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THE PLACE OF LOCALITY FOR IDENTITY IN THE NATION: MINORITY NARRATIVES OF COSMOPOLITAN ISTANBUL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

Amy Mills
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These words of an elderly Jewish man in Istanbul relate his memory of neighborhood life with Greeks, Armenians, and Muslims in the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk. In this place, there were no arguments between people of different religious backgrounds; Muslims shared “his” language, and he, as a Jew, knew Greek. As I examine his narrative for what it emphasizes and for the silences in between, I read Kuzguncuk as exceptional: describing an absence of argument in the past suggests that tension exists today; sharing multiple ethnic languages is understood now to be an old-fashioned rarity. His statement “Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much” suggests that in Kuzguncuk, he and his Muslim neighbors shared a common tie to place, a unique identity as Kuzguncuklu (of Kuzguncuk) that superseded any difference based on religion or ethnicity. As he describes a culture that remained from Ottoman times, his story illuminates indirectly the current Turkish national context that conditions the telling of his narrative.

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Articles
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , August 2008, pp. 383 - 401
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

That place we grew up, it was the place we lived, our place, our citizens, from local Greeks, Armenians, with Turkish citizens; all of us there were like siblings. . . . We had a beautiful life. . . . We were all like siblings; we had no problems. . . . All of us there never argued, all of us, from poor to rich we loved each other very much; there were never any divisions, no divisions like “I'm rich, you're poor.” We lived such a life in Kuzguncuk, though now of course, I don't know. . . . I left Kuzguncuk thirty-five years ago. . . . I grew up there and still until now I can speak Greek, rather a lot . . . because I would go out and we had friendships with Greeks . . . The Muslims there would even speak our language, you know. They spoke Spanish; it was such a beautiful life, Ottoman times I can say. I don't remember the Ottoman city, I didn't grow up in Ottoman times, but what remains there of the Ottomans is very beautiful. . . . Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much. Loved us very much.Footnote 1

These words of an elderly Jewish man in Istanbul relate his memory of neighborhood life with Greeks, Armenians, and Muslims in the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk. In this place, there were no arguments between people of different religious backgrounds; Muslims shared “his” language, and he, as a Jew, knew Greek. As I examine his narrative for what it emphasizes and for the silences in between, I read Kuzguncuk as exceptional: describing an absence of argument in the past suggests that tension exists todayFootnote 2; sharing multiple ethnic languages is understood now to be an old-fashioned rarity. His statement “Because we are Kuzguncuklu Jews, our Muslims over there loved us very much” suggests that in Kuzguncuk, he and his Muslim neighbors shared a common tie to place, a unique identity as Kuzguncuklu (of Kuzguncuk)Footnote 3 that superseded any difference based on religion or ethnicity. As he describes a culture that remained from Ottoman times, his story illuminates indirectly the current Turkish national context that conditions the telling of his narrative.

This contemporary context is a product of the same historical processes through which Kuzguncuk's landscape was transformed and Jews, Greeks, and Armenians became azınlık, minorities.Footnote 4 As a geographer, I view this national context as a social space produced through complex power dynamics.Footnote 5 In this article, I examine narratives of place to understand the contemporary cultural politics of Turkish national identity and the role of place in sustaining feelings of belonging to, or exclusion from, the nation as an imagined community.

I heard the story that introduces this article in June 2006, when I traveled to Kuzguncuk to update research I began in 2001 on the cultural geography of this formerly multiethnic Bosporus neighborhood. I was interested in the links among the popularization of images, things, and places that represented a nostalgic cultural memory of Istanbul's past and of non-Muslim minority cultures and places in the city, a nostalgia grounded in the social alienationFootnote 6 created by rapid urbanization and rural–urban migration.Footnote 7 Minority issues became increasingly visible by 2006, when Turkey passed laws, such as those concerning the restoration and reclamation of non-Muslim properties, with the aim of joining the European Union. A conference was held among Greek and Turkish researchers on topics concerning Istanbul's historic Greek community. I wanted to ask Kuzguncuklus about their experiences within this changing context. I was also preparing to go to Tel Aviv to interview Kuzguncuklu Jews to learn whether minority narratives told outside of Turkey differed from those in Istanbul. This research has led me to consider the role of locality in the construction of national identity in Turkey, an approach that reveals that identity—and therefore, the nation as an imagined community—is multidimensionalFootnote 8 and constituted together with place in an ongoing process that works through sociospatial practices and emplaced memory.

GEOGRAPHIES OF IDENTITY

Studies of national identity have focused largely on the role of the state in producing the nation, a top-down approach that leaves unexplained the processes by which people make meaning of and constitute their own identities in relation to the state-authored nation. Identity is produced in relation to place, as location layered with individual and cultural meaning,Footnote 9 and as “the geographical expression of the interactions between individual action and abstract historical processes.”Footnote 10 National identity is constructed and contested through emplaced memory.Footnote 11 Diverse narratives of place reveal the multiplicity of interpretations of the national past and are a powerful resource for examining the cultural politics of identity in the national present.Footnote 12

This article examines narratives of urban life during the mid-20th century, when rural–urban Muslim migration combined with waves of non-Muslim minority emigration to complete the course of developments through which Istanbul was transformed from a multiethnic, multireligious city into a predominantly Muslim, “Turkish” city.Footnote 13 This complex process began in the late 19th century, within the context of increasing Muslim demographic dominance and early imagining of the Turkish nation as Muslim.Footnote 14 This process varied with the temporal moments and geographic places within which the state enacted policies or events that impacted non-Muslim minorities as it authored the ethnically Turkish, Muslim, and secular nation. However, in spite of the fact that the Turkish state has not historically been (nor is it today) a monolithic, unchanging entity, Istanbul residents perceive the state to have a reality and coherence, a perception grounded in their experiences of the state in spaces of everyday urban life.Footnote 15 Place narratives reveal that the nation is perceived to have coherence, as well. Minority narratives of the past link events (such as the 1942–43 Wealth Tax and the 6–7 September 1955 riots), recalling them as similar evidence of Turkish state nationalism and the cause of prejudice, exclusion, or fear. These events, authored by the state, were grounded in place: locality is where the work of nationalism occurs.

Within the larger national context in Turkey, the 1942–43 Wealth Tax (which disproportionately burdened non-Muslim minorities), the Events of 6–7 September 1955 (during which thousands of Greek and other minority properties were destroyed), and the deportation of Greek citizens in 1964 (the sudden expulsion of thousands born in Istanbul who technically held Greek citizenship) are generally forgotten, denied, or rationalized as necessary events to protect the state—without consideration of their impact on Greeks, Armenians, and Jews and on urban culture in Istanbul. Remaining minorities in Istanbul almost never speak to outsiders about these events because of pressures to assimilate and fear of unwanted attention or retribution.Footnote 16 Although each group has a distinct history,Footnote 17 I group Greeks, Jews, and Armenians together because of their common status as minorities and for the purpose of comparing their narratives. Jews were most interested in participating in my research and are the most assimilated of those minority groups.

Place narratives are not evidence of historical fact but are by nature subjective and partial because they are told from memory.Footnote 18 My aim is not to definitively detail how state-authored nationalism altered the neighborhood of Kuzguncuk,Footnote 19 although my research suggests that Kuzguncuk was transformed through discrete (as well as subtle and ongoing) processes of minority-property confiscation, pressured sale, and abandonment. State-enforced nationalism through Turkification was geographic in that it focused on minority claims to place in the city (and thus, in the nation) through property. This process, combined with social pressures within a changing urban cultural context, resulted in today's ironic paradox: although Kuzguncuk has come to represent a place of multiethnic harmony, its historic cosmopolitanism is lost. Furthermore, my research suggests that not only were state, municipal, and neighborhood authorities involved, but local residents also sometimes participated or complied with a tacit silence. This process resulted in the near total erasure of non-Muslims from contemporary neighborhood life, betraying further irony in nostalgic representations of the neighborhood.

What place narratives reveal is how memories of nationalist events and local transformations construct a sense of identity in relation to the nation, thus illustrating how imagined national categories of identity (as “Turk,” or “minority”) come to have meaning for ordinary residents. Two conclusions emerge. The first is that comparing narratives from Istanbul and Tel Aviv illuminates a general silence in Istanbul regarding antiminority nationalism. Tel Avivans spoke far more openly than Istanbul residents about the impacts of midcentury antiminority events on daily life in Kuzguncuk. A second, more unexpected, conclusion stems from the marked similarity between diasporic and Istanbul-located narratives regarding remembered “siblinghood” (kardeşlik) as fellow neighbors in mahalle (neighborhood) life. Non-Muslim minority and Turkish residents alike describe a complex space in which religious identity indeed marked difference between people, and yet ties to local place also created a common identity shared by all as neighbors in the mahalle, where “we were all like siblings; we had no problems.” An imagined shared identity as Kuzguncuklu thus sometimes transcended nationalist-identity categories, suggesting that the role of place sometimes supersedes the role of the state in processes of national (and minority) identity formation.

Place narratives describe Kuzguncuk between the 1940s and 1960s as a place torn apart when nationalism fragmented what remained of Istanbul's cosmopolitan urbanism. At the same time, however, memories reveal a shared nostalgia for the place and for the diverse social relationships of neighborhood life. In spite of the state's authoring of a national narrativeFootnote 20 that imagines the Turkish nation and its “others” in a binary fashion, residents have complex, multiple, and unpredictable relationships to nationalism as a framing concept for identity. They articulate or conceal various facets of identity depending on sociospatial context.Footnote 21

I first situate my research within studies of the nation and identity in Turkey and then historically situate the narratives. I then introduce Kuzguncuk and the narratives told by Muslims, Greeks, and Jews in Istanbul. After relating narratives from Kuzguncuklu Jews in Tel Aviv, I compare the narratives to examine how memories of place mediate contemporary cultural politics of Turkish national identity.

NATIONALISM IN URBAN DAILY LIFE

Studies of the interrelationship between the nation and identity are an important trend in Turkish studies.Footnote 22 Scholars examine the tensions at the core of the definition and articulation of Turkish national identity as modern, secular,Footnote 23 Turkish, and Muslim. Spatial studies have focused primarily on architectural form, monuments, and urban planning.Footnote 24 My geographic approach contributes to the literature on the negotiation of state power in everyday lifeFootnote 25 and on the creation and contestation of multiple collective and individual identities in Turkey through the work of memoryFootnote 26 with a focus on the co-constitution of identity and place.Footnote 27 My analysis of minority narratives is grounded by the research of those historians who have worked to restore threads of history elided by the dominant national narrative in Turkey.Footnote 28

Turkish nationalism is founded on an imagined collective Turkish identity established when the Turkish state declared its sovereignty in the name of the nation. It was constructed through a narrative that denied, forgot, and silenced minorities.Footnote 29 The state reproduces the historic narrative of the nation as ethnically Turkish through educationFootnote 30 and through laws such as Penal Code 301, with which nationalist lawyers attempt to censor narratives of minority history that challenge the state. Ideas of what it means to be Turkish are thus created through actions to remember and to forget particular histories.Footnote 31

The role of the state in producing the nation is essential for the reproduction of collective national (and minority) identities. My research, however, examines the roles of ordinary citizens in reproducing or challenging nationalist memory. In spite of the ubiquitous national narrative, the categories of “Turk” and “minority” are not inherent; they are continually in a process of reproduction and thus are vulnerable to challenge and reinterpretation. In addition to a recent rise of popular nationalism, Istanbul culture is witnessing an increasing openness toward minority issues in the wake of the publication of fictional, research-based, and autobiographical works about Istanbul's historic cosmopolitanism since the 1990s. A revisionist history movement to critically examine Turkey's multiethnic past and civil society organizations that work to advance minority civil rights have moved from the margins to occupy public spaces and popular media. The presence of this diverse movement is visible in the cultural consumerism of places recalling the cosmopolitan past.Footnote 32

Istanbul, the former imperial capital, presents an interesting case for examining the role of locality in the processes of producing national identity through territorialityFootnote 33 in Turkey. Istanbul bears traces of the Ottoman past in its cosmopolitan landscapes and in the multiethnic neighborhoods of Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and others. The Ottoman practice of administering non-Muslims of the empire through the millet system meant that a religious leader was responsible for administering the affairs of a given religious community in each mahalle.Footnote 34 Although not all mahalles were homogenous by religion or ethnicity,Footnote 35 they were important sociospatial locators of identity. The nationalization of Istanbul's cultural geography thus necessarily worked at the scale of the mahalle.

In the following section, I sketch a very brief history of Kuzguncuk to situate the themes and events that surface in place narratives of the mahalle. My aims in this section are to acquaint readers unfamiliar with this context and, for those who are familiar with it, to frame a discussion of nationalism through the lens of local place. A thick description of each of the rich historical contexts within which these different events occurred is beyond the scope of this section, which is based on interviews and the limited secondary sources available on the history of Kuzguncuk.

KUZGUNCUK, ISTANBUL'S “LITTLE PARIS”

The neighborhood of Kuzguncuk is a frequent subject of media and literary attention for its multiethnic history and landscape of Ottoman-era wooden houses, religious buildings, and small shops.Footnote 36 This landscape has come to represent a nostalgic cultural memory of close neighborhood life and tolerant cosmopolitanism.Footnote 37 As Kuzguncuk becomes more popular for the memory it represents, gentrification increases.Footnote 38 Kuzguncuk is only one of several historically non-Muslim neighborhoods in Istanbul undergoing nostalgic gentrification. Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and others lived in areas all over the city; in other Bosporus villages, such as Çengelköy, Ortaköy, or Arnavutköy; in neighborhoods on the peninsula, such as Balat, Fener, or Samatya; and on the European side of the city, in Beyoğlu, Kuledibi, or Kurtuluş. Non-Muslim minorities were not only clustered in these particular areas, however. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians lived in every district of the cityFootnote 39 and constituted the majority of Istanbul's population at the beginning of the century.Footnote 40

Kuzguncuk did not become an urban mahalle until Istanbul expanded from the historic peninsula northward and integrated Bosporus villages like Kuzguncuk via ferry transportationFootnote 41 (and later via bridges) in the late 19th century.Footnote 42 Its population was ethnically mixed, and residents were generally of modest means. Livelihoods relied on fishing, ferries, and the boat industryFootnote 43; urban gardening; Kuzguncuk's soap and printed-scarf factories; local shops; home businesses, such as cleaning houses, tailoring, and dressmaking; and artisanship and craftsmanship, among other things.Footnote 44

Kuzguncuk occupies an important place in Jewish history because it inherited a significant community of Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain.Footnote 45 The oldest synagogue, Virane Synagogue, was built in 1664, and the larger Beth Yaakov Synagogue in 1846.Footnote 46 A few native Ladino speakers remain in the mahalle today. The visual, material landscape of the Jewish cemetery in Kuzguncuk testifies to the significance of this community and its emigration. Part of it is maintained, but much of it was destroyed by earthquakes, neglect, and rural migrants from nearby Sivas, who in the 1950s and 1960s occupied it and built gecekondus (squatter settlements).Footnote 47

Kuzguncuk's Surp Krikor Lusavoriç Armenian Orthodox church was built in 1835Footnote 48 by Kayserili Armenians who arrived to work on the nearby Beylerbeyi palace. The Armenian community of Kuzguncuk grew, and in 1868 it requested an addition of a priest's room to the church.Footnote 49 The Greek Orthodox history in Kuzguncuk is the oldest: the foundations of the oldest Greek Orthodox church, Ayios Pandeleimon (1836), date to the 7th century or earlier. The smaller church, Holy Trinity, was built in 1832 with financial support from a sailor and fisherman originally from Sinesos, a village near Kayseri.Footnote 50 The Jewish, Greek, and Armenian communities were much larger than the Muslim community, which, until the mid-20th century, consisted mostly of an Ottoman elite summering in the hills of Kuzguncuk or living in its waterfront mansions. In 1914, according to one source, Kuzguncuk had 1,600 Armenians, 400 Jews, 70 Muslims, 250 Greeks, and 4 foreigners.Footnote 51

Cosmopolitanism left its traces well into the years after the founding of the Turkish republic. People moved to Kuzguncuk because of business, social connections, or marriage, and sometimes because of tragic events, such as the fire in nearby Dağ Hamamı.Footnote 52 It seems that in the early 20th century, ties to the larger millet community through education, business, and administration provided residents with networks beyond the mahalle. Some Jews, Greeks, and Armenians moved from Kuzguncuk to newer, more elite minority neighborhoods on the European side, such as Galata or Kuledibi.

Although they moved to achieve higher social status,Footnote 53 the desire to live in a neighborhood dominated by minorities and closer to the urban core was perhaps heightened as a nationalist atmosphere began to make people feel uncomfortable. Turkification worked in the 1920s and 1930s in Istanbul through policies that banned certain minorities from professions they had long dominated and through the “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaign that prohibited minorities from speaking non-Turkish languages in public spaces.Footnote 54 During World War II, Jews felt vulnerableFootnote 55; the wealth tax was seen as anti-Semitic and threatening to a safe, prosperous future in Turkey. This climate resulted in minority emigration from Istanbul and from Kuzguncuk. During this same period, Istanbul's demography began to change radically with the arrival of large numbers of rural Turkish migrants—in the case of Kuzguncuk, from the Black Sea region.Footnote 56

TURKIFICATION IN THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

The process of rural–urban migration is intertwined with Turkification, as the spaces and landscapes incoming migrants occupied were made available because of the forced or encouraged minority emigration from the city. Many minority-owned properties were sold, abandoned, and/or confiscated and became vulnerable to squatting, rental, or purchase by incoming rural migrants or, later, to purchase and renovation or reconstruction. These properties were inexpensive and accessible due to their unique political and social history. The targeting of minority properties and their transfer, through various means, to private Turks or to the Turkish stateFootnote 57 remade them into Turkish–Muslim urban spaces and rendered the communities that built them “forgotten.”

Narratives of Kuzguncuk emphasize three specific moments during the long and varied context within which minorities emigrated from Istanbul: the 1942–43 Wealth Tax, the 6–7 September Events of 1955, and the deportation of Greek citizens in 1964. From 1942 to 1943 the Turkish government levied a tax meant to aid the state during the financial distress of wartime. Some Muslim Kuzguncuklus and some Kuzguncuklu Jews in Tel Aviv made the point that the disproportionate taxing of non-Muslims and especially Jews was done because the Turkish government faced great economic pressure, and non-Muslim minorities happened to be the ones with the greatest wealth. However, as Ayhan Aktar demonstrates with property data, the wealthiest Muslim Turks were not commensurately taxed.Footnote 58 Several Kuzguncuklu families lost their homes and businesses or paid exorbitant sums. Some male family members were taken to work camps because they were unable to pay. For Jews, this situation resonated uncomfortably with the fate of Jews in Europe. Some husbands and fathers were drafted for a special, mandatory military service for non-Muslim minoritiesFootnote 59 although they had completed their regular mandatory military service. Jews in Kuzguncuk became nervous about their futures, and many emigrated to Palestine in the late 1930s, in greater numbers during the 1940s, and after the declaration of Israel in 1948.

The final erosion of Kuzguncuk's cosmopolitan culture occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. From 6 to 7 September 1955 the Cyprus conflict impacted Istanbul when a state-led riot against Greek-owned properties swept the city. The incident was provoked by reports that Atatürk's birthplace in Salonica had been bombed. It was later discovered to have been a state-led riot. The violence and massive destruction of minority (particularly Greek) property created fear: after 1955, thousands of Greeks departed in what became the nearly total exodus of this historic community.Footnote 60

After the massacres of ethnic Turkish Cypriots in 1963, Prime Minister Inönü canceled a 1930 treaty with Greece that granted Greek citizens residence in Istanbul. These people were born in Istanbul and held Greek passports only because their ancestors came from provinces of the Ottoman Empire that were incorporated into Greece after 1830. Nine thousand people were legally affected,Footnote 61 as were thousands more related to them by marriage. The population of Greeks in Istanbul, only a small number of whom were actually Greek citizens, decreased from 120,000 to 3,000 after the decision.Footnote 62 The emigrants were permitted to take only twenty kilos of property and the equivalent of U.S. $22. Their property was confiscated by the Turkish state, and the Turkish treasury benefited, with property valued between U.S. $200 and $500 million.Footnote 63 Other property owned by Turkish citizens married to Greeks was left in an ambiguous legal status.Footnote 64 The effects of these events are rarely considered in studies of Istanbul's urban social history and morphology,Footnote 65 yet they are significant factors in the emigration of minorities and the availability of properties to incoming rural migrants and, later, to the gentrifying elite.

By the late 1960s most of Kuzguncuk's non-Muslim minorities had left, and those who remained reclustered in new neighborhoods in other parts of Istanbul, such as Caddebostan, Suadiye, Gayrettepe, and Şişli. There are fewer than fifteen Greek, Jewish, and Armenian households in Kuzguncuk, primarily single elderly residents and younger, intermarried families, although more Greeks and Jews return weekly for religious services. As minorities left Kuzguncuk, rural migrants from areas near Rize, Trabzon, and Kastamonu purchased (or, as some residents of Kuzguncuk allege, merely occupied) empty houses and built apartment buildings within and on the edges of the neighborhood's historic core.

Beginning in the 1950s, migrants from Sivas built gecekondus along the upper part of the central road in Kuzguncuk. Since 1978, but particularly since the early 1990s, professionals and artists have been arriving to restore/recreate Kuzguncuk's historic fabric. These newcomers value the mahalle's multiethnic historic culture, as do the Black Sea migrants who raised children in Kuzguncuk.

METHODS

I conducted ethnographic research between June 2001 and August 2003, in February 2005, and in June 2006 in Istanbul and in July 2006 in Tel Aviv, Israel. I participated in daily neighboring with women residents of Kuzguncuk and conducted semistructured interviews with a variety of current and former residents, including migrants of Black Sea origin from several generations, relatively recently arrived professionals living in historic houses, and non-Muslim minorities.Footnote 66 I had countless conversations with many others about Kuzguncuk, minority history, and gentrification. I conducted eighteen interviews with Kuzguncuklu Jews in Tel Aviv and participated in a Kuzguncuklu reunion there,Footnote 67 where people shared memories and photographs of Kuzguncuk. Two people who live in Istanbul and who worship at the Beth Yaakov synagogue traveled from Turkey to attend the reunion.

After conducting extensive research in Istanbul, but before arriving in Tel Aviv, I interpreted the nostalgia for the multicultural harmonious past, even among minorities, as a silencing of minority perspectives threatening to the dominant national narrative. Most denied (or refused to speak of) antiminority politics or social difference. The few exceptions served only to highlight the silence in the rest of the narratives. Most narratives passed over the political and demographic changes of the 1940s through the 1960s by describing the wonderful life of the past and then skipping to the present day. I examined how these narratives produced a collective memory of Kuzguncuk and read in them the importance of propriety not only in maintaining a collective narrative that conformed to the nationalist narrative, but also in not speaking poorly about Kuzguncuk to me, a foreign researcher. The narratives revealed that nationalism did create imagined boundaries of belonging or exclusion as a “Turk” or “minority.” The nostalgia for past cosmopolitanism appeared to reinforce a notion that minorities were exceptional and thus “other.”

Subsequent research has complicated these conclusions. Place narratives of Kuzguncuk told in Tel Aviv describe in frank detail midcentury antiminority events. They recount fear, persecution, loss of property, and social difference as Jews vis-à-vis other minorities and Turks. The mention of these details in Tel Aviv indicated that “silencing” does occur in Istanbul regarding these events. Yet these narratives (told from afar and thus without fear of persecution or of offending propriety) also describe instances of Muslim protection of neighbors from rioters during citywide events or from Muslim thugs in everyday violence or threat, feelings of belonging as a Kuzguncuklu, and, especially, a longing for the pleasant, congenial, and multiethnic sociality of life in the mahalle.

In marked contrast to the difficulty of doing research on these topics among Jews in Istanbul, all except one of the Kuzguncuklus I met in Tel Aviv were eager to participate in my research. My interviews were often emotional experiences. One family, a brother and his sisters, invited me to Friday dinner, where they recounted stories of Kuzguncuk and sang songs they knew as children. One man spoke for four hours without prompting; he cried openly remembering a lost friend and laughed recounting childhood pranks. I saw Shlomo Bovete's landscapes; he emigrated from Kuzguncuk as a youth in the 1940s and paints pictures of Kuzguncuk from memory.

At the reunion, people shared photographs, exclaimed when they saw childhood friends for the first time in decades, and took to the stage to describe their memories of Kuzguncuk and their feelings at the reunion. The enthusiasm and emotions among Kuzguncuklus in Tel Aviv attest to a continued attachment to the mahalle. Common stories evince a common Kuzguncuklu identity connecting current Turkish residents of Kuzguncuk, minority Kuzguncuklus in Istanbul, and Kuzguncuklus in Israel. Local-place relationships thus created a sphere of belonging beyond nationalist categories—as Kuzguncuklu, a neighbor in the mahalle.

COSMOPOLITAN KUZGUNCUK: “WE WERE ALL LIKE SIBLINGS; RELIGION NEVER DIVIDED US”

The narratives in this section, told in Istanbul, are representative of all the narratives I heard. Regardless of the narrator's ethnoreligious identity, origin, or age, each describes Kuzguncuk as a special mahalle where everyone was like siblings and religion made no difference in everyday civility and neighboring. This theme suggests that Kuzguncuk was truly cosmopolitan in the sense that it was a mixed culture, where people spoke a variety of languages and celebrated together a diversity of religious holidays. This culture is also remembered as being lost when rural migrants arrived and minorities left. These narratives contrast with those in the subsequent section, told in Tel Aviv, where the theme of belonging and fondness for a cosmopolitan past resonates even as Tel Avivans describe social difference or persecution as a minority.

Turks who lived in Kuzguncuk in the 1940s and 1950s fondly remember that time,Footnote 68 as evidenced in an interview with an elderly Muslim male resident whose parents migrated from the Black Sea region. He arrived in Kuzguncuk as a child in 1942. This excerpt from my field notes illustrates a feeling of siblinghood among Kuzguncuklus of different religions and an example of respect regarding others' religious practicesFootnote 69:

Muslims were a very small minority in Kuzguncuk. They lived as siblings with the Jews, Armenians, and Greeks without argument. They went to weddings at synagogues, visited and helped each other with deaths, and went to the church, synagogue, or mosque for each other without problems. . . . His neighbors were a Greek family, and his mother used to visit the women there, and when the call to prayer rang out for prayer time, the Greek family would set up a prayer rug in an area of the house for their Muslim friends to pray.

An elderly Muslim woman similarly recalls from her childhood in Kuzguncuk a closeness among people of different religious backgroundsFootnote 70:

There were Greeks and Jews, all friends together; everyone was close and loved to help each other. We rented a house . . . owned by a man who lived in Greece. . . . We had close Jewish friends. But they all sold their houses and went. When they were going to Palestine on a boat and someone exploded the boat and they all died [she refers to the Struma incident], we were all very sad about it. We loved those Jewish people. When they were sick, we went to them. When you were sick, someone would always come to you.

For both of these narrators and for all the people I interviewed, daily life is remembered as specific practices of interethnic neighboring and generosity. In the second interview, the narrator simply states that the Jews left but does not explain what happened to them. These examples are typical of what elderly Muslims who lived in Kuzguncuk describe in their place narratives as they remembered the mahalle life of their youth. The theme of religious plurality and tolerance emerges in minority narratives, too, as in the following, told by a Greek woman. She describes the emigration of minorities and the arrival of people from rural areas. She told me that she still loves living in Kuzguncuk and does not want to live in the minority neighborhoods on the European side of Istanbul. Because she declined to be recorded, I wrote the following passage from my interview notes:

In the old days Kuzguncuk was a mosaic. Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews. No place else like this existed. There was a church next to a synagogue, a church next to a mosque. On Sunday the churches would empty out, the Armenians would walk out from their church, everyone would walk together. The promenade was famous. She had school friends from all over Kuzguncuk. They visited each other often, but there are none left now. There was a big migration after 1968–69, but the migration started earlier, in 1955. Many of her friends were good Turks, but there were also very many Greeks back then. She says she can only think of seven people in Kuzguncuk today who are old Kuzguncuklu Greeks. She said in the old days there was wonderful neighborliness. Her neighbors were all Greek, Armenian, Jewish—now there are none of these people. Kuzguncuk was a small place. . . . Then the villagers came after the 1960s. They came with lots of possessions and were brought by their relatives and friends. There were no Muslims on Büyükada before [this and other islands in the Marmara Sea had predominantly Christian and Jewish populations], but now there are.

This woman describes close neighborly relations and the migration of minorities out of Kuzguncuk without mentioning the context or circumstances of the emigration. She describes how few Kuzguncuklu Greeks remain and mentions the arrival of rural migrants in Kuzguncuk. However, again she does not describe their interactions with old Kuzguncuklu residents or the circumstances of their settling in to the neighborhood.

A Greek woman who currently lives in another part of IstanbulFootnote 71 also described a tolerant multiplicity of cultures in Kuzguncuk and referred to the arrival of rural migrants. Her narrative is more specific; she refers to the riots of 1955, although she does not describe the events nor does she explain why everyone left.

After the 6–7 September Events, places died. In the old days it was civilized. Between Jew, Armenian, Greek, there was no rudeness. Then when they began to come, it began to get ruined. There used to be 200,000 Greeks in Istanbul. Everyone left. Jews went to Israel. The shops in Kuzguncuk all used to be Greek, Jewish, Armenian. Kuzguncuk used to be a beautiful place. They were good people in our village.

Her story describes a general historic character of the neighborhood, but she does not recount any of her own personal history. The points she makes regarding the nature of the decline of cosmopolitan culture, that the departure of minorities happened together with and after the arrival of rural migrants, are shared by others, such as this male middle-aged Jewish interviewee who grew up in Kuzguncuk. He argues that the rural–urban difference is at the root of social differenceFootnote 72:

What can I explain about Kuzguncuk before I came into the world?. . . In the 1930s it was mostly Jews, Greeks, Armenians, not too many Muslims. . . . In my childhood it began to change. Why? In the 1950s in Turkey urbanization started, from villages, migration to cities. Kuzguncuk was . . . influenced of course, definitely. The Black Sea people, and the people from Anatolia, they came to Kuzguncuk, Muslim Turks. . . . In my childhood there was still a population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, but not the majority; the majority were Turks.

The foundation of Israel in 1948 caused Jewish emigration. Jewish people in Kuzguncuk also moved to more upper-class neighborhoods in Istanbul. . . . By the middle of the 1970s only ten families or so remained in Kuzguncuk. People began to come from other places to fill the synagogues in Kuzguncuk. . . . There were clear cultural differences—cultural and life differences between city people and newcomers. The problems maybe came from these differences, maybe due to village and city difference more than religious difference. All the Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Muslims in the city had lived among each other sharing the same culture; there was no big cultural difference. They were all city people.

His narrative describes how minorities were leaving as rural migrants arrived in Kuzguncuk but mentions only that Jews emigrated after 1948; he leaves out any mention of the larger context that shaped migration decisions at that time. For other Jews remaining in Istanbul, describing the loss of Kuzguncuk's cosmopolitanism directly articulates identity as minority and Jewish, as in the following narrative from a middle-aged woman. She describes the pain of having lost her community in Kuzguncuk but similarly does not describe exactly what happened. Our interview took place after she took me on a tour of Kuzguncuk to show me all the houses that were Jewish when she was a child.

Husbands would come from the ferry station. There were a lot of Jews here; many, many Jews were here. After that the Jews went here and there. Before they left, the Jews, everyone in the evening would wait for their husbands at the ferry station down below. They'd dress up, the women, and when their husbands would get off the ferry they'd walk with them arm in arm. There were restaurants with music, and outside tables, and chairs, and there they'd sit, and they'd eat. There was a synagogue, and they'd go to the cinema. . . . Everyone could wear their bathing suit[s] and walk down to the sea, with their bathing suits; then it was so free that no one would look at anyone else and they'd wear their bathing suits and go into the sea. . . . Of course I wore my bathing suit and went to the sea, everyone did. . . . We had a beautiful life until '65, here, until '65. Yes.

When I asked her, “What happened in 1965?” she responded,

Then, things happened, I won't say what, and the Jews left. They sold their houses. . . . Ayyyy, there's so much to say, but I've lost my head, I'm upset. Everyone went, everyone scattered, everyone sold their house. You understand? For one lira, for eighty kuruş, they sold their houses, the whole Jewish community. After that Kuzguncuk was finished.

NARRATIVES FROM TEL AVIV, ISRAEL

In contrast to the Istanbul narratives, experiences of prejudice and persecution are a significant theme in narratives told in Tel Aviv, perhaps because Kuzguncuk becomes the place of origin from which people emigrated to Israel, or made aliyah, a theme consistent with Israeli national identity. These narratives provide crucial comparative evidence regarding perceived and real antiminority events, key moments in the narratives with which the nation is imagined in Turkey. The narratives discussed in this section illustrate difference and otherness in the mahalle even as residents identify as onetime Kuzguncuklu and remember very fondly the cosmopolitan culture of their youth. These minority perspectives reveal that nationalism that produced categories of “Turk” and “minority” did indeed operate through urban space, and they complicate the nostalgic memory of Kuzguncuk's cosmopolitanism. These stories highlight the mahalle as not only a space of cosmopolitan Kuzguncuklu belonging, but also as a space through which minority identity, and difference, was reproduced.

My first interview in Tel Aviv was with two female Kuzguncuklu childhood friends. The information about the 1942–43 Wealth Tax, the 1955 riots, and other antiminority violence discussed here is completely unlike the stories in Istanbul. I asked the same questions as I had asked in Istanbul, such as, “What do you remember about Kuzguncuk?” and “How was Kuzguncuk when you were growing up?”

Beki told me what it was like to live as a child during the 1942–43 Wealth Tax, directly linking the national context to her family's experience and her personal decision to emigrate from KuzguncukFootnote 73:

During the Wealth Tax, they took my father to the military; they took all the men in my family to Aşkale. . . . We remained with no food, no money—these things really scared me. I put it in my mind that one day I'd go to Israel. After I came here, the rest of my family moved from Kuzguncuk to Galata.

Beki was seven years old during the Wealth Tax and did not emigrate until she was in her twenties. In her narrative, the taxes had a dire impact on her family, and the events were a significant part of her thinking about emigrating to Israel.Footnote 74 Her family's move to Galata was similar to that of many other minority families in old neighborhoods who moved across the city to regroup with other minorities in new neighborhoods according to their relative means after large waves of minority emigration from Istanbul.

Recollections of even harsher nationalist and anti-Semitic events are revealed in Riva's narrative of the tumultuous 1955 riots and earlier Wealth Tax. She describes Muslims protecting Jewish neighbors in Kuzguncuk—evidence, for her, of the siblinghood between Kuzguncuklus of different origins.

There, in 1955, ‘56, the 6–7 September Events happened. Turks against the Greeks, all the Greek places, their houses, they stole a lot; it was a big event. Turkish families protected the Jewish families. Turks at that time said “Gayrımüslim” [non-Muslim]; they confused people [meaning that rioters didn't know who was Greek, Jewish, or Armenian]. The Turks really protected us. One night, after 1955, was it 1962, 1963?—a different time, whenever it was that they started to attack, another time. Again it was Turks doing it, again from outside [Kuzguncuk]. There was a grandmother, she lived over on Garden Street; everyone called her “Grandmother.” Grandmother said, “No Greeks here!” and saved us.

About the Wealth Tax. . . . I was born in 1937; in 1939 the Germans came out, until 1945. Turkey didn't enter the war, but Turkey was getting ready. In Balat they built crematory ovens.Footnote 75 In 1940, my mother would tell me to turn off the lights. To turn on the lights we'd hang a blanket on the window so the light wouldn't be seen. We had no bread, no sugar. [The government] did it to show the Turkish people because there was anti-Semitism. And they wanted money. Those who couldn't pay the tax were sent to Aşkale. My aunt's husband went to Aşkale. My father . . . had a shop selling printed scarves and fabric. He had to pay the tax. He came to an agreement with the muhtar [the neighborhood administrator], who adjusted the tax so he could pay. My father was respected, and he knew the muhtar. We lived in a two-floor house, lived on one floor and rented the other. We rented the shop, and my father paid the tax. If he'd been young or had nothing to give, he would have gone to Aşkale too. . . .

When we were growing up in Kuzguncuk, we had Turkish teachers at school, and they knew who was Jewish; there was anti-Semitism. Jews, Greeks, Turks, some of the teachers were good, [and] some were anti-Semitic.

Her narrative describes not only how nationalism was produced at the state level, but also how national/minority identities were reproduced between individual people, as neighbors had the power to reinforce or intervene in the imagining of nationalist boundaries of “Turk” or “minority.” The muhtar knew her father, so he was able to pay a feasible tax. In contrast, because the teachers knew who was Jewish, she felt discrimination as a student. In Beki's story, the Muslim grandmother “saved” her Jewish neighbors by saying there are “no Greeks here.”

The story of Muslims protecting non-Muslim neighbors in times of crisis was told by a few older Turkish residents remaining in Kuzguncuk today, and it emerges from the following narrative from Tel Aviv, which describes Zionist political participation among Kuzguncuklus, marking Kuzguncuk as a special place in Jewish social history. Several of the narratives from Tel Aviv recounted experiences of Zionist activity and Jewish social organization in Kuzguncuk and in this way differ greatly from narratives told in Istanbul.

When we [Jewish youth] had a football team, in 1938, they wanted to have a game with us; in Beylerbeyi we had a match. After the match, I don't know what happened. I went to Istanbul by ferryboat. The Turks won the match, but we also scored a few goals, and they came on [the boat], they came, eight or ten guys walking around [the ferry]. . . . When they found a guy from our team, they'd start to beat him. . . .

After the match I went to Istanbul, and I'm coming out from the ferry station [returning to Kuzguncuk]. They're coming out from the ferry; the station was like this [he shows me]. I couldn't escape, they caught me. They were about to beat me, but my friend [Mehmet], he was a bit slow but a good kid. They used to call me Moise. . . . “Moise! I won't let them get you! I'll beat you all!” he said. He saved me. He loved me a lot. He saved me. They were fighting with us. . . . But generally it was good between us. Later, I don't know.

Later in the interview he told me more about his political activities and Jewish identity in a context of increasing pressure against Jews in Istanbul during the 1930s:

During the Wealth Tax, my uncle went to Sivrihisar. My wife's father was sent to Aşkale. They had shops, but the tax that was levied on them was to the extent they couldn't pay it. . . . During the second world war, at that time . . . sugar, foodstuffs were going from the storage to the Germans. That's why the Germans didn't enter Turkey. The government was supporting the Germans. They'd give us a quarter loaf of bread. It was, excuse me, like mud. All the wheat was going to the Germans. On one hand, it was a good thing. Germany didn't enter Turkey, but at that time, because of the Germans, anti-Semitism really increased in Turkey. . . .

At that time, I was in the first year of university, 1942, 1943. . . . When I was in university, I was working and studying; I was also working [in the Zionist youth group] Neʾemanei Zion, and in Aliyat Hanoar. . . . In Çamlica we'd go for walks. Later the youth would come, from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, [and] we'd meet them at Sirkeci [train station] and invite them as guests. I didn't go to the Sirkeci station; I didn't have a lot of time. We'd invite them up to a hotel called Mado Palas in Moda. We'd invite them there and take them to Haydarpaşa [train station] on their way [to Palestine], and they'd go from there by train.

In these place narratives, Kuzguncuk is situated within the nationalist context and bound together with the narrator's identity and experiences. As a young, bright student involved in Zionist youth groups, he was connected to other Jews and eventually to Israel. He is Kuzguncuklu, saved by his friend Mehmet, and a Jew who would later emigrate to Israel.

GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY

The geography of memory—that is, the social space through and upon which memory is constructed—is complex, constituted together with the making and the telling of the memory itself. Because memory and narrative are always grounded in locality, the relationship to place is constitutive of identity.

The geography of memory for minority narratives told in Istanbul is the larger nationalist context in Turkey. Narratives told in Kuzguncuk are located in a mahalle where everyone knows everyone else, and people, as neighbors, are responsible for maintaining propriety. Minority narratives told in Turkey in general avoid describing contentious political events and feelings of persecution.

In contrast, stories told in Israel tell of antiminority events as they happened at the state level and in personal experience. They are former minority narratives told in another national context, in which persecution in place of origin is part of a new national identity, and thus, they are variations on a larger and dominant narrative of being Jewish. However, for Kuzguncuklu Jews in Tel Aviv, Kuzguncuk remains a very special place.Footnote 76 Place narratives of Kuzguncuk relate memories of intercommunal relationships, beloved neighbors, celebration of other religious holidays, and a civility and respect in cosmopolitan neighborhood life.

Remembering Kuzguncuk as a mahalle with a special character of tolerant multiculturalism is what makes one a Kuzguncuklu, whether minority or Turk. There are silences, in Kuzguncuk and in Istanbul, regarding past traumatic and violent events, in spite of increasing appreciation of the cosmopolitan past in the larger cultural sphere. All of these memories reveal that identity and, thus, nationalism are indeed embodied.

At one level, place narratives reify national categories, telling of certain moments in which particular individuals had power (or were powerless) to redraw (or remake) national categories of belonging and exclusion as “Turk” or “minority.” It is also evident, however, that national categories of belonging are rendered meaningless at moments of articulating identity as Kuzguncuklu, through attachment to place and the common, beloved memory of truly cosmopolitan life. Most of the people I met in Tel Aviv have returned to Kuzguncuk. Some of them visit frequently and have begun new relationships with Muslims now living in Kuzguncuk.

At the time of this writing, Turkish and international media report a wave of radical nationalism in Istanbul. The narratives gathered in this research are a testament to the danger of what these recent incidents may herald: the power of nationalist events to irretrievably alter urban life. Yet Muslim and minority narratives of a past in which people “lived like siblings” and “were all friends together” reveal that a shared attachment to place can ground tolerance and belonging in the city. They should be told, for it is at this moment that the future of Istanbul is being imagined.

Footnotes

Ibid.

References

NOTES

Author's Note: This research was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the Institute of Turkish Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, a Women in Under-Represented Areas Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Kentucky, and the Walker Institute for International Studies Faculty Research Grant at the University of South Carolina. I am extremely grateful to these institutions, to the many people who assisted my work in Istanbul and Tel Aviv, and to my anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. Any errors or faults of the article are entirely my own.

1 My translation of a recorded interview.

2 Muslim and Christian residents of Cairo similarly remember past harmonious interethnic relations and remark on the contemporary absence of mutual respect. van Doorn-Harder, Pieternella, “Copts: Fully Egyptian, But for a Tattoo?” in Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies, ed. Shatzmiller, Maya (Quebec City: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2005): 22–57Google Scholar.

3 The suffix -lu or -li, when attached to a place name, means “of” or “from” there. Someone of Istanbul is an Istanbullu, and someone of Kuzguncuk is a Kuzguncuklu. This suffix illustrates the importance of place for identity in Turkey.

4 Azınlık is the term for non-Muslim minorities that also describes the political status they acquired with the Treaty of Lausanne.

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17 Furthermore, grouping people in minority categories betrays the diversity within groups. Religion, language, and ethnicity as political and experienced categories of belonging have not always cohered. Clogg, Richard, “A Millet within a Millet: The Karamanlides,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gondicas, Dimitri and Issawi, Charles (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1999), 115–42Google Scholar.

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27 Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity.

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36 Some of these works are memoirs—for example, Büyükfırat, Zakire, Kuzguncuk: Bella Vista Hoşçakal (Kuzguncuk: Goodbye Bella Vista) (Istanbul: Sone Yayınları, 2005)Google Scholar. Others are semiautobiographical/scholarly works—for example, Bektaş, Cengiz, Hoşgörünün Öteki Adı: Kuzguncuk (The Other Name for Tolerance: Kuzguncuk) (Istanbul: Tasarım Yayın Grubu, 1996)Google Scholar, and Ebcim, Nedret, Üç Dinin ve Ünlülerin Buluştuğu Semt: Kuzguncuk (The Neighborhood Where Three Religions and Their Famous People Came Together: Kuzguncuk) (Istanbul: İleri Yayınları, 2005)Google Scholar. Kuzguncuk is frequently represented in newspapers and magazines. See for example Çakil, D. and Duğen, M., “Istanbulʾda Küçük Bir Paris” (A Little Paris at Istanbul), Akademist 1 (2002): 24–29Google Scholar.

37 For example, see Bektaş, Hoşgörünün, 34.

38 Mills, Amy, “Boundaries of the Nation in the Space of the Urban: Landscape and Social Memory in Istanbul,” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 367–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some argue this is not gentrification because Kuzguncuk has a long-term population that values the neighborhood's history (e.g., Morgül, Tan, “Kuzguncuk Üzerine Kafası Karışık Bir Deneme” (A Confusing Test on Kuzguncuk), Mimar.ist 6, no. 21 (2006): 64–68Google Scholar), although renovation has caused socioeconomic change. Uzun, C. Nil, “The Impact of Urban Renewal and Gentrification on Urban Fabric: Three Cases in Turkey,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 94, no. 3 (2003): 363–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 Bali, Türkleştirme, 196.

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46 Banoğlu, Niyazi Ahmet, Tarih ve Efsaneleri İle İstanbul (Istanbul with its History and Legends) (Istanbul: Ak Kitabevi, 1966)Google Scholar.

47 This point was made by several residents, including a young man born to Sivasli parents in that area who took me on a tour and explained the gecekondu's history.

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49 Başbakanlık Arşivi Cevdet Adliye (Prime Minister's Archives) #2000 16 M 1284 (1868). Thanks to Christine Philliou for identifying and translating this document in the course of other research.

50 Thanks again to Christine Philliou for reading and translating the Greek inscriptions.

51 Banoğlu, Tarih ve Efsaneleri, 81.

52 Kastoryano “Millet,” 257. One interviewee in Tel Aviv recalled his mother's story of being a child in Dağ Hamamı and helping a neighbor move things out of the house during a big fire and hearing from a neighbor that her house was burning too. The fire damaged many houses; several who lost their homes moved to Kuzguncuk.

53 Ibid., 258. However, one Tel Aviv interviewee's family moved from Kuzguncuk to Kuledibi to feel safe in a neighborhood with more Jews. Her family was very active in Zionist political activity, and her father manufactured documents to facilitate illegal emigration to Palestine.

54 Bali, Türkleştirme.

55 Toktaş, Şule, “Turkey's Jews and their Immigration to Israel,” Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2006): 505–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bali, Rıfat, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında, Türkiye Yahudileri. Aliya: Bir Toplu Göçun Öyküsü, 1945–1949 (Turkish Jews in the Republic Years. Aliyah: The Saga of a Mass Migration 1945–1949) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayinları, 2003)Google Scholar.

56 Several older residents, including the former muhtar, indicated that immigration began in the late 1930s/early 1940s.

57 Aktar, Varlık Vergisi.

58 Bali, Türkleştirme, 450–55. Over 97 percent of the properties sold to pay the tax were sold by Jews, and these properties were appropriated and effectively transferred to the state or to private Turks; Aktar, Varlık Vergisi, 229. Those who couldn't pay were sent to work camps in Aşkale, Erzurum, and other places; Bali, Türkleştirme, 458, and Aktar, Varlık Vergisi.

59 Bali, Türkleştirme, 408–22.

60 Speros Vryonis describes problems recording damages and the complex situation that resulted in the compensation paid to owners but only for a very small proportion of total damages. Vryonis, Mechanism of Catastrophe, 266–87.

61 Bahcheli, Tozun, Greek–Turkish Relations since 1955 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 174Google Scholar.

62 Demir and Akar, Sürgünleri, 190.

63 Nicole, and Pope, Hugh, Turkey Unveiled: Ataturk and After (London: John Murray, 1997), 116Google Scholar.

64 Demir and Akar, Sürgünleri.

65 For example, Çeçener, Besim, İstanbul'un Kültür ve İmar Sorunları (The Problems of Culture and Urban Development in Istanbul) (Istanbul: TMMOB Mimarlar Odası, 1995)Google Scholar, and Şengül, H. Tarik, “On the Trajectory of Urbanisation in Turkey,” International Development Planning Review 25 (2003): 153–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Two papers in Istanbul Between the Global and the Local briefly refer to minority emigration in other discussions: Ayfer Bartu, “Who Owns the Old Quarters? Rewriting Histories in a Global Era,” and Keyder, Çağlar, “The Housing Market from Informal to Global,” in Istanbul Between the Global and the Local, ed. Keyder, Çağlar (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 31–46 and 173–86Google Scholar.

66 I formally interviewed seven Kuzguncuklu Greeks, one Kuzguncuklu, several non-Kuzguncuklu Armenians, and twelve Kuzguncuklu Jews. I spoke with many other Jews after synagogue services in Kuzguncuk. The Turkish Jewish community maintains good public relations, although individuals may privately distance themselves from Muslims and perceive historic discrimination. Anonymous, “Jewish Life in Turkey Today,” in Jewish Women from Muslim Societies Speak: A Program Guide, ed. Susan M. Kahm, Nancy F. Vineberg, and Sarah Silberstein Swartz (Waltham, Mass.: American Sephardi Federation and Hadassah International Research Institution on Women at Brandeis University, 2003), 32–34.

67 Approximately fifty people attended. Thanks to David Angel and the Türkiyeliler Birliği (Association of Turkish Jews).

68 Young Muslim Kuzguncuklus who heard about this time describe Kuzguncuk's historic cosmopolitan tolerance with the word hoşgörün, as do new residents who moved to Kuzguncuk because of its mahalle culture and historic buildings.

69 I conducted interviews in Turkish, with the exception of one interview in Tel Aviv with a woman who replied in Ladino, which David Angel translated into English. Several interviewees in Istanbul declined to be recorded. When I could not record, I took detailed notes during the interview and completed text to the best of my ability after the interview. This interviewee declined to be recorded; this excerpt is from field notes I wrote immediately after our interview, based on notes I took while he spoke.

70 This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

71 I was to interview two women together at the church in Kuzguncuk but, upon my arrival, discovered that our interview would be observed by the priest and other male church members. Approximately a dozen people surrounded us and occasionally interjected. I felt the interview was thus heavily monitored for propriety. This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

72 This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

73 This interview was taped, and this is my translation.

74 Toktaş, “Turkey's Jews and Their Immigration,” 508.

75 This widespread rumor, although untrue, caused many to fear Nazi occupation of Turkey. Bali, Rıfat, “Talat Paşa'nın Kemiklerini Mi Nazi Fırınları Mı?” (Talat Paşa's Bones or Nazi Ovens?), Toplumsal Tarih 150 (2006): 42–47, 45Google Scholar.

76 The relationship to place of origin is important for identity construction in transnational contexts. Neyzi, “Fragmented.”