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Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 103; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1931-0846.2013.00017.x

1931-0846

Emiliano Bugatti,

Historical and Architectural Studies

AbstractTwo huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.KeywordsOttoman EmpirecatastrophefireIzmirSalonicaTurkeyGreece Notes1. Reforms were opened officially with the Imperial Edict of Gülhane, under the reign of Sultan Abdül‐Mecid I, in 1839. Tanzimat is the plural of the Arabic noun tanzim, which means reorganization.2. The Frankish quarters of Izmir and Salonica are the districts where by tradition Europeans, called generically Francs, lived.3. For instance, the reconstruction plan after the 1856 Aksaray fire in Istanbul was designed by Luigi Storari, creator of the first modern Izmir map, probably influenced by the urban layout of the Armenian district of Izmir.4. Salonica is an interesting case of an Ottoman city surrounded by urban walls inherited from its Hellenistic‐Roman past, which were restored and improved during the Ottoman period with the addition of the White Tower. Izmir was more a typical open Ottoman settlement, and the importance of the Roman structures was only first recognized with Storari's city survey in the middle of nineteenth century.5. The term caravanserai is a composite Turkish word derived from caravan, a group of travelers, and serai, palace.6. I define urban scene as the outcome of different aspects that determine the character of public streets: the street morphology, with its width and its pattern; building types and their relation between public and private spaces in terms of interior layout and functions; façades and their relation to the public space, such as dimensions, rhythm, composition of façades, sense of opening or closing, and volumetric articulation.7. Salonica's Greek quarter burned down in 1890, after the new waterfront was realized. Its reconstruction used the same urban approach as found in the Izmir Armenian quarter. Urban blocks were regularized, preserving connections with the existing street networks.8. The scale of buildings is expressed by the relationship among the floor area, the height, and the width of streets.9. Ernest Hébrard was a French architect and urban planner. Member of the École des Beaux Arts, he studied in the same period of Henri Prost e Tony Garnier. In 1904, Hébrard won the Grand Prix de Rome, and he visited different countries in the Balkans. He designed the reconstruction of the Diocletian Palace in Spalato‐Split, and later visited Salonica, where he surveyed some Roman‐Byzantine monuments. In 1912, he published The World City, an ideal plan for a modern city from which some ideas were later executed in Salonica's reconstruction plan.10. The church Saint Demetrius was converted into a mosque in 1493. It was destroyed during the 1917 fire and rebuilt without any elements from the Ottoman period, such as the minaret.11. René Danger was an engineer and urban planner. With his brother Raymond, he worked on urban plans of several Mediterranean cities such as Aleppo, Beirut, and Antioch after the Izmir reconstruction plan. They worked with Prost, one of the most important French urban planners at that time. René became member of the Commision Supérieur des Plans de Aménagement et d'Extension des Villes in 1923.12. The main civic axis of Salonica was partially completed only in the 1960s.13. As Yerasimos pointed out, fires were considered as natural events according to the Islamic rule, and since they were a part of God's order were not systematically prevented until the nineteenth century.Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmiliano BugattiDR. BUGATTI is an assistant professor in the department of architecture at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey; [emiliano.bugatti@gmail.com].