HERMIT IN TOPHANE
MATTHIAS WECHSLER, 2017
A middle aged man selling fish rolls in Istanbul
Sinan University of Fine Arts and a few faceless office buildings. Furthermore restaurants and a beautiful, almost baroque mosque under reconstruction since years, covered in dusty sheets. After a thin stripe of land alongside the Bosphorus, the terrain mounts steeply and is cuttet mainly by stairs orthogonal to the coast. On the slope, between half excavated ruins, residential houses blend in and constitute a smooth transition towards Cihangir, Istanbuls scenic beauty. Till the early 20th century, Greeks, Armenians and Jews have been living in Tophane; nowadays the populations is mostly muslim and conservative. A few years ago though, many new cafés settled in two small streets, close to the water. Mehmet understood the special character of the new visitors. They are modern Turks, drinking coffee in an elegant ambience, while giving a supercilious smile to the simple elements of their Turkish culture. There is a sentence for this kind of arrogance: ‘Hiç leğende yıkanmamış gibi mocha içmek’ (Drinking mocha as if your mother never washed you in a plastic bowl). But it’s not all that easy. The smile is just seem-
allures Merve and me regularly in the neighbourhood Tophane. Unlike the filet in a bred roll one gets at Galata bridge, he wraps the fish in a thin pancake and adds surprising ingredients such as pomegranate and hot spices. Mehmet takes his time for a proper Dürüm, frying not just the fish but also tomatoes, green pepper and onions on an old barbecue covered in salty crust and slime. The place of Mehmet Usta in Tophane consists only of the usual hand truck of an Istanbul street seller and an alcove in the wall in front of which he resides. Some plastic stools serve guests with simple comfort while waiting for their snack to be ready. This wall and the interdependency between the fisher Mehmet and the wall is the object of my fascination.
Tophane is a central district with a wide range of
functions, a careless combination of old and new and no clear pattern of use. Here lies the museum Istanbul Modern, old harbour lands, Mimar Front view on Mehmet Usta wall, autumn 2015
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Mehmets terrace on the first floor; a streetlight lits the scene, spring 2015
ingly arrogant and not meant to be disparaging. After their coffee, they like to pass by Mehmet Usta and enjoy a fish roll. For me, the implicitness with which the unhygienic conditions of the fish stand are accepted, proves the love and affection for the old Istanbul; a picture consumed by the present day city. The combination of the two motives -the old one and the new- for me display a present condition of Istanbul.
caying monument have been consolidated with a layer of concrete. A friable edge on the backside serves as stairs to reach the terrace-like surface. There, an old welded balustrade keeps you from falling from the terrace to the street. On the backside, single remaining elements of the wall and arches rise two or three meters higher. Between balustrade and back wall, the typical inventory of informal occupation of space has gathered. Different wooden chairs and stools made of plastic, a stained two-storied tea pot, gas bottles with extension to cook, many plants in paint buckets and advertising boards that once will be useful for something. On this surface, Mehmet Usta built a room that leans on the neighbouring building and redefines the space as its terrace. A streetlight, suspended on a steel cable between two nearby buildings, incidentally works as lamp for Mehmets terrace. Merve and I have been invited to eat our DĂźrĂźm there twice or three times in the middle of the night, because Mehmet was flattered by our admiration for his home.
Mehmet Usta works in front of a ruined wall,
squeezed between two faceless, multi-storied buildings. When the wall was built, bricks and stones were placed in alternating layers, but it seems that they’ve morphed into whirls without order or logic. A giant with clumsy fingers might have moulded it from clay, left it unfinished and then forgot it. It might as well be flooded by the sea for decades and invaded with mussel beds. Everything is half overgrown and washed out. At its connection to the winging buildings, the wall is plastered into their facades and seems to develop out of them. This, of course, is a transfiguration of reality, since the wall is a few centuries older than the parturient buildings on its flanks. In the middle of the wall, an archway leads to the void behind it; above the wall lives the fisher. The ruin of the wall is a few meters thick, ten meters long and the solid part of it is about one floor high. The loosening bricks on top of the de-
Mehmet behaves towards the ruin as if it was
nature to him, as if a few rocks would coincidentally lie favourably to lean a cabin on them. The informality of his life and tools limits the alterations he could do to the wall so drastically, that the given becomes unchangeable nature. 3
It moved out of his reach and turned him into a simple reactant to the existing. I imagine him as recluse, leaving the city to find a new way of living with provokingly simple means. He turns his back to the city only in his mind though, and resides as hermit in the centre of a metropolis. This way of life may be a poor necessity or an extravagant self experiment of a man searching for a relation to a city. There is an other aspect that distinguishes Mehmets shelter from the current trend of city shaping, while still being typically for Istanbul: His architecture can not be described by terms such as ‘finished’, ‘under construction’ or ‘decaying’ because it remains in a indifferent state. While some of his interventions are certainly in better condition than others, no one could say, how much is missing for it to be complete or fixed. The wall is one of these buildings in Istanbul, that lost time and the vanity of being young many years ago.
bureaucracy of the young Turkish republic simply could not, or did not want to cope with the challenges of Istanbuls rapid post war urbanisation. When the formal Istanbul of today expands onto the areas of a Gecekondu, the pragmatic tolerance of the administration collides with the investors’ influence. Nowadays the municipality, hungry for short term revenues, abuses the weak legal statues of the Gecekondu’s residents. With dubious claims, residents are evicted from areas they urbanised as Gecekondus decades ago and which become increasingly central and attractive the more Istanbul extended its limits. In the last years, many of these transformations took place, evicting the poor further to the edges of the city. All the more impressive seems Mehmet’s single Gecekondu to me, which exists till its unpredictable time of destruction.
Mehmet can live here, because the landowner
couldnt decide for a restoration, nor is she allowed to demolish the listed building. Due to this constellation Mehmet -contrary to all laws- was able to erect his home. Maybe the most interesting offspring of Istanbuls architecture occurs in the silence of an unresolved status quo between a dysfunctional conservation policy and the interests of investors. This stalemate encourages informal and low-threshold interventions that exist without a future and therefore out of time. These interventions display the citizens small influence on the appearance of an increasingly suppressive city. In the non participatory policy of city shaping of nowadays Istanbul, the law of ‘take what you want, until someone takes it from you’ applies also for the weakest. In Turkey, this rule has been almost institutionalised in the toleration of Gecekondu-settlements.
Mehmet replaced his first hand truck early 2016 with a upgraded model, summer 2016.
When Merve and I came back to Mehmet in an
autumn night in 2016, the hand truck was missing and a note on the wall signed that the Usta had moved a few hundred meters further. The terrace’s major part had been covered with a wooden construction and a blue canvas, seemingly the basis of a new roof. The niche in front of which the hand truck had been standing, became a short door and might as well always been there. Perhaps the wall had always been hollow and always been this house which it now got again. Mehmet had just lived there temporarily, like the Goths did with their tents in the
According
to an old customary law, everyone was allowed to keep his informally erected building, who had finished the construction before dawn. In these Gecekondu (placed/built over night), the poorest resided tolerated, because their arrival from eastern Anatolia has served as back bone of Istanbul’s fast growth in the second half of the 20th century. No ownership certificates were issued to the residents and expectable problems postponed till recently. The 4
ruinous temples of Rome. Also the Goths soon enough learned the conveniences of houses. Mehmets new restaurant is simple and nice. With an other Usta, he shares a small, open room facing the street. On the backside, spiral stairs lead to a -not yet developed- first floor. We have a tea while he is closing their place. During our chat with Mehmet, we don’t dare to ask whether he’s still living on the wall, whether he has ever lived on the wall. To me, Mehmet is a character of a tragic development to the better. He migrates from the sea to the city and starts a simple life along trench lines of generations and identities which he can not uphold. At the same time, it is the story of slow social rise and better living conditions in Turkey.
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