These Istanbul “streets” that accompanied the formation of various mahalles and that gradually took shape in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had to espouse the city’s quite uneven ground and unusually hilly topography. There were, of course, a few main arteries whose location did not change from early Byzantine times.39 Their configuration was essentially dictated by the crestline of the intramural Istanbul hills and by their relation to the surrounding sea and to the main gates of the city ramparts. The road that was (and is still) considered Kasap ƒlyas’ “high street” was precisely one of those older roads.
This Ottoman artery was superimposed upon the Byzantine road that went from the Forum Bovis, situated right in the middle of the city, to one of the main gates on the land walls. But apart from those very few main arteries that remained intact for centuries, it is unlikely that many of the secondary “streets” of old Istanbul could have retained for long the configuration that they had
in the sixteenth century.
What did these “streets” of Kasap ƒlyas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look like? First of all, they were unpaved, and therefore dusty in the summer and muddy in the rainy winters of Istanbul. The regular paving of the Istanbul streets began to be considered a normal municipal activity only after the 1850s. Before that, if streets were to be paved the expense had to be paid by the locals,40 and it is improbable that the modest dwellers of Kasap ƒlyas could have afforded that expense. Second, these “streets” did not necessarily have the same width; they could be quite narrow at some points and uselessly wide at others. The attempts at regulating the width of Istanbul streets were the work of a special municipal committee created only in the 1860s (Islahat-ı Turuk Komisyonu). The sixteenth-century streets had no sidewalks worthy of that name. Third, they had not been leveled and were full of all sorts of bumps and holes. Fourth, these “streets” did not have any
official name. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents all of these streets are named the public thoroughfare (tarîk-i ‘amm), and the dead ends simply the private thoroughfare (tarîk-i hass). Besides, as we saw, these streets were surrounded by walls, thus limiting—and protecting—the visibility of the (mostly single-story) enclosed houses on both sides.
People used to circulate in the city either on foot or on horseback, so, for most of the minor streets in traditional Istanbul they just had to be wide enough to allow the passage of a horse-drawn carriage. In the seventeenth century the streets in the Davudpaœa area must have been particularly narrow,
for they were, so runs the legend, at the origin of an interesting political crisis. When, in 1647, Sultan Ibrahim (nicknamed the “Mad”) went strolling through Davudpaœa on horseback (and also in disguise), his way happened to be blocked by a horse-drawn carriage. Getting angry, he instantly ordered the Grand Vizier Salih Paœa to forbid all carriages from entering Istanbul. A short while later, the same thing happened again in the same area, but this time the Sultan was furious and had the Grand Vizier removed from office and then executed.41
These events might well be an outright fantasy, produced by a politically minded official Palace historiographer and chronicler, with the intention of demonstrating that Ibrahim was really out of his wits and thereby justifying his overthrow in 1648, and subsequent assassination the same year. As to Grand Vizier Salih Paœa’s removal from office and execution, they were most probably due to more complex political reasons. Whatever the case may be, it remains that, first, a real or imaginary “traffic jam” that occurred in or near our neighborhood was used as a justification for a very important political execution and that, second, the story found its way into standard Turkish history books. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Davudpaœa and Kasap ƒlyas streets must have been, at some points, barely wide enough for a single horseman. The area must also have had at the time quite a bad reputation due to the narrowness of its streets and to the ensuing circulation problems.
The narrow streets of the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle were seldom straight; they had many bends and curves. They clearly lacked both greenery and perspective. They had to follow the hilly Istanbul terrain, as they followed an itinerary almost randomly determined by the borders of the various houses and by the enclosed gardens and vegetable gardens of the neighborhood. Thus constituted, these streets were, strictly speaking, just passageways.
Their spatial configuration did not allow for any other social function involving any durable intracommunity relationships. The Kasap ƒlyas mahalle did not contain any public square/piazza or any equivalent that might have the same spatial meaning and social/cultural functions. The “streets” of sixteenth-century Kasap ƒlyas could obviously in no way function as open public spaces where the
locals could come together to trade, communicate, exercise an innocuous pastime, or even simply to chat. Even their functioning as a simple playground for children must have been limited by their physical characteristics. Besides, there was at the time in the mahalle neither a coffeehouse nor a tekke.42 The only two places where the locals could have met and shared common experiences were
the Kasap ƒlyas mosque and the Davudpaœa public bath.
Besides, the fact that most houses had only one story and so many walled enclosures meant that it was impossible to sit at one’s window and talk to one’s next-door neighbors or to those across the street, or just to watch the passersby. True, there was nothing of much interest that could happen in the streets of a peripheral mahalle like Kasap ƒlyas. In sum, this type of a house and street configuration in our mahalle entailed a local spatial perception radically different from that connected with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century houses and neighborhoods. It is this last perception that still survives in Turkish memories and that is sometimes teleologically extended backward to the earlier centuries. However, uses and perceptions of private and public spaces had greatly changed in Ottoman Istanbul in the meantime.43