After a week in Istanbul it all seemed terribly glamorous, a city of marble palaces and cosmopolitan streets. But I’d read that 400,000 people arrived every year, hoping for work or a better life. There was a ten-million person slum somewhere nearby, but where? In a city that had to be mostly struggling migrants, the poor were completely invisible.
My guidebook mentioned the strife of an immigrant sprawl, but only in a sidebar, never really saying where these people actually lived. Googling “Istanbul slums” gave almost nothing substantial, at least in English. Millions of people simply don’t exist in the infosphere of a Western tourist. Eventually I began to find references to the Gaziosmanpaşa district northwest of the center, with a population of a million or so. With a reported population increase of 79% in the decade 1990-2000, this is an immigrant city risen whole from the fields: migrants from all over the country and sometimes further, speaking Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Arabic, refugees from rural poverty and violence and the war in neighboring Iraq. Gaziosmanpaşa was on my maps, but just barely, a name on the corner of the page.
“Why do you want to go there?” asked my English teacher acquaintance. She was pretty and professional, clearly as much on the fast track as she could get. “There’s nothing there!” she said. Nonetheless she directed me to a tram line; I took it to the end, a stop named Mescid-i-Selam, approximately 20km from the city center (map).
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