Friday, March 30, 2018

City of Countless Names- Kassim Pasha p1


We only have five neighborhoods left in our exploration fo Constatniople's norther shore.
 
Kassim Pasha (Kasımpaşa, Khassim Pasha)

Kassim Pasha is the largest quarter in Constantinople’s northern shore, extending from the Golden Horn for over a mile inland over hills and valleys toward Ok-Meidan.  Its width spreads from Has Keui in the east and ending at the cemetery known as the Champs des Morts on the outskirts of Galata and Pera. Two deep ravines cut through Kassim Pasha’s hills north to south. In 1453, the army of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror slid sixty-eight ships down the eastern ravine into the Golden Horn and past the inlet’s defenses, after transporting their armada overland, much to the consternation of Byzantium’s defenders.  The most northern third of Kassim Pasha is known as “Piyale Pasha”, named for its famous mosque with multiple domes, and the southern edge around the harbor is called “Tershane” or “the Arsenal” because of the Naval complex there located.
Despite its massive breadth, Kassim Pasha is a quiet residential suburb.  Its cramped streets and closely-clustered houses look much like those across the water in Stambul. In the recent past, outbreaks of plague and cholera quickly spread through the tightly packed dirty homes. The quarter holds few sights of interest for travelers beyond its impressive harbor ringed with docked warships, shipyards, and barracks housing the sailors of the Ottoman navy.
As evidenced by the ever-present mosques, tekkahs, and tombs, Kassim Pasha’s Turkish community outnumbers the rest of its population. The prosperity of the quarter’s residents ranges from the middle-class life of merchants and naval officers to the poverty of craftsmen and laborers. Most make their living on the docks and naval facilities along the Golden Horn. 
During the city’s Byzantine days, the land was wilderness save for the country estates of Genoese generals. In 1525, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent saw Constantinople had become crowded in its prosperity. He ordered his trusted servant, Vizier Kasim Pasha, to oversee the construction of a suburb across the Golden Horn where the city’s excess population could comfortably dwell. Kassim Pasha built the quarter and gave it a mosque, both still bear his name. Kassim Pasha started as a glamorous neighborhood with spacious streets and garden courtyards and after the Ottoman navy moved its headquarters and fleet to Kassim Pasha’s harbor, its reputation grew further with military prestige. 
As the Ottoman Empire waned, so did Kassim Pasha. The once terrifying navy fell behind more progressive nations, its once industrial docks declined. In 1821, a city fire swept through Kassim Pasha in a wave of destruction reaching from the quarter’s western end into the heart of Pera, destroying many embassies. Their home countries rebuilt the embassies with stronger, grander designs, while in Kassim Pasha, hovels replaced homes, just as vulnerable to flame as before. Some whispered the Janissaries or those loyal to them started the fire in outrage over the plans to replace the elite warriors with a modern army. 
Divers harvest great numbers of oysters, muscles, and prawns from the piers and hulls off Kassim Pasha’s shore. Although the Turks eat their shellfish fondly, Roman Aluminats purchase the majority of the catch to observe their dietary laws to the letter, mostly unaware of the copper and other impurities tainting the harbor’s water and aquatic life.

Friday, March 23, 2018

City of Countless Names- Piri Pasha p1


 We only have five neighborhoods left in our exploration the Constantinople's northern shore. Most are small and simple like today's subject, but we still have two very big and important quarters coming up soon. 

Piri Pasha (Peri Pasha, Piri Paşa, Kaliji Oghlu, Chalydsche Oghi, Halidji Oghlu) 

Upriver from Haskeui is the serene suburb of Piri Pasha, the most northern of Constantinople’s villages along the Golden Horn. None of the filthy garbage and detritus that accumulates in the water downstream dirties their shore. No crowds clog their streets, only the village’s inhabitants and sightseeing travelers seeking quiet in the country. 
This village’s distinguished name causes some confusion. It’s named after one of two important men in Ottoman history, either Piri Reis Pasha, an Ottoman Admiral and mapmaker who earned much honor from his victory at the siege of Rhodes, or Piri Mehmed Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Selim I, who built a mosque in the village.  
Much like Eyub, the Turkish quarter across the water, Piri Pasha serves as a respite from city life, and a departure point for excursions into the European countryside.  Unlike its opposing quarter, the population of Piri Pasha is incredibly diverse. Synagogues, tombs, mosques, and churches sit on every street corner, and a traveler hears a dozen languages while walking the streets. Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Europeans all live in pleasant houses scattered in front of tree-covered hills and gardens.
Most of the population belongs to the middle class, running their business from small shops and stores.Boathouses along the waterfront and livery stables full of horses and rigs provide transport to those arriving in or leaving Constantinople.  A decade ago, French engineers cleared the woods off a broad hill just north of Piri Pasha and built the city’s first landing field for airships. The war in the Crimea brings a constant stream of diplomatic mail and influential passengers giving the landing field local prominence.
Occasionally, rough-looking hill men trek into the village to trade or buy supplies. While most are farmers, guides, or woodsmen, some are undoubtedly ruthless bandits planning to spend their illicit income.

Famous Locations:
The Jewish Cemetery
Northwest of Ok-Medan’s arrow-strewn heights, a massive Jewish cemetery crowns the steep hills east of Piri Pasha. Unlike most of Constantinople’s cemeteries, no cypress trees rise over the rows of flat marble tombstones, no cultivated flowers cheer the bare ground, and a dreary, mournful air pervades the hills.
It is the largest Jewish cemetery in Constantinople and the oldest in Pera-Galata, as old as Byzantium. Eroded and barely legible Hebrew inscriptions chiseled into the grave markers show dates in the 1400s, but much older graves than that have toppled or been lost to fresh interments. Over the centuries, the number of its occupants rose to over 20,000. Although the ground is full, burial continues.
The history of this cemetery is full of segregation and dehumanizing laws. During the rule of the Western Aluminat Empire, the religious authorities prohibited Jews from burying their dead in Aluminat Cemeteries.  The Jewish community had to bury all of their dead in these hills far outside ancient Constantinople’s walls. Later, anti-Semitic Ottoman officials ordered their executed criminals and enemies of the state to be buried here alongside the dearly departed as an insult both to the executed and the Jews.



Friday, March 16, 2018

City of Countless Names- Haskeui p2



Today, we're exploring some of the intesting locations in Constatniople's neighborhood of Haskeui.

Ok-Meidan
Beyond the crest of Haskeui’s hills is the vast empty heights named Ok-median by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, from the Turkish meaning “Field of Arrows”. The field begins east of Kaliji Oghlu and Haskoy and extends west over Kassim Pasha. Ok-Meidan’s heights give a fantastic view of the Golden Horn and the vista of Stambul’s northern shore.
Freed from the cramped city streets, Ottoman Sultans and their most prized soldiers came to Ok-Meidan to train and compete using bows and arrows. The trials on Ok-Meidan valued the strength of the archer’s draw, not the accuracy of their aim. Small pillars and monuments memorializing particularly impressive arrow flights and spear throws rise out of the brush on the plane. Sultans often used foreign idols taken from their conquests as targets for their soldiers. Visitors to Ok-Meidan still find old, lost arrows lying on the ground.
In a modernization of this tradition, the Ottoman army uses Ok-Meidan as a drilling ground to prepare their troops for the war in Crimea. No arrows cut through the air, but recent shipments of British and French weapons and equipment made their way to the heights for testing and training.
During a plague outbreak in the 1590s, the Grand Mufti and the Greek Patriarch chose Ok-Meidan as a gathering place for the faithful of both faiths to pray for Constantinople’s deliverance from the disease. Since that massive assembly, congregants of all faiths return to Ok-Meidan after earthquakes, fires, or droughts to pray to the Heavenly Host for mercy.

Aynalıkavak Palace
During Haskeui’s days as an idyllic forest free of the city, the Sultan Ahmed I built a pavilion surrounded by gardens in sight of the imperial ship yards. The beautiful view of Stambul and the Golden Horn drew following Sultans to expand the pavilion into a palatial complex with quarters for the imperial harem, a treasury, barracks, baths, and mosques.
After signing a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1718, the Venetian government sent Sultan Ahmet III a set of ‘mirrors as tall at poplar trees’, orAynalıkavak” in Turkish. The Sultan had the mirrors installed in the palace and their fame gave the palace its name.
Sultan Selim III tore down most of the buildings to expand his shipyards leaving only the pavilion, a beautiful example of Ottoman architecture. The pavilion sits on a terraced hill with two stories facing the Golden Horn, and one story facing Haskeui. The lower floor was devoted to servants, the main floor to two large halls, a magnificent domed Reception Hall, and a rectangular Inner Hall with quarters for quests. A calligraphic script praising the pavilion stretches across the cornice curving around the large windows and door frames of the Reception hall. Some thaumaturgists believe Turkish sigils might be buried among the letters. Like most palaces on the northern shore, the Aynalıkavak Pavilion is under renovations funded by Sultan Abdulmejid.
The Greek Aluminat faithful of Constantinople believe an agiasmata (a spring of holy water) linked to Saint Pantaleon flows in the pavilion’s gardens.

Friday, March 9, 2018

City of Countless Names- Haskeui p1



Moving on in our exploration of Constatniople during the Crimean War, we reach Haskeui.

Haskeui (Areovindou, Aravindou, Khasgiugh, Pikridion, Hasköy, Haskoy)
Further up the Golden Horn’s north shore from the military harbors of Tershane, is the village of Haskeui. The shore line looks much the same as Tershane, with shipyards, warehouses, docks, and barracks, but cultivated beauty flourishes further inland. Haskeui’s many well-tended orchards and vineyards supply Constantinople’s inhabitants with a bounty of fruits, such as lemons, oranges, grapes, peaches, and pomegranates. The villages’ wines too are drunk in taverns, consulates, and progressive Ottoman circles across the city. Its fruitful gardens and pleasant countryside made Haskeui a popular holiday spot for the Ottoman royal family in the 1600s.
As industry and modernization crept up the Golden Horn’s coast, its idyllic environ faded and the wild game moved on. Only a few buildings from the Empire’s golden days remain. Its name, meaning “elite or select village”, still reflects back on its past glories as an Imperial paradise.Most of Haskeui’s residents live in pleasant one-story houses built on the hill’s gentle slope. The wealthiest own large mansions on the slope of the hill overlooking the village.Haskeui is an insular community, with very few Turkish inhabitants.  Much like the neighborhood of Balata across the Golden Horn, Has Keui’s population is predominately Jewish.  Dissimilarly to the ghetto of Balata, Has Keui’s Jewish residents are mostly middle class and a few families live in considerable wealth.
Although they share the same Yehudite faith, the Jews of Haskeui come from very diverse origins. Some ancestors fled to Constantinople to escape persecution in Spain. Others were forced into Haskeui after the Sultan confiscated their land in Emin Eunou to make room for the construction of Yeni Cami. Still others descend from the Jews welcomed into Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II to repopulate the newly conquered city.  
A small Armenian community lives in the western side of Haskeui, where they too live in more comfort than their kinsmen across the water in Stambul. England’s partnership with the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War brought British engineers and ship-makers to Constantinople. They and their families settled in Haskeui near the ship-yards.

Famous Locations:
Mayor Synagogue
The largest synagogue in Haskeui is Mayor Synagogue. Its edifice juts out of a hill almost  a block from the shore of the Golden Horn northwest of Taskizak Shipyard. Rough, jagged masonry covers its squat walls giving the Synagogue a mystic and ancient appearance.
The majority of the synagogue’s congregants are Sephardic Jews, descendents of refugees from the Iberian Peninsula. Their ancestors built the synagogue 300-400 years ago, although some histories suggest the building dates back to the Byzantine Empire. Some postulate the Synagogue received its name for its impressive size, but most locals agree Mayor derives from Majorca, the island from which many of the Sephardic Jews emigrated.


As I write these descriptions of the neighborhoods north of the Golden Horn, I glean more accurate geographical information. This Post is a little shorter than usual, so to make up for that, here is the updated map of Pera-Galata: