Kasap ƒlyas’ High Street: “Butchers’ Road”

It is only toward the end of the eighteenth century that documents mention, for the first time, a street in Kasap ƒlyas having a specific name. This name is one with which the Istanbulites at large were quite familiar. The road concerned here is that which was, and still is, considered Kasap ƒlyas’ “high
street.” It crosses the whole neighborhood from one end to the other in the east-west direction and, while within the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, runs between the mosque and the public bath, right in the middle of the neighborhood’s small marketplace. This Ottoman artery had been superimposed upon an old Byzantine road that went from the Forum Bovis to one of the main gates on the land walls (the small gate called “The First Military Gate” and situated just north of the Castle of the Seven Towers-Yedikule). This road had no particular name in Byzantine times. But the man in the street in Ottoman
Istanbul called it, and for good reason, The Road of the Butcher/Butchers (Kassab/Kassablar Yolu). We shall shortly see why.59
When, in the 1870s, the first tramways were put into service, the Aksaray-Yedikule line that went from the location of the Byzantine Forum Bovis to the Castle of the Seven Towers passed through this road. As it was too narrow, houses on both sides of the road had to be demolished to allow for the simultaneous passage of two streetcars. The name “Butchers’ Road” given to this road before the nineteenth century has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this artery happens to run through a neighborhood that bears the name of a famous and heroic butcher (Kasap ƒlyas). As a matter-of-fact this road, which has a total length of about three kilometers, starts off just south of the semt of Aksaray, heads west, borders around the large Langa vegetable gardens, and passes through no less than eight different neighborhoods before reaching the city walls. This street came to be called “Butchers’ Road”60 simply because, throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, some of the butchers of Istanbul had to carry their merchandise through that road very often, sometimes every day.
Ever since the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul, and perhaps even before that, all activities linked to the production of meat, leather, and related animal products had been concentrated within a large and empty area called “Kazlıçesme” just to the west of the Castle of the Seven Towers, immediately outside the city walls. By imperial decree, all of the slaughterhouses and tanneries, for sanitary reasons, had been relegated to that particular area.
Small slaughterhouses did from time to time exist here and there within the city and some butchers slaughtered animals in their backyards. As a consequence, there were complaints from the populace about the filth and the stench, but also about unfair competition and noncompliance with guild regu-
lations. Sometimes the Istanbul butchers themselves filed in complaints about the distance between the slaughterhouses and their shops and requested an official authorization to slaughter animals where they pleased. Time and time again imperial fermans were edicted, and the kadı of Istanbul issued warnings to that effect, forbidding the slaughtering of animals within Istanbul intra muros and reminding the butchers that the initial edicts of Mehmed II the Conqueror were still in full force.61 The number and frequency of edicts of a similar nature and purpose suggest, however, that they were far from being fully complied with.
However that may be, the Kazlıçeœme area remained, throughout the Ottoman centuries, the main area for animal slaughtering and hide tanning, as well as for meat, leather, glue, and gutstring production in Istanbul.62 And the meat produced in the Kazlıçeœme slaughterhouses had to be delivered daily to the various butchers within the city and therefore had to pass through the “Butchers’ Road” that ran through the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle. This meat distribution operation was carried out almost every single day in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Obviously, no other name was more fitting for that kind of a road. As Sarkis Hovhannesian, the eighteenthcentury Armenian historian of Istanbul notes: “…[outside the ramparts]
The slaughter-houses are near the sea and from there the slaughtered animals are distributed to the butchers of the city every day. As for the Janissaries, they have their own butchers who prepare the meat and take it to their old and new barracks every day.”63
There was one particular instance in which the daily transportation and delivery of meat—which always, lest we forget, passed through Kasap ƒlyas— was done collectively, so to speak, and took the form of a stately and frightful ritual. The event was the daily transportation and delivery of their rations of meat to the Janissary barracks called the “new barracks” and situated in Aksaray, precisely where the Byzantine Forum Bovis used to be. Large amounts of meat in the form of carved-out animal carcasses were carried in carts or on horseback and were accompanied by special attendants belonging to the Janissary corps. This blood-dripping convoy traveled every morning for about three kilometers, the whole length of the “Butchers’ Road,” all the way from the slaughterhouses beyond the city walls to the Janissary barracks. Very appropriately, the old Byzantine Forum had been, in the meantime, renamed Etmeydanı, or Meydan-ı Lahm, that is, literally, “Meat Square.”
During the transportation of meat through the Butchers’ Road early every morning, the long line of carts and horses was preceded by special attendants belonging to the Janissary corps called se™irdim çavuœu. These attendants, all clad with bloodstained leather overcoats, kept shouting all the time, signaling their coming and warning the populace not to block the road.
For to have an open and free road was a privilege of the Janissary butchers, and anyone who dared to block the road, or even to inadvertently cross the convoy’s path, could be sentenced to death. This sentence was indeed executed a few times during the seventeenth century. As to the effective distribution of the meat brought from the slaughterhouses, once arrived in Meat Square, it was accomplished with a real ceremony, full of religious symbolism

and reminiscent of the ritual of the Bektaœi order of dervishes, to which many of the Janissaries are said to have been affiliated.64
The inhabitants of Kasap ƒlyas’ “High Street,” just as those of seven other mahalles, were witness to this bloody daily procession for centuries. The overall reputation of the neighborhoods must have suffered. The artery that went from the center of the walled city eastward to the entrance of the Topkapı Palace is the direct descendant of the central Byzantine Mêsê. That is also the relatively wide avenue that the Ottoman viziers and the other grandees took—most often on horseback and in a procession with great pomp—on their way to the meetings of the Imperial Council, the Divan.
That road naturally came to be called Divanyolu (Divan Road/the Road to the Divan). Though much less prestigious, Kassab Yolu, the “Butchers’ Road,” was just as memorable.
Such a relatively narrow road, with the daily passageway of convoys of freshly slaughtered and butchered mutton and beef carcasses could obviously not have been clean and proper. And when, in 1793, a well-meaning rich woman named Nazperver Kalfa built both a Coranic school for children and
a public fountain on the “Butchers’ Road,” the point certainly did not go unnoticed.
Nazperver Kalfa—most probably a slave of Circassian origin—had been, in the 1760s, a nanny (dadı) to Selim, then heir to the Ottoman throne. When Selim (Selim III, who reigned from 1789 to 1807) finally ascended the throne, she was appointed as one of the treasurers of the Imperial Harem
(Hazinedar) and was, from then on, known as Hazinedar Kalfa.65 She then built a Coranic school for children and a large and magnificently decorated marble public fountain right on our “Butchers’ Road.” The small school cum fountain complex is situated at approximately the junction point of two
mahalles: Kasap ƒlyas and its immediate western neighbor Kürkçübaœı. A chronogram in verse is incised in marble just above the fountain and contains, as was customary, a panegyric of the benefactor of the school and of the fountain and gives 1792–1793 (1207 a.h.) as the date of completion of the construction. The verse ends on the following optimistic note: The former imperial dadı / Finally cleansed the butchers’ road (Sabıkan dadı-yı œeh-i vâlâ / Kıldı kassablar yolun tathir).
Clean or not, “Butchers’ Road” was an important and topographically unavoidable artery in intramural Istanbul. It was used by almost everybody, not only to enter the city but also to leave it. Sovereign Selim III himself, for instance, for whom Nazperver Kalfa had been first a nanny and then a protégé, seems to have used that road quite often. A few years after the building of the fountain, on October 13, 1795, on his way to watching some wrestling contest, Selim III had gone on horseback “…through the Samatya avenue and the Butchers’ Road and out of the city through the Seven Towers, to the Veliefendi Green….”66 On another occasion, a note in the diary of Selim’s confident reads: “…[April 30, 1796] on horseback through…the Butchers’ Road and out through the Seven Towers directly towards the gunpowder factory….”67
A couple of other streets within the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle also bore a particular name toward the end of the eighteenth century. Çavuœzade Street, for instance, is already mentioned as such in a deed of trust dated from 1773. It apparently took its name from that of a family possessing a large house that
was completely destroyed in the 1782 fire. In another deed of trust dated from July 1796 appears the name of Hamam Odaları (Hamam rooms) Street. These “rooms” that gave their name to that street might have been the living quarters of people associated with the public bath, or only a remainder of the shops given away as endowment together with the hamam back in the late fifeenth century. These two streets were just relatively small local thoroughfares, however, and none could compare in importance with the Butchers’ Road.

Yorum Yok

Cevap bırakınız

Bu site, istenmeyenleri azaltmak için Akismet kullanıyor. Yorum verilerinizin nasıl işlendiği hakkında daha fazla bilgi edinin.