A couple of years ago, a young professional woman I met told me the story of how her family lost a parcel of land overlooking the Bosphorus on the Asian side that had been in her family for generations. Men with guns came and threatened to harm them if her father didn’t sign the property […]
A system of sea taxis will be instituted in Istanbul, a great relief to those of us stuck for hours in traffic and crammed into overcrowded buses with someone’s elbow in your eye. But the sea taxi prices are high, making it a facility for the wealthy and for emergencies. What about more ferries, […]
Turkish Daily News, May 8, 2008:
Three members of the European Parliament sent a letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Tuesday welcoming the decision to task Parliament’s Human Rights Commission to look into abuses taking place in the ongoing demolition of Istanbul’s traditional Roma neighborhood known as Sulukule. Underlining the lack of understanding on the […]
Photos are by Jenny White
I visited the Romani (gypsy) area of Sulukule yesterday, which is being torn down and its historic population moved 40 kilometers outside of Istanbul to make room for a housing development. Sulukule is a neighborhood of substandard homes, a number of them in various stages of being demolished. It is surrounded […]
Photos are by Jenny White
May 6 is the Hidrellez holiday. Some believe it to be an Islamic holiday, others a pre-Islamic, pre-Christian spring festival. It is a celebration of nature; the first spring lamb is eaten. The night of Hidrellez (tonight) brings blessings, so one custom is to leave your purse open if you want […]
Turkish municipalities are increasingly invoking Article 5366 of the law passed in 2005 which allows the demolition of shantytowns in the name of urban transformation projects and using them to destroy parts of the urban fabric. The Romani (gypsy) neighborhood of Sulukule, which dates to Byzantine times, has thus become an “urban transformation area” […]
Photo from Radikal
On May 1 an army of police in Istanbul closed off Taksim Square and surrounding streets to prevent a planned labor union rally.
Excerpt from a Turkish Daily News article (my comments are at the bottom):
Thursday’s outrageous scenes of brutality, firing gas bombs into hospitals, trade union and political party buildings, beating up protestors […]
The destruction of the thousand-year-old Sulukule neighborhood (see my previous Sulukule blogs under the ‘Istanbul’ category) and the displacement of its Romani (gypsy) residents continues. This “urban renewal” project will destroy Istanbul’s Romani community –which dates from Byzantine times — by pushing its residents 40 kilometers outside of the city and replacing their neighborhood with […]
Here are some photos of the tile murals inside Taksim and Levent stations on the Istanbul Metro. These are just a selection; there are many more murals, all spectacular. The bottom scene shows the fall of Constantinople (Christian Byzantium) to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The top scene is of the Ottoman city after the […]
Photo from Turkish Daily News
According to news reports, the thousand-year old Romani (gypsy) Sulukule neighborhood that dates back to Byzantium has become a site of despair as more and more houses are torn down with many residents given only 24-hour notice. (70 houses have been demolished so far.) An urban transformation project will replace […]