Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [83]
It is here that Istanbul’s periphery begins, symbolically and functionally, although Harem itself is physically near the center: if you pause in the middle of its asphalt expanses, as few people do, you have a clear view across the ship-clogged Bosporus to the domes and spires of the Blue Mosque on the city’s storied European side. The well-established residents of that older Istanbul are often unaware of this dusty bus terminal’s existence, which may help explain why the explosion of the outskirts has given them such an unnerving shock. The Istanbul of literature and legend, the entirety of Byzantium and Constantinople, is today little more than a flash of greenery and historic domes along the banks of the Bosporus, a tiny museum trapped within a dense, uninterrupted crystalline growth of human settlement many times its size.
Given the importance of Harem in modern Turkish history, the station offers little to commend itself—a few low-slung concrete buildings, brash ticket booths run by competing bus companies, vendors selling hot, sesame seed–covered simit rolls, piles of duffle bags and cardboard boxes, and bus drivers standing on the concrete, hawking their destinations: “Bilecik, Bozüyük, Eskişehir! Leaving in five minutes, hurry hurry hurry—beautiful Bilecik!” The arrivals stream off the buses day and night, after journeys of up to 20 hours, and depart quickly for parts of Istanbul that do not appear on tourist maps, places that didn’t exist 20 years ago, pasture fields transformed overnight into dense thickets of megalopolis.
THE ARRIVALS FIND THEIR PLACE
One evening in the early winter of 1976, a shy, moustached young man named Sabri Koçyigit arrived in Harem. It was not his first visit to Istanbul, as the vicissitudes of his family’s tiny, unproductive grain farm in the hilly Sivas region of central Turkey had often forced his father to come to the big city as a seasonal laborer, sometimes with his young son in tow. But this time, at age 31, Sabri was here to stay. He was determined to change things in a lasting way, to make a new home for his young family, and he had vague aspirations of larger, more dramatic changes. He also had no money at all.
In his father’s time, an arrival in Harem would lead inevitably to a ferry ride across the Bosporus to Istanbul’s European side, a makeshift home in an industrial district, and a tentative place among Turkey’s growing army of industrial laborers, some seasonal but most becoming permanent residents. The 1950s were a potent time for Turkey. Half a century before most other poor nations opened their economies, Turkey was feeling the pains and stresses of a fast change from an agricultural to an urban, industrial economy. Prime Minister Adnan Menderes put an aggressive and largely admirable emphasis on ending his country’s subsistence, peasant-driven agriculture system, shipping 40,000 tractors into the countryside between 1951 and 1953, subsidizing a national industrial economy, and building a modern highway system to replace the ancient dirt tracks of the Silk Road. It was an impressive success, creating industrial agriculture well ahead of most countries. But Menderes did little to prepare for the flood of peasants abandoning the land for the better prospects of the city. His economy was ready: Turkey’s industrial boom needed all the Anatolian laborers it could get. But they had nowhere to live, salaries that were generous by village standards but desperately inadequate in the city, and nothing resembling a welfare state to support them.
So, encouraged by Prime Minister Menderes to develop their own solutions, the new urbanites found their own way of creating shelter. One observer described what they did: “Those working in the factories thought nothing about building houses in the immediate vicinity: one-story, often with a garden for personal use … this led to the emergence of settlements which were not produced for a market value,