Sulukule

What you see on the picture below is the poor rest of Sulukule, one of the neighborhoods with the longest history in Istanbul (some even consider it older than the city itself.). It was home of Roma community for hundreds of years. After a long fight to save this quarter it is lost now to a ‘gentrification’ project and the Roma were moved to outside neighborhoods. Sulukule was once famous for it’s music, culture and art.

One of the interesting things you could see on the picture are the metal fences that go through the whole area. There are likely three or four houses were still people live. You go through this long corridors to reach them and i can’t help but having this feeling of being in or outside a prison. Long walls, where you can’t look behind.

Istanbul is a city on the move in many ways and being the European Cultural Capital 2010 (with a budget around 500 million euros) might have paced up some processes even when no one really could tell me, where that is. “We have so many events here all the time that you can’t see a difference when there are some in the name of the Cultural Capital.”, one of the students from the project i was documenting the last days said. But at least it seems to me that many projects on the line and in the planning for a long time got through the Cultural Capital at least an extra push. And maybe it is not a surprise that Sulukule was finally poured down at the beginning of the year.

It is always a difficult conflict city-planning is in, keeping the old, the history, the culture, but at the same time modernize. For a long time (and still happening everywhere..) city-planning focused on creating something people afterwards can connect with. Nowadays participation is the way how to do it many say. But also here you have to get people together and actually talk about it. A process what i was told is hardly working in Istanbul.

In Sulukule no one asked the Roma families. And the Roma culture as in many other countries, seemed to be not something worth saving or keeping alive. One of the problems i was told is in this case also not only the rude city-planning that just planned to re-build the whole neighborhood, but also the lobby of the Roma that was weak. Part of the Roma are integrated fully into the islamic culture and consider themselves as such, the other part not, what makes the inner communication more difficult i was told.

In any way it maybe was a fight hard to win against financial interests, a strong islamic community that should become a new center there. We have seen things like that happening all over the world but the people without a voice, the poor and weak are the ones that lose at the end, no matter if it is in Mumbai, Nairobi or here in Istanbul. But here it is beside that also a culture slowly getting destroyed.

Some of the Roma families already came back to Sulukule, now living hidden in the ruins. The main reason is that they can’t afford the new houses they were moved to or the way into the city is to long.

Sidenote: I had planned to work on a little story on that, while i was in Istanbul, but my main assignment kept me busy so that i only had the chance to visit it once and talk to people there and some city planners i was working with on another project this week. So no pictures, but maybe this little insight gave you a glimpse of the story, even when there would be way more to write about it. If you are interested in more, check Ciara Lemming, who was attending the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop the week before and worked on a story about a Roma family. You can find her pictures here.

UPDATE: Ciara made a new tight edit of her work from Istanbul. You can find it here, also downloadable as a pdf. Great stuff!

Posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 10:17 pm. Filed under: blog, essays Tags: city-planning, european cultural capital, istanbul, roma, sulukule, turkey RSS 2.0 feed.