Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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sites in the city, as many recent studies on the built environments of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir have been (Holod and Evin 1984, Yeşilkaya 1999, Kolluoğlu-Kırlı 2002, Çelik 2007, Bertram 2008). Nor does it concentrate on the city’s spatial formation as generated by the social relations of the capitalist mode of production (e.g., Keyder 1999), although I do write about both of these processes in chapter 3. Rather, it foregrounds the second dimension of the violence of architecture, in an attempt to bring the vital social movements of the late 1970s, the activists of the leftist factions and the cadres of the ultranationalists, into relationship with the historically evolving spatial organization and built environments of the city. Together they changed radically the experience of inhabiting Istanbul, both for their own partisans and for any politically neutral public.
1.2 ISTANBUL 1974–1983
Why arrow in on the period 1974–1983? Is there not artificiality in bracketing off these years from the influence of earlier social processes and events that bequeathed to activists already-instituted imaginaries, heroes, political practices, and urban environments, even as they sought to create insurgent social-historical habits and arrangements? Despite this risk, 1974 seems to herald the emergence of a city qualitatively different from the Istanbul of the early 1970s. The coalition cobbled together by Süleyman Demirel to form Milliyetçi Cephe, the first “Nationalist Front” government in April 1975, included the “fascist” Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP [Nationalist Movement Party]), which was given two ministries despite having won only three seats in the five-hundred-member parliament.4 (In the 1977 election the MHP polled 7 percent of the votes and increased their seats in parliament to seventeen.) Ministers enabled the “infiltration” and “pillaging” of state institutions by their own party members, as well as turning a blind eye to the organized “Turkist” violence that began to characterize urban places. Less than a year earlier, in July 1974, an amnesty extended to political activists by the short-lived Ecevit coalition government released thousands of leftist intellectuals, trade unionists, student leaders, and journalists imprisoned after the March 12, 1971, military intervention and declaration of martial law (including the poet Can Yücel).
The Istanbul many returned to had changed. For example, according to Hüseyin (TKP, Turkish Communist Party) until the early 1970s “Istanbul ferries and train were divided into two sections, first and second class. But even if you had the money you couldn’t enter first class unless you were known. Ecevit abolished this in 1973.” The most liberal constitution in the Republic’s history (in 1961) had legalized the establishment of class-based parties, and by 1965 the Workers Party of Turkey had emerged as an electoral force. Its internal fragmenting in the late 1960s, and then its being closed down after the 1971 intervention for (among other things) its recognition of Kurdish rights at its fourth congress in 1970, boosted the appeal of more revolutionary ideologies, and by the mid-1970s a host of radical socialist, communist and anti-imperialist groups were active in the city. These legal and illegal leftist parties and organizations sought to mobilize the inhabitants of the workers’ suburbs on the edges of a rapidly expanding Istanbul, and all over the city their university and even high-school youth groups were active in educating students in their analyses of Turkey’s retarded social development. At the same time, labor militancy was growing among workers in state industries and in large private factory plants, with membership in unions fractured between two major rival confederations, DİSK (Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions) and Türk-İş (Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions). That same 1961 constitution (and then more fully Ecevit government policy in 1974) had given unions the right to educate workers upon the signing of a collective agreement; paid leave was funded by the employer. These privileges encouraged union activities, and by 1979 more than one million workers were organized in unions, the majority of them in Istanbul (Mello 2010).
A broad and eclectic range of civil society associations, parties, and organizations had also organized to oppose the Demirel coalition. According to Faik (Aydınlık [Enlightenment]), “When I came out of prison in 1974, I was surprised by the strength of the leftist groups. They were everywhere and very lively.” They had also become more factionalized: “The new TKP began to organize in 1973/4 as well, and had become influential. They gained control of DİSK. After the mid-70s the left groups divided into two fronts [cephe], Maoists and the Soviet aligned groups.” Of course, an active and heavily factionalized radical leftist movement generated its own opposition, not only in employers’ federations or in right-wing political parties vying for parliamentary domination, but also in the form of a para-military anti-communist organization, known as the “idealists” (ülkücüler), whose intention was to combat, violently or otherwise, the influence of the left (Çağlar 1990).
Another momentous event happened in late 1974: the first killing of a student since 1971. “I even remember his name,” said Ömer (Birikim journal), “it was Şahin Aydın. He was stabbed to death by fascists outside a dispensary on Barbaros Boulevard.” Around this time guns, too, became a feature of activist life: “All groups began to be armed after 1975–76, because of the violent anti-union attacks,” said Erdoğan (Dev-Yol). Thus, activists encountered a new experience of urban life—the visceral phenomenon of violence. The bloodshed at the May Day rally of 1977 confirmed a new level of political polarization and provocation had been reached:
I left Halk Kurtuluş [HK: Peoples Liberation] a few days before 1 May 1977, because I could see what they were planning to do, and I thought it was opening everything up to provocation. They were going to march into Taksim Square with guns, hoping for a fight [to avenge a death]. There was a story that someone from TKP had killed a member of HK, and that it was time to take revenge. The TKP and DİSK had already declared that they wouldn’t let Maoist groups enter the square, as they were claiming the workers’ day for themselves. The TKP did not object to Devrimci Yol cadres entering the square. The Dev-Yol militants stayed in front of the Hotel . . . and as they entered someone fired, and then automatic gunfire opened up from Etap Oteli and the waterworks building. (Salih, Kurtuluş [Liberation])
What makes 1983 the end of an era? Post 12 Eylül, the violent pacification of the city continued throughout the years of martial law (see chapter 7). Although the 1982 military constitution structured its working processes, the return to restricted parliamentary authority with the election of Turgut Özal as prime minister in November 1983 signified the cessation of the direct rule of the military junta. Indirect rule was assured through the operation of the new constitution. Kenan Evren remained president of the Republic. Despite this, civilian government facilitated the faint beginnings of a new experience of the city for its cowed and shocked inhabitants. For activists, too, politics began to take on different dimensions:
It is clear that the feminist movement [and human rights] began in 1985 because it was almost the only legal way of doing politics. Thus, the first political march after 12 Eylül was a women’s march from Kadıköy Yoğurtçu Park to Kadıköy Square. Before the march we went out at night to write about the protest and to put slogans on the wall. We went out late as a group, very made-up [çok süslenmiştik]. It was a cold, snowy night, and we caught a taxi from one place to another. The slogan was: “Women exist” [“Kadınlar vardır”]. Unlike the 70s, men could join in the march but only if they stayed silent and marched at the back (Berrin, HK).
Similarly, according to Filiz, the leftist organization Kurtuluş decided in 1985 that if two people with the same experience were to apply for the same position, the woman should be preferred.
In sum, the years 1974–1983 may be construed as constituting a distinct period for the city, characterized first by the fearlessness of mass urban mobilization and then by the fear of mass urban pacification, both of which marked indelibly, in their reckoning with Istanbul, a generation of activists. The years are punctured by the military coup in 1980 that initiated in the city an unprecedented phase of state terror.
Inhabiting Istanbul
How can we gain a preliminary sense of the finer contours of urban living in Istanbul in those years? Certainly the daily newspapers, although politically partisan, illuminate and extend political science and political economy perspectives, facilitating our imagining of the existential affect of the city, of how it