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with narrow paths and passages between the plots. This kind of space is a result of a long-term consolidation process and provides a special kind of environmental quality for the inhabitants. The built environment offers variety, flexibility in the uses of immediate environment of the houses, fluid spaces between indoors and outdoors and an opportunity for socialization.” Established city-dwellers looked at the outskirts and saw a million rural villages popping up. In reality, though there were certainly aspects of village life in the gecekondu, the houses and their surroundings bore little resemblance to the villages their occupants had fled. “Gecekondu houses are not pure replicas of original village houses; they are not products of traditional ways of construction,” a Turkish historian notes. “They are rather new inventions.”6

The new residents of May 1 enjoyed a life that offered many more economic opportunities than their parched and oppressive Anatolian villages had. They were making enough money to send significant sums back to those who remained in the villages. But it was, in many ways, a more difficult life. “They had to get water from a 15-minute walk away, and carry it home,” the historian Şükrü Aslan remembers. “It wasn’t until 1979 that the Greater Istanbul municipality built a water pipe going overland … Electricity was illegal—engineers, left-wing guys, helped bring the wires here—it was guerrilla electricity. There weren’t proper roads for cars—there was only a mountain road that tractors could cross—all bread, food, was brought on a tractor, sold off the back of it.”

The children, who outnumbered the adults, were a bigger problem. By this point, Sabri had moved his wife and his two young children to May 1, and for weeks the children roved the streets. Finally, the residents built their own school, and the government actually provided teachers. “It was a strange situation—an illegal neighborhood, but a legal school, with a government-appointed head teacher,” Sabri recalls. Slowly, entrepreneurs provided transportation by bus and dolmus (a collective taxi that is a key form of travel for the Turkish poor), linking them to Istanbul itself. Physically, it was becoming something like a real neighborhood.

Politically, though, it was far from calm or comfortable. In the 1970s, the political identity of Turkey, which for half a century had been governed by a paternalist state secularism, was suddenly up for grabs. Much of the pressure came from the arrival cities, which were now recruiting their villagers along ideological lines. Some gecekondu neighborhoods were populated with right-wing nationalists, associated with the Grey Wolves, the fascist front organization of the right-wing National Action Party. Some were Islamist, giving their support to the Muslim fundamentalist National Wellbeing Party. And others, notably May 1, were left-wing. It was these Marxist groupings that were seen as the greatest threat to the Turkish state. This was the height of the Cold War, and it seemed as if Turkey might topple into a communist revolution.

Sabri’s remote valley began appearing in the headlines during the summer of 1977. In a neighborhood just up the hill, where the women generally wore headscarves, a group of Islamist party supporters had built a mosque on privately owned property. The owner, who lived in Germany, sued them, and the Islamists occupied the mosque in protest. The police watched but didn’t intervene. They were worried about the politics of the outskirts, but the Islamists weren’t their concern. The May 1 residents, who were Alevi, Kurdish and left-wing, were what worried them. “We were both ethnic and political minorities, and we were living on the edge of town,” Sabri explains. “We were the ultimate outsiders, even though we wanted to be part of Turkey, and they treated us like invaders.”

Over that long, hot summer, the May 1 neighborhood became the site of violent clashes with right-wing and Islamist gangs, with the police and with the Turkish military. There were murders, pegged to both residents