates faced these blind alleys were sharing this semiprivate space; this fact entailed mutual obligations and responsibilities. As they were shared by more than one household, none of
them could infringe with impunity on the tacit agreement that made the alley an area of common privacy, so to speak, or a meeting point of many private domains. For instance, such building activities as the construction of a new house, the extension of an existing one, the adding of a second floor, of an overhang, or of a bay window that might overlook either the alley or the neighboring gardens, the opening of another gate to the alley, and so forth, were all pending on the tacit agreement of all of the other inhabitants of that blind alley. This, in most cases tacit, building permission was called, in Ottoman legal parlance, a partners’/shareholders’ permission (izn-i œürekâ). The absence of such a permission meant the possibility of a court case, or, more frequently, the request for an ad hoc official legal opinion (fetva) to be obtained from the ¥eyhülislâm, and that would have force of law.
The problems that arose in these blind alleys did not necessarily exclusively concern the respect of mutual property rights. Any intervention on that communal space was ipso facto a direct intervention on somebody else’s privacy. That is why building activities in these dead-end streets often gave rise to legal disputes; a new window overlooking the neighbor’s garden, an extension slightly dimming somebody’s sunlight, or any sort of noisy activity could be the occasion for a legal opinion emanating from the highest religious authorities. Quite a large number of these disputes between neighbors thus found their way into the fetva-collections of such reputed and authoritative seventeenth-century ¥eyhülislams as Feyzullah Efendi and Çatalcalı Ali Efendi.44 These collections of legal opinions were then used later as precedents for the settlement of similar conflicts.
A modus vivendi between all neighbors had to be eventually found, for the rules of communal life in the dead-end streets of residential Istanbul had to both respect all legal property rights of the inhabitants and to be mindful of their perception of their respective private domains. It remains that the interface between the public and the private domains in Ottoman cities, and its evolution and its relationship to Ottoman urban culture in general is a topic not yet sufficiently investigated.
The Population and the Inhabitants of a Peripheral MAHALLE
The sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas mahalle consisted of mostly single-story wooden houses, all set at some distance from each other with their enclosed gardens, and of narrow and irregularly winding streets and dead ends. Apart from the central area with the mosque, the hamam, and a small “shopping center” around it, the neighborhood was generally quite sparsely populated,
as it contained large vegetable gardens and some vacant lots. We know that, in the first half of the sixteenth century, one of the shops around the public bath45 was a butcher. Another shop housed a maker and seller of boza.46
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the semts and mahalles around the Davudpaœa wharf could in no sense of the term have been central to the life of the city. They were not near the main political (the Palace) or commercial (the harbor and the Grand Bazaar) areas of Istanbul. Nor were they part of the more densely populated residential districts situated in the central, northern, and eastern parts of the peninsula. 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.47 Many seventeenth-century local sources also show that, just as two centuries ago, the coastline of the Marmara sea west of Kumkapı was still hardly built at all. This coastline was lined with gardens, orchards, and empty land. The great seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, as well as the Armenian historian Eremya Kömürcüyan, his contemporary, describe the Davudpaœa area as one most suitable for walks and for general recreational activities.48
Though it is quite impossible to give a plausible estimate of its sixteenth-and seventeenth-century population, it is sufficiently clear that the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle never had a large number of inhabitants. A list of taxpayers and mahalles of Istanbul dating from 1634 provides another illustration.49 The tax to be collected that year was an avârız-tax. These avârız50 taxes were occasionally levied from the inhabitants of the capital, either when the treasury was in dire need of funds or when a state of imminent war was the cause of extraordinary government expenditure. Whenever a tax of this sort was to be levied, a number of avârız households was attributed to each Istanbul mahalle and the total amount to be levied was apportioned among the neighborhoods according to the number of households attributed to each of them. The number of households was not arbitrary, for it depended on the population of the mahalle and was also supposed to reflect the overall “ability to pay” of the inhabitants. The tax attributed to each mahalle was then apportioned between the locals and collected by the imam of the local mosque. In 1634, a tax register cum listing of neighborhoods was established for Istanbul. According to this listing, the Kürkçübaœı mahalle, immediately to the east of Kasap ƒlyas, was attributed 10 households, and the Sancaktar Hayreddin mahalle, its immediate western neighbor, had a total of no less than nineteen. As to Kasap ƒlyas itself, it was lumped together with the Davudpaœa mahalle and these two had been assigned a total of fifteen households only. This clearly comes to mean that, in the first half of the seventeenth century, and compared to the surrounding areas and districts, Kasap ƒlyas was neither particularly populous nor noticeably well-off.
The population of Istanbul has always been overestimated or exaggerated, by European travelers, by well-meaning Orientalists, and also by many eminent Turkish historians. Fantastic figures have often been bandied about, such as a figure of over a million inhabitants for the middle of the sixteenth century.51 The real number couldn’t have been much above a quarter of a million, still a really extraordinary figure for that period. The population of Istanbul was to reach the one-million mark for the first time at the eve of the First World War only, but to fall again below that benchmark soon after the end of the hostilities.
The first complete and fairly reliable count of the population of the capitalcity of the Ottoman Empire was conducted as part of the census of 1885. At that date, Istanbul had a total of 875,000 inhabitants, that is, about three times its sixteenth-century population. The city had grown throughout the nineteenth century and the density of settlement, especially within the walled city, had tremendously increased.52 The population of Kasap ƒlyas stood at about eleven hundred people.53 The same census, however, puts the average population of a traditional intramural Istanbul mahalle at about fifty percent above that figure. Though the transposition and extrapolation of figures taken from the city at large to the level of a small neighborhood is perilous, it seems quite certain that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century population of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle could not possibly have exceeded a few hundred inhabitants.
Who were then those sixteenth-century inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas? The wharf, a crucial transiting point in the urban transportation and retailing of wood, timber, and other construction materials and the large vegetable gardens provided the main local opportunities for employment and were certainly the main local sources of income. The carrying, storage, and distribution of those bulk goods, as well as the rents and other revenues accruing from the cultivation, distribution, and sale of fresh fruits and vegetables were certainly providing the means of subsistence of a substantial proportion of the inhabitants of the neighborhood.
There was, as we saw, a small “shopping center” right in the middle of the mahalle. Its main feature, the large double hamam (a place for socialization as much as for ablutions), proved to be a durable center of attraction which, together with the Kasap ƒlyas mosque right across the street, certainly contributed to attract some customers for the local shops. A document dating from 1782, for instance, shows that the small conglomerate of shops was still there at that date. In the month of August of that year, a large fire had devastated the city and spread havoc in many of the Istanbul neighborhoods, built mostly of wood, like Kasap ƒlyas. A report on the widespread devastation caused by that fire contains the following statement “...a tentacle of fire went into the Seamen’s Hamam and the Marketplace inside the Davudpaœa Gate and, from there, reached the dervish convent of Etyemez....”54 This
small marketplace in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle was well-known to the Istanbulites at large.
The sixteenth-century deeds of trust contain a number of useful clues on various social characteristics of the inhabitants of our neighborhood. The descriptions of the endowed properties include, for instance, the names of the owners of each of the neighboring properties.55 Among a total of about 60 inhabitants of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle mentioned in the deeds of trust of the first half of the sixteenth century, there is only one non-Muslim. The same remark applies to the whole of the Davudpaœa District. Among hundreds of property-owners whose names are cited in the 122 Davudpaœa deeds of trust, the names of only 6 non-Muslims are mentioned, 5 of which appear to be Greek Orthodox. At the time of Süleyman “the Magnificent,” then, Kasap ƒlyas was a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, with but a tiny minority of non-Muslims, and so was the whole Davudpaœa District. Armenian chroniclers and historians of Istanbul confirm that this was still the case throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.56 By opposition to its two neighboring districts of Langa, to the west, and Samatya, to the east, and whose Greek and Armenian churches are lavishly described by the Armenian chroniclers of Istanbul, Davudpaœa receives scant attention, and only by virtue of its gate on the ramparts and, not surprisingly, because of its wharf.
The account-books of the building site of the Süleymaniye mosque confirm our local sources. This monumental sultanic mosque, commissioned by its eponymous ruler to Sinan, chief architect of the empire, took seven years to be completed (1550–1557). The account-books of the construction have been transcribed and extensively published by Ömer Lütfü Barkan.57 These detailed account-books include listings of all those who had worked on the construction site, with mention of their ethnic/religious background as well as specifics on their neighborhood of residence within the city, or of their town of origin for those who had come from outside the capital.
Among the hundreds of master builders and construction workers who, at sometime or other, had worked on the building—site of Süleyman “the Magnificent’s” complex, there were twenty stonemasons (sengtraœ) and carpenters (dülgers) who had come from Davudpaœa. All of them were Muslim. By opposition, the same account-books contain the names of 28 workers who were residents of the neighboring district of Langa. Only three of these were Muslims, though, the remaining twenty five being either Greek or Armenian. As to the westernly neighboring urban districts of Samatya and Sulumanastyr, they had provided a much larger contingent (about 70 workers) to the Süleymaniye construction site. Not a single one was a Muslim. Both the Davudpaœa District and the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were, throughout the greatest part of the Ottoman centuries, areas populated mainly by Muslims, but were embedded between some of the predominantly non-Muslim areas of Istanbul, along the sea of Marmara.
Many construction workers were then living in Kasap ƒlyas in the sixteenth century. Indeed, none of the sixty dwellers of the mahalle mentioned in the deeds of trust have ever been honored with such titles and status-markers as paœa, bey,or even a™a, indicative, respectively, of high-level militaries or bureaucrats or more simply, with the last, of just an above average social status. Except for the imam officiating in the Kasap ƒlyas mosque itself, no one in the neighborhood was ever qualified as efendi, a title then attributed to persons belonging to the higher ranks of the religious hierarchy such as religious judges, and teachers in theological schools. That not a single house donated in the neighborhood was qualified as luxurious (mükellef ) in the deeds of trust is also another indication on the general socioeconomic picture of the mahalle.
There were also, however, as there would always be, a few of the more well-to-do living in Kasap ƒlyas, inhabitants who were wealthy enough to own slaves. Two of the houses in the neighborhood (one of them with two floors) had indeed been bequeathed by their initial owners to their manumitted slaves, who were to act as the trustees of the pious foundation they had just established. But that type of social mix was a quite common occurrence in traditional Istanbul and does not constitute sufficient reason to suppose that Kasap ƒlyas was any wealthier for that.
As they were appointed trustees of the pious foundations, the identities of some of the imams and müezzins of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque in the first half of the sixteenth century are known to us. As early as 1506 the small mosque already had a permanent imam, who was probably living in one of the endowed houses nearby. His name was Murad, and he seems to have kept his post until at least 1510. In 1533 Ahmed bin Veli was the mosque’s müezzin and between 1542 and 1546 the müezzin was one Ali, who was being supervised by Ayas Efendi, the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque.
The sixteenth-century deeds of trust in Kasap ƒlyas also tell us about the donators’ sex. Interestingly enough, seventeen out of a total of twenty-six local foundations had been endowed by women. Some of these women had even set up more than one foundation. Safiyye Hatun bint-i Hamza,58 for instance, had bequeathed three houses situated in the mahalle between 1531 and 1538. As to Aiœe Hatun bint-i Mehmet, in two different deeds of trust, both dated 1509, she had given a two-story house and an amount of cash of no less than thirty thousand aspers, a considerable sum of money. This relative overrepresentation of women among the donators to pious foundations in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle will not disappear in later centuries.
Kasap ƒlyas’ High Street: “Butchers’ Road”
It is only toward the end of the eighteenth century that documents mention, for the first time, a street in Kasap ƒlyas having a specific name. This name
is one with which the Istanbulites at large were quite familiar. The road concerned here is that which was, and still is, considered Kasap ƒlyas’ “high street.” It crosses the whole neighborhood from one end to the other in the east-west direction and, while within the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, runs between the mosque and the public bath, right in the middle of the neighborhood’s small marketplace. This Ottoman artery had been superimposed upon an old Byzantine road that went from the Forum Bovis to one of the main gates on the land walls (the small gate called “The First Military Gate” and situated just north of the Castle of the Seven Towers-Yedikule). This road had no particular name in Byzantine times. But the man in the street in Ottoman Istanbul called it, and for good reason, The Road of the Butcher/Butchers (Kassab/Kassablar Yolu). We shall shortly see why.59
When, in the 1870s, the first tramways were put into service, the Aksaray-Yedikule line that went from the location of the Byzantine Forum Bovis to the Castle of the Seven Towers passed through this road. As it was too narrow, houses on both sides of the road had to be demolished to allow for the simultaneous passage of two streetcars. The name “Butchers’ Road” given to this road before the nineteenth century has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this artery happens to run through a neighborhood that bears the name of a famous and heroic butcher (Kasap ƒlyas). As a matter-of-fact this road, which has a total length of about three kilometers, starts off just south of the semt of Aksaray, heads west, borders around the large Langa vegetable gardens, and passes through no less than eight different neighborhoods before reaching the city walls. This street came to be called “Butchers’ Road”60 simply because, throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, some of the butchers of Istanbul had to carry their merchandise through that road very often, sometimes every day.
Ever since the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul, and perhaps even before that, all activities linked to the production of meat, leather, and related animal products had been concentrated within a large and empty area called “Kazlıçesme” just to the west of the Castle of the Seven Towers, immediately outside the city walls. By imperial decree, all of the slaughterhouses and tanneries, for sanitary reasons, had been relegated to that particular area. Small slaughterhouses did from time to time exist here and there within the city and some butchers slaughtered animals in their backyards. As a consequence, there were complaints from the populace about the filth and the stench, but also about unfair competition and noncompliance with guild regulations. Sometimes the Istanbul butchers themselves filed in complaints about the distance between the slaughterhouses and their shops and requested an official authorization to slaughter animals where they pleased. Time and time again imperial fermans were edicted, and the kadı of Istanbul issued warnings to that effect, forbidding the slaughtering of animals within Istanbul intra
muros and reminding the butchers that the initial edicts of Mehmed II the Conqueror were still in full force.61 The number and frequency of edicts of a similar nature and purpose suggest, however, that they were far from being fully complied with.
However that may be, the Kazlıçeœme area remained, throughout the Ottoman centuries, the main area for animal slaughtering and hide tanning, as well as for meat, leather, glue, and gutstring production in Istanbul.62 And the meat produced in the Kazlıçeœme slaughterhouses had to be delivered daily to the various butchers within the city and therefore had to pass through the “Butchers’ Road” that ran through the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. This meat distribution operation was carried out almost every single day in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Obviously, no other name was more fitting for that kind of a road. As Sarkis Hovhannesian, the eighteenthcentury Armenian historian of Istanbul notes: “... [outside the ramparts] The slaughter-houses are near the sea and from there the slaughtered animals are distributed to the butchers of the city every day. As for the Janissaries, they have their own butchers who prepare the meat and take it to their old and new barracks every day.”63
There was one particular instance in which the daily transportation and delivery of meat—which always, lest we forget, passed through Kasap ƒlyas— was done collectively, so to speak, and took the form of a stately and frightful ritual. The event was the daily transportation and delivery of their rations of meat to the Janissary barracks called the “new barracks” and situated in Aksaray, precisely where the Byzantine Forum Bovis used to be. Large amounts of meat in the form of carved-out animal carcasses were carried in carts or on horseback and were accompanied by special attendants belonging to the Janissary corps. This blood-dripping convoy traveled every morning for about three kilometers, the whole length of the “Butchers’ Road,” all the way from the slaughterhouses beyond the city walls to the Janissary barracks. Very appropriately, the old Byzantine Forum had been, in the meantime, renamed Etmeydanı, or Meydan-ı Lahm, that is, literally, “Meat Square.”
During the transportation of meat through the Butchers’ Road early every morning, the long line of carts and horses was preceded by special attendants belonging to the Janissary corps called se™irdim çavuœu. These attendants, all clad with bloodstained leather overcoats, kept shouting all the time, signaling their coming and warning the populace not to block the road. For to have an open and free road was a privilege of the Janissary butchers, and anyone who dared to block the road, or even to inadvertently cross the convoy’s path, could be sentenced to death. This sentence was indeed executed a few times during the seventeenth century. As to the effective distribution of the meat brought from the slaughterhouses, once arrived in Meat Square, it was accomplished with a real ceremony, full of religious symbolism
Figure 1.1 Procession of Butchers and Janissaries Conveying Meat to the Janissary Barracks
Source: A. Djevad Etat Militaire Ottoman depuis la Fondation de l’Empire jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1882
and reminiscent of the ritual of the Bektaœi order of dervishes, to which many of the Janissaries are said to have been affiliated.64
The inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas’ “High Street,” just as those of seven other mahalles, were witness to this bloody daily procession for centuries. The overall reputation of the neighborhoods must have suffered. The artery that went from the center of the walled city eastward to the entrance of the Topkapı Palace is the direct descendant of the central Byzantine Mêsê. That is also the relatively wide avenue that the Ottoman viziers and the other grandees took—most often on horseback and in a procession with great pomp—on their way to the meetings of the Imperial Council, the Divan. That road naturally came to be called Divanyolu (Divan Road/the Road to the Divan). Though much less prestigious, Kassab Yolu, the “Butchers’ Road,” was just as memorable.
Such a relatively narrow road, with the daily passageway of convoys of freshly slaughtered and butchered mutton and beef carcasses could obviously not have been clean and proper. And when, in 1793, a well-meaning rich woman named Nazperver Kalfa built both a Coranic school for children and a public fountain on the “Butchers’ Road,” the point certainly did not go unnoticed.
Nazperver Kalfa—most probably a slave of Circassian origin—had been, in the 1760s, a nanny (dadı) to Selim, then heir to the Ottoman throne. When Selim (Selim III, who reigned from 1789 to 1807) finally ascended the throne, she was appointed as one of the treasurers of the Imperial Harem (Hazinedar) and was, from then on, known as Hazinedar Kalfa.65 She then built a Coranic school for children and a large and magnificently decorated marble public fountain right on our “Butchers’ Road.” The small school cum fountain complex is situated at approximately the junction point of two mahalles: Kasap ƒlyas and its immediate western neighbor Kürkçübaœı. A chronogram in verse is incised in marble just above the fountain and contains, as was customary, a panegyric of the benefactor of the school and of the fountain and gives 1792–1793 (1207 a.h.) as the date of completion of the construction. The verse ends on the following optimistic note: The former imperial dadı / Finally cleansed the butchers’ road (Sabıkan dadı-yı œeh-i vâlâ / Kıldı kassablar yolun tathir).
Clean or not, “Butchers’ Road” was an important and topographically unavoidable artery in intramural Istanbul. It was used by almost everybody, not only to enter the city but also to leave it. Sovereign Selim III himself, for instance, for whom Nazperver Kalfa had been first a nanny and then a protégé, seems to have used that road quite often. A few years after the building of the fountain, on October 13, 1795, on his way to watching some wrestling contest, Selim III had gone on horseback “... through the Samatya avenue and the Butchers’ Road and out of the city through the Seven Towers, to the
Veliefendi Green ”66 On another occasion, a note in the diary of Selim’s confident reads: “... [April 30, 1796] on horseback through... the Butchers’ Road and out through the Seven Towers directly towards the gunpowder factory ”67
A couple of other streets within the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle also bore a particular name toward the end of the eighteenth century. Çavuœzade Street, for instance, is already mentioned as such in a deed of trust dated from 1773. It apparently took its name from that of a family possessing a large house that was completely destroyed in the 1782 fire. In another deed of trust dated from July 1796 appears the name of Hamam Odaları (Hamam rooms) Street. These “rooms” that gave their name to that street might have been the living quarters of people associated with the public bath, or only a remainder of the shops given away as endowment together with the hamam back in the late fifeenth century. These two streets were just relatively small local thoroughfares, however, and none could compare in importance with the Butchers’ Road.
Fire and Brimstone
Nazperver Kalfa’s decision to build her school and public fountain in 1792 precisely on the “Butchers’ Road” was no coincidence. A few years ago, the area had greatly suffered as a result of a catastrophic fire, one of the most destructive that ever hit Istanbul, and there were plenty of vacant plots of land along that road.
Ottoman—and wooden—Istanbul has been the theater of hundreds, if not of thousands of fires. Many of them were strictly local affairs that left no permanent scars on the city’s texture and ended up by destroying just a few houses and shops, or sometimes a whole neighborhood. The city, however, did not suffer in its structure. But some others, such as the fire of 1660 or that of 1782, were a real cataclysm. Due to the strong northerly winds, the absence of any effective preventive action, and the nonexistence of fire brigades worthy of that name, everything that they met with turned to ashes. These fires could last for days on end (those of 1660 and 1782 lasted for three days each) and spared no public building, be they mosque, church, palace, or school. Many were killed in those large fires, tens of thousands were left homeless, and thousands were often forced to migrate elsewhere.68
The probability that any new fire would quickly spread to the neighboring houses and shops was perhaps less likely in such sparsely populated areas as Davudpaœa and Kasap ƒlyas, as compared to the more densely settled central districts. Indeed, all of the fires that devastated big chunks of the city started either in the commercial areas bordering on the southern shores of the Golden Horn, or right in the residential center (in Fatih, Aksaray, Saint
Sophia, etc.) and quickly spread to the neighboring districts. It is hardly surprising that the name of the Davudpaœa District and that of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle do not frequently occur in the numerous accounts of the fires in Istanbul. The sparsely distributed population and distant houses, as well as the many gardens and orchards and the small number of shops might have been a protective factor. So were presumably the presence of the city walls and the proximity of the sea. These proved to be insufficient “protection,” however, whenever the fires were violent. The fact remains, however, that no fire that started in the Davudpaœa District and then spread to other parts of the city has ever been recorded in Istanbul.
The Fire of 1660—Ihrâk-ı kebir (The Great Burning)
On Saturday July 24, 1660, a fire that started in a timber shop near Ayakapısı, on the southern shores of the Golden Horn, quickly spread throughout Istanbul and could not be put out for more than forty-eight hours, wreaking havoc in the city. When the cataclysmal fire finally stopped on the third day, hundreds of mosques, churches, markets, palaces, and thousands of houses and shops had been reduced to ashes. Thousands had perished. Tens of thousands had been left homeless and many disastered families had to be resettled after the fire in the towns of Çorlu, Silivri and Çatalca, all of them a few miles from Istanbul. Among the hardest-hit Istanbul districts were those along the Marmara: Kumkapı, Niœanca, Langa, Davudpaœa, and so forth.69
After the fire, popular rhymed pieces (destans) were composed to lament and to commemorate the dreadful event. One of them, signed “Kâtipzade” is important in that it relates how the disaster had reached Kasap ƒlyas. Here is part of that rhymed piece:
Vardı andan Yenikapı semtin âteœ kapladı / Gelmeden kaldırdılar esbabı Cellâtçeœmeli / Langa bostanı içine döktüler esbabların / Geldi yaktı nârı ibret kaldı yerinde külü / Geldi andan Davudpaœa iskelesine geçip / Etyemezde dökündü üçünçü kolu hâsılı / Yandı bazı kalekapısı kanatları dahi / Kaldı mıhlarla demirleri eœikte dökülü.
(From there the flames engulfed the district of Yenikapı / The Cellâtçeœme people took their belongings away / They put their belongings in the vegetable gardens of Langa / The exemplary fire came and left but ashes / From there it moved to the Davudpaœa wharf / The third branch finally reached Etyemez / Even some of the city gates were burned / Their nails and irons were strewn on the doorstep).70
More than the effective destruction it caused, it is the itinerary followed by the fire that is strikingly related in this piece of popular rhyme. It appears that the fire moved south from around Aksaray toward the sea and then progressed westward, probably along “Butchers’ Road.” The large Langa vegetable gardens were burned to ashes too, and with them the belongings that were carried there by their owners who thought that they would be secure. Unaffected by the bostans, by the ramparts, and by the sparse population and houses, the fire’s progress was not slowed down, and ran across our neighborhood from east to west, ending up at Etyemez, Kasap ƒlyas’ western neighbor.
There is every reason to think that the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle suffered greatly, though one cannot document the destruction in any detail. One of the houses that was completely burned down left, however, a few traces in the records. According to a document dated May 11, 1663,71 this house, belonging to a pious foundation whose trustee was Mustafa Efendi, then the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque, is being rented out to Mehmet Çelebi and to his wife Amine Hatun. What is being rented, however, is not a house but in reality just an empty plot of land with, in the middle, the charred remains of a house. The document openly specifies that the house that belongs to the foundation was completely burned in the big fire (... vakıf menzil harik-i âlide bilkülliye muhterik olup....) and that what was being now rented was only a plot of land with the remains of a house (... arsa-yı merkume enkaz-ı mevcudesiyle....). Obviously, Mehmet Çelebi and Amine Hatun were renting this plot of land from the pious foundation in order to build themselves a new house. Moreover, particular modes of expression used in the text suggest that it was written ex post facto. It’s likely that the couple first got oral permission from the imam in order to begin building the house and then, once the building was in progress—or perhaps completed—had the imam put down the agreement in writing. Whatever the case may be, less than three years after the devastating fire, houses were being rebuilt and the mahalle was being repopulated, an example of resilience that also applies to many of the traditional neighborhood communities of Istanbul that went through such a cataclysmal event.
The Fire of 1782—Harîk-i Ekber (The Greatest Fire)
Fire started on Thursday night, the fourteenth of the moon of Ramadan 1196 a.h. (August 22, 1782), this time in a house but, just as in 1660, on the shores of the Golden Horn. It then split into many branches and lasted for three whole days and nights.
This time the catastrophe reached the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle by not just one but by two of its different branches. The first branch followed the “usual” itinerary, westward from Aksaray and through the “Butchers’ Road,” going
right across the neighborhood to reach Etyemez, then the Greek and Armenian quarter of Samatya, and finally to Yedikule, having thus traveled and wrought destruction along the whole length of the “Butchers’ Road.” This branch was so violent that even some houses situated within the Castle of Seven Towers were completely burned down. The second branch of this monstrous fire came to the mahalle not from the east but from the north. It arrived from the northeasternly neighbor of Cerrahpaœa and stopped just at the northern tip of Kasap ƒlyas, though not before having destroyed a few houses situated within our neighborhood, among which two mansions (konaks) belonging to the Çavuœzade and Ispanakçızade families.
The first branch of the fire, however, was certainly by far the more destructive. As narrated by Derviœ Mustafa in his observation of the fires of 1782, “...the fire split into many branches before morning and a tentacle of fire which followed the Butchers’ Road went into the Seamen’s Hamam and into the Marketplace inside the Davudpaœa Gate and, from there, reached the dervish convent of Etyemez....”72 The small marketplace with the shops that had been, in a way, the “community center” of our neighborhood ever since the very early sixteenth century, was completely destroyed. Even the mosque and the public bath, albeit both built of stone, were not left unscathed, since some of the wooden houses of the neighborhood were directly abutting on the walls of the bath or of the mosque. The wooden roof of the mosque must also have greatly suffered.
The records of the Davudpaœa Religious Court73 show us that an unusually large number of houses and plots of land within the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle had changed hands within the few years that immediately followed the fire of 1782.74 Between 1783 and 1788 no less than eighteen deeds of sale of real estate property within Kasap ƒlyas have been recorded in the Records of the Davudpaœa Religious Court. Some other sales of property within the mahalle might also have been recorded elsewhere.
For a relatively small neighborhood which, at the time, could not have had more than a hundred houses, that is a very high number indeed. The type of record concerning the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle occurring most frequently in the records of The Religious Davudpaœa Court in the decade that immediately followed the fire is the real estate property sales agreement. Of these eighteen sales of real estate, at least eight concerned houses that had been burned down in 1782. These eight legal acts of sale concerned basically the transfer of an empty plot of land. A closer look at the texts of these deeds of sale clearly shows, however, that some of these plots of land might include such items as the well-known remains of the house (enkaz-ı mâlumeyi müœtemil arsa), and that some of them were qualified as the land of the burned-down private house (muhterik mülk menzil arsası). Another was qualified as a piece of burned-down house (bir bab muhterik menzil arsası). We are also sometimes
told that the plot of land was burned down, so that now only the land is left (muhterik olup arsası sırf kalmakla).75
Besides the sale of these eighteen “houses” that were all private property (mülk), we also have records concerning two more “houses” that belonged to one of the local pious foundations and that had changed hands in the same postincendiary period.76 The first of these houses is mentioned in a vakıf record dating from November 1789. Before the fire, this house had been rented by the trustee to one Mustafa Çavuœ, who had died sometime between the date of the fire and 1789 without leaving any legal inheritor and without having rebuilt the house. The record tells us that the house “...was, by God’s will, completely burned in the great fire and the land was left empty....”77 In 1789 the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque rented this empty plot of land to one Ömer A™a, who was also allowed to build a new house. Four years later, when the property was passed on to a new tenant in October 1793, the record tells us that it was not a plot of land anymore, but a “vakıf house.”
The second house is first mentioned in another vakıf record dated January 1792, when a new tenant came forward to rent an empty bit of land belonging to the local foundation. Quite exceptionally, the measurements of this burned-down plot of land (muhterik arsa) are also given in the vakıf record. This plot of land had a total perimeter of 157 zira,78 that is, just enough for an average-size house and a smallish garden. There was certainly feverish construction work on this plot of land, too, because when about a year and a half later, in May 1793, a new tenant came along, the rented property was not described as the charred remains of a burned-down house in the middle of an empty plot of land anymore. It was just a proper hane (house). Here, too, ten years after the catastrophe, there was a new house and new inhabitants.
The social and economic havoc as well as the destruction caused by fire have obviously been followed by a large increase in the rate of turnover of both the inhabitants and of the property-owners in the mahalle. Though house by house data are lacking, it seems not excessive to hypothesize that it is not only the houses and the grid of streets that changed after the fire, but also, to a certain extent, the social fabric of the mahalle itself. Those who had to leave the mahalle or who had no means of rebuilding their house after the fire simply sold their property if they were owners, or tried to transfer their legal right to—often lifelong—usufruct if they were only tenants of a local pious foundation.
Whatever the case may be, and provided the central pillars of the neighborhood community (the mosque, the hamam, or any other building of similar local importance, as the case may be) were not completely destroyed, the mahalle itself always could recoup its losses. As shown in the case of the two
large catastrophies that befell Kasap ƒlyas, within ten years of the disaster many of the burned houses were rebuilt and the new owners or tenants were settled. We also have reason to suppose that the 1782 fire also largely contributed, once and for all, to the stabilization of the street plan of Kasap ƒlyas.
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2
Power and Local Administration in Kasap ƒlyas
Tanzimat and After
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 ƒlyas 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.
For the larger or sultanic mosques, the appointment of imams was a matter of seniority and, most probably of some haggling within the official religious hierarchy. As to the imams of small neighborhood mosques in Istanbul, such as that of Kasap ƒlyas, there was, to the best of our knowledge, no standard method or procedure for selecting or appointing them. The process must have certainly involved a combination of widespread local concensus and open or tacit approval of higher religious authorities. The imam needed at least tacit local concensus as the source of his religious authority since, from a strictly theological point of view, he was nothing but a primum inter pares within his congregation. But he also needed approval of the political/religious authorities because many of his functions constituted a link between the populace and the government.
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 ƒlyas mahalle, a father and his son have been the officiating imams of the mosque since 1970.1 Local dynasties of imams may therefore have survived to a certain extent.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the imams officiating in the small neighborhood mosques of the capital-city of the Ottoman Empire were not only religious figures, leading the prayers, reading sermons, and officiating in case of marriages and funeral ceremonies. They were also supposed to act as a link between the kadı of Istanbul, responsible for order and security in the capital, and in the population at large. The orders of the kadı were to be transmitted to the population by the imam after the Friday sermon, and so were the contents of imperial fermans, when these touched upon matters of everyday life. Besides, these imams were supposed to be in full control of their small neighborhood and of their congregation. They were considered guarantors for each one of the inhabitants of their mahalle. The imam was, in an informal manner, morally responsible for his congregation’s behavior.
Adequate supervision and effective control of the local imam’s activities were often lacking, however, particularly in times of political and economic trouble. This gave rise, in early nineteenth-century Istanbul, to a number of complaints about the arbitrary decisions and abuses of power of many local imams. These imams, so went the complaints, never consulted anyone when taking a decision concerning the neighborhood and were “cruel” to the popu-lace.2 The Istanbul imams were accused of bribery, of favoritism, of misusing vakıf property placed under their trusteeship, of being unfair in the apportioning of the avârız taxes within the mahalle, and of squandering the funds that had accumulated in the avârız foundations of their neighborhoods. Perhaps more importantly, they were blamed for not taking seriously their duty of contributing to the city’s security and for letting the inhabitants of their mahalle get out of control. They were accused of being sloppy in controlling the travel documents of newcomers, rural migrants, and foreigners to the city who wanted to set up house in their mahalle, thus putting the security of Istanbul in jeopardy.3
These complaints and accusations seem to have prompted the reformist authorities of the Tanzimat period to introduce new and “secular” local administrative structures involving local headmen (muhtars) instead of imams. This “secularization” meant, for all practical purposes, that the new basic administrative relationship between the government and the population at large was to exclude members of the religious hierarchy. The kadı, the chief religious judge for Istanbul was totally deprived of his previous authority on municipal, economic, commercial, and security matters, and so were, therefore, the imams. From the late 1830s and early 1840s on, muhtars were
appointed in both villages and urban neighborhoods and the administrative powers of the imams were gradually transferred to these “secular” local head-men.4 Probably in order to prevent further abuses of power, the new local headmen were flanked by a second muhtar (muhtar-ı sânî) and by an electoral committee (ihtiyar heyeti).
The IMAM and His Congregation
As shown by local vakıf documents of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,5 the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque continued to muster a nonnegligible amount of local resources. Ten vakıf documents, all carefully updated and kept by the successive imams of Kasap ƒlyas have survived from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These contain ten texts of the initial deeds of trust, plus, for each of them, various acts of rent or transfer of the endowed property, all signed by the foundation’s trustee, that is, by the imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque himself. The first registered item dates from 1663, and the last from 1855. The bulk of the information contained therein, however, relates to the period roughly from the early 1770s to around 1850.
The large number of local pious foundations is, just as in the sixteenth century, a good indicator of the fact that local solidarity and a basic trust in the local mosque and in its imam did continue to play a definitional role in the constitution of the neighborhood community, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. Besides, in all of the deeds of trust, our neighborhood was still defined by reference to the same basic topographical landmark: the Davudpaœa wharf. The mahalle is defined as the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle near the Davudpaœa wharf (Davudpaœa Iskelesi kurbünde Kasap ƒlyas mahallesi).
Nine out of these ten seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas vakıfs were meant to secure a regular revenue for the imam and the müezzin of the mosque to live on, and to provide for the upkeep of the mosque itself. As to the tenth, it was an avârız vakfı,6 which must be taken as another strong sign of the existence of a durable sense of local identity and solidarity.
Indeed, these strictly local avârız foundations, usually set up by one of the better-off inhabitants of the neighborhood, were essentially meant to compensate for the insolvency of the poor local taxpayers in the case where an occasional and unexpected avârız tax was to be levied by the government. Given the mode of apportioning this tax, the insolvency of some of its inhabitants might also have meant the insolvency of the mahalle as a whole. In the absence of an avârız tax, however, the regular income accruing from the endowed property and money was, in principle, to be used by the imam—the trustee of the avârız foundation—to provide some help to the most destitute in the mahalle and to contribute to some enterprise of public utility, such as
the clearing of a street, or the building or the upkeep of a public fountain or of a primary Coranic school.
That is certainly why these particular philanthropic foundations were also often called avârız sandı™ı (avârız cash-box). In 1772, the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle had an avârız vakfı of its own. To this foundation had been bequeathed, by one Ismail A™a, a house, a shop for charcoal/timber, and a mill. Half a century later, in 1825, however, only the shop was left,7 the rest having probably been destroyed in a fire.
The Imam with the Forty Keys
What is crucial from the point of view of intraneighborhood relationships is not that many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deeds of trust stipulated that, as an appointed trustee, the imam was to receive a small fee for his services, or that he or the müezzin of the mosque, if any, were to pay no rent when occupying a house donated to the local vakıf. These houses were called meœruta, imam meœrutası, or müezzin meœrutası, for they were to be occupied free of charge on the strict condition that the occupant be the imam or the müezzin of the local mosque. Otherwise rent would have to be charged to the occupant by the trustee. That was only fair enough, as the imams or müezzins had no regular salaries.
What is much more important is that a number of houses and other real estate property situated within the neighborhood, as well as the revenues accruing from them, were directly under the imam’s control. Alongside his moral authority over the inhabitants of the mahalle, this certainly gave him considerable economic power especially when, as in Kasap ƒlyas, the neighborhood itself was neither too populous nor too big, but there existed nevertheless a relatively large number of local vakıfs.
For instance, it was the imam who decided if and when and to whom a house, a garden, or a plot of land belonging to a local vakıf were to be rented, and what the amount of the rent and its mode of payment were to be. Who would have to pay for the repair work of houses belonging to the vakıf? The owner, or the tenant? Would the tenant, for instance, be allowed to build a house on an empty piece of land belonging to the local vakıf? If yes, who would this new house then belong to? To the builder or to the owner of the land? Would this decision have an appreciable effect on the amount of the rent? These were matters over which the imam, being the trustee, had an absolute right of say.
Indeed, in many instances in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, the respective rights of use and of property had to be clearly specified in the vakıf documents. “Whatever is built belongs to the holy vakıf”8 is a note we often came
across in the documents. In that case, simple repair work done by the tenant to the house owned by the vakıf could be “deductible from his ordinary rent.”9 In other cases, however, the tenant of the vakıf plot of land was allowed to own the house that was built on it.10 In that case, all repair work was paid by the tenant. In any event, that was a matter for the trustee of the pious foundation to decide.
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