Streets of Memory: Exploring Landscape, Tolerance & National Identity in Istanbul - Perfect for History Buffs & Cultural Travelers

In this book the problems non-Muslim minorities face in Istanbul are detailed in field observation and interviews conducted over several years. Amy Mills did not interview Albanians, immigrants from Africa or Central Asia, Roma, politically active Islamists or Kurds, although these groups have also experienced some discrimination or repression in Turkey. Her focus is on Greek, Armenian and Jewish Turkish citizens and the architecture that remains from their ancestors. Among her subjects were women who married outside their religion. As widows, they find themselves isolated, uncomfortable in their husband's community after his death and out of touch with their own original faith community, which has shrunk precipitously in recent decades.Mills presents Istanbul as a nationalizing city, becoming narrowly Turkish as it shrugs off the cosmopolitanism of its past. Her research focused on Kuzguncuk, renowned as a historic multi-ethnic neighborhood in Istanbul that retains its Ottoman wooden houses, churches, mosques, synagogues and small shops. Over several years Mills recorded in photos and notes the cultural symbols in the landscape, observing what supported and what contradicted the nostalgic memory of cosmopolitanism and its erosion. The two Jewish synagogues that survive have become less visible. In particular, Beth Yaakov is now hidden behind walls and very high doors blocking all view of the entrance courtyard. Jewish headstones used in squatters' shelters tell of the encroachment into the Jewish cemetery by Kurdish immigrants from rural Turkey.Yet nostalgia can lead to misinterpretation of the physical street as well. "The notion that the Armenian Orthodox Church in Kuzguncuk gave land to the mosque appears as a natural truth because the church and mosque actually, physically, stand side by side; they seem, incontrovertibly, to be evidence of a historical truth of siblinghood." The nostalgia for a tolerant past expressed by Turkish non-Muslim minorities is at the same time an expression of 21st century tensions, a created myth that hides present experience and a historic reality when Istanbul was dominated by non-Muslims of multiple ethnicities. International media have long covered the Turkish conflicts with their Kurdish citizens but not the treatment of non-Muslim minorities, except for reporting on trials of prominent Muslim authors who allude even in the slightest way to the mass killings of Armenians in 1915.The Kurdish squatters who come from remote areas of Turkey are regarded by ethnic Turkish Muslims of Istanbul as too rural, uncultured, naive in their language, manners and dress. By contrast, the Turkish Christians and Jews intentionally blend into the educated Turkish majority, speaking Turkish and adopting Turkish names for the business world. In the 1930's use of the Ladino language in public sparked attacks, so Ladino is lost among contemporary Turkish Jews. Just as they have abandoned the various languages common on Istanbul streets a century ago, the minorities avoid mentioning bitter histories--church bombings and other violent attacks--believing such references would only increase their vulnerability. Mills finds that minorities maintain a positive public discourse about their lives in Turkey as protective shielding.During the years of Mills' research in Istanbul, the Turkish-Israeli relationship was the best in the region for Israel. That is no longer true. The tensions experienced by non-Muslim Turks within their neighborhoods in Istanbul are today writ large in the newly hostile relations between the Turkish government and Israel after decades of cooperation.