Download PDF | A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul, Fruit Vendors and Civil Servants in the Kasap Ilyas Mahalle, State University of New York Press (2003).
236 Pages
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 Ilyas 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 Tiirkmenoglu, 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 Ilyas. 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 Ilyas. 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 Ilyas 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 Ozbay 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas obtained from the Ottoman Religious Courts’ Archives and with quantitative data from the 1885 and 1907 Ottoman population censuses (Tabrir-i niifus). Thanks are due to Nurettin Civi and Aysel Istanbullu, directors of the Istanbul Registry Office (Istanbul Vilayeti Niifus Miidirhigi), for allowing me to transcribe in their entirety the original Ottoman census documents for the neighborhood. The help of Dr. Abdiilaziz Bayindir, director of the Istanbul Religious Courts’ Archives (Istanbul Miiftilhigi Seriye Sicilleri Arsivi) is also gratefully acknowledged. My heartfelt thanks go to Aysel Danaci, Emre Erdogan, Tiilay Genctiirk, Meric Mekik, and Araks Sahiner for their assistance in transcribing the Ottoman Sharia’ Court records for the Kasap Ilyas 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 Ilyas whom I interviewed and who have provided me with a perspective on what life and human relationships in Kasap Ilyas had been, a perspective that I could not have obtained otherwise. Hasan Sarkalkan, muhtar of the neighborhood since 1994, made all of the interviews possible, and what is more, made me feel like a dona fide member of the highly extended familial network that the Kasap Ilyas 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 Istanbul? has been an excellent source of inspiration. Nedret Isli and Ibrahim Yilmaz (“Simiirg” Ibrahim) 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, Bogazici University, and Sevket Pamuk, of the Ataturk Institute of Bogazici 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 ¢4e city, or as “a world in itself” was often used to depict the size, the bustle, and the diversity of the Ottoman capital.’ 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.” Its three boroughs (Eyiip, Galata, and Uskiidar) were set outside the walls and, for two of them, across the water. The official Ottoman denomination of greater Istanbul, Dersaadet ve bildd-1 selase (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.’ 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 (sirgiin) in an attempt to revive the city in the decades immediately following the conquest. About a century later, under the reign of Stileyman “the Magnificent” (1520-1566), the Istanbul population 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 temporarily—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 col/age. 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 (Ser iye Sicilleri/Kad: sicilleri); and even in these archives, homogenous, long, and uninterrupted time series are difficult to come by.
THE M4HdALLE 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 mahadles had an average population of around fifteen hundred people.*
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 (¢arsd-y 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 /ocal 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 (sem) 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 (¢u/umbact) also took upon themselves the task of defending the honor and reputation of the locals. ‘Twentieth-century Kasap Ilyas bears many reminiscences of these groups. The districts (semzs) 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 mahaille. 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.’ In intramural Istanbul, large mansions of pashas and deys neighboring the shanty lodgings of beggars (se’e/e) or of streetporters (hamals and kiifecis) 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 semf® (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 sem¢s 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 (Edirnekapi, Fatih, Sultanahmet, Karagiimriik, Unkapani, Sehremini, Fener, etc.) and were therefore used as basic geographic markers. Sometimes, the toponymy of the sem¢s might indicate the city or region of the empire from which an initial population had migrated (Aksaray, Karaman, Carsamba, etc.). Many people referred to their personal addresess by indicating both the sem and perhaps the name of a local landmark (a well-known mosque, a city gate, a wharf, a monument, etc.). These semés 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 semis.
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 sem¢ and/or a well-known local landmark were mentioned. For instance, in the religious court rulings in which a resident of the Kasap Ilyas mahalle was involved, that person was always identified as “such and such, from the Kasap Ilyas mahalle near [the] Davudpasa [wharf/gate].” The Davudpasa semt and/or the Davudpasa wharf clearly localized the small Kasap Ilyas 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.’ Before that period, these public coffeehouses were concentrated in a few central or commercial areas of the city. The mescit and, perhaps, the amam 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 semd, its extent implied that routine face-to-face meetings were much less important. In Istanbul the semz 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 semf 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 sem¢s, 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 kad, 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 Ilyas.
THE “IsLaAMIc 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.’ 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 builtin 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 Is/amic 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.” 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.”
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 “worldeconomy/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.'' The same codification had also been applied in the 1930s and 1940s to North African Muslim towns by the French Islamists William and Georges Marcais.”
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.'’ 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 ‘asadbiyya. 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.“
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 Ilyas, 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. 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 Ilyas, 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 Ilyas.
The Aaras 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.’® Over the centuries, there were orders issued by the hadi 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 Ilyas madalle 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 Ilyas 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, Aaras, or mahalles) too, cannot be made to fit into a set of fundamentally unique and ghettoizing characteristics.
Tue Kasap Ityas MaHALLE
Kasap Ilyas (“Butcher Ilyas”) 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 Pasa Kapis1) 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 Pasa Wharf (Davud Pasa Iskelesi). 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 Pasa. The fifteenthcentury mosque bearing the name of its founder, the grand vizier Davud Pasa (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 Pasa Hamamz), this mosque gave its name to the whole area. The Davud Pasa sem# is surrounded by other well-known districts: Cerrahpasa, Samatya, Langa, and Etyemez. As to the Kasap Ilyas 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas still recount the many foundation myths concerning Kasap Ilyas and his arrival to the neighborhood, as well as his many exploits, religious and otherwise. Kasap Ilyas 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 1494” 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 Ilyas mosque was almost totally rebuilt after the 1894 earthquake. Of the original structure, nothing much remains.
The available wagf (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 Ilyas, however, had one of the highest number of foundations (26, to be precise) among all the 219 listed neighborhoods in traditional intramural Istanbul.* 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 Ilyas 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 Aamam 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 Ilyas mahalle covered an area of approximately six hectares.!? Quite a large portion of the mahalle was occupied by gardens and vegetable gardens (4ostans), sometimes called the “Davudpasa gardens.” ‘These were extensions of the neighboring Langa Gardens (see map). Kasap Ilyas, 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 Ilyas 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 semis. The last Ottoman census of 1907 tells us that Kasap Ilyas contained about eleven hundred people.” Its sixteenthand seventeenth-century population must have been about half that figure, or even smaller.
Kasap Ilyas 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas was always a much less prestigious residential area than some of its immediate neighbors.
Kasap Ilyas 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 Ilyas or the Davudpasa District had never been very wealthy or particularly prestigious, still took great pride in its allegedly “aristocratic” (read: “old Istanbul”) character.
Kasap Ilyas’ 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 Ilyas mahalle near the Davudpasa 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 Davudpasa 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“! 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 (sirgiins) 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.”
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.” 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. 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.” In the reconstruction process, however, some neighborhoods were reconstructed and survived almost intact (e.g., Kasap Ilyas) but some less fortunate mahalles did not. They disappeared and/or were absorbed by one or more surrounding maballes.
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.” 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 Pasa and Cezeri Kasim Pasa. 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 (vaksf) 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 (Svira-yz Devilet) 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.?” In the municipal reform of the 1920s its area was included within Mahmud Pasa.
What is it that made such a difference possible between the “stable” Kasap Ilyas, 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 Ilyas 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 Pasa gate. It was at that time called a “new mahalle, adjacent to Kasap Ilyas,” probably because it did not yet have a mosque of its own from which to derive a name. In the 1630s, however, Bekir Pasa, one of the defterdars® 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 Ilyas.
It appears, however, that a bona fide “Bekir Pasa mahalle” could never be launched. This “new” neighborhood does not appear in a late seventeenthcentury Istanbul avériz list of neighborhoods” composed just a few decades after the building of the Bekir Pasa 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 Pasa mescit, but does not omit to mention that this small mosque “has no mahalle attached to it.”*° Similarly, a “Bekir Pasa 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 Davudpasa wharf.”*! 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 Pasa mesci#, 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 Ilyas 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 wagf 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.” At least three other such small mosques without a mahalle of their own were situated not too far from our Kasap Ilyas neighborhood. One was the Sah i Geda mosque, situated to the west of our neighborhood and part of the Kiirkctibas: mahalle. The second was the Sah Sultan mosque in the neighboring Etyemez District. The third was the Cavuszade mosque situated at the northern border of Kasap Ilyas. All of these mosques were sixteenth-century constructions and the Cavuszade 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 Pasa’s unsuccessful attempt at pioneering the establishment of a new neighborhood “independent” of Kasap Ilyas.
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 Faroghi, 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.** 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 Ilyas mahalle. As detailed in the 1885 census documents, the inhabitants of the Kasap Ilyas mahalle lived within a total of 14 streets and cuds-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 14.54 The Kasap Ilyas 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 Ilyas. 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 Pasa 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.* 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, Cavuszade Street has always been part of the Kasap Ilyas 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 Ispanake: Viranesi, another small area within Kasap Ilyas, 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. Ispanake: Viranesi housed new rural migrants to Kasap Ilyas, especially in the nineteenth century, and Cavuszade Street was inhabited mostly by Istanbulites. But there never officially existed a separate Ispanakgi Viranesi mahalle, nor was there ever one named Cavuszade. 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 Ilyas mahalle in the Hamidian period, however, strongly suggest that even in earlier periods urban mobility must have been far from negligible.
The ¢urnover 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 muhtars 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 Ilyas 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 twentytwo 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 Ilyas 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 trends** 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. Faroghi 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 Ozer Ergeng 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas mosque and by the muhtars of the Kasap Ilyas mahalle in the second half of the nineteenth century. These notebooks and folios contain, among other items of information:
1. a nominative list of 654 marriage contracts registered by the imams of the Kasap Ilyas mosque in the second half of the nineteenth century;
2. acomplete list and description of wagf 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 wagf buildings and land have been put and the revenues that accrued;
3. anominative 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,
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 Ilyas 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 wagf 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 (Seriye Sicili Arsivi) for the Davud Pasa District, spanning the period from 1782 to 1924, and the 1885 and 1907 late Ottoman Population Census (Tahrir-i Nifus) 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 (¢ahrir-i niifus) 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.*”
Until recently, these data had been utilized only in a superficial way.* 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 (Aane). 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 (miifus 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas mahalle are kept intact in the Population Registry (Nifus Midiirligi) 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 im 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas maballe 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 Tabrir 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 avdrzz 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 (Ser’iye Sicillert Arsivi) 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 Pasa District, of which the Kasap Ilyas mahalle is a part, span the period between 1782 and 1924. The Davudpasa Court of Justice, always headed by an aide (na’ih) of the kad: 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 Davudpasa 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 Davudpasa Court Building and its three centuries of accumulated archives.
As to the post-1782 religious court records for Kasap Ilyas, 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 plaintiffs 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 Ilyas mahalle.
Interviews and Personal Narratives
A small number of in-depth interviews have also been conducted with elderly inhabitants of Kasap Ilyas. Nine of them were with Kasap Ilyas-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 Ilyas 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.” 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 Aistoire 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas mahalle were taking place in a very close environment and that almost all of them involved people who were well-known both to the muAtar 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 /ocal 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 Ilyas madalle 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 Ilyas 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 Ilyas 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 wagf 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 Ilyas would be to emphasize the extreme diversity and dissimilarity of urban neighborhoods, as well as their fluidity.
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