Forgotten Capital: Images and text

November 28, 2008 | Pulitzer Center

Street celebrations in the neighborhood of Balat before a wedding

A vista of Istanbul’s Ottoman mosques taken from the Halic Bridge connecting Istanbul’s two European promontories

Istanbul’s poor underclass lives in proximity to up-market areas such as Beyoglu and Istiklal. A large-scale urban redevelopment plan is gentrifying areas such as Tarlabasi, a formerly majority Greek neighborhood now mostly settled by Kurdish and Gypsy squatters

Washing hung out to dry cris-crosses the narrow streets of Tarlabashi. Increasingly For Sale and To Rent signs are also cropping up in the windows of renovated apartment houses

A revealingly attired model peeks out of a large advertising poster in Tarlabasi neighborhood, immediately above a cluster of satellite dishes receivers piping foreign television channels into homes of mostly traditional internal emigrants from Turkey’s eastern provinces of Anatolia

It’s a Coca Cola Christmas on the Istiklal thoroughfare, the main street of old Pera that for many centuries has been the centre of Westernised commercial Istanbul

City-scene from the Karakoy port neighborhood, taken from Cihangir park

An Ottoman dome belonging to a mosque built by famed architect Sinan on the Karakoy waterfront is framed against the Bosphorus

Sufis of the Naqshbandi order during a zikr in the conservative Edirnekapeh area, one of the neighborhoods currently under redevelopment. The image that was taken in 2005 is already visual history: as demolition equipment moved into the neighborhood and its residents relocated to a new satellite town 30km outside Istanbul, the order abandoned the house

French-style street-lamps and tram cables strike a contrast against Ottoman minarets

A scene from the Halic tributary taken from the Pera side, the abode of European traders and ethnic minorities during Ottoman times.

Bare mannequins cluster in a shopfront in Istanbul’s depressed Tarlabasi quarter in front of a poster advertising a new mosque

A couple snuggle against the window of an old house in the formerly Jewish neighborhood of Balat

A young Gypsy girl dressed in a bridesmaid’s outfit stands in front of a Turkish flag in a street in Tarlabasi

Street portrait, Tarlabasi

Persian inscription from the gateway of a mosque

A battery of minarets in the Ottoman style of mosque architecture

At the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, snow and fire mix together on a cold January morning

Whether Istanbul or Constantinople, this solitary city that straddles both Europe and Asia and was the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, has always exerted a splendor that bequeathed it its Greek epithet, the Vasilevousa (the Reigning/Majestic One).

Istanbul is a multi-layered city built in overlapping urban strata. Recent archaeological discoveries of skeletons unearthed in the city's Yenikapi district reveal that this Turkish and deeply cosmopolitan metropolis of 16 million inhabitants has been inhabited since the Neolithic Era, nearly 8.500 years ago.

The facades of Istanbul's buildings say as much about the cultural influences that shaped the city as a landscape moulded by successive generations of inhabitants. The city's winding lanes and grid structure demonstrate the urban layout of both a Muslim and a Western city. The traces of the numerous ethnic communities living alongside a Turkish majority are everywhere apparent. Historical populations of Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Gypsies, Jews, Kurds are today supplemented by an ever more exotic ethnic mix of immigrants jostling to slip past the sentinels at the EU's well-guarded gateway.

In the rambling neighbourhoods stretching far inland from the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmaris into the Asian and European hinterlands, today's Istanbul has many faces: Sufis perform a sweaty zikr ceremony on a foggy January night; shoppers crowd the arcades of the grand pedestrianised commercial avenue of Istiklal; slum-dwellers inhabit the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Tarlabashi; devout Christians light candles at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate; and glittering women dance in the street at a raucous working-class wedding in the old Jewish neighbourhood of Balat. Frozen in time, these are some of the many faces that Istanbul reveals at every turn.

Iason Athanasiadis is a writer and photographer documenting the Middle East. Some of the following images were first exhibited in 2006 at the Istanbul, the Forgotten Capital exhibition in Tehran's Mehrva Gallery.