Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [84]
By 1976, this ad hoc system had become a potent institution. When Sabri arrived, he knew what to do: He spent a few weeks gathering downtown with fellow villagers, like-minded peasants mostly from the Alevi minority that dominates the Sivas region; some, like him, also had Kurdish roots.* They were giddy, hopeful gatherings, full of men and women willing to work hard. Then Sabri turned his back on the European side, got on the road toward Ankara, traveled until the buildings disappeared beyond the horizon, and stopped at a nearly empty, rock-strewn valley. “There was nothing here, and it looked terrible—just trees, rocks, dust, garbage, not even a good path,” he recalls. This, Sabri and his fellow rural émigrés decided, would be home.
In the early months of 1977, Sabri did what tens of millions of rural Turks have done. In an unnoticed place on the edge of town, he built a rugged but rudimentary house that was not supposed to exist. Sabri knew what he had become. In the 1950s and ’60s, when they started to appear amid Turkey’s industrial boom, these buildings, and the communities they formed, were given a name that was uttered with distaste by the better-off residents of central Istanbul. It combined the word for “night” (gece) with the word for “arrived” or “settled” (kondu). The gecekondu (pronounced “getchy-kondoo”) became, for many years, the menace on the frontier, a word that perfectly captured the sense of shock and alarm these “night-arrivals” provoked within the city they had already long since encircled and overwhelmed. As the 1960s wore on, that initial shock evolved into a begrudging, if fearful, acceptance. Gecekondu residents happened to be much-needed laborers. They also happened to be voters and potential taxpayers—which would prove important.
“It was just an empty place—bushes, rocks, that was it,” Sabri remembers today, sitting at his friend’s double-glazed-window shop downstairs from his office, in a place that has become a dense and central part of the urban expanse. In 1977, it was a rubble-strewn, tree-lined deep valley far from the outermost reaches of Istanbul, its twisting dirt roads leading to a meat-processing plant, some stone quarries, and a dump that held all the garbage of Istanbul’s Asian side. Most of it looked barren and uninhabitable. Its steep valley walls seemed ill-suited to any kind of housing, there were no water or sewage lines, and the roads were often so rough that you couldn’t reach Istanbul itself without riding a tractor. But it possessed a quality that Anatolian peasants had learned, over the previous two decades, to value dearly: ambiguous ownership.
Sabri’s friends, most of them fellow Alevis from Sivas who’d come to Istanbul months earlier, had found this forlorn valley through the courts. In earlier times, it had been known as the Hekimbaşi Estate, a large plot of idle agricultural land, which, since 1874, had belonged to an Ottoman prince. In 1923, after the Ottoman Empire had collapsed and the secularist, modernizing regime of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk turned Turkey into a republic, it became illegal for royalty to own land, and the estate became the property of Turkey’s Ministry of the Treasury. Starting in the 1940s, the prince’s descendants launched a series of lawsuits that were not to be settled until the 1990s, and the descendants tried to sell plots of the land to various private owners to pay for those lawsuits, leading to even more court conflicts over their right to do so. Nominally government land, it was, like much of the emptiness surrounding Istanbul at the time, legally beyond any official use.2
“This place was the very edge of Istanbul. There was nothing here. It was the outskirts. It wasn’t even the edge: there were fields between here and the edge of the city,” Şükrü Aslan, the author of a history of this neighbourhood3 told me as we stared from an impossibly